Let’s keep it real simple. Life is hard. Bad things happen. And. God is not only present, He is good and active. Do you hear me? He is actively working in every moment of your life. And, in the lives of those you love. Our Faithful God is fulfilling the purposes of His heart for His children. 

There is no need to be “bewildered or surprised when you go through the fiery trials ahead, for this is no strange, unusual thing that is going to happen to you.” 1 Peter 4:12 TLB

I heard a prophet once say (my paraphrase) it doesn’t take a prophet to predict that bad things will happen. Most humans do that fine on their own steam. It takes a prophet to help us see the goodness of God, the love of God in impossible situations.

Bad things make us question God. Not look for Him.

Friends, when life gets really difficult, don’t jump to the conclusion that God isn’t on the job. Instead, be glad that you are in the very thick of what Christ experienced. This is a spiritual refining process, with glory just around the corner. 1 Peter 4:12 MSG

Glory just around the corner. 

Hmmmm.

I want to release testimony that God’s glory puts more fuel in my tank than doom and gloom ever did. I have been knocked down more times than I care to count. I have had seasons, not days, but entire seasons where I had to clutch every scrap of faith I could find. Frankly, I’m in one of those right now. Maybe you are too.

I usually say at one of these moments: BUT God. 

However today Holy Spirit is correcting me. Today, She is pressing me with the same question Jesus asked Peter.

Who do you say that I am? 

God is not the one under the microscope. We are. 

Are we increasing in boldness, overflow, and hesed? Are we carrying the peace and hope of the Kingdom of God that comes only after much practice and spiritual rigor? Endurance is grown in the soil of adversity.

I have told you these things so that My joy and delight may be in you, and that your joy may be made full and complete and overflowing. 

John 15: 11 AMP

Go back and read what “these things” are. What I have learned through it all, is His joy and delight settles me, motivates me, directs me, shapes me. 

It is through the real tears and real disappointments that God reveals His hope in our well planned future. 

Hold on dear ones. Not to your bitterness or disappointment. But to His joy and delight. Then a true joy will soon be pouring out. 

Remember, His glory is just around the corner.

Oh Jesus captured my attention one morning. I read an email from  I Hear His Whisper and, whew, every time it’s right on time. One phrase exploded in my mind, like when you double-click on a link and images instantly open on your screen.

Line your heart with gratitude.

The authors went on to explain how gratitude and praise in each moment softens our heart and helps us see even more things to be grateful for. Please go read their words. It’s beautiful.

But I’m sitting on this phrase, line your heart with gratitude…

I don’t know how many of you cook, but lining a pan takes some skillzzz. You take wax or parchment paper and cut it to the size of your pan.Then you place it in the pan and place uncooked food on top of it. Into the oven it goes. 

Sounds easy until you have to match flat paper to a shaped pan. Think bundt pan. Yeah. Not so easy. Thankfully, my mom showed me how to cut out a rough circle by folding a piece of paper in half and then into a cone so it will fit a pie or cake pan. 

It works well enough. But to be frank, I have an upcoming baking project and I cheated. I bought perfectly sized liners for the specialty pan. I need all the help I can get to make this tall cake. 

But… Back to Holy Spirit. 

WHY do we need liners in the first place?

So the food doesn’t stick to the pan. Cakes, candies, and vegges need the heat of the oven to transform them into edible wonders. However, lots of things can happen in the heat. 

Have you ever tried to get a beautiful cake out of a pan? You flip it over and …nothing happens. Or worse! Half of it flops out! That cake didn’t make it out of the heat well.

Veggies sweat and stick to the pan making it nearly impossible to eat and even harder to clean up. Butter and sugar when heated becomes sugar-y concrete. 

The pan was needed to cook in the oven for a specified time. 

The liners protect the food from get stuck in the pan. 

Stay with me. 

You and I are headed over and over for the oven. It is the heat of life that transforms us and reveals the mature, finished, delicious us. The various trials, aka pans in hot ovens, produce lots of expressions of God’s wondrous goodness.

And the liner? The liner is our praise. It seems small. Even insignificant. And yet praise protects my heart. It keeps me from sticking. From getting burnt. From getting stuck in the pan instead of out on a serving platter. 

Liners create a moisture barrier between food and pan. Praise and gratitude does the same. Keeps us tender, keeps our hearts soft.

Listen, I know it’s a crazy picture. But when it says, Line your heart with gratitude —it’s not a cute little ditty. It is a well-worn, time-tested, kitchen-approved reality. It really works.

“His praise will always be on my lips” Psalm 34:1

I have been re-reading “The Shack.” Again. At this point, it has been a decade or so. And let me stop you right there. No, it’s not the same as the movie. The movie is good but the book it far, far better. There is a depth in the words the author selected that feels like heavenly revelation. There is a weight on them. A weight of glory, perhaps. 

One passage likens our thirst for independence as being part of a worldly matrix. However, instead of being plugged into a monstrous robotics system of the sci-fi movie, independence is us walking away from the circle of love provided by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Picture this. A child encapsulated, surrounded by the purest love and desire, stands up and pushes through this divine embrace, walks  several paces away, then turns and says, “I’ll do it myself.”

If you have been around toddlers at all, you have seen this play out in the natural. “My do it,” they yell. As earthly parents, we know how to observe them for their own protection. The same is true with our Heavenly Family. 

But in the spiritual world, such independence creates its own misery. We think we need control. We want to dictate. We attempt to predict success. We want to determine our identities. 

Yet what follows the “my do it” rant is the utter onslaught from the enemy:
  You are alone.
      It’s all on you. 
        You can’t do it.
           You are abandoned.
               You are unloved.

Independence isn’t an American idea. It is a demonic one. 

It is the delusional quest for self-sufficiency. Self-reliance. We vacillate  between self loathing or self worship. Constantly questioning and assessing our value and worth.

I will venture to an extreme line and say that independence from God is so counter creation that all our global hurts are demonstrations of humans demanding “my do it.”

Apart from Me, you can do nothing. (John 15)

Jesus said it because He was living proof of a new way. A better way. 

That’s not a judgment. That’s an invitation. An instruction of how to break out of the matrix. How to be free of the damning existence of doing life own our own.

You know, it’s funny every time I find myself sitting in a pile of self-pity poop,  the Lord always begins the with same basic truth.

I love you.

Running into His arms always unwinds me. It always frees me. Resets me. 

Surrender maybe needs a new definition. Surrender could mean sitting in the Holy Embrace until I feel His truth wash away every worldly lie, evaluation, criticism. 

God’s love is a white hot fire. It burns off the deceptions of independence.

I was made for Them. So were you. We were made to do life with Them. Through Them. All else is futility. 

He woke me up yesterday with an old school Gaither song from my mom. It was sung at our wedding. And the 30th is her birthday.  So I took it as a sweet, sweet kiss from Jesus. 

I am Loved, by Bill and Gloria Gaither

I am loved, I am loved
I can risk loving you

For the One who knows me best
Loves me most

I am loved, you are loved

Won’t you please take my hand
We are free to love each other

We are loved

Every time you encounter God there is an upgrade available. The key word is, available. Holy Spirit always leads us into truth, and truth changes us and sets us free. Some encounters are teaching or cleansing. It may be letting go of an idol or counterfeit love. Some moments are just sheer bliss, His presence being that intoxicating. No matter the beginning point, every encounter opens the pathways to more of the Kingdom being revealed to us and in us. 

It was precisely one of those delicious moments when Jesus whispered, “I want you to go from Follow Me to Flow with Me.”

I blinked a few times. My spirit was trying to adjust to the new realm like walking from a dark room into the bright sunlight. 

“Flow?” I said. 

“Follow Me is about obedience, which is beautiful to Me. I love your quick and willing Yes. But flowing is being so entwined with Me, there is no stop and start, just the two of us going in the same direction, effortlessly.”

Selah. 

Right after that, I was listening to a worship song by Davy Flowers that said: 

Oh, be still, my restless soul

Be still and know all the work is finished

Lay down your heavy load

Take on the yoke Jesus has given

Leave the weight of your world on His shoulders

Let the Cross of His love draw you closer

To the water

When you’ve got nothing left to offer

Just come running like a child to the Father

There’s no greater fountain

There is a whole revelation brewing for me about the river of God. It’s been going on for months. I just keep listening and marveling as He drops jewels in place. Yet, I know in my spirit that He is calling His people to lean into His peace. To lay back in His grace and float. To flow in His presence and hope. 

He is asking us to resist making life so hard but learn to flow in His eternal love and provision. We have to unlearn the grind and dependence on ourselves. We have to learn to enjoy the wild river ride with this Beautiful God, even the white water sections when we think we might die. Smile. 

So find a verse or a song, and start speaking and singing the truth into your reality. Watch it carry you to a new place.

Here’s my line that keeps bubbling out of my mouth. (From the same song.)

“Oh my soul be still. Oh my soul be lifted.
He loves you. Oh how He loves you.”

 

Well then. This is exhilarating! In two weeks, we’ve had a staff retreat, looked at property to purchase, signed the contract, gathered the $10K earnest money, and whew… What just happened? I think the answer we are straining for is:  Jesus. I laughed and told my team the last time the Spirit was moving this fast I ended up in another state!  

I will keep you abreast of all the steps as we go. You can watch the backstory video if you missed it. But going forward, I want to tell you this is NOT a story about property. As beautiful as Hunter Valley Farm is, this story is much, much bigger.

This is a story about our faith. 

And how our faith stirs the heart of our God. 

When all this began, I kept asking the Lord, “Am I crazy?” He responded by taking me back to Psalm 145, the song by Shane and Shane. What you don’t know is that song was a pivotal passage of scripture and an anthem in a season when I was praying for—wait for it—a miracle house. 

“You open Your hand and satisfy desires of all things.”

I took a deep breath and told Him, “Okay, okay, I’m tracking with you.” Then He started replaying in my mind all the miracle house stories and the feelings of fear, thrill, and clinging to Him that occurred with each one. 

“This feels familiar,” I said, the tension and breathlessness around the miraculous. “We’ve been here before,” I said.

“Yes. I just love it.” He said. 

But every story had one common denominator. Worship.

Many times I could do nothing to impact the outcome and He told me to simply worship. The same was true for this adventure.  

So I sat out on my dock and played the song, over and over, to let it seep into my spirit. 

Suddenly lyrics broke through in a whole new way. 

One generation will

Commend Your kingdom

To one another

They will speak of You

 

And I will meditate

On Your wonder

 

And they, they will speak

Of Your glorious splendor

Of Your majesty

 

Every day I’ll praise thee

Forever and ever

Tears slid down my cheeks. One generation will tell the wonders of God to another generation. That is the story God is telling us all. This is what He loves. 

Then I watched the episode from The Chosen when Jesus heals the centurion’s son. 

From a distance. With a word. 

The centurion explained he understood what it meant to be under authority and he KNEW that Jesus merely had to speak a word and his son would be healed. 

The look on Jesus’s face. 

His wonder and enjoyment. 

His response to such faith. 

I tell you with all my heart, our faith moves our God. It makes Him smile, makes Him laugh, even stops Him in His tracks. 

Makes Him proud. 

My friends, how will we tell God’s wonders if we never experience them ourselves? 

This wind of God is not merely on a ministry changing locations. The wind is blowing on the hearts of His people to rise up in faith. To test and see that He is good beyond what we can ask or even imagine. He wants us to stretch, to sacrifice, to give as He gives. Hilariously. 

Why? Because when we do that, it means we have tapped into His idea of Kingdom riches. There is always enough.

I am worshipping and listening to hear what God is dreaming about. What brings Him joy as we go on this great adventure? Like the centurion, I want to make Jesus marvel at our great faith in His goodness.

Every day I’ll praise thee

Forever and ever

We were talking at our staff retreat about our word for the year. Have you revisited yours lately? My word for this year is surprises. I am usually excited to hear from the Lord through this exercise. But at the beginning of this year? Not so much. I didn’t receive the word surprises as something akin to fun and delight, as in parties, gifts, and trips. It came with a tinge of dread. Surprises felt more like being caught off guard, snuck up on, or tricked. You can imagine my initial conversation with the Lord.

 

“Why am I nervous about this word?

Why are you?

It’s been a hard season.

Yes, and I have been with you through it all.

I know Lord. Thank You. You have been so good to me. I think I am just tired. I don’t want any bad surprises for a while.

But I give you good things. Good surprises. Do you trust Me?

Funny that Trust word. Dang it. It always circles back to our whole-hearted trust in His goodness. 

So here we are in April. And, whew, there have been a plethora of surprises. Some were painful. A lot of unplanned home repairs. A new HVAC. A new water line. A car repair. A new dock after storm damage. There have been surprising heart twists and turns. Some relational breaks and lots of transitions. But God has been with me, teaching and changing me through it all. 

That’s just doing life in His good hands.

And. There have been delightful surprises. Visits from Knoxville friends, and my team just left a few days ago. A Florida church all because Chuck went to a funeral. Lots of hearts. Seeing manta rays off our dock. New flowers are blooming for the first time on our property. Restored family relationships. 

Again, just doing life in His good hands.

But there are deeper surprises still. God has revealed and healed some hidden wounds. Places in my heart I was surprised still needed medicine. He has provided in amazing ways, unexpected gifts and commissions. And recently, He has surprised me with His plans for my future.

God doesn’t forget. God doesn’t quit. God doesn’t skimp or slack. 

See, I had gotten stuck in a mental loop of two yucky choices regarding the future. I had prayed and asked Him ‘What the heck am I supposed to do?’ To which He was silent.

Then I spent some time with my sisters and they started to echo back to me key phrases. Extend your tent pegs. Houses of promises. Extreme Security and Extreme Generosity. The current house prepares for the next house. 

God surprised me in several ways.  

• He used my sisters to remove the lenses (read: lies)  I was looking through. They jerked me out of faulty small thinking to recall God moves in mysterious ways. 
• The Lord told me I was far from done and to get ready for the next season of GT.  
• And, He reminded me what He has already told me. Every step leads to the next bigger step. Glory to glory. Strength to Strength. Faith to Faith. 

Whew. It’s only April. And boy, have I been surprised by this hilarious and intentional God. He has plans for our future to prosper us. 

I love doing life in His good hands. 

 

I was driving home after church, I found myself praying for people in my circle, my community, my family. I reflected on the conflicts and struggles going on there. ‘It’s hard to be human,’ I exhaled as a silent prayer. Then this picture popped into my mind of a person taking off pieces of clothing. The clothing had names on it. Hiding. Shame. Insecurity. As each word was taken off, the person went from a shadowed demeanor into a brighter countenance. 

Remember Psalm 34:5? Those who look to him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame. 

Then I saw the same person, now radiant, put on three new garments; 

Confidence. Mercy. Compassion. 

The Lord reminded me of how Colossians 3 instructs us to live as those made alive in Jesus and we have “taken off your old self.” 

Rather our wardrobe has completely changed. We now live “as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved” and therefore we “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.”  Putting off and taking on. There is a lot of personal power packed in this whole passage. There are a lot of heavenly exchanges too.

Taking off hiding. Putting on confidence.

Confidence to live wholly seen since we are bathed by His Love.

Taking off shame. Putting on mercy.

Mercy flowing from Heaven to cover any past sin, lie, failure, or memory. 

Taking off insecurity. Putting on compassion.

Compassion, not futile tolerance, but deep heavenly kindness for our still-in-process human weakness. 

I wonder, could we become uncomfortable in these ill-fitting clothes provided for us by the enemy? Could we become so rankled that whenever we feel insecurity, shame, and hiding, we recognize it’s an assault on very tender places in our life?  

Places that need healing, not accusation.

Instead of defending our bad fit, we would shirk off the clothing and run for the garments that God has given us.

We’re not trying to fix ourselves. Jesus already did that. The old man (woman) is dead. We got ourselves a new life. A new look.

Now we have the honor of putting on the same garments that Jesus wore. And may I say, His righteousness looks good on us!

There is a miracle of God’s mercy that we often overlook. Not only does it come fresh, full and renewed every single morning, but it also keeps us from destruction. His mercy is a healing balm available to us on the small scale of our individual lives and also on a global scale. That’s why Chuck and I have been having conversations with our kids about the days we live in. Lots of threats, lots of predictions, lots of fear, fear, fear. But God calls us to live and move in faith, trusting His goodness, living as God’s children in what is often presented as a God forsaken world.

Do we prepare for hard times? Absolutely. My friend put it so beautifully, “Enough to survive and to share!” That’s just wise and generous living. 

I have a vivid memory as a small child standing in my grandmother’s pantry. Rows and rows of jars of canned food that she had put up from her garden. “Enough food for a year, just in case,” she would say. 

You see, my grandmother lived through the Great Depression. And so did my mother. In my home growing up, we had a hu-u-u-ge garden and we canned stores for the winter. In her later years, my mom stopped canning but she still had a well stocked pantry for ‘just in case.’  That’s not fear, that’s wisdom straight from Proverbs 6 about the ants. 

Today, we are way past the Depression. And yet. 

While we navigate the social media mania and diligently search for scraps of reliable facts, there is a God in heaven who is completely and intimately involved in every detail. He loves the world He has made and the people He created to fill it, even if they don’t love Him. Far from being abandoned, or orphaned, we drink from the mercies God generously rains down every morning. 

We consult the web, the scroll and predictors. But do we consult the King of Heaven? Or worse, do we dare tell Him what is going happen?

“Who can fathom the Spirit of the LORD, or instruct the LORD as his counselor? 

Whom did the LORD consult to enlighten him, and who taught him the right way? 

Who was it that taught him knowledge, or showed him the path of understanding?” 

Isaiah 40: 13-14

As Chuck and I quietly enjoyed time at home for the eclipse, we recounted the major hysterias just in our lifetime. Y2k, 9/11, Market Crash 2008, Covid Epidemic 2020. This doesn’t even count the meteors, aliens, conspiracy theories, nuclear blasts, and the precisely predicted day of Jesus’s return.  We told our kids “Humans do the best they can, and sometimes they get it wrong. However, God never fails. His mercy never fails.” Then we went on to tell them about divine interruptions, holy interventions, and God provisions in the worst of times. 

This is where the buzz started around His mercy. 

Do you remember that Y2K had worldwide attention? In Chuck’s realm of telecom and IT, the companies he served brought in international specialists and attached bonuses and created entire tasks forces to figure out how to minimize the coming crash. Few businesses implemented all the required updates. The world watched, beginning in the far East, as the time zones switched to 2000, one after the other. There was no collapse. No catastrophe. In the end, all the specialists shook their heads, none of us were ready. How did we make it through that…?

God has a thing or two to say about the affairs of men. It begins with His Love and ends with His mercy. 

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded?

Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? He who brings out the starry host one by one and calls forth each of them by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing.” Isaiah 40:21, 26

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are ACTIVELY working in the world today. We see the horrors of mankind and the absolute mess we are generating on so many levels. But are we seeing and celebrating the miraculous and merciful works of our Loving God? 

I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have the wardrobe for fear and hysteria. It’s not in my color wheel, doesn’t bring out my best features. Makes me look fat. Smile. 

But seriously. Faith looks beautiful in us and on us all. 

God’s mercy is a one-size-fits-all, perfectly. 

So keep using your words to release the Kingdom of God. 

Keep storing goods so you can be generous ‘just in case.’

Look for the mercy of God. 

Release the mercy of God.

Celebrate the mercy of God in your own heart, your relationships, and the world you live in. 

It’s fresh every morning so might as well have a hot serving with your coffee.  

The faithful love of the Lord never ends!
    His mercies never cease.
Great is his faithfulness;
    his mercies begin afresh each morning.

Lamentations 3:22-23 NLB