Just the beginning...

Where to begin. This all started about 3 months ago after I, along with my husband and others, took a class called, 'The Art of Hearing God'. Pretty cool. I had wanted to take this class for over a year, maybe two, and the opportunity finally arrived. The class did not disappoint. I walked away thinking, or 'chewing', over our intense 21 hour course and where I wanted to go from here. You could almost rename this class, 'The Lost Art of Character', because that is what 90% of the material was about. I loved it. Basically, it was all about rebuilding, or just building, your character. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are amazing, but what good are they if we have no character to go with them? In today's society, sadly, character is one of those elements that has been slowly declining in everyday life. Families, schools, jobs, and churches are no exception to the loss of character. Questions like, 'how do you treat your wife or husband? How do you act at work? Are you lazy? Are you on time? Are you honest? Do you listen to people or like me, pretend to listen just waiting to interject your amazing part of their story? Ouch. My friend called the weekend a 'healthy slap in the face'. So, after chewing on all of this information I found myself talking to God, bouncing some ideas back and forth and listening, for once, to His input instead of my own.

As I was listening, I was feeling excited for the next season of life. A season full of possibilities and limitless boundaries. I wanted more. I wanted more 'God stories' and more encounters. More character building and accountability to what really matters in life. The past two years have been amazing years of discovery and new identity in who I am in Christ. I am in 'process' and I hope I always will be. I am ready and excited to experience His love in real ways. To encounter Him in all areas of life, not just the big, life changing decisions. How often do we put Him on the sidelines as our safety, then when we encounter one of life's many hardships we 'tag' Him in, then when its fixed, we put Him back and go on our merry way. I love that He loves us enough to let us do that, but really, I think He's just waiting for the opportunity to really blow our socks off. I myself am no exception. It wasn't until just two years ago that I started encountering God in a whole new way, and I was being prompted to share. This is what this blog is about.

This will be a collection of right now, in your face, God encounters. Some will be mine, a lot will be my dearest and closest friends. All are true, and all, I hope, will encourage you in some way to think differently of our Father. He is waiting. He already loves us, we know that much, but how He wants and longs to show His love for us! Real, intimate, violent love. He might show us through dreams, visions, songs, people, email, newspapers, trees, water, rocks, you name it, He can use it. Thats how good He is. Does He have to? No. But the cool thing is, He does.

"You know me inside and out,

you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;
all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I'd even lived one day."

Psalms 139:14-16 (The Message translation)

I will be the first to admit I have no idea what I'm doing and I am learning everyday to hear His voice in my life. It is a process, and I am in process. As my friend Rob Mazza says, "God is bigger than previously thought".