I'm a lover but Im also a fighter. Im a missionary but Im also an artist. I have a heart of mercy and I also have a heart for Justice. I want to speak words of love but I also want to speak words of truth. I want to make people feel good but I also want to make people feel uncomfortable. Uncomfortable enough to think to grow to change to give to go to love to fight. I want to ache and bleed for a cause for a God who saved me who rescued me who deserves so much more than we give to Him.
This year I can feel it. I can feel a collision coming. I can feel the heaven's coming and more of my authentic heart's true cry, my authentic being will be allowed to sing, to dance, to create...quite literally ha. For several years I have felt like I have only been able to move in certain passions of my heart in certain places. I have laid down certain dreams with discomfort in order to lay down my life for a nation I have fallen passionately in love with.
Im so excited that next year God is beginning to open doors to me that I have only dreamed of. Allowing me to pick up certain creative parts of my self that I laid down.
His Timing is perfect, His ways are higher than ours. He is always good. In our discomfort, when we feel our hearts are breaking, Oh He is always waiting to release the desires of our hearts in His perfect timing.
My dream has always been to change the world through song. I get to take a glimpse into that this year and I'm beyond excited about it! Oh My Daddy is a Dream King. :-) He knows people in high places. He's extremely wealthy and very influential. He's already won every battle. He can even make miracles. I am quite blessed to call Him Father...and how I love to do so.
This year, 2011, has been so full. Full of hope, full of joys, full of challenges and sorrows at times, full of new beginnings, full of growth and progress, full of change, and certainly full of love. I have been so overwhelmed at the growth our ministry has gone through over the last 18 months. It still makes my head and heart spin sometimes. Im so thankful to those who allowed themselves to be moved by God's Spirit to bless us and to give and to pray and to visit!
My prayer remains that the body of Christ will be Moved deeply with compassion to action...that their hearts will be broken for the helpless abandoned and destitute, and revived with hope and tenacious faith that the same Spirit who raised up Jesus Christ from the dead and lives on the inside of us...can change lives and heal hearts and save souls...through our willing hands, feet, and hearts in action.
May God Bless you richly in every way in 2012!!!!!!!!!!******************
Here's a few Bono quotes that inspired me today. :) May they inspire you and challenge you in the new year to come.
The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is.
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them.
All the best songs are co-written by God, y'know!
Well, the going rate for change is not cheap. Big ideas are expensive.
The fact is that this generation -- yours, my generation ... we're the first generation that can look at poverty and disease, look across the ocean to Africa and say with a straight face, we can be the first to end this sort of stupid extreme poverty, where in the world of plenty, a child can die for lack of food in it's belly.
Eight million people die every year for the price of going out with your friends to the movies and buying an ice cream. Literally for about $30 a head per year, you could save 8 million lives. Isn't that extraordinary? Preventable disease - not calamity, not famine, nothing like that. Preventable disease - just for the lack of medicines. That is cheap, that is a bargain.
Imagine if a third of the kids at your local primary school were AIDS orphans. That's a reality in Africa where the parents of 13 million children have been killed by AIDS.
Music can change the world because it can change people
At a certain point, I just felt, you know, God is not looking for alms, God is looking for action.
I love this work I do. It's a privilege to serve the poor,....
AMEN.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Monday, December 12, 2011
God is near to the broken hearted.
My heart broke for her once. We sat in this same living room a year ago when she told me her story. And now here we were again in the same room with another part of the story and I wept with her again as she asked me for my advice. She married a man she loved dearly...before she was born again. A few years into her marriage, she got saved and started attending church. Her husband didn't. A few years into her marriage, she found out he got a second wife. She was heartbroken just from the news but then she found out the woman was HIV pos. Her (now former) pastor advised her that she should stay with this man because God hates divorce. She became obsessive. Going to the clinic twice a month to check her status in torment and fear of infection. She told me that God eventually set her free from having to check and she just knew he would protect her. Then during that, the second wife bewitched her children. This means that she put curses on them to kill them but instead of death, they just got very sick. Her 5 year old bled from the mouth uncontrollably and no doctor could find any reason why. Her 9 year old boy was vomiting. Then the woman put witchcraft inside the car she was supposed to travel in. She was supposed to sit in a particular seat but instead her brother sat in the seat. He was killed in the car crash. The witchcraft remains were found. And still she stayed with him. He was verbally abusive but he was in her words "not a bad man". After all, he cared for and provided for her children. Without him, she didn't know how she would survive or how her children would survive. Then he started telling her that he wanted to take her children to live with "the other lady" in the village. She refused. He threatened her but eventually relented. I sobbed as I heard her story. I told her I could not be as strong as she was to stay in that marriage. I explained to her that such things don't happen often in my country...and to be honest with you, this is not the worst of the worst story I have heard by any stretch.
And she came to me again a few days ago. She told me that her husband wants to take her children for good to live with the other lady in the village where they have their farm. He told her that is she refused to let him go with their children, all of her children, that she would never see him again and she should never again ask her for money. Difficult decisions for her...but not too difficult. She told me...I came to you because I want you to advise me. She told me I know he is just doing this because he doesn't have money. She kept defending him saying again that he's not a bad man. I told her I understood her pain and it was evident by the tears that filled my eyes. I knew that...she loved the man despite all of that chaos. I knew her world as she knew it as flawed as it was ...was being ripped apart. I knew her heart was aching and bleeding and broken. I told her to be strong and not to let him take her children away. Her husband and "the other lady" are not born again. Her responsibility is to care for her children and raise them in the ways of Christ. I told her that God would provide for all of her needs as she trusted in Him, he would be faithful. I gave her a little bit of my personal money to help sustain her during the transition....
and my heart just hurt for her. I could see the pain in her eyes. Mostly pain from losing the man she loved as twisted as the story was...and also the pain and fear of losing her children...and then her entire world.
Her words still ring in my ears, and tears filled my eyes...."I've come to you so you can advise me." and I ask myself, who am I? Why am I here with these kinds of situations? Who am I to advise anyone what to do in something like this?
...and our hearts just ached together there. Sitting in my little sitting room with the children running in and out of the house during our conversations. What a strange and different world it is here. A world where women share their husbands and defend them. A world where men freely take other wives (though NOT in the born again churches!). A world where there is much pain and heartache and people forced to be so strong that it breaks your heart. My prayer is for healing for restoration of what God intended for these people in the Garden of Eden. Where he made them in His image, male and female...to be partners for two to become one. To love and serve each other. To hold each other's hands in tough times. Not to compete or make demands, but just to simply love with free and open hearts. May God heal hearts here that have been so wounded and battered. May He pour out restoration as His children lost and wild come home to Him, to know His love and truth that sets us so free to live to love to cherish and be cherished and to simply be who we were created to be.
And she came to me again a few days ago. She told me that her husband wants to take her children for good to live with the other lady in the village where they have their farm. He told her that is she refused to let him go with their children, all of her children, that she would never see him again and she should never again ask her for money. Difficult decisions for her...but not too difficult. She told me...I came to you because I want you to advise me. She told me I know he is just doing this because he doesn't have money. She kept defending him saying again that he's not a bad man. I told her I understood her pain and it was evident by the tears that filled my eyes. I knew that...she loved the man despite all of that chaos. I knew her world as she knew it as flawed as it was ...was being ripped apart. I knew her heart was aching and bleeding and broken. I told her to be strong and not to let him take her children away. Her husband and "the other lady" are not born again. Her responsibility is to care for her children and raise them in the ways of Christ. I told her that God would provide for all of her needs as she trusted in Him, he would be faithful. I gave her a little bit of my personal money to help sustain her during the transition....
and my heart just hurt for her. I could see the pain in her eyes. Mostly pain from losing the man she loved as twisted as the story was...and also the pain and fear of losing her children...and then her entire world.
Her words still ring in my ears, and tears filled my eyes...."I've come to you so you can advise me." and I ask myself, who am I? Why am I here with these kinds of situations? Who am I to advise anyone what to do in something like this?
...and our hearts just ached together there. Sitting in my little sitting room with the children running in and out of the house during our conversations. What a strange and different world it is here. A world where women share their husbands and defend them. A world where men freely take other wives (though NOT in the born again churches!). A world where there is much pain and heartache and people forced to be so strong that it breaks your heart. My prayer is for healing for restoration of what God intended for these people in the Garden of Eden. Where he made them in His image, male and female...to be partners for two to become one. To love and serve each other. To hold each other's hands in tough times. Not to compete or make demands, but just to simply love with free and open hearts. May God heal hearts here that have been so wounded and battered. May He pour out restoration as His children lost and wild come home to Him, to know His love and truth that sets us so free to live to love to cherish and be cherished and to simply be who we were created to be.
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