How things change

It’s funny how things change. Other night I was reminded how much my taste in music have changed in only a few years. Three years ago if you had asked me who my favorite band was, I would have rattled off a rather length list of hard rock (Disturbed, Godsmack, and Avenged Sevenfold). Today if you were to ask me that the results couldn’t be more different (DecembeRadio, Rick Pino, and etc).

That’s quite a change, and it got me thinking about why I liked those former bands to begin with. What came to mind was chaos, the reason I liked those bands was because when I listened to them they drowned out the mess that was in my own mind. For a few mins their music quieted the storm that was inside of me. Inside I was lonely, depressed, and angry, and listening to this kind of music provided me with an outlet to release or assuage those emotions. But it was never enough the music did little to comfort me when it was off and in reality it was a vicious cycle, of feeding those emotions and the chaos inside.

Today things are different, Glory to God! There’s still chaos at times in my life, but what has changed is how I deal, rather than try to drown it out, I let it go and give it to God. I seek him, for answers to my questions, for clarity in the fog of life. And remarkably the He answers not always in my timing or the way I expect, but He is faithfully by my side even when I am stubbornly doing my own thing.

Dreams: Five Year Plan

I had this dream this morning:

I was at a restaurant with a large group of friends at a bug round table everyone was eating and laughing having a great time, but I was waiting because I was meeting someone for lunch (I did have a little something to eat while I waited).

Midway through the meal the person I was waiting for showed up. I quickly got up and joined him at a table. It was just he and I at a small table out on the porch, facing the outdoors. The guy I was meeting ended up being on of my old bosses. This was a guy that I greatly respected and admired for his vision and leadership.

We didn’t eat anything instead he looked at me and asked a question. “Do you have a five year plan?”, he asked. My reply was a rather sheepish no. Then he looked at me and said, “If I were you, I would buy this property.” He said that while pointing at a hill with a fence, in the distance.

Vision

What’s your life vision? We need one to get through life with some sense of purpose. Living just to eat, just to survive, is not living. Animals do that. God made us in his image as noble creatures with great creative ability. Take a few minutes to write your vision down. This one comes from 24-7 Prayer.

The Vision
So this guy comes up to me and says “what’s the vision? What’s the big idea?” I open my mouth and words come out like this… The vision?

The vision is JESUS – obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus.

The vision is an army of young people.

You see bones? I see an army. And they are FREE from materialism.

They laugh at 9-5 little prisons. They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on Tuesday. They wouldn’t even notice. They know the meaning of the Matrix, the way the west was won. They are mobile like the wind, they belong to the nations. They need no passport.. People write their addresses in pencil and wonder at their strange existence. They are free yet they are slaves of the hurting and dirty and dying. What is the vision ? The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes. It makes children laugh and adults angry. It gave up the game of minimum integrity long ago to reach for the stars. It scorns the good and strains for the best. It is dangerously pure.

Light flickers from every secret motive, every private conversation. It loves people away from their suicide leaps, their Satan games. This is an army that will lay down its life for the cause. A million times a day its soldiers choose to lose that they might one day win the great ‘Well done’ of faithful sons and daughters.

Such heroes are as radical on Monday morning as Sunday night. They don’t need fame from names. Instead they grin quietly upwards and hear the crowds chanting again and again: “COME ON!”

And this is the sound of the underground The whisper of history in the making Foundations shaking Revolutionaries dreaming once again Mystery is scheming in whispers Conspiracy is breathing… This is the sound of the underground

And the army is discipl(in)ed.

Young people who beat their bodies into submission.

Every soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms. The tattoo on their back boasts “for me to live is Christ and to die is gain”.

Sacrifice fuels the fire of victory in their upward eyes. Winners. Martyrs. Who can stop them ? Can hormones hold them back? Can failure succeed? Can fear scare them or death kill them ?

And the generation prays like a dying man with groans beyond talking, with warrior cries, sulphuric tears and with great barrow loads of laughter! Waiting. Watching: 24 – 7 – 365.

Whatever it takes they will give: Breaking the rules. Shaking mediocrity from its cosy little hide. Laying down their rights and their precious little wrongs, laughing at labels, fasting essentials. The advertisers cannot mould them. Hollywood cannot hold them. Peer-pressure is powerless to shake their resolve at late night parties before the cockerel cries.

They are incredibly cool, dangerously attractive inside.

On the outside? They hardly care. They wear clothes like costumes to communicate and celebrate but never to hide. Would they surrender their image or their popularity? They would lay down their very lives – swap seats with the man on death row – guilty as hell. A throne for an electric chair.

With blood and sweat and many tears, with sleepless nights and fruitless days, they pray as if it all depends on God and live as if it all depends on them.

Their DNA chooses JESUS. (He breathes out, they breathe in.) Their subconscious sings. They had a blood transfusion with Jesus. Their words make demons scream in shopping centres. Don’t you hear them coming? Herald the weirdo’s! Summon the losers and the freaks. Here come the frightened and forgotten with fire in their eyes. They walk tall and trees applaud, skyscrapers bow, mountains are dwarfed by these children of another dimension. Their prayers summon the hounds of heaven and invoke the ancient dream of Eden.

via Seth Barnes

What’s your life vision? We need one to get through life with some sense of purpose. Living just to eat, just to survive, is not living. Animals do that. God made us in his image as noble creatures with great creative ability. Take a few minutes to write your vision down. This one comes from 24-7 Prayer.

Bellarive – Love Has Found Us

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9100847&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

On the night of 1/27/10 Orlando based band, Bellarive (http://www.myspace.com/bellarive) led worship for a local student ministry (http://www.thelement.com) from the top of a parking garage overlooking the city of Orlando.

Shot with 1 Canon 7D and a 35mm 1.4 lens

The band was only able to play through the song a couple of times, so I had to really experiment with some B-Roll. But all in all I really like how it turned out.

Edited in FCP, colored in Magic Bullet.

Dreams: Flights

Here’s another interesting dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

From what I can remember I was getting on a plane, but it wasn’t a normal plane it was more like an egg carton that could fly. The seats didn’t really look like seats but like a bench with little troughs as a place to put your feet and either a straight metal back or no back at all. After I found my seat the person in front of me turned around to talk to me, it turned out to be Tori-Da-Great from church. She looked straight at me and said, “This is what the God says:…..” (for the life of me I can’t remember what she said, it had something to do with God being pleased with me or not being pleased with me). I was so shocked that TDG was talking to me like a prophet and then the flight attendant came up and confirmed what she had just said.

Once the flight landed we had to make a connecting flight that wasn’t at the same airport. We had to walk from one airport to the other, I was walking a bit ahead of TDG but came to an intersection and wasn’t sure which way to go. After I started going to the right I realized that Tori had gone to the left, as I walking Tori’s dad pulls up and offers me a lift. As we’re driving to the airport the thought occurred that we should have stopped and picked up Tori, but we never did and when I got there I felt bad that we hadn’t. Going through security was pretty cool, think full body scanners 2.0, once inside I headed up to the lounge where I found Tori waiting. We hung out and ate some food while waiting on our next flight.

Dreams: Digging

This was a dream I had a few weeks ago. It starts off with me walking into a dark room, it looks almost like a bombed out basement. There are a few lights here and there, but overall the room was quite dark.

In the room were groups of people some just standing off to the left or right side, I recognized them as people from my old congregation (which was really interesting) in the middle were some of the leaders from that congregation digging two cylindrical holes in the ground. We didn’t talk about it, I just somehow knew what they were doing. The first hole I came to hadn’t really been started maybe a few inches had been dug just to mark it out in the ground. The second hole was probably a foot or two deeper than I am tall, but inside of it was all these pieces of debris (large pieces of cement). I jumped in and started tossing the pieces out, once that was done I helped finish digging the hole.

And that was it. It was a strange dream in regards to who was in it. Not sure what digging and holes means but I should take a moment and look it up.

Men with a whole heart

From Ray Ortlund

There is only one way to play football — 110% effort every play, all the way to the end of the fourth quarter.  You lay it all down on that field.  Then you crawl off the field after the final gun with nothing left to give.  Football must be played with wholehearted abandon.  It’s the nature of the game.  It prepares us for life.

If I could change the Bible, all I would do is add “play high school football” to the qualifications for elders.  Men who have experienced such intense effort, hurling themselves into every play, especially as a team sport — such men understand what ministry demands and how good it feels to give their all for a cause greater than self.

Of course, there are other ways God provides for men to punch through to the experience of total abandon.  Football is not the only way.  But every man needs some kind of experience like this, to become the warrior God wants him to be.

There is only one way to serve Christ — all-out passion.  Passive men don’t understand, men who are afraid they might get knocked down or hurt.  Christianity must be lived with wholehearted abandon.  It’s the nature of the faith.  It prepares us for eternity.

Men with a whole heart — joy awaits them!

“Blessed are those who seek Him with their whole heart.”  Psalm 119:2

Overcoming Fatherlessness With Alex Lyons

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10062491&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=ff9933&fullscreen=1

Alex Lyons tells his story of overcoming childhood challenges to strive toward a strong spiritual heritage.

via The Mentoring Project

btw: the picture in the header is a much younger me, my grandpa Shansky, and my Dad.

I Don’t Care What I Think Anymore

Jamie Neumann is in her 10th month on THE WORLD RACE. Her latest post is below. You can check out her blogs at: http://jamieneumann.theworldrace.org/

I might be putting myself on the line here for this blog.  You might view it as radical, or stuff that just does not happen anymore.  You might blow it off, and that’s okay, because one day God will reveal the truth to you.  But here is what I have come to know… I don’t care what I think anymore.

This has been year of self-discovery and invigoration of my faith.  I wish I could articulate what I have grown to learn, but I cant.  All I know is I have a greater understanding of the things I already knew along with a whole new ball park of things I wouldn’t let myself believe in.  My whole life I spent searching for more.  Originally I thought I would find God in the university, in getting a great 6 figure job, and finding the perfect husband…. because that is what America is all about right? You go to church every Sunday and go back to whatever you were doing for the rest of the week. But little did I know I would find a better understanding of God by living out of a backpack for a year with the lost, broken, homeless, orphaned, and widowed the i ever could with the ordinary way of living.  I guess I should have paid attention to the scriptures when it said the first shall be last.

I used to think that God was stagnant; I  was calloused to His ways and how He worked.
I used to think praying for the sick and dying was futile.
I used to think people couldn’t have physical encounters with God.
I used to think people who got emotional or danced during worship were embarrassing.
I used to think God didn’t work miracles through people anymore like he did in the ancient of days.
I used to think that tongues were a fake babbling of people who were pretending to be spiritual.
I used to think people couldn’t literally hear angels sing.
I used to think casting out demons was a scary thing.
I used to think raising the dead only happened the 3 or whatever many times that it happened in the bible.

As a culture we have taken God out of the equation.  We no longer live with a reckless faith where “all things are possible through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13).  Its so easy to take God out when you can just go to the doctor when you are sick, or go to the store to buy food when you are hungry, or turn the heat on in your house during the winter. But the rest of the world isn’t like that.  They still have that reckless faith to depend on God for their needs. Don’t take me wrong, I don’t think you should stop going to the doctor, or go hungry at night, or sleep on the streets (although more power to you to deny yourself) but it all goes back to the heart.  Why do we live the way we do? When the first shall be last and the last shall be first.  If lilies and the sparrows depend on God for their food let us complex humans (the best of all His creations) put Him back in the equation. But after a year like this, and thinking about all those things I used to think about how God couldn’t move I have decided I don’t care what I think anymore.

Now I cannot deny that God is more then alive; I am now brokenhearted yet full of joy for how He works.  I now admire reckless unguarded worship.  It is so contagious when you actually meet people who worship like they really believe in heaven and hell; people who actually cry, shout, and dance when they are encountering God himself.  Worship is amazing when it is unplanned and led by the spirit.  Freedom in that kind of worship in how He moves is what I experienced today in our 24 worship session in Berlin Germany.  God is so alive here. I now knowpassion so deep that you cannot help but express it.

I now know that God speaks directly to me if I actually take the time to listen.
I now know you can sing with angels when they encounter you during a worship session and the entire room hears them.
I now know that the sick can be healed because I have seen it with my own eyes when we prayed over a lady who could not walk in Nigeria, and then miraculously walked after our prayers.
I now know demons can be cast out and freedom is so sweet because I have seen it with my own eyes in Cambodia as 12 men prayed for hours over a man who was delivered from the fire of hell.
I now know that the dead can be raised, because my friend Dan Synder <– (click on his name to read the blog about it) had enough faith to pray for a little boy in Africa who died but came back to life.

I cannot explain any of these things, and believe me I am the first to be cynical over any of this spirit stuff. Believe me I have tried many times to deny any of this stuff was actually happening, but when its real its real.  God will not relent.  He does not want us to live boring mundane lives he wants to encounter us every minute of everyday. I wont be satisfied with anything ordinary, I wont be satisfied at all.  I want You.

What I love about this post, is that I see so much of myself in there. I see parts of my journey, and this gives me great hope that God will see me through to the end. Completely transformed into his image.

And I am certain that God, who began the good work within you, will continue his work until it is finally finished on the day when Christ Jesus returns. Phil 1:6

Amen!

Club Remnant: Summer Concert

Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 7pm
Southbound Fearing with guests One31 and Stria

Tickets are $8 in advance and $10 at the door. Groups of 10 or more can be purchased for $6 each. Tickets can be purchased in advance at the venue.

Order tickets via Eventbrite:
http://southboundfearing-efbevent.eventbrite.com/

Club Remnant 1020 Saveage Ct. Longwood, FL 32750
321.439.0529