Several years ago I taught a class called Crossing The Threshold: A Journery into Transformative Worship. I wrote notes to go along with portions of the class and am going to be sharing them in the next few weeks on this blog . If you want to listen to the talks and see the other notes handed out in class they are all under the Teaching page on this site.

                                      Orientation

When you start out on a journey it is important to know the place from which you are starting; that is if you have any hope of finding the place to which you are going. Take the giant map in the shopping mall for example. You first need to find the star that says “you are here”. Once you discover it, you can orient yourself and find where you are and where you are going. Or remember how you spent an entire day of orientation in a new school, where you were given the lay of the land so to speak. After that day it was possible for you to navigate the maze of classrooms and winding halls. Even the most famous road trip, Dorothy’s trek down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City began with orientation from the good witch Glenda. It wasn’t enough for Dorothy to know she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

To orient means to set right by adjusting to facts; to put oneself into correct position or to acquaint oneself with the existing situation. Unfortunately most people never receive an orientation lesson to life. No one says to you, here you are on the map of history and tells you what that means or why it should matter to you. After all history is just a boring subject often taught by boring teachers who rarely connect the subject to your personal life. It is flat, dull, in the past and irrelevant to your life in the here and now. Or is it? Could it be that history is more like a story with an author, a plot, a setting, a theme and characters? Christianity maintains that history is His story; God’s story. If that is true wouldn’t it be important to know where you are? To know what part you play so that when you step out onto the stage of history you can play it well?

Fellow pilgrim you and I are going on an amazing journey over the next few posts. This journey will take us out of the ordinary world, crossing the threshold into a very special world. We will meet interesting characters, cover vast amounts of terrain, have a few awesome encounters and return home like all good pilgrims do having been transformed by our adventure. But we need to know where we are. We need to find the “you are here” star on the map of history.