Tomorrow morning I fly home to the states for the weekend and I am so excited.
One of the nice things about England is that it feels like home but one of the hard things about England is that it isn’t my family’s home. Tomorrow night I will sneak into my nephews room and kiss his face because I can’t wait to see him until the morning. My mom, dad, and I will have In N Out on the way home from LAX because come on it’s In N Out. Then I will sleep in my parents house snuggled up all warm in the California heat for a short trip to the West Coast and my heart will be filled.
You see, the reason I am going home so quickly after I’ve arrived in England is because one of my closest friends is getting married. I am so excited to stand next to her as she commits her life to her best friend, forever, and they both take up their new name and roles as they start a new season of life with the Lord. She literally will have a new name and I can’t help but think about when the Lord changed the names of people in the Bible. You look at Abram and when God changed his name to Abraham he literally breathed a new meaning and new life into him by the simple act of adding a few letters ‘ha’. I believe that the name change my friend will take part in also from the Lord. Her identity is continually being shaped and molded as the Lord matures her and brings her into new places with him. Her new name will signify a change that has taken place where her and her future husband will join together in a covenant relationship. This covenant relationship affects their identities in a way that changes their actions.
This reminds me of what our ministry night for Campus Awakening looked like on Monday. We kicked off the year by hosting a night of activation, worship, and equipping for the university students of Manchester. Erik, the other intern, and I planned out the evenings order alongside Phil and Ralph, the pastors at Vinelife and directors of Campus Awakening, in an effort to enable university students to live out their identities as ambassadors on their campuses. Ambassadors carry a new role and an ability that other do not. They have the authority to go into a foreign place and represent who they are and where they come from to the people there. As Christians we are ambassadors representing our identities as sons & daughters of God and we are able to carry that and represent those truths to people who do not know that. We get to bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth because of the role and position we carry and we can bring revival to the people we interact with in our daily lives.
Because we have walked out of fear we can bring that to peers and show them what that looks like in their lives. We can instill freedom. Because we despise the spirit of comparison in our workplace we can actively sow in prayers and speak life into our spheres of influence and see comparison flee. We are ambassadors with power and a voice and this all flows from our identity as children of God. The Spirit inside us bears witness to this truth. I can’t wait to see what God is going to do in the community after I return from the states, just like I can’t wait to see what God is going to do through my friends marriage as she takes on her new identity as wife.
What are you bringing into your workplace through your identity?
