An Invitation (part 1 of 3)

Hi everyone! I have huge and super-exciting news!! I am officially fully funded. WHAT!? $15,500 still seems like so much money, but Papa God proved faithful once again. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible by giving, spreading the word, and praying for me. We have a really good Daddy and are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses! I'm so happy to be able to continue on to finish my last three months (Thailand, Malaysia, and Cambodia). THANK YOU!!! I ask that you pray that I continue to be being filled with the presence of Holy Spirit, and specifically for His passion, purity, joy, strength, and for an awareness of the great love our Father has lavished upon us to become even more tangible to me in the following months!

 

I'm currently in Phuket, Thailand, where I will be living for the next month during "manistry", our 9th month of the race, and a month to spend with the other 13 men on my squad. We are working with SHE ministries (Self Help Empowerment), a group that focuses on reaching out to the bar girls in Thailand that often feel as though they have no other options, and are pressured into a lifestyle that Jesus came to deliver us from. Trafficking is a sort of sensitive subject, but a lot of the women on our squad are ministering to these girls, and the men are working on the construction of new facilities for the girls who chose to join SHE. They come, learn skills and identity founded in Christ, and then go and begin new lives with confidence and freedom. We feel so blessed to be here working in a place that I know has stolen the Father's heart. He is so eager to bring His lost sheep home, freeing them from the thorns that trap them, cleaning their wounds, and shepherding them into green pastures beside quiet waters.

 

Lets rewind. I have loved the last two months. With a new year, a new continent, and a new focus, Nepal and India blew me away. For too long, I fell captive to a settling mentality. Africa was hard and I struggled, but God began to lift that heaviness in Malawi and Mozambique, and I have felt so much joy since that time. I feel so blessed. Nepal seriously stole my heart, and India broke every expectation I had of it. I felt at home both of those places and God has given me faith that the next three months will be the best three months! Come on!! Lets go. 🙂

 

I have been so busy recently that I haven't gotten (or haven't made) time to write about what Holy Spirit is teaching me. In the last few months, He has shifted my thinking in a few big ways, and in short they can be broken up for blogging purposes by titling them: An Invitation, The Presence, and Great Expectations.

 

This is the first of those three: An Invitation. It sounds pretty exciting right? Well it is! Our Father is inviting us into this incredible adventure, this beautiful romance, this scary faith journey that doesn't usually make sense and always takes us places we couldn't have expected! It's crazy! And it isn't just a big picture invitation. Every moment of every day is an invitation. I'm sitting at a coffee shop in a mall in Phuket and I could choose to respond to the invitations of the spirits of materialism and lust that are constantly drawing people in like Homer's siren calls. Or, I could accept the Father's invitation to engage with Him and bless someone around me. Are we listening? What is He inviting us to right now?

 

One of my favorite writers is the incredible Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986). His works are some of Spanish Literature's finest and his perspectives on the world blow me away every time. Plus, we love the same coffee shop in Buenos Aires, so that doesn't hurt. Anyway, he has this famous short story titled The Garden of the Forking Paths. It's really about string theory and the implications of our decisions in creating alternate realities. Fringe science is not what God is teaching me; don't worry.  But somehow it looks similar. In The Garden of the Forking Paths, a man walks into a garden (or more of a labyrinth) and begins to walk, encountering one fork in the road after another. Anyway, it is really reminiscent of a journey that God has walked me though recently, where every decision, conversation, and attitude is like a fork in the road, and how I choose to walk really matters. 

 

Every new day is a new invitation to choose Him! Every day of ministry is a day to choose to listen to His voice! Every piece of feedback I hear is an invitation to grow into who He wants us to become (and it isn't just feedback given to me; I can grow from the feedback given to others! Like a testimony of what Jesus has done in someone else's life that I can prophetically grab onto and receive for myself, I can choose to grab on to other people's affirmative and constructive words and grow from them as well). When someone offends me, it is an invitation to let go of old habits, hurts, burdens and offenses. Jesus isn't really about making us comfortable, He is about making us holy and free! Choose to receive His invitation into this freedom and holiness. And Jesus is a really powerful redeemer, so even when people hurt us, see an invitation to turn the other cheek and have grace, and those hurts can build us up and not infect us.

 

Every time worship starts, it's a fresh invitation to enter into His presence. Every time! What keeps us back? I don't know, but I don't want to let it happen any more. I don't want to be a slave to my circumstances, I want to choose how to live my life in Christ and walk with intentionality and boldness.

 

God has been teaching me so much through the story of the man who threw a banquet in Luke 14. He invited all of His friends to come, and they didn't come. They came up with excuses that got them off the hook. He invited everyone in the streets and there was still room, so his servants went out to the highways and byways. He went way out of His way to find people who would say yes to His invitation! He says that the hungry get fed. I know it's true. Every time. In the Spirit, the hungry get fed and the thirsty drink deeply. The poor are blessed. Every time. (Theirs is the Kingdom!) I don't want to be full and self sufficient. I want to be hungry, thirsty, and needy. The people who receive the invitation but don't accept it have serious consequences. He says that none of them will taste the banquet food. I want to receive the blessing every time! I don't want to miss out; I want to position myself spiritually to always be in the right place in my heart to say yes to Him. We need to shape our thinking around the reality that every moment we walk with God is another moment to, like Jesus, do what we see the Father doing! I don't want to let another month go by. I don't want to wait for tomorrow when I can have Him today!

 

I've been reading Bill Johnson's new book Hosting the Presence, and it is messing me up (in the best way possible). Chew on this quote (below) for a while and let it prepare you for part two, "The Presence." I was reading Exodus on my own and beginning to think about this thing of invitations when I got to this passage of Johnson's book; needless to say, I was pretty excited. Ask God to give you a heart to accept His invitations and look for them in even the least enjoyable circumstances. I'm pretty sure it's how Paul learned to be content in every situation.