room for them all

if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. isaiah 58:10.

every time i turn around i am hearing or singing or reading about caring for others as a service to God. that his love is so abounding and so great that when you are the donor of it then you cannot help yourself but to spend yourself to give it to others. these thoughts, and our trip to the village of hope in uganda where we will care for and love on orphans, is beginning to transform me. it's reached right down into me, into my inner parts, and is starting to change me. because this is what i dreamed last night:

we had a family living with us (no surprise there, i guess), we also had a gal that worked for us in our house. this gal came to me to tell me there was a young woman at my door. she was a battered wife. and she had no place to stay. i invited her in and looked past her down the road and there three more.

my employee asked if they could all stay and i told her we would find room. we would find room for them all. so she went to get them settled.

later she found me in the kitchen and explained that the place that used to take in women who were battered had closed its doors for good. i became so grieved over this that i wept bitterly. "where will they go?"

i asked how these women had heard of us - how did they know we would take them in? i don't remember getting an answer but i knew i would find room for them all.

then a man came into the house and he was looking for one of the young ladies. i understood he was her husband. i told him he could not enter my house without my permission. he didn't budge at first - insisting on seeing his wife. i finally had to yell at him. scream to him to leave the house. when he finally did, i turned to my employee and said, "we have to find a safe place for these women." and so we decided to find some land to build a secure place where we would have room for them all.

we looked at a map and found where we lived. i pointed to our place and said, "it looks like we live on mission island." she said, "yes."

[isn't that funny? mission island?]

i told her we would travel to the main part of the island and find some land. we went 'downtown' and there was a mission there. then i was in a store with my mom and she pointed to some pencils because we wanted to purchase school supplies for the children, but i told her not to get those ones, "we can get them for less money somewhere else, and we will have more money left over for other things."

and so, it appears, that this trip and God's mission he has given us has been swirling about in my thoughts so much that i am even answering this call while i'm asleep.

when i woke up this morning and prayed, i asked God that i would wake up to his praise and that praising him would be so much on my heart that i would fall asleep with the utterance of it on my lips. and during worship today we sang a song about God's praise.

i want my life and my response to his call to simply be just one more song of praise of the God who has saved me and made me alive... truly alive. with this life you have given me, may i praise you.

hubba hubba

i love donald miller. he's smart and funny. he has clever-humor. i like that. and every once in a while i need my donald fix and i'll listen to a session he did at willow creek several years back. it's about how we need artists to help people grasp the gospel and he was encouraging us to not give up. was timely for me, which might be why it impacted me so.

anyway, in the session he mentions how people have a hard time understanding the gospel or 'christianity' until we start to refer to it in terms of a relationship. he says that people don't think it's weird when guys will say, 'my wife wants me to love only her.' well, duh. but people get bent outta shape when they hear, 'God wants me to love only Him.' because we haven't done a very good job of explaining that it's a relationship.

when you get that it's a relationship.. so much else makes sense about God and why he loves us and how he wants us to love him.

i think christians often miss the mark on this.

we get rules. we understand them. they are measurable. quantifiable. translatable.

and so many times we confuse christianity with a set of rules. some people don't want to become a christian because they don't want to live by a set of rules. funny though - those people are usually married or are in a relationship and they don't mind living by certain 'guidelines' to respect their partner and make them happy. that's not living by rules. that's loving.

if you've got a spouse, think back to when you got married. remember those gushy feelings? remember looking soooo forward to the honeymoon? most of us actually take time off of work and leave our surroundings and the daily buzz to steal away with your beloved and get to know one another intimately. deeply. you pour yourselves into one another. you are strengthening your bond together and fall further for each other.

there's something magical about that time you spend. there's wonder and peace and delight all stirred up together. you meld.

why, then, do we take a brand new christian and yank the honeymoon rug out from under them by heaping rules upon them? they are in love! they are heady with the scent of their lover. their feet aren't on the ground. why strip them of that?

give them time to get to know God intimately. let them gush. let the magic happen.

and as they grow in their relationship, they are going to begin to make choices that respect God and that are a symbol of their love for him. not because there are rules to be followed but because they are drawn to living a life that pleases their lover.

God started the whole relationship thing - it's patterned for us right at the start of it all. "in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God..." soo... God wasn't alone. he was with the Word - he was with Jesus. there was union. a relationship.

i don't know about you, but looking at it that way is a huge relief. it's no longer a set of rules to live by. but rather, it is the greatest love story of all time.

now, how 'about that honeymoon? hubba hubba.