Day 1: The surprise is INSIDE you

It seems that there will be parallel surprises as I go through this... the surprise experiment as it's lived out in my life, but also the surprise that comes from realizations reading the book as I walk through this experiment. I'm reading the story for the day I'm living, which is one day ahead of the story I'm blogging... clear as mud.

My story yesterday is surprising in its "unsurprising-ness," so to speak. As I lay my little head down to sleep last night, I realized how capable I am of paying attention and taking note of my thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and moods in the moment as they arise. Around lunch time, we got word that one of the guys who plays guitar on our worship team may have lung cancer. This guy is an amazing ball of energy and life. He used to be part of the touring band with Hank Jr. and a whole slew of other guys who you'd be really impressed to hear. Needless to say he lived a hard, fast, life, and within the last two years let God find him. This guy (Greg) is a true example of the power of Christ in a life. The guy has walked away from nearly every vice you can imagine a hard-livin professional musician can have (not just the drinking and drugging, but all the attendant emotional/psychological baggage as well). He just recently got married and started his new life over again with a passionate faith. Then... BOOOM. The big C-word.

Immediately I heard the infamous question that doesnt' have an answer "Why?" I heard him ask the same question. How can it be that only now, in light of the amazing changes in his life, he gets this prognosis? It's a tough question, and it's one that I don't have an answer for. It reminded me of a Phillip Yancey book (Disappointment with God) where Yancey asks, "The question becomes not, 'is God good,' but 'what good is He?'" That's a powerful question to ask. In terms of this experiment though, I was surprised to notice how quickly I noticed the question rising. It took me back to my old Buddhist days when the whole idea was to "notice the thoughts that come into your head, don't claim them, judge them, grab them, or hold them, just notice them."

The shocking/disturbing thing about that realization is that if I can see them welling up and see them rising in me... then I have the ability to curb them and not act on the ones that I don't like. That doesn't make me feel very good, because there were a few emotions yesterday that I don't like the way they came out. If I can see them rising, and I choose not to curb them... that's a surprising thing with surprising implications.

Surprisingly enough (pun probably intended) I woke this morning with a good feeling about a lot of what showed up yesterday. Ordinarily I wouldn't have felt so good about such a lack of self-control and evidence of such inner-yuck, but I really have a feeling that seeing that stuff may be the greatest surprise of all. It's a powerful thing to come to terms with your own depravity. Fortunately I know that at the point of my greatest depravity, I find Christ's grace most sweet.

I was going to write about what I got from the book, but it would take too much space and probably would be anti-climactic. Suffice it to say for now that God surprises will show up in surprising places. I did like what Esau said (to paraphrase), "in the cosmic game of hide-and-seek, what if it's not God whose hiding, but us?"

So we begin from here. Surprise me, God.