Better is one day in His courts......

Sometimes an image, a smell, a sound can catch you by surprise and take you to a feeling and a thought process that will expand your view and tremendously grow your love for Jesus and others. God set that up for me today (02-17-09). The day started as normal and boring as always the labor to get myself out of bed, the epic struggle to convince myself to shave, and then the drive to work fighting the urge to just not go. Luckily reality seems to always win and I forge ahead to conquer all the worlds’ real estate problems. The first stimulation of thought, the scripture reading for today on the pimp tight bible software on my blackberry, psalms 83 & 84: God has conquered evil, and better is one day in his courts than thousands elsewhere. That’s the basic summary of it, it refocused me for the day brought me out of a little bit of a funk and set me up for a very beautiful ending to the day. Next came a prompting by a sight and sort of a smell. I was at the Junior High gym (those three words should sufficiently explain the smell part) to get Upward practice started for the evening. My next move is usually to retreat quickly to the sanctuary of an office at the church to occupy my time with any number of things from reading to upgrading my blackberry to just sitting and enjoying the silence but things were different tonight. I was working on a teaser for the Journey coming up in April. The vision for the video is to overwhelm the audience with a sense of hopelessness about the plight of disease and poverty in America and the world. Then to show that there is hope we can make a difference if we pull together to do justice and bring Jesus to world. I needed to communicate in this video that this Journey we are embarking on will not be accomplished by one part of the body of Christ it will take the entire body. So the first part is a barrage of pictures and stats detailing the realities and the magnitude of injustices throughout the world. The majority of the goggle results returned pictures from Angola and Darfur the places I like to think this sort of thing is meant to be. As cruel as that sounded those pictures had become the norm, that’s just how it is. They elicited no emotional response from me. Then a change in search criteria “poverty in America” and this picture appeared:




My heart sank, that is here, that could be just down the street from where I sit. You probably thought I forgot and left you kind of hanging back at the junior high gym but it all ties together here. I am looking at these pictures sitting in the bleachers watching about 100 kids roughly this Childs age practice basketball. Are you starting to see the collision of it all now? I don’t know fully why this picture impacted me so much I had seen much worse as I looked for content for this video; maybe it was the loneliness and hopelessness of the eyes. I am not sure. The sense of urgency and necessity was overwhelming. So what do I do now, as I mentioned in a previous post, when there is a problem I am wired to want to fix it and not just fix but fix it now not later. I think that’s what discourages me so much sometimes as I am slowly realizing an immediate solution is not always possible. My mind was wasted at this point the pictures from third world countries of sick and dying people now became a felt reality. The impact of another hard hit into a wall consumed my body. My heart has become hard. God revealed that to me tonight. I will be honest I cant put that feeling into words, I think it is something that has to be felt just reading it would not do it justice. God then immediately poured out his hope and grace on me through a song that began playing as my itunes shuffled my play list. Here is one line from the song “ Greater things are yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city”. The phrase had double meaning I knew now that my heart will soften I already felt that happening. I also knew now with great confidence that God is at work, that He is about to use me powerfully and that he knows the little girl in that picture by name and loves her. Greater things are yet to come, His kingdom is coming and I want to be nowhere else but in his courts.

The journey…. Two simple words can bring a multitude of different thought patterns to ones mind. They can branch into an epic adventure of knights and princesses or maybe a voyage to outer space. Could my journey have an even bigger purpose? I have been shown a lot over the past few months about life… and more intimately my life serving Jesus, my journey. A change in my heart has begun an awakening has began. My journey hit a climax this week, well really more of a wall, a hard hit into a wall that left me disorientated and unsure of anything. Unsure that there was a God that he did care, that I did have a purpose. The scary thing was I was so sure of that purpose a mere month ago. I felt that I had been disqualified. When put in this place I felt I had one option and that was to just resign myself to life as a banker, to a typical life, to a predictable stable life. I mean everything, my feelings, my heart were telling me it was over, they said, “you see the things you’ve done, you are worthless.” On top of those feelings there was the daily stress, the stress of people I love dearly suffering with huge life issues. That was the toughest part, I am wired in away that I feel the need to always have the answer, to be ready and able to solve problems and offer comfort to everyone and most especially the people I love the most in my life. I couldn’t do that this past week I was at a complete lose everything seemed so cliché. The journey had come to an end and what a weak ending it was no explosions, no damsel in distress saved, just me sitting in my office looking at an Italian cypress tree wondering how anyone thought that an adequate replacement for a palm tree but that’s a whole other story for another time.
Then God spoke…..
When God speaks it is always a good time to listen in and see what is going down. I took off work early one day because I just needed to get away. I ended up with a very wise friend of mine looking at video cables at Wal-Mart. Random I know but stick with me. We had our usual conversation about the many pressing issues of the world such as why businesses employ people dressed like the statue of liberty to stand by the highway and advertise their going out of business sale and the mystery behind Wal-Mart’s ability to always offer the most peculiar assortment of customers and employees, you never see people like these anywhere but there, truly amazing. Then he ask the question that I had been longing to be ask yet at the same time dreading to be ask, “what’s going on?”. A seemingly innocent enough question, except there is no doubt at this point he’s not asking for a casual answer to this, a oh not much man will not suffice. So I let it out, I told him it was over I had been disqualified. Then a pause, me afraid to take my eyes off the road as we drive I didn’t want to see his face, knowing that his expression would confirm I had truly been disqualified, the calling I had been so passionate about had ended and him no doubt making sure the response would not be churchy and cliché knowing I would instantly not listen if it was. His response wasn’t one of disgust at all but of hope. He said you can’t trust your feelings in times like these, he then quoted 1 John 5:13 “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life.” Notice it doesn’t say so you can feel you have eternal life it says so you can know. It is quite possible that I have read this passage of scripture or heard it a hundred times and always glossed over it to the next part where it says if I ask God will give, the selfish side of me shining forth. The past few days the cry of my heart has been that I may know not feel, not let circumstances, or other people’s actions toward me define my divine purpose in his kingdom. I am clinging to that hope that better things are yet to come.