From Survival to Revival

So I am physically, emotionally and mentally tired. I never knew attending a women's conference could completely were one out! I had the pleasure of going to a Women of Faith Conference http://www.womenoffaith.com/ yesterday and today. The tour topic this year was From Survival to Revival. The name itself is enough of a tag that fits my life... however the speakers at the conference - man! Were some of the most amazing, inspiring and God-filled women I've been able to witness.  And the music!!! Hmm-mmm-mmm! I rocked it out to the likes of Natalie Grant and Matthew West - both of which just made me feel and like there music even more than I previously did.  And more than that there was the comradery of worshipping God, not only with the almost 40 women from my own church attending, but the nearly 6,000 women attending.

Here are just some of the notes from the speakers that I just have to jot down and share...

From Sheila Walsh:
"Sometimes when things are broken, when brought together they make something beautiful."
"Declaring Gods name can drag you from the dark places"
"Guilt is ok. Guilt tells me I've done something wrong, but shame tells me I am something wrong."
"...living on borrowed time..." (This last one is just a snippet of a story she told - but the sentiment is always something that has followed me - and because she said it on Friday night - I ended up breaking open my story a bit for a friend in the car as drove home late last night and got stuck in construction traffic at like 11 at night! I write it here as a reminder so that I someday share the sentiment details...)

From Patsy Clairmont:
"You want some revival - be willing to change!"
"God gave his word to know what to do in our moments of weakness."
She quoted poet Mary Oliver: "Are you breathing just a little and calling it life?"
"Sometimes we are enamored with the sound of our own voice when we should be trying to listen to the voice of God."
"Fix yourself before you fix others."

From Lysa TerKeurst:
She talked about the saying IMPOSSIBLE and how you can break it down into I'M POSSIBLE which I've heard before but then she took it further and said I'M is really I AM and I AM is another name for God so really IMPOSSIBLE = GOD's POSSIBLE.
"Go where wisdom gathers not where wisdom scatters."
"God takes your offer of service and gives it back as wisdom."
"Your identity is that of God's Daughter. Let your identity lead you not your insecurity."
"Life doesn't tie up in a nice neat bow!"

From Christine Caine:
"God is in the midst of it with you."
"We are on assignment from God."
"Fear paralyzes us and cripples us from Gods designs for us."
"God has always used broken people to do his will!" (AMEN!)
"When you are given an assignment - the devil sends in the fear to stop us. New levels = new devils!"
"We should not be afraid of dying but that we didn't live the life God wanted us to live!"
"Impossible is where God starts - Miracles is what God does!"
"It's not about my smallness but his bigness!"
"Step from comfort into the promise."

Lisa Harper:
"Don't forget your first love! Jesus!"
"Don't just do good works, they are nothing out of the context of a loving relationship with Jesus."
"Revival is the love child born out of an authentic reunion between a sinner and her savior."

All of these women are amazing speakers (and it looks like they each have books - I love that!).  I had moments where I laughed, cried, was humbled, was encouraged and overall just moved to step out and do something!  For me it was more confirmation that I need to continue on the path I am with this blog, with my possible book someday and overall the journey I am on to figure out God's plan for me.  I'm more excited than ever at the possibilities before me. 

I am so blessed with the people in my life, the church I have found here, and the beautiful and amazing women I attended the conference with tonight.  In particular I got to sit in between two of my most favorite women who have reached into my heart and inspired me each in their own way.  I am truly grateful for every word of encouragement they have spoken into my life.

And here's a few photos from the event!

I'm too tired to figure out how to make them pretty and put a caption under each to describe (I just tried and it did something weird and changed my font :( ).  So...
Photo 1: Pre- show!
Photo 2: My two favorite gals K and J! (and a photobomber K(2? lol?) )
Photo 3: My favorite speaker Christine Caine!
Photo 4: My current favorite singer Matthew West! I couldn't believe I actually got to see him - basically in a mini 40 min concert today! A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!

Choose Joy

This week has been difficult. As I sit here writing this first couple lines of this post I am waiting for a funeral for a former boss who happened to attend my church. He died last Friday and I found out Sunday night after my bible study. Monday it turns out Robin Williams died. Unless you live under a rock you know who he is. And then I found out my 88 yr old grandmother had to go to the hospital. While she turned out fine so far, we are dealing with the reality of her mortality. So death has seemed to surround me for the last couple of days.

And while there is many a debate going on about Robin Williams death because of the circumstances of it: whether it's about the state of mental health care in this country; whether suicide is a choice; whether we should care this deeply about a celebrity - someone most of the public doesn't know personally; whether it's appropriate for politicians to comment; or whether the media and the commentators are glamorizing suicide by saying he's in a better place and how that might affect others who are contemplating suicide. I’ve seen, read, and even had at least one of these conversations/arguments in the last 3 days.
(Continued tonight after work)
I even saw tonight the fact that Robin William’s daughter had to delete her social media accounts because of the negative comments criticizing how much she has posted in the last couple of days and how many photos (or lack of photos) she had of her father. I mean, really, everyone has an opinion, including even myself. And isn’t that sad. Can’t we just be supportive of each other and not pick apart anyone’s reaction. I don’t want to get into any of those conversations except to say I hope people are gentle with each other when discussing sensitive topics like this as we can do more harm than good. And for me I personally will miss Robin Williams as a source of joy for me. I grew up watching him as he was a favorite of my mothers. As a result, seeing him in a movie or on TV always gave me the sense of being home.

To discuss something, that is in reality, a little closer to home: the funeral today. It was really quite beautiful in its entirety. I barely knew my former boss but he was an example of God working in my life. When I first arrived in KC in October I got a job at a big craft store to bide my time and help out financially as I searched for full time work. In late November/December G. became my manager there at the store. When it came to scheduling he was very understanding when I said I couldn’t work on Sundays because of church. But it wouldn’t be until January when my church was doing an all church study which included sermon series, related bible study and daily devotional that I'd really find out something remarkable. I had the devotional book in my purse and as he checked it before leaving the store it was plainly there to see. He smiled and said, “He my church is doing that study…” and I replied, “So is mine!” He then asked what church I attend and after I answered he laughed and said that was his church as well. This was surprising because the store isn’t in Lee’s Summit which is where I live and where the church is located so what were the odds that we would both attend a church over a half hour away. Besides that we never crossed paths – which turned out to be because he went to the 8:00am service and I mostly go to the 12:30 service. But still it was a nice connection. We both ended up leaving that store in March/April and I had been meaning to try and see him somehow at church but I never did. And now I never will. It just proves that you have to do things when you think of them. Don’t put off anything that you can and should do now until tomorrow or to some future date.

And this also has been reiterated with my Grandmother’s health. She is 88 years old and lately she’s been having episodes of declining health or falls. One of the reasons I moved back to KC was to be near her and my other Grandma in their last years. And unfortunately I can count on two hands how many times I’ve seen both of them, let alone my maternal Grandma who has ailing health. But she’s recovered this time and I have decided to make sure I don’t squander my realization that life is short. I’ll be, starting this Sunday, going and spending Sunday afternoons with her.

For me, all of this has reminded me of my father’s death over three years ago. The reality is I should have learned my lesson about putting people off with his death. I had cut my father out of my life thinking I had all the time in the world to sort through my feelings about him and our past. And it turns out I didn’t. He died before I could reconcile with him. I have plenty of older posts that touch on his death and some of how I got through it so I won’t get into that again. But I will say it’s amazing how far I’ve come since his death. And I think, in fact, that some of my current success is due to actually having to deal with his death and reconciling my feelings about him without him here to do it.  Through that process and as a result of some deep healing I was able to learn how to choose joy despite all of my circumstances.

Choose Joy. This is becoming a mantra for me. It’s a very simple concept that took me forever to grasp. In fact it didn’t seem simple at all. Choosing to be happy didn’t make any sense to me. In fact I remember thinking that the people who told me being happy was a matter of choice were absolutely crazy. They didn’t understand my pain. But in the end it really was a choice for me. Someday I’ll sit down and write it all out. I mean again there are bits and pieces of this throughout the posts on the blog so I hope I’m being transparent enough about it.

I’ve had a long day and if I don’t stop soon I won’t get this posted. I will end with this song I heard over the weekend from Sanctus Real’s “Lay it Down.” It really hit home for me how and why I was and am able to Choose Joy.  

********************************

I know you have your problems
‘Cause everybody's got ‘em
If you get lost in your sorrows
Then you could hit rock bottom
But if you smile in face of trivial things
And you learn to pray when you wanna complain
Stand up straight when the Earth is shaking
And just breathing when you feel afraid
Oh, don't you know

Those problems you're worried about
They can't keep you from living now
When you shake ‘em off and lay ‘em down, down, down
At the cross where your freedom's found
Oh You can stand up no matter what
March on when times are tough
Be strong and don't give up
All you need now
Is to shake ‘em off and lay ‘em down
At the cross where your freedom's found

We all have our seasons
When we get caught up in our feelings
And I know there's a time for laughter and a time for pain
A time for doubt and a time for faith
But when you believe you can find the strength
So get back up on your feet

Lay it down, lay it down
Why you holding on so tight
Oh, the freedom you will find
When you let go God will take over the fight
Oh, just surrender
And feel what it's like to be free again

A Birthday: Forging my Path and Overcoming Doubts

"Together we will forge a pathway up the high mountain. The journey is arduous at times, and you are weak. Someday you will dance light-footed on the high peaks; but for now, your walk is often plodding and heavy. All I require of you is to take the next step, clinging to My hand for strength and direction." - Jesus Calling by Sarah Young

It's been a long times since I've posted. And that in itself has led me to not posting. I mean I get to thinking, "It's been this long... why should I do it now?" or "Man, now its been X amount of time in my second attempt at a blog - maybe this is telling me something!" But in all these doubts over these past 10 months I've had the whispering of my heart to continue.
Have you ever had that whispering? I mean it started out vaguely over the last couple of months in response to some HUGE life changes and decisions I've made and the 2-3 blog attempts to describe what has been happening. In the end I let my perfectionist view of what I had to say get to me or my doubts that it really mattered at all. I always had an excuse. And then there is the biggest thing: the fact that sharing about my faith story and how God has moved in my life in the last year is scary.  That maybe it won't appeal to some of my friends on Facebook. That maybe I will sound crazy.

And I let it all get to me. And like my other attempts I simply let it go... (and no singing of any Disney songs now please). And I thought it was OK.

I once had a dream to write a book about my life. I had an inherent need to shout my story from the rooftop - but for all the wrong reasons. Its funny, the more I came to God, the more I healed from the past, the more I found myself, I then began to slowly let go of that dream.  I didn't feel the need to share it for my sake anymore. I did, however, eventually start this blog as a means of sharing my revelations and feeling free to talk about the healing power of God, along with talking about just the general stuff that happens in life from my distinctive viewpoint and voice. In the end I knew that would entail sharing my story, the one I wanted to write all those years ago, bit by bit. And that felt ok - in fact I felt powerfully pulled to do so by God. That sounds very distinctly scary to say. 

But that is what risk is right? It's scary. I bring up risk because of my pastor's sermon just yesterday. Firstly, I know because I'm jumping into month 10 of my life it's as if I'm just making an assumption everyone knows that I've found a church (www.eaglecreekchurch.com) and how important that church has become to making my life here as whole as it is. And see that little tidbit there is my example of how I'd get bogged down in all the details. How am I supposed to tell someone the important stuff if I don't start at the beginning or even just hit the highlights? This is partly my personality (ask my friend A - He totally just asked me this past Saturday night about one specific thing and I told him the whole story of my day from the time I woke up) and partly I think its a way for negativity (the devil) to push at me to just give up right here and now. So I'm going to skip the fact that I may think you need to know more about everything and just start with this sermon.

My church for the past 7 weeks has been doing a summer sermon series called At the Movies.  And I know that I could probably go back and look at my notes and find little tidbits about following God's whispers because I know I've been feeling his nudges for awhile now.  But yesterday's was a bit more forceful than a nudge.  The sermon: "The Bucket List".  It's crazy to me is because I once wrote a Bucket List years ago and my number one to do was to jump out of a plane. Pastor Matt used that as a first example! When he asked who had that on their list I enthusiastically raised my hand and it seemed as if he looked right at me. What is more extraordinary is another one of my top things was writing that book - which I eventually decided my blog could replace that. So it was kind of like a wake up call - like God was saying pay attention.

He then went into the 3 things that we should have on our Bucket List and that if you did these things by the end of your life you will have lived a fulfilled life.  The very first thing: "Keep taking God directed Risk." The other 2 were important too and if you were curious you can go to my church's website and watch it (it's already posted I checked), but I want to just stick with this first principle and how it rattled in my brain for the rest of the day.  Matt said, "God challenges us to step out... to live a life of faith." He reviewed Hebrews 11:1 "Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see." Have I been living in faith.  Have I been taking risk. No. No I haven't. Not the biggest one. The one placed on my heart. The one to write about my faith here.  These statements reminded me of a bracelet given to me (and the whole group) by a group member of one of two bible study's  I've been attending this month.  I've been wearing everyday to work since she gave it to us. It says My Life = My Worship. I know I'm going to butcher the story behind it so I will just say what I took from it. We should remember that everything we do in our life should be to the glory of God, whether at home, in church, with friends, at work or really anywhere. I wear it to remember to choose to be a representation of that every day. And while I did that simple thing - wearing a bracelet to change the way I am everyday in the real world - there is one place I'm not showing my faith by my truest God given gift - my writing here and in the online world. I was letting my doubt, need for perfection, and my plain fear of the unknown cloud my calling. 

But did I go home and write a blog post?  No. I went and did laundry - lazily watched television. Didn't even read my two Bible study books like I had promised myself I would do. I let distraction rule. And as a result I was almost late to my Bible Study. And you know what - I was given another push. The book my Sunday night group is reading is called Forgotten God by Francis Chan and the section we were reading was about our reputation and where we letting that it get in our way. If you do listen to the sermon I mentioned you'll see that this went along perfectly with the 2nd principle to live in your life. There was a section about how we as American's tend to worry, to often an unhealthy degree, what people think of us. Chan goes on the say, "When we become overly concerned about our appearance, our spiritual reputation, our coolness, and our acceptance, we are living as citizens of this world rather than as ambassadors." I ended up sharing with my group about this blog and how I related that passage to my own personal fears. They of course challenged me to ignore my fears and worries of such a large gap since my last post. And I went home and could not for the life of me log on to my blog account. And I took that frustration as a sign to just go to bed.

And then there is today.  My 33rd birthday. It's funny I've been telling everyone I'm 33 for several months now. It started out as saying I'm almost 33 and somewhere along the line I just dropped the almost. I don't know if it was that or for the first time in my life I didn't have any plans (even for the weekends before or after). I mean my mom's in Arizona (so far away!) and my brother is in Iowa (so busy!) and my friends here... well we made a comment about a month ago about doing something - but with the holiday, jobs and life... well it just slipped by.  It's also the first birthday in 10 years that I didn't take off from work (as I have a new job I couldn't justify taking a Monday - the hardest day of the week - off). So I woke up today very anti-climatically.

In fact, I woke up sort of in a haze. Not really in a funky sad mood - just hazy. It was the first day of having a new boss, some reorganization at the job as the result of losing 4 supervisor/managers to federal positions. It felt disorganized, I had some difficult claims to read, and it went downhill from there. By mid-day I was struggling to not think why me and to not fall into the negativity that was falling on my shoulders. I kept chanting my new motto: Choose happiness (which is a whole other post I hope to eventually write :) ). At the end of the work day I went to run an errand that proved to just be an errand in frustration as it turned a simple activity of one hour into three hours as I made a huge error in my mapquest calculations. And again I was almost late to getting to my Monday night Bible study!

And tonight - I ended up sharing a big part of my story with these women. Our Bible study we are doing is called Sacred Secrets by Beth Moore and its had a profound effect on me and I really hope to maybe go into some of that in another blog post. But two things stood out to me in tonight's video message from Beth Moore. The first was a diving into the context of Mark 4:22 "For everything that is hidden will eventually be brought into the open, and every secret will be brought to light." Sounds like an ominous verse but add the previous verse Mark 4:21 "Then Jesus asked them, "Would anyone light a lamp and then put it under a basket or under a bed? Of course not! A lamp is placed on a stand, where its light will shine." Basically it is saying that what God has done for us in secret we should share it with the world. And that basically has described my life over the last 4 years. I have been working in private with God, carving out the bad and letting my scars heal. I've learned to even love my scars. It was ugly at times but it was also quite beautiful in others. And I haven't shared it with very many people. In fact, up until recently, I've only really shared huge chunks of it with those who lived it with me - those that walked the same road to recovery with me. And they actually know the story - saw the transformation, and so its not scary to share it with them. But everyone else, putting out there for possible old friends, friends of friends, acquaintances or even strangers to read.  That is scary.

The second thing was just an extension of the hidden the private, where Beth Moore ended up discussing David and Goliath and how he mentioned how he fought a lion and a bear so they should send him in to fight Goliath. She discussed how the people of that time may not have even understood what he meant or believed him because no one had seen him do these things. She found that so profound she end up on her knees almost shouting "I have fought a Lion and a Bear. You have no idea what I've fought in private." I could relate and I even felt myself saying loudly in my head the exact same words, "I have fought a Lion and a Bear." And I should not hide that under a basket or under a bed.

And if leaving that Bible study wasn't inspiring enough God had three messages in a row for me on the radio... two full songs broken up by a message:

1) Francesca Batistelli's "He Knows my Name" - specifically the following lines:
"Spent today in a conversation, in the mirror face to face with somebody less than perfect
I wouldn't choose me first if I was looking for a champion
In fact I'd understand if you picked everyone before me but that's just not my story
True to who You are, you saw my heart and made something out of nothing....
I'm not meant to just stay quiet, I'm meant to be a lion (A LION you guys!)
I'll roar beyond a song with every moment that I've got
True to who You are, You saw my heart and made something out of nothing"
2) The devotional for today from Jesus Calling Facebook page was shared.  I thought it the perfect intro for my post.

3) Mikeschair's "Thank You" - specifically these lines:
"It would have been easy but I'm glad You never walked away
Cause Your love runs deep for me and I see this beautiful world
And it brings tears to my eyes and I think it's beautiful to be free...
Wanna thank You for the grace, I know I don't have to earn
You love me, You love me
Your mercy is proof
All I can do is say thank You"

And it was like God talked to me all the way home back to my little apartment. It was all the pushes I need to sit down and write this all out.

It's just past midnight and I've been writing for several hours - but it feels like only moments I've felt so moved.  I'm going to go ahead and post this mistakes and all. Because if I let myself I'll keep it to review tomorrow just to make sure there aren't mistakes made in a rush. But will it have the same earnest edge I feel in it now. I'm not so sure. And besides I've more often than not written whole posts and just never posted them because I felt different later. I think that's all negativity that I don't need to pay attention to. So please enjoy, ignore the grammar mistakes, and feel free to share with whomever you want.

Thank you for reading. But in the end, "all I can say is thank You" to God for giving me the encouragement I needed to sit down and post.