Alive

I felt alive, you know. That feeling when you get out of the stuffy house or the air-conditioned office, you breathe in the fresh air and you run to the top of the hill where the cool wind seems to blow everything else away.

You can shout into the wind up there. No-one will hear you. You can stretch your arms wide and throw back your head and shout until you're hoarse. You can let it push you over, rifle across you like a rushing torrent of the wonderful wild wind as you stand in its path. And you know you are alive.

This is what worship is like for me. This morning, standing on a wooden stage behind my old familiar piano, with a room full of people I love, I felt alive. There was no wind, no desperate race to climb the hill, and certainly no solitude. But there was God.

The thing is, it's what He does. He draws us aside in those moments of stuffiness, he calls us like the softest song on the gentlest breeze, and places deep within us that inescapable desire to search for something... more. Something we know we're missing.

"If anyone is thirsty..." whispered the voice in my heart. "If anyone is thirsty..." It rose and fell. "If anyone is thirsty..." stronger, louder it came, pulsing in my ears, "anyone... anyone... if anyone is thirsty... LET HIM COME..."

... and nothing else matters. Then suddenly, as we sing, somehow it's exactly like that mad impossible race uphill. It's breathtaking, it's crazy, it doesn't make sense but God is at the top and the wild, incredible, indescribable, untamable One is waiting and laughing and crying and hoping - just for that same moment with us - and I'm not going to miss this. I am not going to miss it.

For the first time in a long time, I felt like me; the real me. And I felt alive.