July 28, 2006
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Last night Aaron, Jen (his wife), Sondra and I went to Cleveland to the everything is spiritual tour with Rob Bell that benefits Water Aid. Aaron and I talked before how awkward and kind of strange it was to explain to others that we were going to a tour…. a speaking tour. But if your familiar with Rob Bell you’d understand. Rob is probably the single greatest informed, intelligent, artistic, communicator and thinker in the church today. Well at least as far as I can tell. He uses complex science, beautiful study of poetry and art, simple yet profound visuals, his own humor and culture references, OT and NT scripture, theorist and philosophers, and popular literature to convey G-d’s truths.Rob came out to a huge white board which covered from the left side of the stage to the right. He was not announced, no big production, just walked out and grinned (like only Rob can do) at everyone and said “in the beginning G-d created the earth” and started their. I’m not going to attempt to sum up his message up because one it was 2 hrs long and two I’ll won’t do it justice. As soon as we got up Aaron said, “when someone asks me about what he talked about, I’ll just have to say ‘it was amazing’”. I concur. The thing that has always drawn me to Rob is that he’s him…. meaning you can just tell he was wired to teach and he actually believes what he teaches and has a strong desire to live it out. For a while now I’ve always seen Rob as my teacher and I still feel that way.
My only regret is that I didn’t take a few friends who would of really learned that the spiritual/physical met when G-d created mankind and that separating the to is impossible. Let me leave you with a final thought that Rob left with. In this life you will find whatever you are looking for; if your looking to be a pessimist you find things to be pessimistic about, if your looking to be a skeptic you’ll find plenty of things to be skeptical of, if your looking for…. and if you look for hope you find things to be hopeful of, if you look for freedom you’ll find things that are freeing. -Thanks Rob
If you experienced the everything spiritual tour… I’d love to hear your thoughts
Comments (1)
Hi! Stumbled across your blog today while looking for – what else – thoughts of others who “saw the show.” I was at the same venue you were.
It was brilliant. Simply brilliant. I agree with your thoughts that one of the great things about Rob is that he’s just himself. He lives and breathes this stuff. He “smokes what he’s selling.” For whatever reason, I had forgotten about the final thoughts you mentioned. Thanks for reminding me.
I got to meet him for a minute and he signed my copy of Velvet Elvis. I watched him as he interacted with various people and was delighted to see how fully present he was with each person. No twiching or looking around him like he wanted them to get on with it and get going – he was just there, listening or talking, as long as it took. I really respect him for that.
Rob is a Spirit-gifted prophetic voice. God is really using him, that’s for sure.