On Celebration - A Release of Tension
After I spoke last Wednesday, one of my pastors pulled me aside and told me that he thought celebration was the release of tension. When we truly celebrate, it comes from a place of a tension being released and things being reconciled.
As I spoke with friends on that thought, I recognized tension in 3 realms of our lives.
Physical tension - This is that tension that says things are hard. It is a tangible example of rough stuff going on. A good example would be WWII. There were years of tension built up. Would the world survive? Would it be forever changed? When victory was declared, the tension was released, and it resulted in real, deep celebration. The problem with people in America today is that we don’t have real physical tension (for the most part). We are able to get by on our decadence.
Emotional tension - This is the tension about our situations. It might be relational or internal. I see the biggest example of this in hard situations where our minds and hearts our stretched. In America, we worship this tension. We say we’re busy, tired, and stressed, even when we don’t need to be. If we don’t look like the hardest worker, something is wrong. We need to be in a state of tension and we don’t know what to do when we’re out of it. On top of that, since so much of this tension is contrived, our celebrations when it’s released are contrived as well. We hold lifeless and fake celebrations.
Spiritual tension - Finally, there is a spiritual tension. This is the one that says things aren’t right and we are unreconciled to God. People in the modern world don’t even realize this tension exists. They don’t want to acknowledge that things might be awry and that they need a savior. We don’t know how to celebrate spiritually because we don’t realize the tension.
