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| I am in Costa Rica with a group of people who are studying God and trying to follow Him for our lives, His will and the salvation of the world. I feel very much like a disciple. with more luggage.
I am leaving for Nicaragua tomorrow with two other young women. We will wake up at 5 am to drive to the bus station. The other people in our group are now in Panama and Heredia, Costa Rica. I miss them a lot. We're working on audio and video for the San Jose base and for the DNA conference that happened last week and getting ready to go again.
There are people here from all over the world. It's wonderful. Panamanians of indigenous tribes, Germans, Mexicans, Columbians, and many from Central America. I love it.
And it's been busy. Even in it, it is not God Himself, and it is good to run away to Him. Oswald says it brilliantly in his Sept 16 devotional-
Prayer is coming into perfect fellowship and oneness with God. If the son of God has been formed in us through regernartion (Galations 4:19) then He will continue to press on beyond our common sense and will change our attitude about the things for which we pray. "Everyone who asks receives..." Matthew 7:8. We pray religious nonsense without even involving our will, and then we say that God did not answer- but in reality we have never asked for anything. ..... we have to ask things of God that are in keeping with the God whom Jesus Christ revealed.
I need to ask God things that are really true on my heart. Praying for the world. All these oppressions and injustices. How do I align my thinking with aaaaall that is wrong in order to truly, heart-feltly pursue one thing that God would say, "Yes. This is what you should do." If I say I want to help people living in trash dumps, do I really even mean that? What do I really mean? What do I really pray about? What has Jesus revealed?
John Mark McMillan has a song that is delicious. Please get it off itunes or at least youtube it.
It's called-
Kiss Your Feet~
I dreamed I kissed your feet
Between the cigarette butts
On the side of fourteenth street
I got down on my hands and my knees
With an alabaster jar
I dreamed I'd bleed with your praises
Just to make the world
Smell like your grace again
I got down on my hands and my knees again
And I'm crawling on the floor
Just to find you now
To tell you how I feel I'm falling all over myself
Good morning brokeness
You know you've cut me to the bone
Like one of those days in the middle of the winter
The kind that you can't run away from
And we've been here for so long
But I found a way to appease you
Inside this alabaster jar
And I'm crawling on the floor
Just to find you now
To tell you how I feel I'm falling all over myself
And all my afflictions
They're only light ones anyway now
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| I am a failure.
Utterly.
There is nothing better
Than dark clouds after a man's un-beating heart spills to the ground
And an Injustice is justified.
and my failure becomes a ridiculous success.
by what I have not done.
I still have to choose and live
I still struggle and do not Want to.
But i know i will Work This Out.
Trembling.
Joyfully.
Fearfully.
God.
What a day.
What a glorious day.
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| God will show us how to build trust. Relationship by relationship.
Love and truth de-dysfunctionalize us. They set our bones and heal our brokenness.
The first dark time away from you
shame covers and holds me
Instead of telling you I did wrong
I ran away to fix myself
The first lie I believed
is that you wouldn't want me.
I am hiding, covering
with what turns to ashes.
All our eyes see our naked lives.
and instead of calling for your glory
I am hiding.
Ashes over pain.
This is why you came.
The dusty road into Jerusalem is lined with crowds of people- people who are like the people in this poem. They wait on a palm tree-lined road under a blue sky with great anticipation for the man that will come riding in on a donkey.
When they see him, they cry, as it is most accurately translated,
"Save Us Now! Save Us Now in the Highest!"
They do not run away. They know who This is. And they are moved to cut down the nearby palm branches and they lay down their clothes for him ride over. They surround him and worship. They need Him. They know who this is, and they do not run away.
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| so Paul, who hated and killed people following the Ways of Jesus as Holy Spirit goodness to life,
was rocked by Grace and Love.
and then,
he became one who followed the Way of Jesus Holy Spirit Life.
I have always read Romans with condemnation in my heart
toward people who do the things it says not to do.
"And likewise also the
men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one
toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and
receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. And
even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave
them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not
convenient; Being
filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness,
maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity;
whisperers, Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful..."
It does go on to explain that we who judge are guilty of the same.
Get ready. this is Good.
It means that it doesn't matter.
Oh
No.
You who does these things that Are indeed against what God loves.
Which is everyone.
We are all the ones who are wrong.
Church men in their ties. Rebecca. Beggars without water. The verses are part of the letter, and they aren't supposed to be out of context. The beginning of the book is a drum roll of the degradation that you and I are in... and the trumpet blast is the Love of Jesus toward us regardless.
We are each wrong in our own way, in the human way. But God was never ashamed of our nakedness.
I cannot compare
because
there is no
comparison
for
how
Jesus
Loves.
People hate and kill, but no longer become these people.
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| "I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you,”
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation."
~John Ashbery
Dawn's intricacies
Dew on the dark green hills
a light air
spilling bright from a new, morning sun
Mercy and grace pull the sun into the sky:
Not because it has to
But because of His love
And the feeling of exaltation
cannot be created at dusk,
nor denied when it comes,
each morning.
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