It’s uncomfortable to talk about it… something missing from your faith journey? It’s illusive and bewildering. This mysterious feeling surfaces as vacant and passionless worship, disconnected prayer time, hollow Bible study, and a vague uneasiness, a pervasive sense that you’ve taken a detour, that something important is out of whack.

Sissy had gone to church all her life, read the Bible from cover to cover five times, and obeyed all the religious rules, but with tears in her eyes confessed, “I feel so detached, so useless. God has done all these great things, but not for me. I feel forgotten and left out. What am I missing? I already read the Purpose Driven Life but I still feel like an outsider looking in.”

A stranger, sitting a table away, interjected, “I’ve been there. I tried attending a different church each week; the neat thing was that I always got a great parking space. I thought I could get the best of all of them, without dealing with my emptiness, but after a while I felt so scattered and distracted, I quit going all together. Now I’m not sure what I want. I just know it’s got to be bigger then me, bigger than a parking spot. So, I just keep looking for God to show up… somewhere. Sorry for butting in.”

He joined the group and we talked more.

Some have missed the point altogether. These well-meaning believers compartmentalize faith and leave it inside the walls of church. All the time is spent in the huddle. The focus turns internal…church traditions, doctrines, and politics. Inside there seems to be a continual angst about leadership and control and judgment. For these believers, Jesus is missing.

Authentic faith is designed to shatter all our compartments. It invades every corner of our lives and is intended to be seen best when the church has left the building. Faith doesn’t stay where the answers are; it follows Jesus into the mystery--an unfamiliar and unexpected journey. It is refined by crisis and nurtured by the fingerprints of God in ordinary life.

The point is we all have parts to play in God’s great mystery. And we do best when faith takes us out of the huddle and into the game, when we learn to live forward and understand backward. The point is, this is Jesus’ story and we are the followers.

Perhaps you haven’t missed the point; you’ve missed the power. Your journey has been buried in the pages of a book. You pray for more knowledge, more insight, more understanding, and more time to study, but you’re tired and frustrated. You know about the God who inspired the Bible, but you don’t really know HIM, nor do you feel inspired by his Spirit.

You can quote the verse that promises, “I will never leave you,” but you still feel alone and disconnected. God is in your head, but he has yet to touch your heart. Truth is, he wants to get your head out of the Book long enough to sense HIS Presence. That’s where the power is.

Still bemused? There is at least one more “missing” possibility: Have you seen Jesus lately? You’ve sung about it; “Turn your eyes on Jesus...” The real faith test is about our eyes. “Do we see Jesus in and around us.” Do you see HIM in the people you meet? Do your eyes see past the present and into the future? Can you see the good in people, even before they see it? Do you sense the hurt before it’s expressed? Do you serve before you’re asked? Is your time invested in “Jesus” people? Do you see HIM?

If you fill your days focused on the people in your neighborhood, on your email list, co-workers, family, and friends, you’ll run out of time to spend missing anything.

The assignment is not to get people to agree with your beliefs; it’s to show them how to live a life that makes God proud. So, open your eyes and your ears, because God’s about to show up, when you least expect it.

It’s a faith step. Open your eyes; absolutely nothing is missing.

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