Go tell it on a mountain

I feel like God is stirring me up inside again.  I love that feeling.  You know that feeling of God's hands on you, like a potter with his clay, pressing and molding and taking care to get it to be just what he wants.  God is good.  He really is.  I can't declare that enough.  It sounds so puny for how immense it feels in my heart.  GOD IS SO GREAT!  He amazes me over and over again.  I am so blessed by him.  I savor him!

I began reading a new book today by John Piper called The Supremacy of God in Preaching.  In the Preface to the Revised Edition he said something that resounded in my heart.  I will post it here for you to ponder with me...

"There are always two parts to true worship.  There is seeing God and there is savoring God.  You can't separate these.  You must see him to savor him.  And if you don't savor him when you see him, you insult him.  In true worship, there is always understanding with the mind and there is always  feeling in the heart.  Understanding must always be the foundation of feeling, or all we have is baseless emotionalism.  But understanding of God that doesn't give rise to feeling for God becomes mere intellectualism and deadness.  This is why the Bible continually calls us to think and consider and meditate, on one hand, and to rejoice and fear and mourn and delight and hope and be glad, on the other hand.  Both are essential for worship."

I think of that song by Lifehouse that says, "...and how can I stand here with you and not be moved by you?"  I've thought about those lyrics a lot in the past.  How can I stand before God and not be moved by him?  How can I see him and not savor him?  Well, I can't.  God is good and I want to shout it from the rooftops!

All you need is love

The other day 

Chris and I were walking through a parking lot to a Starbucks when this guy out on the side walk starts running to the bus stop to catch the bus there.  When he started to run he didn't notice that he had dropped something out of his backpack.  I couldn't tell what it was, but Chris noticed right away that it was the guys keys.  Chris said, "He's gonna want those" and ran to them, picked them up, and ran them over to the guy at the bus stop.  While I stood there with Liam waiting for Chris to return, a woman was walking up and said to me, "Oh, that's so good to see.  That's so great.  That's so good.  Pay it forward.  Pay it forward."  Then she went over to Chris and said the same thing.

I was thinking, "Pay it forward?  What the heck does that mean?"  I asked Chris and he said it had to do with karma.  Then he got a little bit upset and said what he had done had nothing to do with karma (duh).  In fact, he didn't even think, "If I dropped my keys, I would want someone to grab them for me, so I should get them for that guy."  He just knew it was the right thing to do.  That guy dropped his keys and he would have never known where he dropped them.  Chris thought, "He dropped his keys and he needs them.  I can help him."

So often I feel like we only act if we feel we will get something out if it.  That's so sad.  Our motivation is often, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  How is that really different than karma?  Shouldn't our motivation be Love, always?  Just Love.  That's it.  That's all the motivation we need.

(I love my husband and what God is doing with him.)

Stay in Pursuit!

I have no focus of thought today.  I feel like I have several rabbit trails in my brain that I can't see the ends of.  But I felt as though I should add to this blog I started so as not to be a quitter.

I finished reading Crazy Love a day or two ago.  At first I wasn't getting much from it, but I kept reading and I did get some nuggets to absorb in the end.  (OK, that sounded weird.  I didn't absorb them in my end, rather in my brain and heart.)  I'll share some lines that stood out to me; I'll rely on Francis Chan's words to inspire you today, rather than my own...

"...if I stop pursuing Christ, I am letting our relationship deteriorate.  We never grow closer to God when we just live life; it takes deliberate pursuit and attentiveness."

"It is a remarkable cycle: Our prayers for more love result in love, which naturally cause us to pray more, which results in more love...

Imagine going for a run while eating a box of Twinkies.  Besides being self-defeating and sideache-inducing, it would also be near impossible - you would have to stop running in order to eat the Twinkies.

In the same way, you have to stop loving and pursuing Christ in order to sin.  When you are pursuing love, running toward Christ, you do not have opportunity to wonder, Am I doing this right?  or Did I serve enough this week?  When you are running toward Christ, you are freed up to serve, love, an give thanks without guilt, worry or fear.  As long as you are running, you are safe."

Hmm

Yeah, so this blogging thing is difficult.  I consider writing what's on my mind and then I think, who really wants to read that?  Then some things that might be interesting I shy away from writing about because I am afraid to offend this person or that person by my thoughts or memories or feelings or whatever.  I feel like what I can really write about is marginalized by my need to please people.  It really stinks not being the rebel I once was.  Life was easier when all I cared about was me.

How many times in our lives do we have "ideas" that seem so great in our heads, but as we try to articulate them, they fall to the floor like dust bunnies in the wind?  It happens to me all the time anyway.  We can feel so inspired one moment, and then later remember only one facet of our great idea, and it now looks like a tiny piece of dried up playdough.  Good for nothing.  Is it just my ADD brain that does that to me?  Or is this common among everyone?  I have learned that if I am feeling inspired, I must go immediately and work on it or I lose it.  There have been times when I couldn't or didn't go right away to work out my thoughts and, after it has evaporated into thin air, I have prayed in earnest that God would reveal it to me again so I could follow through.  It never seems to work that way.  Then I question if I ever had those thoughts of what seemed like divine inspiration in the first place.  Sometimes I think I'm mad.  Insane in the membrane.  If God were really trying to give me inspired thought, why does he let it dissipate, never to be remembered?  Perhaps I'll ask him that someday, if I remember.  :)

So I have been thinking about "rejoicing" lately.  I think it's divine inspiration.  I have started researching it in the Bible, and it is leading me down other paths, and back to paths that I, and others, have been on before.  Sometimes everything in life seems connected.  And I think maybe it is.  But then there are times when I feel like my thoughts are floating on an ice cube in a sink full of warm water, connected to nothing, and quickly beginning to deliquesce.

I wonder if Jesus ever had thoughts like this when he was here as human.  Or were his thoughts always in perfect connection with his Father?  I wonder.  I very much look forward to the day that I am in perfect communion with God with no sin or human nature in the way.

Phillipians 3:12 (NIV) "Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me."

I become a hand or a nostril or something...

So I look over and see Todd and Melanie Anderson, who were them-selves at The Father's House for the very first time, up from Ontario, CA where they had been living, to accept a job offer for Todd as Youth/Worship Pastor.  What a coincidence!  You see, I knew them from the People's Church days.  (Actually, my brother Chris was in a band with Todd, and they were attending People's church and my brother is the one who got me to go there too.)  Todd had been the worship leader of the college group worship team, and Melanie was my great friend that I had lived with, along with her sister and  another friend, for a little while back in 1993.  This was now August of 1998 when we both "happened" to show up at TFH for the first time.  They stayed and we stayed.  It was divine providence.  (They were the only people our age with kids our kids' age, but there were/are some kinda close to our age with kids.)

Anyway, it is at The Father's House where I finally began to give my entire self over to God to do with as he pleases.  This is where I really danced during worship, waved banners, have run around excited by God and unconfined in worship of him.  This is where I learned I had the gift of prophecy and learned what that meant.  It is here that I learned how to play bass, and worship with it in hand.  And it is here that I learned how to run the sound board and contribute to worship through that.  (I have my husband to thank for those things.)  I have had several people here that I would call mentors.  Though never really official mentors, they have taught me so much about how to live out God's love in a real way.  Some of these people are Cathy Davis, Brad Davis, Kathy Bos, Carol Yohannes, Mari Eleneke, and Jeff Hopper, just to name a few.  (Don't be offended if you weren't named.  I have really been influenced for good by each and every person that has been or still is a part of The Father's House.)  But Cathy Davis was a great teacher on using the prophetic.  I value greatly what I learned from her, under the wing of her loving mother's heart.  And Kathy Bos taught me so much about looking with spiritual eyes to see what God is doing in our midst and she taught me about boldness in proclaiming it as well.  And there is so much more, I could go on and on.  Mari and Carol have taught me a lot about loving unconditionally, and giving with joy.  They are amazing.  Jeff has taught me so much about patience and integrity and parenting.  He doesn't even know what I have learned just from watching him live his life.

All I can say is that I know without a doubt that God placed me in this body so he could finally get his hands inside my core, snatch me up, and change me for his kingdom purposes.  And he has used relationship to do it.  I think this very much aligns with our theme for the year.  It seems it has my theme since I arrived at TFH.

And so it goes

That day at Abundant Life Chapel I met the Holy Spirit and I never was the same.  When I got home that day I was very excited to tell my parents what happened.  Unfortunately, at that time, my father was not as open as he is now, and I got what felt like a lecture on "Emotionalism" and it's lack of importance in church.  I was crushed and angry.  I didn't buy into what he said.  I thought God created emotions, why not use them to worship him?  I was increasingly unhappy at my church where the only movement I saw during worship was standing and turning hymnal pages and then sitting again.  I attended ALC many more times before Monica and I switched schools and saw each other less and less.  But I'll never ever forget the love her family showed me.  I would say perhaps their love and acceptance was what kept me from being frightened and turned off by what I saw at their church.  I knew I was safe with them.

After I graduated from High School I went through some bad times with God and life (maybe I'll talk about all that another day), but found myself back in church seeking more from God.  I knew that what I had been doing all my life was not satisfying me.  I have told people that I knew all about God, but didn't actually get to know God until I turned 18 and left my parents' church and sought Him on my own.  I visited a Vineyard or 2, I attended a Calvary Chapel for a little bit, but I ended up at People's Church in their college group under Mike Chastain.  There I went through some major growth and exploration of the Trinity.  It was a wonderful time of life.  I began to learn about the gifts of the spirit and their use in the body.  I was prophesied over there and told that God would use my life experience (which was greater than it should have been by then) by giving me the gift of discerning spirits.  I really had no idea at that time what that really meant, and now only know a fraction of what it means, but I believe that to be true.  It goes along with the prophetic for me.  I was prayed over by my friends who were so gung-ho and full of zeal.  They prayed that I would be given the gift of tongues.  They encouraged me to speak it out, but it didn't happen for me.  There have been a few times when I have felt like there was something strange on the tip of my tongue, waiting to be spoken, but it has not happened for me yet.  If God wants to do that with me he can...  

While attending there I still felt torn.  As I look back now it was almost a battle over my life.  I was falling deeply in love with God and made the mistake of thinking I was ready for love on earth as well.  Then my focus turned to a guy.  I felt like I was being pulled from one end by God and another end by my emotions and lust.  I can talk more about that later.

Eventually, I ended up looking to God to meet my needs.  I ended up back in an MB church, which was just crazy to me.  But in my defense it was a contemporary plant that looked nothing like the church I grew up in.  It had a worship band.  This is where Chris and I met again.  (We went to High School together but he was focused on someone else.  If you have been at TFH you may have heard his story.)  Anyway, I still hadn't learned my lesson and we ended up pregnant and engaged and looking for a new place to worship that had young families like we were.  Chris had heard about a place called The Father's House that an old friend had been attending, so we thought we'd go and give it a try.  As we were  driving up we agreed, "If we see one couple that's our age and has kids we'll stay here at this church."  As soon as we said this I turned and looked at the entrance as Todd and Melanie Anderson were walking up with their daughter....

I will continue this story tomorrow.  :)