Tonight I had the honor of doing the Invocation at Saturday Night. (For those of you who may not be familiar with SN, we do the Invocation at the very beginning of the service, right before worship. Some would call it "the call to worship.") I had something that I was working up, but I didn't feel it was ready. In my time of distress, I turned toward Google and looked up "celtic invocation."
And... Interesting. I found invocations, but not the ones I was looking for. Pagan invocations. Wiccan invocations. Christians aren't the only ones interested in Celtic religion. So it made me wonder...
Other people seem to take their invocations seriously. Do we?
In spiritual terms, to "invoke" something means to summon it; if we invoke God, we ask Him to show up. The "invocation" is the action by which God is summoned. In Christian circles, it also seems to be an appeal to God's authority; but in other religions, it has the meaning of summoning a spirit and bringing about the supernatural.
So after a bit of searching, I found one. Read it here. But it weighed on me as to what I was doing, and after, I wondered what I had done. And then I remembered an incident from a few days ago...
I was driving in a mall parking lot and stopped at a stop sign. While I was stopped, a butterfly flew in front of my windshield. It passed me, doubled back, and then flitted around on the other side of the glass. It didn't try to fly inside my car; it just looked at me for a few prolonged seconds, and then flew away.
It could have been seconds; it might have been hours. I was arrested, transfixed by this butterfly. It felt like God had perched on the hood of my car and waved and smiled. It was a thing of great beauty and tranquility inside a chaotic moment. And even in its simplicity, it was enough to strike me speechless. God invaded that moment just to say hi.
And I called His name to kick off church tonight. Wow.
