It never ceases to amaze me
It is so awesome that our amazement, that our love and excitement of God's love is never-ending. It always renews. It always feels just as good or even better than before. What a beautiful thing!
"...God keeps renewing the promise and setting the date as today."
- Hebrews 4:7
I am speaking at Agua Viva tonight, my "crazy" friend Amalio's church project and I have been concerned with what I was going to say, not so much being nervous, but rather thinking I need to spend time to outline out what I want to say - you see I had a vision before I decided to engage God on this. I kind of couched this under the guise of I need to spend time praying and outlining with Him. Don't get me wrong if we include Him it's gonna be right. But what is amazing is that I had a particular notion which has now totally evolved based on 5 separate times when God entered my heart this last week.
Each of these 5 experiences have now shaped what God wants me to say and it is beautiful. In fact right now, the morning of the day I go speak, I am not preparing an outline. I am sharing. I am sharing His story, the same thing I have felt called to do over the last couple months, and the same thing He wants me to do tonight. But the story I will now present tonight, is so much more complete than the story I had in mind a week ago. Thank you God!
My five gifts this week:
1. Someone said to me (I'm paraphrasing so please forgive any mistakes I may make in remembering), "Wow that's cool, but it makes me wonder. My story isn't as interesting as yours. It's not that dramatic."
My heart sank when I heard this. And all I could say at the time was, "What do you mean, you're creating your story right now, every day." I wanted this person to realize that if they truly team up with God the story can't help but be interesting - it's God's story after all.
What I realized later at home that night was, I was planning to focus on just the return to faith part of my story, which is crazy and dynamic (an atheist of 18 years turned believer over the miraculous dismissal of all penalties of a DWI even when known by all parties to be guilty.) But what I realized that night is, yeah it's a cool story but what's even cooler is all the stuff God did in me after that - that was just the beginning and anyone and everyone can have God intercede in their lives just by connecting with Him regularly!
2. I spoke on the phone with my first serious girlfriend, a beautiful girl (inside and out) from my second year of college. We went separate ways after breaking up, in which I wasn't very loving nor did I treat her very well at that time but God has given me the gift of rekindling that friendship or at least reconciling anything that needs to be reconciled, which is great. By the way, she is doing well and has a beautiful family now.
We talked for 2 hours the other night catching up and talked a lot about God, it was great. One thing she said to me though was, "Now I know how you returned to faith but I still want to know what your faith looks like."
Again a beautiful nudging from God to quit focusing so much on this story of the DWI, but to share the more important stuff, His stuff, and how I see Him all the time, what I do to engage Him and how He responds. He always responds and:
He never ceases to amaze me!
3 & 4. I have had 2 friends, Amalio and Stevie B share the following with me:
"...do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you."
- Matthew 10:19
5. And finally what truly is amazing is that God literally showed me last night that I can do this without a script because He will be helping me.
I came home from a night out with a friend and thought I needed to get to bed early, so I could get up and prepare. I still thought I needed to prepare some (sometimes we don't get it, we don't trust enough, or we think it's going to happen one way but God chooses another way, which we don't see but it is a more powerful way.)
Last night God did that. I came home to find about 5 to 6 responses to my video on You Tube, including the long-awaited video response from Phil, as well as lot's of commentary, and a handful of new subscribers to my videos. I watched Phil's and it was excellent as most of his vids are, but curiously enough he talked about a faith experience that was really different than mine, or at least how my faith came about. So instead of getting to bed early to rest up to prepare this morning God prepped me right then and there.
I jotted down a few notes, started to plan out a response to Phil and then just felt very compelled to scrap the notes and just start shooting a response. It was amazing. With no script in place I loaded up the video program and hit record. What I found later as I wrapped up my response was truly amazing - I had in "one take", no edits, just talked for 20 minutes in front of the camera in a response that was honest, authentic and introduced the much more important parts of my story than the DWI. It really became a testimony to my experience with God! It was awesome as this is what I believe I'm called to do, to simply share how He reveals Himself as I know it from my experience.
I was actually up until 3:00am doing this (so yeah - no getting up early today), as I had to break up the video and re-save it into 2 videos. You Tube has a 10 minute limit that I didn't know about.
(Anyway, go to my page and Phil's to check all this out - addresses in previous blog below)
I now feel that I am truly prepared for tonight and that God will speak through me to say whatever ever needs to be said and most importantly, it will be about his continuous love and the amazing things he does every day for us!
... He keeps renewing the promise and setting the date as today!
