A modern day Gideon (or two)

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God has been working in my life, and in Jacob's life all these years, gently, lovingly, patiently pushing us to do more and go deeper. For whatever reason, we found ourselves in a position similar to Gideon where he wanted to both worship the one true God and "have it our way" worshiping the idols of the day right alongside Him. But God chose Gideon anyways. Flawed. Human. To break that cycle. To be the one to help lead his

people to receive the blessings of God's glorious promised land in it's full glory. And even when God called him loud and clear, Gideon doubted that God could use him, that it was possible. So God, in his wisdom, stripped down Gideon's army of 32,000 soldiers to a measly 300-to go up against 135,000 Midianites. Again he doubted that it was possible, but all through those times, God used those circumstances to prove his mightiness. If Gideon had a huge army, it would be easy for them to take credit for their own victory. Instead, God stripped his resources down to rightfully claim the victory himself. He wanted his people to be without excuse, to know without a doubt, that their help and victory came from the Lord, not from their own strength. We are learning that God will often give us the most difficult of circumstances, not only to show out  himself, but also to require our complete and total faith and trust in him. When he breaks us down to our weakest moments, the circumstances where we are FORCED to acknowledge that we cannot do it on our own, that is when everyone who knows about it can bear witness to the fact that he is a provider, a healer, a warrior... A Savior. He can use our circumstances to make himself known to others, as well as to grow us in our own relationship to others. It is truly a complex thing, the way God works. He's been teaching us, like Gideon, to trust him all this time. He's been using everything and every one in our path to confirm to us that we are acting in obedience with him.

 Just over a month ago, Jacob and I went to a marriage conference, thinking our marriage was "fine", but were rocked to our very core. The things I learned that weekend, thank God, will leave me forever changed, and I know Jacob feels the same. Our marriage was fine before. Just fine. But it turns out that we were missing out on so much, and now that we have tasted the sweetest blessings of an even closer marriage than we ever though possible, we really won't ever be able to go back to what I now know was mediocrity. We pray together, read God's word together, we're dreaming Big dreams, even parenting our children differently! One of the things the conference spurred was some deep discussions about our dreams and then, the Sunday of that weekend, Pastor Shannon O'dell rocked the whole church (I hear, quite literally, as they played guitar hero together as a church). Jacob and I served in the nursery, but as soon as we could, we watched the uploaded sermon on the CHC smartphone app. Yes, our church has an app. (So does Shannon's. It's "Brand New Church") They're both awesome, and if you have an xbox and a super smart phone, you can even link your devices and watch it on the Tv, but moving on... When we watched the sermon the following day, it was about none other than Dreaming big dreams. He challenged us to discover and pursue our dreams.

Lessons from Narnia

I have always heard that C.S. Lewis was a great author, but I can't say I've read his works until recently... and although I loved the first "Narnia" movie, and I never got around to reading any of the fiction books either. Until this year. I always meant to, wanted to. It was on that "to do" list of bucket list type things that you thought should be important, but most likely you'd never actually make time for. You just felt good thinking that you wanted to do said things. On my spiritual bucket list was just that-Read C.S. Lewis.