as if… in the first place

so.. this week has been a little discouraging to me as far as churches go, especially my home one. i can’t figure out why what God wants us as Chrisians to do and be.. seems to just not happen. i was reading 1 cor 12 the other day and its about the body of Christ and how we’re all different parts and MADE to fit together and work together for a common goal - loving God and loving people - thats the point. DELIGHTING in God and letting His love flow through us onto each person we come in contact with!! i know we can’t be this all the time, we’re imperfect broken people, but i don’t even feel like we’re anything more than an organization asking for money and at the first sign of possibly losing some.. shutting good things down. now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of beautiful God loving amazing churches, i’m just speaking from a perspective of 5 years of frustration that was reccently reopened. so i was struggling with this…. and i had been reading blue like jazz at camp but hadn’t opened it in a while, and chapter 12 was where i left off, and this is part of it - begining with the authors frustration…

“… only one more thing that bugged me… war metaphor. the churches i attended would embrace war metaphor. they would talk about how we are in a battle, and battling pverty and hate and injustice and pride and the powers of darkness. they left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. their teaching would have have me believe i was the good person in the world, and and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught we were all bad and he is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. the truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus….”

then, about the church he’s at now and the beginning of that ministry…

‘…we’d meet on sunday nights and then again of wednesday nights for prayer. a lot less people showed up for prayer. there were only about ten of us, and it was pretty boring. it felt like an aa meeting gone bad. we’d sit around and talk about the crap in nour lives, and then we’d pray for a little while, and then we would go home. one night rick (his pastor) showed up sort of beaten-looking. he had been to some sort of pastor’s reception where a gay guy spoke about how the church had lost touch with people who didn’t know about Jesus. rick said he was really convicted about this and asked if we thought we needed to repent and start loving people who were very different from us. we all told him yes, we did, but i do’nt think any of us knew what that meant. rick said he thought it meant we should live missional lives, that we should intentionally befirend people who were different from us. i didn’t like the sound of that, to be honest. i didn’t want to befriend somebody just to trick them into going to my church. rick said that was not what he was talking about. he said he was talking about loving people just because they exist - homeless people and Gothic people and gays and fruit nuts. and then liked the sound of it. i liked the idea of loving people just to love them, n ot to get them to come to church. if the subject of church came up, i could tell them about Imago, but until then, who cared. so we started praying every week that God would teach us to live missional lives, to notice people who needed to be loved.”

yes, yes. how encouraging it is to know this is true and that there are passionate people about the real thing out there, it seems a little radical and i suppose it can be scary to a lot of people but loving Jesus with your whole heart and truly hearing his voice was never supposed to be anything less than that. its about new creations and new beginnings and THE LOVE OF GOD, which is not something everyday and ordinary. its gonna push us out beyond the edges and take us places that we’re not comfortable with at all. but thats Jesus. thats my Jesus, and i need to love Him more so my life reflecs that. we shouldn’t tip toe around the darkness, we should be bold and step right into it with the light of our Christ piercing it, and we shouldn’t be afraid - perfect love drives out ALL fear, and my Jesus is THE DEFINITION of this love. praise God, and i pray that He brings me to a place of complete love for him and people, i think when we truly get a grasp of REAL love, we’ll find its quite different than what we’ve all expected.. praise God for that too. praise Him that he ALWAYS offers us more than we’ve expected, and He’s different than all we’ve become accustomed to in the world….. i hope this makes sense, in my heart its big and bulging and blatently obvious what i mean… buti pray God speaks His truth through it…. yes, He is good, and praise him also for always turning discouragement of frustration of hurt… everything, into somoething beatiful. be a part of that love…… love people just because they exist

welp, once again, it has indeed been a while!!!! i can’t seem to ever remember my password… so it always takes me a while. i’m in knoxville now!!!! its been exactly a month… 2 days ago, and i’m just now kinda getting adjusted, not that it was ever bad… just needed some adjusting i suppose. something Gods been teaching me the past couple years is that where he takes me isn’t necesarrily about mee and what i’ll be when i get there. like, with school in gallatin He was showing me that it wasn’t about my art classes and learning all this “stuff” but about the people He would have for me there to love, with His divine love. so getting here was a real struggle cause i didn’t feel like i’ve been doing anything for Him as far as that goes and i just really started wondering why in the world am i here!!!! and i just kinda came to this thought like… right now because school hasan’t ever really been hard for me at all, and here its like, CRAZY hard and time consuming, so is been what i’m consumed with instead of people like i was… but then i wonder if its really different from my emphasis put on people at school last year… or the emphasis put on people at camp this summer, cause i had nothing to do BUT love people this summer, so it could just be an adjustment from that, but also, God does want me to be at school here to learn so that i can learn to better the quality of life for people by creating their environment. like, before i got here i really wasn’t sure about interior design and if it was really gonna have an impact on people…. cause i never thought of design as being life changing or gratifying or anything like that…. but in my interior design classes we talk SO MUCH about people and how they think and how the environment they’re surrounded by has soooo much to do with their life!!!!!!! that is very exciting!!!! like, i’ll get to surround people with beauty and what they love and make it into something that effects them every DAY!! thats amazing. and i’ve been thinking the past few days if, since theres all this psychology involved… and Gods the one who created us as complex as we are and He knows exactly how we work and think and all that stuff that we think we have all figured out…. like, what if theres a way to design an environment to point people to Him - back to their creator who created those things in them that they love so that they could be surrounded by them and giving me the opportunity to be at this school and learn these things so that i can help them be surrounded by those things…. hmmm.. that would be amazing. and like, this is the first time i’ve really realized that, that He does have me here to truly learn these things so that i can do that, and i came to this realization mainy by a conversation i had with alana the other night…. it just takes me a few days to let things sink in i guess. i have to chew on it for a while, but even thought i’ve realized that, He’s also shown me today that i’m totally here for the people right now - here, today - because thats what matters. right now. i was talking to a friend about church and it just went into a way deep conversation, but this is what i was thinking about when i called this “haven” cause i’m realizing how camp truly is mine. being there this weekend was amazing. i can’t even describe that, but just knowing that its not the way the world is, the whole world doesn’t know these mysteried of christ and see their beauty. its completely blind to any of it. i think a lot of times all the see is hard edges and jagged lines that, if they touched them, would pierce them deeply. its so clouded. if you would, please pray for the people God has already put in my life. i love them and i want so badly for them to see the beauty of the truth. the real truth, not the facade that is most often seen and not pretty at all. pray that they’re hearts are open and that they could truly see. becuase on my journey here learning all i need to know to do what God wants me to do, there are many people going right along with me, and we’re together because God put us together and He wants us all to be touched by Him, and others will be touched by it coming out of His children. i know thats why He’s placed me with them…. now its just… seeing Him do His work, but i must be that empty vessel for Him to use, and i want to be empty so i can be totally filled with Him, just like this summer. the whole world is just like camp… we need to be the same… have the same mentality… why it always seems to be different, i don’t know, but its really all the same…. being a family… and inviting everyone else in and loving them the same. that should be life…. and theres no reason for it not to be