yup. I hear the voice.

Todays adventures in hearing God’s voice:

1.   Drive 30 min across town only to remember that my lunch with friends is Wednesday.  Yeah….I totally felt the whole way driving there, and when I was getting dressed that I should re-check my email, that they weren’t gonna be at the restaurant when I got there.  Bleh.  Failblog in hearing said voice.  I did actually have a really good conversation with God in the car so it wasn’t a total loss.

2.  Driving home from family night, felt like I heard go to Wal-Mart and get what I tell you to get (this is relation to word received earlier in the night about having creativity).  So here is what was in my cart:

-bunch of fake eucalyptus.  yup weird.  and they smell funny too.  but I walked by and saw myself making designs with them, so there ya go.

-green polka dot ribbon.  not my style but apparently now it is.

-clear plastic alphabet stamps, commonly used for scrapbooking.  They were kinda cheesy looking but I saw myself painting on them and making them look cool.

(so I guess we will see what God does with all of that stuff-something awesome and creative that has never been done before)

I love that God talks to us.  I love that God loves to talk to us,  that He is just looking over the edge of His throne and waiting with crazy anticipation to whisper something into our ears.

He’s just that good.

disjointed thoughts on birth control

So in a horrible twist of fate and awful irony today is Mother’s Day and the 50th Anniversary of the Pill.  Yup.  Happy Mother’s day to all you mothers out there that chose to not be mothers, or choose to at your own convenience.

I think that there is something to be said about giving God full control of our lives.  I think that there is a reason why God said that children are a blessing.  I think that God meant it when he said that grandchildren are the glory of old men.  God is all about family.  He is Father, we are His children.  He adopted us into His family because he wanted to be with Him forever.  He loves to give good gifts to His children.  In the Old Testament the Jewish people were counted by number in families and in the New Testament entire families were saved in one night.

I think that we have confused humanistic tendencies to accelerate human achievement and rights with God’s desire to give us abundant life.   We have made children a burden instead of a blessing.  An abundant life is a blessed life.  And a blessed life is having lots of children.

One of God’s first commandments to humans was to multiply and fill the earth.  Even after all this time the earth still isn’t full, there’s still plenty of room in Wyoming for starters.

There is a commercial on right now for “Essure”- a permanent birth control.  Birth Control that you don’t have to take daily, you just go to your doctor and you come out 10 minutes later not ever having to worry again about being preggers.  Just go on with your life.  It drives me crazy every time I see it.  My family isn’t complete when I think its complete. My family is complete when God says its complete.

It heavily irritates me that we have made children a matter of planning.  A matter of a good wise decision made in the right time with lots of forethought and money in the bank. We have made having less children a fad to accommodate our need for more security, more wealth, a better education, and even a more developed economy.  I think that we’ve been tricked into believing that birth control should be a normal thing for women of child producing age.

When there are conversations about giving God our all, about letting Him be in control of our lives, why don’t we ever talk about reproduction? You’ll never hear a pastor give a sermon on that.  I just wonder what would happen if we would really trust God with everything.   If we really did then why would be need birth control?

What if this was the truth?: birth control flies in the face of a Good Father who knew us before the foundations of the world, who had dreams in His heart for us before He even breathed the breath of life into the first Adam.

I think that God had dreams for all the children that never were.

it all comes down to this

I believe that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

I demand it all

I didn’t write a blog yesterday.  I guess that missing one out of 28 isn’t that bad.  I did’nt miss it on purpose but I felt so horrible when I got home that I took some Tylenol pm and didn’t wake up for 12 hours.  I have a super bad cold and my mind has been a bit fuzzy, as one often does in the middle of the high temperature, sore throat, and stuffy nose.

I woke up this morning and spoke life and health to my body;  commanded it to come back into alignment with the way that it was created.  And yet, here I am….still feeling pretty awful.

I believe that my inheritance is full and complete health.  I believe that when Isaiah said “by His stripes you are healed” that he really meant it.  I will not embrace any theology that says absolute healing is for later.  I demand that the blood covers me fully and completely right here and right now.    Sometimes it doesn’t happen, or sometimes that it is delayed a bit, but I choose to believe that Jesus is who He says He is.  And I keep on asking like the persistent widow, knowing that my Father is nothing but good. I keep on asking because I know that it is God’s will for Jesus to receive the full reward of his suffering.

I choose not to deny the cross.

glory

I was listening to the The Hallelujah Chorus, from Handel’s Messiah today. I think that that it is one of the most stirring pieces of music ever written.

I love that everyone stands up during that section.  This tradition began on March 23, 1743 when King George II stood up abruptly when the Chorus began. The reason why is a mystery but many people have hypothesized that he wanted to stretch his legs, or thought it was the national anthem, or even that he knew that the Chorus was written for a King that was higher then himself so he stood in honor.  No one will ever know.  I would like to think that it was the last one.

I love that at the name of Jesus everyone will bow.  Kings, Prime Ministers, Presidents, bakers, and cooks, and barista, school teachers, policemen and businessmen.  I love that when the Glory filled the Temple everyone hit the deck.  Glory will be given to whom Glory is due.

There is something in us that wants to give glory to another.  I think of the times when they have cheesy segments on the news to honor heros.  I hate to watch them but they always make me cry.  Some kid who collected pennies, and gathered his whole school to do the same, to give to the kid who has cancer.  All the stories are the same and they almost always end well.  We want to honor greatness, we were created to respond to greatness.

This can easily be perverted into humanism and giving ourselves, meaning humanity, the glory.  Of course this is only a counterfeit of the real Glory.  We were made to give glory to God.  We were made to shine, for Him.  We were made to love, for Him.  We were made to create, for Him.  We were made to bear His Glory, so that We could give Him the Glory.

Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, for with His own blood He purchased men for God, from every tribe and tongue and nation.

thoughts on Lincoln, dreams, a long faithful life.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.  I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fall-but I do expect it will cease to be divided  ”.                                                                                                                -Abraham Lincoln, Springfield speech: June 16, 1858.

“That on the fist of January, the the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”.                         -Abraham Lincoln, The Emancipation Proclamation: January 1st, 1863

“Four score and seven years ago out fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are create equal.  Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can so long endure…. we have come to dedicated a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here have their lives that that nation might live”                                                                                                         – Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address: November 19, 1863.

“Fondly do we hope, fervently so we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away….with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds”               -Abraham Lincoln, 2nd Inaugural Address: March 4, 1865.

I think that sometimes I still forget that this life is a process.  I have so many dreams, so many visions of what I feel like God has created me to do in this life.  Sometime I freak out and feel like I am 27 and haven’t done anything important with my life yet, and other times I just laugh at how much I have actually done, seen and been a part of.  I used want to accomplish great by the time I was thirty: to be famous, to have discovered some great ancient spiritual mystery, speaking in front of thousands of people.  I wanted to visit every continent.  Sometimes I have remind myself that I have already done what most people don’t even accomplish in a lifetime

I’ve become a lot more laid back as I’ve gradually gotten to the grand old age of 27.  I’m discovering how to love fully and deeply.  How to pour my life out for others.  How to live as a martyr for a cause that yields only Glory for another.  How to be me.

Most of my dreams haven’t change.  They are still larger then life and have glimpses of eternity in their shadows. But I will wait.

And be persistent.  And faithful.  And gentle like a dove and shrewd like a hawk.  I will sometimes roar and other times just gaze.  But my dreams will win, because they were found in God’s heart first.

immigrant

This weekend I saw an incredible musical at the Denver Center for Performing Arts called “In the Heights”.  It opened on Broadway in NYC two years ago to rave reviews and went on to win the Tony for Best Musical.

“In the Heights”, takes place in Washington Heights, the neighborhood at the very northern tip of Manhattan; it’s a ‘barrio’ of Hispanics, mostly from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.   The parents came over years ago but now their children are stuck inconveniently between two worlds.  First Generation isn’t an easy thing.

“The Heights” used to be where the Irish lived, and probably the Italians before that.  These blocks, you see, are transient, they change as fast as the Hudson’s tide and the traffic that flows in and out of the George Washington Bridge.  The people who inhabit these streets are longing for a better life. The parents who came here for their children work hard days and long nights to leave their children the American Dream. The children work hard at dreaming how to get out, how to move downtown and bring the traditions they love with them and perhaps forget the ones that remind them too much of where they came from.

I come from immigrants…I mean, well….this country was built on immigration, but much of family history starts here in the 1900s.   My Grandmother on my mom’s side immigrated  here after WWII but she didn’t come along-she was a war-bride.  My Grandmother is Spanish and she worked in Nice, France at a USO hotel, where she met my grandfather, during the war.

She speaks 5 languages and still speaks English with a strong accent; I always laugh a bit when she sprinkles in traces and French, Italian, Spanish, and English into one sentence.  She cooks with butter, has wine with lunch and eats a teaspoon of olive oil a day.  She makes the best Strawberry Rhubarb Pie on earth and she always has cans of pop ready for when the grandkids come to visit.  She is an incessant very opinionated Democrat who still reads the paper every day and watches the 4pm news on Channel 4.  She used to be the shoe salesman at May D&F.  She is strong and a hard worker and funny and lively and 8 years short of a century.

My mother is the 3rd of 6 children  First Generation.  She speaks Spanish, but only after visiting Colombia 10 years ago, where her brain suddenly remembered the language of youth.  She grew up in era very different from now.  It was not so much multi cultural, as is the norm today, but rather incredibly focused on integration.  Her culture wasn’t celebrated, rather it was relegated to the history books of Ellis Island.

I am the youngest of 5.  Second Generation.  I took Spanish twice and failed it twice.  Oddly enough I took Swahili and got an A.  I grew up neither fully embracing the culture of my blood, but not rejecting it either.  I guess I knew what I was but didn’t really make a fuss about it.

But sometimes I hear Spanish beats and rhythms  and my heart dances; I hear the tender plucks of the Flamenco guitar and I remember a bit more of who God created me to be.

joy branch

“ Religion is meant to be in everyday life a thing of unspeakable joy.  And why do so many complain that it is not so?  Because they do not believe that there is no joy like the joy of abiding of Christ and in His love, and being branches through whom He can pour out His love on a dying world.”

-Andrew Murray, The True Vine, pg 81.

I want to be that joyous branch who is always dependent on that life-sap from the root and the careful pruning of the husbandman.  And I want to pour out His love on a dying world.

This Man

Love wins.  He has won my heart.  The whirlwind may come, my eyes might drift-if just for a second in the eyes of eternity.

But this Beautiful, Glorious Man.

The Man who hold everything today.  The Man whom by everything He made for Himself, for His Glory.  That Man who sits on throne, whose been gazed on and sung to for eternity.  The Man who hung heaven and sewed my heart before the foundation of the world was brought forth molecule by molecule .  This Man.

He has won my heart.

there’s only one reason

I listened to this sermon today.  Suffice to say it will be one that is with me for a while.  It was on incessant worship and the Glory of God, by Stephen Venable from IHOP KC.

It hit me really hard—                                                                                                                                  Colossians 1: Everything is by Him and for Him and from Him.  He existed before everything and He holds everything together.

His glory is above, beyond, before.  Its why I exist, its why he created the world.  And he deserves worship just because thats who He is.  24-7 prayer & worship isn’t just about intercession for the nations, its not just about getting God’s heart, about being intimate with Him.  Its about His glory.

I will worship Him not because he makes my life better, not because he makes me feel good, but purely because He is God.  And He is above.  He is worthy.