A New Experience

This was one of the more exhausting and exhilarating weekends of my life. At Mosaic, nine of us have been planning our experiential labyrinth for almost three months now. All our theoretical brainstorming came down to putting paintings where our mouths were and setting up the labyrinth this weekend. After fifteen hours of labor (without a break), i finally retired to bed late saturday night. sunday, working down to the very last minute (and a few minutes after our 6pm opening), the labyrinth became open to the public having transformed eleven rooms and two hallways of a four story FBC building into a re-created, carefully planned conglomeration of art, music, aural poetry, activities, movies, collages, exhibits, slideshows, etc.
I can't believe we did it. My initial thoughts at 11:30 on Saturday night were, "I hope God appreciates this!" [throw in an expletive or two, well deserved after a six inch long (body, not tail) and four inch fat RAT almost ran up my leg - story for another time. i digress]. However by 10:30 Sunday night as I sat in the room i was womaning with scissors, tape, a marker and my phone stuffed into my pockets to prepare for emergencies, tears welled up in my eyes as overwhelmed, I stared at the images and soaked up the aura of the room. I sat in front of three TV's playing slideshows I created of "community," "austin," and "the world" pictures and quotes, and for the first time I saw them anew. Tears sprung not from the three inch scissors poking me in the ass, but from understanding for the first time that God is love and I must be love and sometimes I am love and sometimes I am not love, but the great I AM loves me anyway.
The whole experience was new for me as I've never been a part of anything like this before, but is was good, and though right now the idea of another labyrinth for Advent or Lent makes my stomach turn, I'm sure someday in the future, another will begin to sprout from the remnants of the roots of this labyrinth in my brain. The process reminded me much of the constructing of a Musical - so many scenes and emotions, and so dependent on the audience's response and participation. and surely just as rewarding and exhausting. if i'd have known what an amazing event this would have been, i'd have asked my parents to come experience it. Pitt and Crazy would have loved it. but since none of the people i personally invited showed up anyway, i guess it's better i didn't ask the "rents" to come either. oh well - i just wanted more people to experience god in this way. it was hard too to watch it all being torn down at 10 pm sunday night. approximately 2500 hours of ten to twelve workers time in two days was being stripped down, destroyed, in a matter of minutes. terribly depressing. but beautiful too. we were faithful to a dream and god was faithful enough to show up. thank you god for beauty, art, culture, goodness, forgiveness, peace and transformation. You are good and we will try to be good too. We love you. Amen.