Psalm 145
1 I will exalt you, my God the King;
I will praise your name for ever and ever.
2 Every day I will praise you
and extol your name for ever and ever.
3 Great is the LORD and most worthy of praise;
his greatness no one can fathom.
4 One generation will commend your works to another;
they will tell of your mighty acts.
5 They will speak of the glorious splendor of your majesty,
and I will meditate on your wonderful works. [b]
6 They will tell of the power of your awesome works,
and I will proclaim your great deeds.
7 They will celebrate your abundant goodness
and joyfully sing of your righteousness.
8 The LORD is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and rich in love.
9 The LORD is good to all;
he has compassion on all he has made.
10 All you have made will praise you, O LORD;
your saints will extol you.
11 They will tell of the glory of your kingdom
and speak of your might,
12 so that all men may know of your mighty acts
and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.
13 Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,
and your dominion endures through all generations.
The LORD is faithful to all his promises
and loving toward all he has made. [c]
14 The LORD upholds all those who fall
and lifts up all who are bowed down.
15 The eyes of all look to you,
and you give them their food at the proper time.
16 You open your hand
and satisfy the desires of every living thing.
17 The LORD is righteous in all his ways
and loving toward all he has made.
18 The LORD is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.
19 He fulfills the desires of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and saves them.
20 The LORD watches over all who love him,
but all the wicked he will destroy.
21 My mouth will speak in praise of the LORD.
Let every creature praise his holy name
for ever and ever.

Do ever feel that you just need something in your life?

You have no clue what it is, yet your heart seeks this “thing”. The only knowledge you know is that you hurt. You find your spirit constantly in roam. You seemingly find no substantial solid ground in your faith, or in your life in general. You, as a person, are constantly searching and digging to find this thing. While as a Christian, we totally know that God is the answer, or at least we say we know due to what we’ve read or what we’ve heard. Regardless, we seek, and we seek, yet we endlessly find ourselves at the end of that search in more pain than what we were prior to. We constantly ask God, “where are You?” We become angry, we become more desperate, we become depressed. We want to give up. Our wounds are opened up for all to see. We are bleeding in every area of our lives. And truly, we know, that we…cannot…go on.

Yet we do.

We push on. We our held up, somehow. We make it through the constant days and weeks of pain. Our tears have dried up due to the amount that our body has already poured out. Our body’s are dehydrated, our voices tremble. We have no patience for the people we love, yet we still press forward. Still, we wonder, “God, where…are…You!” We claim His absence. We claim He has forsaken us. We become pissed at the Church, and blame those around us for not praying or loving us like we need. If only they had prayed more, we know that God would have carried us through. If only our family and friends would have loved us more, we could have found a strength through their efforts and love. But they didn’t, so now we have to claim this pain.

Yet again, here we are, still surviving long enough to claim ALL of these things.

Do you relate?

Do you ever believe that today is your last day, yet somehow tomorrow continues to come?

I know right now, if you are reading this, you are waiting for a great conclusion paragraph to tell you the answer to all of the questions. The truth is, I don’t have one. I, just like you, am seeking answers to each one of these questions.

I suck at a lot of things.

It’s true, I do. What I do offer is that I will pray for each one of you who will read this. You can leave a comment with something you need prayer for, or you can just simply be a number on the amount of hits to this blog post. Regardless, I will pray for your number or for your comment.

I will leave you with the song below, be blessed. Again, feel free to leave a comment with anything at all.

The Cure for Pain

Many of you have been following the story of Kate McRae. This is an update copied and pasted directly from Aaron McRae’s blog(Kate’s dad). Please read and take this seriously…

This Wednesday September 16th Kate will have an MRI to determine if the treatment plan she is on is working or not. Needless to say, this is a HUGE day for us and the anticipation of this test weighs heavy on our hearts and minds. A multitude of questions occupy our thoughts, questions like …

Is the chemo working? Is the tumor shrinking? Are we putting out daughter through all this pain for nothing?

Throughout the Bible there are certain circumstances in life that cause for extra steps of faith, like the old adage that says ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’. Times like when Jesus says, “except by prayer and fasting”. SOOOO, here is the response that God is calling us to and we are inviting anyone who can and will to join us. Holly and I are going to seek God through fasting on behalf of Kate. We are inviting family, friends, strangers, basically anyone who trusts in Christ our Lord and believes in the power of prayer to join us.

Fasting can be skipping a meal or a day of food, in order to devote extra time and focus to prayer! However, food is not the only thing we can fast from. You could go without TV or internet, go on less sleep, give up exercise any of these activities that occupy our lives. The point is not, NOT doing something, the essence of fasting is DOING something else, namely seeking God with greater effort and intensity.

So, would you consider joining us at some point in the next few days in fasting for Kate. We are praying for things like this…

-that the MRI will reveal that the tumor is shrinking or even gone completely

-that Kate’s stomach pains will go away

-that there will be no harmful effects from any of this treatment on Kate

-that God would be glorified and many come to know Christ through this

I will post more details on fasting over the course of the next few days. If you are willing and able to join us in this then please let us know by posting a comment/prayer here or on www.prayforkate.com. Thanks to all of you who are standing with us through this…

Please take some time, and pray, and see if this is something God is calling you to take part in. I cannot imagine God leading you away from a moment to intercede and fast on behalf of someone for healing and love.

Let’s BE that community that Jesus talks about.

As many of you have heard, recently Allison and I have decided to step away from Dialogue Church. I can only imagine the surprise and shock that many of you are or have experienced in hearing this news. Allison and I have said nothing but good things about Dialogue and encouraged others to ‘Join The Conversation’. While the spirit has lead us on a new journey leading us away from Dialogue, our thoughts and mindset on Dialogue remain the same. Dialogue was, and is, a place where you are family from the outset. It’s a home for the broken hearted, for the weary, for the peacemakers, for the dreamers. It’s a place the lost can be found; a place Christ is evident in every crack and crevice of Dialogue. All of these things made this decision that much harder. We were loved and accepted in that family, as we were. It did not matter how broken and battered, or how ugly our lives were. When we stepped through the doors on Sunday’s, we were loved, unconditionally and agenda free.

With that spoken, I’m certain you are wondering why have we decided to leave Dialogue. In a previous post I talked about the question, “How Do You Know What God Wants You To Do?”. That whole thought process has came into play while making this decision. (take a moment now and read that post if need be)

There were a couple reasons that lead us to this path. Firstly, one of the most important things in an individuals walk with Christ, is peer accountability. I fully believe in the power of fellowship and community. While we were experiencing community, we were both lacking that community and accountability from peers our own age. For Allison, she has a lot of friends that she works with, yet has became extremely disconnected from Christians her own age. While her friends that she works with love her, they also have different values and beliefs, which in return creates a unique type of accountability, which in some cases, is no accountability at all. What Allison needs, is an accountability from a female Christian her age, who is experiencing some of what she is experiencing, and is tempted by the things in which she is also tempted by. For me, I also need that accountability from an adult male my age, who is willing to dig deep in my life, and not be afraid to piss me off in order to get his point across.

In Allison and I’s current place in our lives, we have found that the only true accountability we have on a regular basis is from each other. While it is great to have a pure and true accountability within the relationship that we are journeying together, at this time, the accountability has been seeming to get lost by both parties, and has been perceived as more of a personal attack or an non supportive attitude. For the sake of the relationship, something had to change.

One of the largest reasons for both us, was the spiritual burn out that we were experiencing. Allison and I both are constantly busy. She has school, work, and three crazy roommates. I have lots of work, and more work, and many more hours of work. On top of that, our schedules have made it to where we only see each other two times a week. Totaling that with the amount of time that we had chosen to put into Dialogue, we had started to experience a burn out like we have never felt before. Everything was becoming routine, and “work”. The things that were enjoyable, were no longer enjoyable. The things that used to fill our hearts with joy or brokenness, were no longer joyful, or no longer breaking. We realized that this burn out was not necessarily from Dialogue, but from the constant pouring of ourselves into Dialogue “the church plant”. While the heart of who Allison and I are, is to give and to pour and to love; we realized that the heart of what we needed was to be given to, to be poured into, and to be loved. We had to make a decision in the question of, was it going to be possible to step away from Dialogue Church and just be an attender on Sunday mornings, while we had taken such an ownership in multiple ministries within Dialogue, and called them our own. That was the toughest decision of them all.

In the end, after much discussion and prayer, Allison and I decided that to fully focus on healing our spirit, to fully focus on rekindling and retorching our relationship with Christ, that it was only going to be possible if we stepped away from Dialogue. So here we are, our spiritual lives are on the big stage for all to see. They are battered and broken. They need mending and glued and healed in areas that we do not know how to do on our own. We have realized that too often we have tried consistently to fix them in that very way, on our own, and have done nothing but rise to the surface in more pain that what we were in before.

So from you, each reader.
Each mother.
Each father.
Each brother and sister.
Each friend.
I ask that you join us in this new journey through prayer for our spirits. As we experience change and uncomfortable encounters, and a new way to worship once again, that you lift us up in peace, love, hope, faith, and courage. That we will submit to God’s desire for us, over our own. That we will experience a revival in our relationship with God and each other. Lastly, that through all of this, the drama, the pain, the confusion, the weary; He will be honored and glorified.

Will you join us in this journey?

Last night I had a student ask me this question:

“How do you know what God wants you to do?”

My first response was that he had little clue to how deep that question really was. After initially not really having a clue on where I was going to go with a response, God placed the following on my heart:

“I believe In the beginning we were made in God’s image and when Christ died we became a part of Him. And since we are a part of Him, I believe in the line, “what it is in us, flows through us.” I believe we learn God’s plan for us through our constant learning of life. We learn who we are, what makes us tick, our passions, the things that hurt us, the things that excite us. In this, we pray over each situation and God uses our past to speak into our current and into our future. So how do we decipher what is “us” and what is God? Carefully. Prayerfully. Faithfully. And Hopefully. Sometimes we will get it perfectly right. Other times, we will make the wrong decision. It’s in those moments that it all becomes the same. We still simply come before God, needing Him to direct us on our next decision. It’s a giving of your own complete desire…and asking Him to give you His desire in your heart, so that you can seek that, rather than your own. The truth is, I’m a selfish person. You’re selfish as well. We all are. However, you cannot afford to be selfish in these moments. Pray for that type of wisdom. The type of wisdom that creates a difference. The type that brings forth change, and most importantly, a wisdom that will deliver a beauty of who God is to our hearts so it can be delivered through us.”

The truth is, after I sent him the eight texts that were filled with this response, I had little clue to what I said.
It was as if the words came out of my mouth without my prior knowledge of any of them.
This morning I decided I was to revisit the texts that I sent.
That’s when God decided to speak in completely clarity to me.
The texts that I had sent the prior evening were not truly even directed towards the student. While the message benefited him in his seeking of God’s truth, God’s true intentions for those texts were for me.
I am the one that is having issues following God’s plan over my own.
I’m the one that sucks.
I’m the one that constantly chooses TV over the Bible.
Music over praying.
Being bitter, rather than being loving.
I’m the one that needs direction.

Those are the words that God decided were appropriate for me to slap myself in the face with.
Thoughts?

The McRae’s continue to fight this battle of cancer. It’s neither an easy or fun journey to be on. I believe however, far beyond the pain and suffering that is being experienced, that God is desperately hoping to bring pieces of joy into their lives. In bringing that joy, I believe God is offering the McRae’s a hope that will never fail.

In another update in that journey, today I want to share another video with you of Kate. This video is what a day is like in the life of Kate today. While the video will surely reach beyond the surface of your heart with brokenness, I believe also that there is joy and hope that is found in the midst of the chaos and pain.

When through watching the video, I desperately ask you to go over to PrayForKate.com and share your heart with them through encouraging words or however God leads you to share.

[***UPDATE***]
Kate starts her first round of chemotherapy today. Take time and intercede on her behalf.

So thankful I serve a God who is faithful to our every need.