Hey fammmm! I hope these words grace your eyes in a place of sunshine and positivity wherever you may be reading it! I am currently sitting outside at a little coffee spot in Atlanta with a vanilla latte next to my laptop and the sunshine kissing my skin! The breeze is blowing lightly and I can’t help but feel like it’s God’s Holy Spirit soaring around this city today!
I initially wrote this post to go on my positivity blog “Grace and Curls,” but decided to post it on my Race blog instead! I feel like this part of my journey with the Lord and this pretty wrecking realization I had within the contents of this post are rather critical to share as a gear up for The World Race and sharing the love of Jesus across this big world.
After spending almost two and a half years being a part of Passion City Church, I knew that this would be my home church as long as I was living in Atlanta. Passion goes exceedingly above and beyond in going outside of the walls of that building and bringing Jesus and “church” into every corner of this city. The walls don’t define the freedom and grace through the application of the Word of God that they strive to share with Atlanta, and more over, the entire world.
Recently, I was serving behind the walls of an all female incarceration facility with some fierce lady leaders from Passion. We were at this facility as they had invited us to their International Women’s Day Pageant they were conducting. We had already brought the good news of Jesus into this place once, and they wanted us to come back outside of our ministry nights there. This invite was off the schedule, and thus incredibly special.
After a dance party with the DJ they had in the cafeteria for this day of the pageant (that I obviously had to participate in), I headed back towards the back of the room. I wipedthe perspiration from my face as women high-fived and laughed with me. “That white girl can dance!” many of them exclaimed! I will say that it was one of the most joyous experiences of my life to be dancing with women who were “locked up,” but felt ever so free on this particular day. Celebrating a holiday that simply celebrated women made it all the more wonderful.
As I stood with a painfully wide smile on my face, taking in the sheer beauty of these moments, two of the women nearby me said, “I bet yall’s church is just so much fun, huh!?” With a confident laugh exuding what I hoped was simply grace maybe this woman hadn’t seen yet, I responded: “Girl, this is church! This is the gospel. Women dancing and laughing and loving together? This is church!”
Because it was.
That day was Jesus.
That day was love.
That day was church.
I think as human beings (and especially as women, right? hellurrrr, girls), we want to complicate the gospel that is such simple truth sometimes. God is love. And if God is within us, then we are love, and our faith-filled duty is to be love to any and all things and people around us.
Loving others can be church.
Sometimes, it doesn’t need to be more or less than just that.But we often distort that simplicity all by ourselves…
But back to Passion City; I love this church home of mine. So much so that I decided I wanted to be baptized there before I left for The World Race this year. I wanted to be newly cleansed from all the sins of my life, and made anew before this next season of Jesus-lead-journeying throughout our big, scary world.
So to my disappointment, I was instantly saddened when on my post-application phone call, one of the staff members told me that I wouldn’t be eligible for baptism; that theologically the Bible only believes in one baptism unless done by force, or without truly feeling like you knew The Lord. I was baptized at my hometown church of Smoke Rise Baptist, when I was 15, so technically according to theology, that was my one and only time, given that I did feel like I truly knew Jesus then.
“I hope this isn’t too disappointing to you,” the kind woman said to me on the phone with a gentle tone. “If you knew the Lord at the time of your baptism, then that was your public declaration of faith, and the process since then has been God working on your heart, transforming you through sanctification.” I thought for a minute in my momentary snippet of sadness, and almost instantly was washed over with a force of loving peace from God…
“Honestly, the more I think about it, it’s really more encouraging than discouraging…” was my response to her. In this moment, tears began to swell in my eyes as we finished our beautiful, fruitful conversation. Tears swelled as they are while I’m typing this right now, because in that phone call, the Truth rushed over me like an ocean.
See, God had been fighting for my freedom all along.
From the moment I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior, He had been fighting for me. During the times I forgot about Him, during the times I ignored Him, during the times I put the sacrifice of Jesus’ life second to the wants of mine, during the times I wanted to live my own way and physically run away from His. He was there all along, watching me intimately. Keeping His eyes on me… waiting for the moment I was going to look back at Him.
It seems that this would have been common knowledge to me, but it wasn’t. It was as if I had misplaced my understanding that God not only designed me and knitted me together in my mothers’ womb, but that the moment I accepted Him as the Lord of my life, that the fight was on for my freedom. Except I wasn’t always the one fighting for my life; many times I was fighting against my own life, but by the grace of God, HE never stopped coming after and fighting for me. If that’s not un-ending grace and unconditional love, then I surely don’t know what is.
Maybe someone needs to read this today: once you’ve made the decision to accept Jesus as the Lord of your life, then the relationship is already on lock. The loyalty is forever. The love and grace are abounding. The mercy runs deep.
We’re human and imperfect, and we all fall short of the glory of God. But thanks to Him, He doesn’t. Jesus was made perfect in our weakness; in our brokenness, He makes us whole again. He gives us hope for tomorrow, when we don’t think we have strength to make it through today.
And simultaneously, I’ve been remembering a lot more lately, that just because we as humans are messy and flawed and make poor decisions, doesn’t mean that that signifies a messy, flawed, poor God. It’s quite the opposite. He loves us regardless of the mess-ups. Even after we come to know Him, the process of sanctification and holiness goes on until the day we go home to meet Him. It is a relationship, so there’s supposed to be effort on both parties, but He surely wants us to lean on Him when we’re tired, to trust in Him when we’re confused, to love Him even when we’re angry, ashamed, feeling broken, or don’t understand His plans. Cause He won’t leave our sides. From 15 to 28, in the midst of all my chaos and failures, He never left my side. And I promise, once you’ve confessed Him as the Lord of your life, He won’t leave yours either.
My freedom was never meant to be found in the building of a church. My public declaration of faith didn’t have to re-happen in this new stage of my relationship with God, in this new place I call my “church home.” My baptism already happened in water once. It took me really pursuing the Lord’s heart to finally be baptized by the Holy Spirit. And THAT freedom… that freedom is what’s to be publicly declared!
As I told those women that afternoon, the walls of a building don’t define the word church or the gospel or Jesus.
I do.
You do.
We do.
I wanna share with the world, that I don’t believe in religion, I believe in love. I don’t need to tell you you’re wrong, I need to share with you how right the Lord has been to me. I don’t want to talk about the freedom I’ve found in Christ, I want to live it out for all the world to see; for the world to experience light and love that no other person, place, or thing can give us, other than Jesus.
So while a baptism won’t ever happen for me at Passion City, a new flame sparked to expand my fire in a new way. A flame sparked to understand the love of my Father in a way I never had before. A flame to remind me that this expanded fire was always burning; I just needed time to understand more of The Light.
Wherever you are in life today, in this moment, I hope you know God sees you. He sees you right where you are, and He loves you right in the messy middle of whatever it is. Even when we don’t remember Him, even when we don’t want to remember Him, He remembers us… and His fight for our lives, His fight to ignite more flames in our fire, is forever.
