Delighting in the Divine
Yes to freedom, yes to play and yes to celebrating the moment!
Delighting in the Divine
Yes to freedom, yes to play and yes to celebrating the moment!
All tagged hope
No one enters into the olympics without training. That training is faith in action. The athletes believe those who have gone before them and their trainers that they have what it takes to compete, if only they will faithfully commit to their training and keep going. Olympic competitors hope to win a medal, but until the line is crossed or the final whistle is blown, that hope is not confirmed. It doesn’t mean that hope is not a powerful force however...
Hope has always been a pretty delicate spring flower until last week. A shot in the dark almost- a holding onto something vague and hoping for the best.
‘I’m pretty hopeful’
‘I have a vague hope of it happening one day’
‘I hope you have a great day’
‘I hope to see you later’
But this evening I studied and met Hope and she has been misrepresented. These are not hope. They are the human side of hope at best. Desires. Doubts painted positive. Not anchored in anything much...
How is your new year going? Does it feel like a new season? It is Summer right now in Peru and we are abiding as a community - spending lots of time resting, spending time together socially, sorting through things and preparing for the new school year which starts in March here. Having spent time resting over Christmas I feel excited and expectant about what God is going to do this year. Right now I am in a season of preparation and deepening roots...
I shared recently about pushing against resistance in order to see breakthrough. I have found this to be essential when wanting to see breakthrough in relationships with others which can lead to much joy!
Life has given me plenty of opportunities to have misunderstandings, painful relationships and disagreements with others and I'm sure you have had those too. In many of the relationships at school or university, I was able to pull away when things got hard, but marriage and living in community with others has meant that I have had to work at unity. It was really hard at first, but choosing to commit to the person and not pull away has led to joy! The feeling of joy and unity that comes when a broken relationship has been restored and brought to another level is worth it! ...
I was totally exhausted but I still had another meeting. I had been rushing around since 6am and now it was 9.15pm. All I wanted to do was crawl into bed, my body was giving way, but I knew I needed to go and see my friend. This kind of exhaustion I knew was not just physical but also emotional and spiritual. I arrived at her house (which is just across the street from my house,) and flopped down on her sofa. She could see my exhaustion and came and surrounded me in a hug and began to intercede for me. I had been through an intense spiritual battle that week and she knew it. She began to pray, speak out life and promises over me and my spirit. She and I cried together and brought the intense issues of the day to God...
About a week after the miscarriage life was pretty intense for some other circumstances and with the stress of grieving the miscarriage, being thrown straight back into leading stuff out here with Mark and readjusting to living life back in Peru after two months of travels led me to really question whether or not I wanted to carry on leading out Oikos with Mark. Not that I had anything else I wanted to do, or any idea of where we would go, but I felt the enemy strongly trying to get me to give up and ‘go home’ wherever that would be! If God had offered me an accelerated ticket to heaven, I may well have taken Him up on the offer! ...
