do you know your lines?

We have a Christian Youth Theater (CYT) in our town and I've had the great privilege of being able to direct several of their shows. I'm directing right now and this week is what we call "tech week". I love being able to do this and we have 80 kids in the cast ranging in age from 8 to 18 years old. (The last show we had a 100!!) I worked in theater much of my life, from high school to community to college theater but even with all that experience the opportunity to work with CYT kind of came as a surprise. We just never know when and where God will allow us to use what He has placed inside of us!

But because we open on Friday, tech week means that we have rehearsals every night this week. One of the things I talked to the kids about at our last rehearsal was "knowing their lines". Obviously, it's important to the show that they know these lines, but it's more than that. I talked to them about how they will be able to really become their character more on stage if they're not thinking constantly about their lines. The better they know them, the less they have to think about them, and the more of the character we end up seeing on stage. It's a simple but critical equation.

But I realized that it's true for us as Christians as well. The better we study, learn from and come to know God, the easier it is to live our lives in a way that's consistent with the Word of God. The more we know of how God feels about things, the quicker we are to recognize when something isn't right. The more deeply we understand and believe what the Lord tells us and shows us in His Word, the easier it is to tell when satan offers us a counterfeit of the real thing.

I'm a fan of the Word of God. It's utterly astonishing to me how much is in there that's truly critical for us to understand. And we can read it every day for the rest of our lives and we're still only getting a portion of who He is. That's why we have to engage with God as we're reading - asking Him to let us know what we need to see. What we need to understand. Our "daily bread".

Our "rehearsal" time is that time we spend in quiet communion with God, seeking to know Him, to love Him, and to follow Him with all of our hearts. That rehearsal time is critical for when we go out into the world and engage with it - that's when we're "on stage"! Because even if we don't realize it - people are watching us, measuring us, trying to decide if what we say is true - if we will live out what we say we believe.

Are you getting enough rehearsal time?

**Cross-posted at a naked faith**