LIVING LIFE ALIVE IN OVERFLOW

I think a lot of us go through life doing the typical things.  Maybe our lives are enriched through marriage and children but a lot of times we just live with our hearts only half alive.  We fall into a typical lifestyle that looks the same as someone who is living with a heart that is not awakened to the greatest love story ever told…and maybe because it actually is the same.  A lot of us haven’t let God love us enough to bring us to life.  This is part of the mystery of being “born again” …of resurrection life. 

JESUS.  What an amazing man!  A man fully alive and awake fully surrendered to His Father’s will.  So close to the Father that everything He does and says is what He hears from His Father’s lips. And what He sees His father doing.  A man of integrity…but anything but typical.  He lives an unusual life.  A life of passion a life of compassion a life of power a life of intensity and radiance a life of adventure a life that was fully alive and fully awake to the booming extravagant heartbeat of His Father.

I so want to live my life like that.  When I look at my life, the only things that really matter to me are the ways I have loved others as well as the way others have loved me.  The way I have taken the fire of the Father that He has so richly deposited in my heart and sown it and tried to spread it all around in extravagant ways that move me outside of my box, outside of myself.  The thing is I can’t do it on my own you know?  But its just a posture of the heart.  A place to live FROM.  Living from a place of being loved.  If you really live there, I truly believe you can’t help but burn to give it away to others and it’s a supernatural thing.  Its not like you have to muster up energy to drag yourself down to the boring soup kitchen to serve the homeless….its the opposite.  Its an overflow.  Its an overflow of His grace, an overflow of His love, an overflow of being in love. 

You know young lovers, the wild things they do?  I want to live my life with Jesus like that all the time.  Why not?  It’s the only thing that I have found that makes my life really matter, mean something.  I know Jesus loves me even if I never do anything for anyone.  Its not about making Jesus love me in anyway.  That’s already a given.  In fact its such a given, that I have come alive to it.  I have been awakened to it…and so I am so crazy in love that I would go to the ends of the world to make an expression of that love come alive.

One of the greatest treasures in my life is the overflow that has happened in Uganda.  Some of the people closest to my heart who I now consider to be dear friends are teens who have gone through so much.  When I say gone through so much consider one of the girls in my home.  Her father was killed when she was 4, and he was eaten by the villagers.  Her mother was poisoned when she was 7 years old.  The mother was hospitalized while this little girl was forced to stay home alone.  A neighbor entered her small house and raped her.  She begged the man not to take all the money so he gave her about $6.  She forced herself to walk down to the little local clinic where her mom was and gave the money to the doctor to help save her life.   The doctor’s eyes filled with tears.  The girls legs were streaming down with blood.  He treated her and said he would take care of her but she lied and told him she had another mom who could help her.  She spent the next few years on the streets of Rwaanda…begging for coins from taxi drivers.  She faced abuse and torment on the streets but at least some friends on the street helped her to get food and basic care.  She was just barely surviving when a woman found her and took her to the capital city of Uganda to be a child worker, she did a lot of chores and helped to sell local vegetables.  By now she was a preteen and befriended one of the teachers at our school who told her about Royal Hope’s program for free education.  Eventually the girl facing physical abuse came to be in the residential care of our ministry.  She lives with me and is such a sweet treasure.  God is still healing her of all the past wounds and Im so thankful for the future she has.  What an incredible honor to get to be a part of God’s words to her.  To tell her how much He loves her.  That He knit her together in her mother’s womb.  That He never wanted her to face all that she has faced.  That He wants her to be blessed as His treasured possession, as a princess in the palm of His hand..  This is only one story…there are many more like it.   The girls in my home have almost all been raped, physically and verbally abused, been child workers and suffered things no child should ever even hear about. 

I just praise God for bringing me to Uganda and for allowing me to sow seeds of His love into these young lives.  I praise Him for enriching my life and bringing me to life through this.  It has not been easy.  It has not been for free.  It has cost me so much actually.  At times it has cost me my safety my health certainly finances, relationships, comforts, heartbreak and so much more…but I give glory to the Lord for this part of my life.  I bless Him for all of those who hold this ministry up through financial support and other means of support to see that it can grow and flourish and continue to multiply the love of God into young traumatized lives.  My joy is being a part of the Father’s rescue of these children.  He rescues and saves.  He really does…and He delights in doing it through His children who have come to know the fullness of His love that brings us to life.  That sets us free from a life that is mundane and typical and boring into a life of intensity, adventure, passion, courage, and wild extravagant love.  Oh what a wonderful Savior.

I also praise Him for new ways He has given me to love.  New dreams and new visions for the future.  His LOVE never stops, it just keeps growing and multiplying.  It just keeps on giving and loving and creating.  It keeps on bringing us to life.  It keeps on awakening us to our hearts deepest desires dreams and passions that will bring the world His love so that they can come alive too.    

‎"Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live" (John 11:25)