Confession Booth..

So I am trying to finish the book Blue Like Jazz, which I started last Summer, along with other books that I started that are waiting to be picked up and completed. Thank God for Intuniv! Anyways, I was a reading chapter 11 and what had happened really got me thinking more about the church and how it is viewed. In a nutshell, the author Don Miller and his friend Tony were attending a college in Portland, Oregon. The college was known to be a pretty immoral and godless campus. Each year they have a festival called “Ren Fayre” and during this time the whole campus shuts down, while the students got high and drunk, some of them would run around naked. I imagine it to be like a Sodom and Gomorrah type atmosphere. Don and Tony were talking about how they as Christians can reach out to this campus and build relationships. Don came up with an out of the box idea of making a confession booth and putting it in the middle of campus. Tony and this small group of Christians decided to make the booth but instead of people coming in and confessing there sins it would be them confessing. They would ask forgiveness for all of the things that Christians have been apart of that hurt so many people and given them such a bad name, such as the crusades, slavery, racism, social injustices, not reaching out and providing and being who Jesus really called them to be. The response was amazing, many of the students said, "I needed to hear that" and even forgave them. I believe that this went on for hours and lives were changed. These guys came up with an idea, which was obvious from the Spirit and followed through with it. The idea sounded crazy and even some of them were a little apprehensive, but they followed the Spirits lead.
Imagine if we followed the Spirit lead no matter how crazy it seems in our minds. I think the church today does not follow those nudges, as they should. Too many people worry about what others think, do not want to make a fool of the themselves, maybe time is an issue or just fear. We all have been there and we have decided not to follow those nudges from the Spirit. How can this be a good thing? How can God bless the church if we do not obey and follow the direction that He wants us to go? Too many times the Church gets stuck in its normal routine and makes sure that nothing out of the ordinary will happen.
I think this is an example of quenching the Holy Spirit. It says in 1Thess 5:16-21 “rejoice always; pray with out ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. Do not quench the Spirit; do not despise prophetic utterances. However, examine everything carefully, holding fast to what which is good. “How do we quench the Spirit? We quench the Spirit by not doing the things that give him access to control our lives. God sent the Holy Spirit into our lives that He might lead and direct us and when we say “No” or not follow His lead then we are quenching, which means to put out, suppressing, or extinguish. The problem with the Church is can be self-directed and not God directed. Nothing could be more misdirected than a self-directed life. When a Church or a believer starts to self-direct things can go wrong real quick but if we rely and ask for His lead in our lives and actually follow, the journey can be amazing. As the above story illustrates, amazing things can happen if we are willing to just go with what the Spirit wants and lives can be change and relationships can be built.