Abba, I belong to You

I got the great privilege of spending a few days with some amazing people last week at Ocean Grove, NJ.  About 30 worship pastors, artists, and leaders got together to encourage, retreat, study, and worship.  That alone was a blessing.  Being with folks who have served faithfully for decades, who have blazed trails, who have scars and chevrons.  I was truly humbled to sit and learn of how God has used them and continues to do so.

We were blessed immeasurably to spend a few mornings with Brennan Manning, who was honestly the reason we all signed up to go on this retreat in the first place.  Knowing his books and a small part of his story, we all anticipated God to speak through Brennan in an amazingly profound way.  Our time together was profound, indeed.  To describe it is to describe the Grand Canyon.  Words will fail.  Pictures revive memories for those of us who were there.  And though a picture is worth a thousand words, it still does not do justice to the SMILE that fell over our time in Thornley Chapel, the Great Auditorium, and the streets and porches of OG.

"Abba, I Belong to You" was from Brennan.  It is the prayer he prays "100 times a day."  In his words,
It gives me a core sense of identity, a core sense of belonging, I belong to the Abba of Jesus...When you pray, you are to say ABBA. What an extraordinary intimacy we are called to with the living God. 


As I try to figure out where I'm to go with all of this, I plan on starting with this prayer.  There is so much to "unpack" from mountaintop experiences like these.  We all want to find the application, to find the "take-home," to see that we've grown a few inches taller than the notch on the door frame.

If I learned one thing this weekend, it was slow down, listen, ponder, wait, and be loved.  We were allowed the opportunity to do that with Brennan and each other.   He graciously loved us.  We together, broken & bruised, our pride removed, worshiped.  And it was all possible because of the Grace & Love of Christ.