How was your week?
Simple question, not so simple answer…
I was faced with this conundrum time and time again when I got back from Training Camp. Some knew I had just spent a week fully immersed in a 7 day crash course that was supposed to prepare me for the 11 month-11 country mission trip I embark on in January; others were just asking to be polite.
But none of them knew the ways my life was turned upside down that week. None of them knew the many lessons God decided to start or dust off that week. None of them knew the ways God lovingly chose to embody in me, through me, and around me. He chose this week to answer my prayers and take my relationship with him to a greater depth; to a realm where the unseen is just as real as the seen.
Will you let me show you what that is like?
Will you let me tell you of a very real way in which God wants to partner with you to bring about his kingdom on Earth? Will you be open to the possibility that God may not just fit in the box of known experiences you or loved ones have had with him? Are you willing to stretch your understanding of who this Jesus is that you follow?
Before I entered this week, I asked God to break me and stretch me so that I could grow in my understanding of who he was. And that is exactly what he did. He broke me of my pride and stretched my perceptions of what union with him looks like.
I really started to feel the stretching Tuesday night during worship. Two of the leaders asked the Holy Spirit to come down on all of us and fill us up until we were overflowing with the love of Jesus. I started to sway back and forth with my hands raised to the sky praising God’s name saying “I trust you Lord. I believe in you, please fill me up.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder and another on my side. I knew someone was there praying with me, asking the Holy Spirit to fill me up. I cried out with greater longing, “Lord, fill me up. I want to know you. I want to know you!” When her hand pressed on my stomach the Holy Spirit overwhelmed me: my whole body radiated heat and my fingers tingled. I felt as though the flame of the Holy Spirit had just risen up inside of me and was licking to consume more.
The hands belonged to my squad mom, Joey, who continued to bask in the presence of the Holy Spirit with me for a while. Before she parted to help another surrender to the Holy Spirit she spoke words that may have been more powerful than she knew for she, “felt the Holy Spirit needed to come from deep inside of me.”
She didn’t know that she was speaking directly to a lie and hurt God had just uncovered to me this morning. One that I had struggled with for many years without even knowing it. One of those pains you keep pushing down because it’s not even worth being upset over. But one that ultimately upset me more than I knew; one that muddled the story of my walk with Christ. A lie that Satan told me so that I wouldn’t see my testimony, but God used this week to crush that lie and to open my eyes to a testimony that is so worth telling. A testimony that won’t sulk behind the lie that it is not real enough, that it doesn’t involve enough pain for me to truly know what it means to be saved by Christ.
A story that God continued to tell me over the course of this week, the story of my testimony.
