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.