A New Season

With a new academic year in full swing and it being a little over a month since I returned to the States from Europe, I now feel like I have the ability to blog again.

I would like to first say again how grateful I am for the wide array of support I received from my family and friends before, during, and after my OMP to Vienna. I am truly blessed by you all and I hope that through some of what I shared the Lord blessed you as well. Please feel free to continue reading my blog even though it won't specifically be about Vienna and Europe.

Just to get the ball rolling again after a considerable time away, I would like to share a few quotes and concepts from my devotional times and my current courses. The reason I share things like this is because (1) I am a scribe (as some of my closest friends have dubbed me) (2) it invites others into my internal processing world and (3) I hope they are as thought-provoking and encouraging for someone else as they are for me - sharing the wealth so-tis-speak.

Some of you might remember when I talked about a discipleship retreat in Schladming, Austria. During this time the Lord showed me some areas in which I was loving other things more than Him. I am so thankful that to God, ignorance is not bliss. Here, he showed me how I was loving the point of arrival more than Jesus Himself. This, as good as it sounds, is still idolatry, where a good thing becomes an ultimate thing. Dispelling the lie that I need to be perfect before I can be used in God's Kingdom is a hard thing to break. The following is a quote from Martin Luther shared during Schladming that helped start that break:

This life is not righteousness,

but growth in righteousness.

Not health, but healing,

not being, but becoming,

not rest, but exercise.

We are not yet what we shall be,

but we are growing toward it;

the process is not yet finished, but it is going on;

this is not the end, but it is the road.

All does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.

When we give our lives to the Father, He can use us and can invite us to co-labor with Him despite our unfinished, under construction, messy, non-linear progressive state. We do not do this because we have arrived. We do this because we have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus.