Goat in the Birdfeeder vs. Ecstatic Experiences

If you've never heard of a goat in a birdfeeder before, neither have I,

until our goat got out the other day and decided to check out the bird feeder!

We have moments like these in our life on the prairie--
where goats are sniffing out the birdfeeder, and birds, such as chickens, perch on top of the goat's back!

Mark Galli, in the May 2013 issue of Christianity Today wrote, "I have had ecstatic experiences when the love of God penetrated my whole being."
But those experiences were few, he wrote.

In his desire to experience them more regularly, he discovered that he "could manufacture something very similar to a genuine spiritual experience. But it soon became clear that the search for daily wonder was creating a religion of Mark Galli. It wasn't helping me love my neighbor, though it did help me judge my neighbor as relatively unspiritual, at least compared to me."

 Galli goes on to talk about how we are fascinated with divine encounters because of our "boredom with the life God has given us."
"Instead of a life of experience," he wrote, "Christ calls us to a life of love. And a life of love for the most part means attending to the tedious details of others' lives, and serving them in sacrificial ways that feels, well, not exciting at all.

Rather than sweeping the kitchen, cleaning the toilet...or crunching numbers for another eight hours...
surely life is meant for more than this...

Is this all there is to the 'abundant' Christian life?
Shouldn't my life be more adventurous if God is in me and all around me?


..."Love is precisely denying the self that wants to glory in experience.
The cost of discipleship most of us are asked to pay is to live the life God has given us,serving in mundane ways the people He has put in our path.
 
To be free from the self and to discover such love is the essence of abundant life.

"As Paul put it, in the final analysis, love is not about speaking in tongues, having prophetic powers, understanding all mysteries or knowledge, having experiences of wonder, or being all we can be.
Love instead 'bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Yes, endures....

It is not hard to see why the religion of experience...tempts one to make feeling an idol, or how a religion of feeling leads to the watering down of great gospel themes.
...The road of experience leads nowhere except to the barren desert of the self."