Last week we welcomed our first US work team of 2017. It is always an exciting time for us. The work team impact is huge - much of what exists at Pico has been made by them. This year they are planting trees, assembling bunk beds, improving access, building gazebos, erecting safety fences, pouring sidewalks, creating shade, making benches, painting dorms... We look at their work (and ours) as lovingly caring for holy ground.
Recently I have been reading Revelations. This is a tricky book of the Bible for me. I like the concrete - things I can see and touch and wrap my hands around. I studied engineering and not philosophy for good reasons. I prefer to focus on the practical side of life. So I confess that Revelations is sometimes a bit "out there" for me. But in the last couple of years, God has been taking me through experiences that have made practical and "out there" intersect for me.
This morning I went back to the first chapter in Revelations. John paints a very vivid picture of Jesus. This is no longer the Jesus that walked around in the skin of a Galilean carpenter, but the Jesus that had returned to his full glory.
"I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance." [Rev. 1:12-16]I tend to think of Jesus in in more down-to-earth terms. As one who likes to work with wood, I am comfortable thinking about Jesus the carpenter who was fully God, but looked more or less like me. Yet I cheat myself if I keep Jesus in the box of human limitations. The reality is that while our God loves and cares for us, he is not our nanny. He is holy, magnificent, all-powerful, full of glory and worthy of our fear and praise and wonder.
Many of you have never been to Pico Escondido, but I hope you all have places where God has given you glimpses of Himself. These are holy places. Normal spaces transformed by God's glory. The Apostle John's island of Patmos was a Roman prison. Yet it was where God gave him an amazing vision of Christ in all of his true glory. For hundreds of adolescents each summer, Pico Escondido becomes the same thing. It is a place they come to because it sounds like a lot of fun - because we have a pool and a giant swing and great food and lots of other people their ages. Yet for many of those who come it is transformed into holy ground - the place where they met Jesus.
