Willow Creek Conference: Day Three (Part One)

It's very hard to explain what took place today. I am completely overwhelmed and amazed!

The first session of the day started out with me not being there on time as usual. So I sat in the coffee bar area for a few minutes before sauntering in. I wish I would have gone in on time, because it started out with a very moving story of a couple of worship leaders from Willow Creek and who are married to each other. They have a child who I believe was born deaf. But through some implants in the baby's ears, he could hear his parents' voices for the first time. Boy did I sniffle at that one. It was very moving, and then they sang the song "You Never Let Go" which of course brought a whole new meaning to the song for all of us.

Don Miller came up and spoke next. I got to hear him speak a couple of nights ago, and I was hoping he didn't speak on the same thing. He didn't, which was good. The basic theme of his message was that when the Enlightenment happened, truth and meaning got separated, mystery was abolished or abandoned, and the written word became the only vehicle by which truth was given and understood. The brain, which consists of three main parts - the left brain, the right brain, and the amygdalae, which is the emotional center of the brain - were separated by placing the emotional center, not physically, but in every other way, in the heart.

The problem with all this, according to Miller, is that the artistic part of Christianity was relegated to the background, and narrative expressed through creative expression no longer held a prime spot in how truth was "learned". Donald Miller was the second person this week to talk about the book Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (the other person was the worship leader from Mars Hill Bible Church, Aaron Niequist), and the basic idea of what Chesterton talks about in the first chapter of the book is that mathematicians are the ones who go insane, not poets. "A mathematician tries to build a bridge to the infinte, the poet swims in the sea. The mathematician tries to fit heaven in his head, the poet is trying to fit his head in heaven." My amygdalae tell me that he's right.

His last part is about Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (not the movie, the actual play), and how the play is an allegory of the Protestant/Catholic war that was happening during the time that Shakespeare wrote it. It was a very interesting point, and it climaxed with the balcony scene (it didn't end with the balcony scene, that's plot for you.) with the fact that Romeo during the balcony scene "switches from iambic pentameter to free verse because what he's saying IS TRUE."