Anti-Ordinary

My hair is blowing everywhere and my face is caked with a fresh layer of red dirt. The scene is beautiful as my mind leaves this ride and returns to one very similar nearly four years ago. The view is near the same but the one viewing it is not at all because the One who created it is creating something new in the viewer.

Although sometimes the changes that life brings scare me to death, I have full confidence in a Faithful God. You see I've been here before. I've been in mid air after jumping off an unfamiliar cliff and I've landed on my feet into one of the greatest adventures anyone has ever been on. I look around and I see the faces of a new generation of dreamers, a new generation of cliff jumpers.

The potential brewing in this place is greater than a hunch or a feeling, it's real and I believe in it so much. I believe that God is raising up leaders, mothers, fathers, pastors, doctors, businessmen, children, disciples, and visionaries from this village in the middle of nowhere Malawi Africa to shake the nations. He uses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise. That's the God I Serve!!!

Just when I start to question I'm reminded of the feeling right before the jump. The feeling of uncontrollable excitement over the unknown adventure that is about to unfold and the belief in a God that is big enough to make something incredible out of a little bit of faith that jumps.

I want to live my life jumping, taking insane risks just to watch what God will do. I never want the ordinary to be ordinary. I want extraordinary and I will not settle for less.

Abba I pray for extraordinary moments and I thank you for catching me after every jump. I thank you that I get to live a life of riding in backs of dirty trucks to unknown places, singing in dark rooms to the God of light, laughing in crowded buses with dear friends, eating on straw mats the food of sacrifice and survival, and rocking on a porch with sweet babies that are now seen.

You are a God of newness and change, a God of risks and jumps, A God that catches and sustains, and You are a God that took my ordinary and made it not. I'm Anti-Ordinary and I'll never go back.

I Won't Stop

"You will show me the path of life.; In Your Presence oh God is fullness of Joy and at Your right hand are pleasures forevermore." Psalms 16:11

It doesn’t matter where I am in the world there is one place that I find freedom, rest, strength, and fullness of Joy. 2000 years ago I was given full access to that place. There is nothing like Your presence oh God.

In Ethiopia I saw your presence in a giggle of a baby infected with HIV, in a thank you from a mother receiving a hot meal, in the wide eyes of a girl named Sarah, in the dirty water washed over a widow’s feet, in the modern youth room on the 8^th floor of a nice office building, and in the sweet sound of hundreds inviting Jesus to be their best friend.

Your Presence is thick in this place.

I have found myself on this grand journey to see the world and carry Your Name. But as I go I’m realizing more and more that I am not taking You but I’m finding You, or rather You are finding me. It’s not about a number or a ministry or a church, It’s only about knowing you more. If I have unlimited access to You then I can go anywhere or nowhere at all and still be lost in the joy it brings. Your Presence is a place of freedom that gives me the right to be who you have called me to be.

My prayer is that as I go I will not try to introduce You to a place You already know but rather that everywhere my feet step I declare, “This is a place of freedom, this is the Lord’s dwelling place!” That is my declaration for Ethiopia and that is my declaration for Malawi. May You reign and may You bring freedom. So I will go anywhere or nowhere just to know You and to declare Your freedom. I will point to You all my days so that when others look at me they will only be directed straight to You.

“Begin to know Him---and never stop!”- Oswald Chambers