Chuck and I enjoy eating out. We have our favorite go-to spots and a list of got-to-try places. As we left Corner 16 the other night, we recalled this memory of eating there when the girls were little.  Only then it was a Ruby Tuesday.  We watched that Ruby Tuesday slowly die. Declining food quality, bad service. Every time we went in there you could tell the place was gasping for air. No one seemed to care. So no one was surprised it closed down.

It was, after all, a bad location. Nothing could ever really succeed there. Blah, blah, blah.

As we exited the packed parking lot of Corner 16, with a wait at the door to get in, I told Chuck it was amazing to see how new management with a fresh vision and creativity could turn something around.

Turns out it wasn’t such a bad location, after all.

This picture in the natural captures my spiritual attention. What areas of my life, or your life,  are slowly dying, and all we throw at it is neglect, hopelessness, and resignation?

Do we have dreams or incredible ideas God has given us that at the moment are hard, declining, or frustrating? Sometimes, we would rather make excuses instead of asking for radical help.

I find often instead of going to Him for “new management with a fresh vision and creativity,” I am blaming and quitting. How about you?

Here’s the point. Jesus changes everything. Can you even imagine how the lame man felt when Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be well?” (John 5)

Imagine if I went to the Ruby Tuesday management,  and I said, “Do you want to have a thriving, brand-new concept that will blow your mind? It’s going to cost you more than money. It’s going to cost your very belief system. You will have to rethink, reshape and re-order your whole life. You in?”

The lame man looked at the King Over All Impossibilities and — made excuses. No one to help me…While I am trying…Someone else gets ahead…

The crucial moment followed. Jesus gave the lame man specific instructions.

Get up.
Pick up your mat.
And Walk.

Or. Stay the same.

The last part Jesus didn’t audibly say. But the choice was crystal clear. Get up in faith and take radical action to go forward, or stay where you are in the same mess and hurt and sadness.

Look at your world and THE world. New Management is on the scene. It can’t help but change. Healing of every human wound and heartache and sin is on the scene.

Radical help and radical healing are ours. What can we do today to get up and walk?

Each year we ask the Lord for His word for us for the year. It’s an exercise we have been doing for a long time.  My spiritual father, John Dee, started this beautiful practice and now many of us have this rich history of seeing God reveal more of His heart to us and in us. So, first things first, have you asked the Lord for your word? Second, what do you do with it when you get it?

More than a faddish thing, these words become bricks in our soul’s structure. I find each word builds on top of one another. In fact, if you haven’t recently, go back to the last 2-10 years and locate your word. It’s amazing how one brick, one deposit or revelation, had to come before the other. While you are at it, look at your memories. See how God unpacked your circumstances through the lens of the given yearly word. I can say that 2022 was a bruiser. But through the lens of His word for me, it is totally different.

Next step, share your word! Give testimony about how God revealed Himself to you.  We are all strengthened by the movement of God in each other’s lives.

Last year my word, or phrase, was “Unveiled and Seen.” I look back over my year of death and disruption, letting go and taking on the new, and I am in awe. This year has truly been an unveiling and seeing a whole new way of doing life with God, new comfort in sorrow, and even a new focus in ministry.

Okay so brace yourself. This is vulnerable. My words for 2023: Unleashing miracles.

I mean what even is that? I didn’t want to write it down. BUT. GOD.

What if Unleashing Miracles is what God wants to do give me, show me this year??
I don’t want to miss that.  So here’s my testimony.  This is me putting on my seatbelt. Tag your it. What’s yours?

Let’s do this.

I went on a crazy rabbit trail with the Lord the other day.  About swaddling cloths. Really? Yeah.

Turns out the details matter to God and ultimately to us when He reveals them.  I have been deep diving into Garments (which will come later).  One thing led to another and the swaddling cloths came into focus where I learned two important distinctions for our Advent meditations.

The first idea is specific shepherds surrounding the birth of Jesus were Levitical shepherds. As such, they were charged with overseeing the conditions of lambs so they would be “spotless and without blemish” for the sacrifices in the temple.

According to columnist, Linda Littlefield, “when the mother ewe was preparing to give birth, she was taken to a special birth place, or to the only cave designated, to give birth to the sacrificial Iambs.

This cave was kept sterile and clean for the arrival of newborn sacrificial Iambs. The newborn lamb was immediately wrapped in clean swaddling cloths to protect them and keep them from blemish and danger.”

So when the angels declared: And this will be the sign to you: You will find a Babe wrapped in swaddling cloths, lying in a  manger, (Luke 2) these particular type of shepherds understood from these specific instructions that they were looking for the Sacrificial Child.

Using our spiritual imaginations, we see how Jesus came as the perfect lamb and God left clues, if you will, to help us discover the beauty and wonder of our Newborn King.

The God who IS. The One who is not created, imagined or even ignored. The great I am that I am.

In the most basic way, the Christmas story confronts my Christian story.  The Christmas story is loaded with miracles, the unexpected, the impossible. It turns our socially acceptable religion upside down. Instead of the most likes and plastic fantastics, instead of going through the motions in a powerless life, it is a babe in a borrowed manger bringing a new reality to the whole world. Instead of us having it all together, the Christmas story holds all things together. Instead of settling in my small world thinking, this new born King releases all of Heaven’s glory to me and to you.

We talked about this at the Gala. How God looked at
—the state of our marriages
—the behavior and challenges of our children
—our fear anxiety, sorrow, selfishness
—the deep, deep need to be truly loved and known
—our helpless state to truly fix all that is broken.

We live in a world of multi-layered confusion. “Like the blind we grope along the wall, feeling our way like people without eyes.” (Isaiah 59:10)  So many in and out of church ask questions about our origins, identities, purpose, and calling.

And yet a greater Truth proceeds the resounding “what about me” question.
It is the eternal matter of  I Am—the God who was.

The Ancient of days.
Before the foundation of the world.
In the beginning.

These words shift me. Much like standing on the shore to look out over a vast ocean, I am simultaneously overwhelmed with God’s bigness and my own smallness.

Whatever my life may mean, or hope to mean, whatever my list of needs or weaknesses or desires, whatever deep joy or grief I may experience, there is One who is long before me and long after. There is One whose power is plainly seen daily and whose love is revealed to any open heart.

When we read Isaiah 59 fully we see our great sin and wandering. But the chapter begins and ends with the hope of our Ever Existing, Ever Interceding, Ever Saving God.

1Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear.

21“As for me, this is my covenant with them,” says the Lord.
“My Spirit, who is on you, will not depart from you,
and my words that I have put in your mouth will always be on your lips,
on the lips of your children and on the lips of their descendants
—from this time on and forever,” says the Lord.

As we approach the Christmas season, with its built-in distractions and stresses, let’s pause and breathe in the comfort of The God Who Was.

Enjoy Him in these moments of worship.

God has been talking a lot about Expanding. It’s a new season. I can feel it in my very spirit. At the recent Yes and Amen Beach Retreat, I could literally sense the excitement of Holy Spirit to unleash, unlock, begin a new work in all of us. It’s no mistake we call it the Yes and Amen Retreat.

For no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.  2 Corinthians 1:20

This is what God is doing. But what about us? What is required of me, and you?

The Lord said to me about this expansion, “The faith that got you here, is not going to get you there.” Whoa. What? My current level of faith was very costly. And He wants more? Yes and Amen.

I read a timely devotion this morning about the 12 spies scoping out the Promised Land. It’s a familiar story 10 of 12 men who were unwilling to believe the Yes of God in impossible situations. However, this statement stopped me in my tracks:

The will, calling, and assignments of God are most often unconventional and occasionally downright outlandish. The math rarely adds up. It requires a suspension of rational judgment and an immersion into the imagination of Jesus and the kingdom of heaven.
From The Seedbed Daily Text

The author, J.D. Walt,  goes on to call it the seductive hell of a predictable situation. “This story will show us something deeply embedded in the human condition—how people will readily choose a known misery over an unknown possibility.”

Ahhhh. Busted.

How many of us stay with what we can see, although it is desert conditions, instead of stepping into the more of God’s promised land?  Maybe it has to do with that word, unknown.

The phrase, unknown possibility, is not quite on point for me. The outcome may be unknown, but God IS known to us. His beautiful, intimate leading IS revealed to us.  Just like He led the Israelites through the desert TO somewhere better, He is leading us somewhere better. Therefore one thing we can bank on every time is His goodness. Sure, there may be wars. There may be giants, but they are dwarfed by His goodness.

What if I told you that F-A-I-T-H is actually spelled R-I-S-K?

Risk means taking action. It means making the phone call. writing the check, putting the house on the market, selling the car BEFORE you have all the outcomes settled. It means believing in our supernatural God despite what you see in the natural. Risk means, as John Dee used to say, putting some skin in the game.

We want God to do all the impossible stuff for us, but we don’t want it to cost us our comfort zones or our plans for independence and assumed safety.

Faith, and risk, is going beyond your own understanding to the realm where only God can pull it off.  Is dependence on Him terrifying? Yes. Is our faith worth it to God? Absolutely.

What can you risk today that puts you one step closer to your promised land?
Together, we will cry Amen to the glory of God.