Resonation

I was in church a few weeks ago and my vicar got up after the speaker and offered prayer ministry to those with whom the message had resonated. Resonated. It got me thinking (you’ve got the love that the main thing that got me thinking was one word the vicar said, not the thirty minutes of teaching before). But I couldn’t get this idea out of my head; the idea that sometimes we hear things or see things or feel things and they resonate. That is, they set something off inside of us with much greater energy than the original prompt itself contained.

I always wondered why some people could watch those African poverty adverts and just not care, whereas some people just can’t watch them. Or why some people always seem knocked out after Church, as if they are now occupied with something going on within, whereas other walk in and out as if nothing happened in the service. At various times I’ve been in each one of those camps, but more and more I can’t seem to shake my reaction to things I never used to react to.

Like today at work, we were discussing various deep issues such as the existence of right and wrong, as one does when there is work to do, and in a roundabout way all three of my colleagues concluded ‘life is hard, then we die’. Now it’s been all of 8 hours since they said this and I haven’t yet got it out of my system. Such a level of hopelessness about life struck a chord in me and have been resonating inside me ever since. Hmmm.

But as I thought about the concept of resonation in the sense of the scientific phenomena, I realised that it actually made a lot of sense. Resonance is the process by which a material finds maximum amplitude in vibration through an interaction with a wave of energy moving on its resonant frequency. In normal language that means if you send a matching signal into a material, it will vibrate to its maximum capacity. But only a signal that matches the materials ‘characteristics’ will have this effect (I apologise to any scientists who probably could explain how I have grossly flawed a definition the concept of resonation!).

So the point is this: things resonate when a message comes in that is on the same character as them. A heart will resonate when a message comes in that is already somewhere inside the heart, no matter how small the message is. So if the heart is on a totally different plane then it will go in and out and have little or no effect. On the other hand, if the heart is in line with that is going on in Church, or suffering, or hopelessness – things of God’s heart – then one of these things coming in in any small form will set the heart going.

This makes total sense to me. If I want a fool proof way of coming to God and coming away unchanged then I either pay more attention to being the cool youth leader at Church than coming before God, or I don’t bother to pray and slow my mind and soul down when it comes to reading my scripture. Those things always ensure that the teachings, and any message God would be saying, go into my brain and stay there for a short while before being replaced with what’s on Sky Sports News twenty minutes later.

The Parable of the Sower talks about the good soil, where just a few seeds grow into large quantities of grain. In the well prepared ground they find a place to grow and multiply. Jesus says this is a metaphor for human hearts. Some hearts are prepared and are good soil. Good soil isn’t held back by worry in the world, or too shallow to allow growth, or too crowded out by other voices. A good soil heart allows that resonation; the maximum impact of God’s message into action.

So how is this resonating heart possible? Three things immediately come to mind. One: preparation. What state is our heart in before we come before God and his Word? Is it focussed on other things? Is it beating at the pace of daily life or slowing to the rhythms of grace? Without a consciously humble and prepared heart there can be now growth of God’s message.

Second: learning. What is God’s heart? What does he care about? Reading Isaiah and Jeremiah over the last months I have seen the outrageous faithfulness and love of God for His people. He cares deeply about the poor, about the suffering, about the lost. These themes are echoed in acute form in the person and work of Jesus. In order to have hearts that resonate in the light of God’s Word we need to know what messages he is desperate to send.

Thirdly, and much more important that the previous two, is this: prayer for a new heart. Twice God promised to Ezekiel that He would give a new heart to his people (11.19, 36.26). It is only by God’s choice that we can have our hearts renewed and transformed like His own. Therefore any hope of a resonating heart must start with prayer to Him and a humility and hunger that led to Psalmist to cry out ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God’ (Psalm 51.10).