So it falls to me to break the bad news to you all – after much ballyhoo we will NOT be at Creation 2010…at least not in any ‘official’ capacity. And while that might be news worth posting to Twitter and Facebook, why does it rate a blog post? Well it’s like this:
We first had this Creation idea thrown at us back in February or something like that and it seemed like a great idea. A little bit later the details firmed up a but and by mid June we were making plans in earnest. Signs, stickers, etc. etc. Like basically everything Soma’s been doing in the last 12 months, it just felt like a door God had opened and we were walking through. But then last week we got the news that the door we were a few days from stepping through was suddenly closed. It wasn’t anybody’s fault or anything, it just didn’t work out at the last minute and we started scrambling trying to figure out what we were going to do.
By virtue of experience, we’ve learned to approach this path with a particular eye on spiritual warfare. After all, we’re trying to step into a cultural space that is currently all but devoid of a Christian voice so we’ve come to expect a certain amount of opposition on the road. Nothing to get all worked up about, but we take the idea seriously. With that in mind, our first impulse was to see this recent event as a barrier to what the bigger plan was – something to push through. I mean let’s be plain: Creation will bring several thousand of our very particular sweet-spot demographic into a place where they are a 3-day captive audience. It’s a place where people are in the mood to spend money on funnel cake, fried Twinkies, and probably a video game or two. From a business standpoint, the festival is a pretty darn good place for Soma to show its face and meet some new fans. So OF COURSE the closed door was a bad thing – what else could it be?
Well it’s a funny thing. In the days following the news we certainly worked on several alternate plans, ways we might salvage the situation and still get rid of these tee-shirts, but we also prayed. And when the immediate “Oh no” wore off we found ourselves feeling like this closed door might not be warfare at all. It might be God. More to point, in the end we came to a peaceful consensus that we actually didn’t need to overcome this obstacle – so instead we just announced that we weren’t going.
So I guess the blog entry is really about this: it’s one thing to listen to God’s voice and follow it toward an opportunity. It’s another to follow Him away from one. In some small way I feel a little like Galadriel when Frodo offer s her The Ring. I don’t know if this was actually some kind of test, but nevertheless I see a kind of test in the way this happened. We had probably 8-10k good reasons to put our shoulders to it and push on to CreationFest in whatever capacity we could muster. It’s a great group of people, I really wan to see Red and we have the potential to make a few bones. But I really want God much more, his presence, his still small voice. And we have a lot of peace about simply saying no thank you. I so want to see this business run with true heart and not in such a way where the shop operates in a way different in character than our personal lives. Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind as I’m up way too late in a Leavenworth hotel and I just wanted to share.