Oh happy day everyone! I miss you guys so much. You are all amazing and huge encouragements to me.
I want to tell you guys about my sunday, before the Arizona Cardinals
completely wrecked it and were blown out. I went to church this morning
at a place I have been really enjoying of late, I really feel like the
pastors are speaking some awesome, and challenging truth. Now this is a
very wealthy church, in a very high upscale area of Scottsdale. We were
going through 1 John 2:15-17, which talks about not loving the world or
the things of the world. So not placing crowns on the things of this
world, like cars, homes, prestige in your job, things of that nature.
To start off the sermon, the preacher asks what people would do if he
asked them to give up their shoes at the end of the service, and have
our shoes be given to the poor. There was sort of this nervous laugh
rumbling through the room, as people with their 200 dollar shoes
squirmed in their seats. But he proceeded to explain that if we love
these things (he distinguished between enjoying earthly things, and
loving them), we are being decieved by Satan. He made one interesting
comment, that what we may beleive to be God blessing us, might just be
Satan messing with us. To mean, that we are giving all of these things,
but instead of being a real blessing, they just to distract us and
seduce us. At the end of the sermon, he invited us to pray to give up
certain things that we may be following, or just to stop “going with
the flow” of life. It was actually a really powerful time in church and
I could tell that the Lord was challenging a lot of people about this.
But I also felt the impression that God wanted me to actually give up
my shoes. And also, to get up on stage and invite others to give up
their shoes, for those who made decisions about giving up following
certain vain deceits. I was like, oh come on, Im not gonna get up on
stage in front of everyone and ask these people to do that. But I could
not get it out of my head, it then spread to a stomach ache, and I
almost got sick. My heart was beating so fast. So I was like, ok God,
Im gonna go down, but I really dont want to do this. So then I grabbed
the pastor who had just spoken and told him what was happening. His
eyes lit up, but then he said, I wanted to give the same invitation,
but the elders thought it would be a bad idea. So although it is
awesome that you want to get up and make that announcement, I ask that
you do not. As soon as that happened, the sick feeling in my stomach
vanished. I then asked that if I gave up my shoes,would they would end
up on the feet of someone who needed them. He assured me that would
happen and encouraged me to do so. So I left my shoes up on the stage
and went home barefoot. I just kind of smiled, asked God why He was so
insistent that I do that. He just said to me, “I just wanted to see if
you would listen and obey.” I basically just started laughing about it
with God. But at the same time I was kind of upset, becuase I really
wanted to invite others to do the same and really cement any decisions
they had made. But after I talked to some others about it, I was
reassured that God was working in people’s hearts, and it would not
have been about me making an announcement that would change people’s
hearts. It was so cool to really hear God again, all we have to do is
listen. It was really encouraging to me. Reassuring me that I dont have
to be in this awesome environment surrounded by all these awesome
beleivers to have an encounter with God. So the moral of the story is
that God was totally speaking to me today, and I really felt just an
intimate closeness with Him all day. It is good to follow Him and do
what He asks of us. Even though now I am out a good pair of sandals!
