I Decided to Come Back to Blogging

It has been a year since I last blogged. Summer seems to be the time when I actually have enough extra time to consider blogging. Here I am again deciding to give it another try.

In my morning quiet times I write my prayers in a journal. If I don't I can't seem to stay focused, and I also like being able to go back and reread them as an encouragement. Recently I have been going back through them and compiling the times when God intervened in our lives, when we felt Him speak to us, or when someone else felt God speaking to them for us. I have really been enjoying going back through these notebooks. There is so much good stuff there. It is also really helpful to see how far we have come in even just the last two years (I am currently rereading in 2007).

This morning I found this entry in my journal:

Pray, Praise & Pause before Him
not Perform

Pray that you may be one with Him
Praise who He is - focus ablsolutely on Him,
not on your circumstances
Praise and the chains will be broken
Pause and soak in His presence - allow Him to bring you
back into intimate fellowship with Him.

It kind of goes along with the Oswald Chambers (My Utmost For His Highest) devotion for today regarding 'His Purposes or Ours?'

Here is the text of that devotion:
We tend to think that if Jesus Christ compels us to do something and we are obedient to Him, He will lead us to great success. We should never have the thought that our dreams of success are God’s purpose for us. In fact, His purpose may be exactly the opposite. We have the idea that God is leading us toward a particular end or a desired goal, but He is not. The question of whether or not we arrive at a particular goal is of little importance, and reaching it becomes merely an episode along the way. What we see as only the process of reaching a particular end, God sees as the goal itself.
What is my vision of God’s purpose for me? Whatever it may be, His purpose is for me to depend on Him and on His power now. If I can stay calm, faithful, and unconfused while in the middle of the turmoil of life, the goal of the purpose of God is being accomplished in me. God is not working toward a particular finish— His purpose is the process itself. What He desires for me is that I see "Him walking on the sea" with no shore, no success, nor goal in sight, but simply having the absolute certainty that everything is all right because I see "Him walking on the sea" ( Mark 6:49 ). It is the process, not the outcome, that is glorifying to God.
God’s training is for now, not later. His purpose is for this very minute, not for sometime in the future. We have nothing to do with what will follow our obedience, and we are wrong to concern ourselves with it. What people call preparation, God sees as the goal itself.
God’s purpose is to enable me to see that He can walk on the storms of my life right now. If we have a further goal in mind, we are not paying enough attention to the present time. However, if we realize that moment-by-moment obedience is the goal, then each moment as it comes is precious.

This is where Vince and I are at right now, living in the moment connected to Him. We feel that He has called us to do something new. We feel that He has confirmed a name for that work, the Prodigal Church. We sense that we will be working mostly with people who have been hurt by the church or who are unlikely candidates for fitting in to the current church model. We desire to love on people, BEING church more than DOING church. But other than that, we don't know much. Our desire is to follow Him each day, going where He leads. This devotion confirmed for me that we are indeed going in the right direction- taking steps as He illuminates them, not worried about what the future will look like.