Remember

Pardon me, I'm in a mood, and not sure what it is...forgive the stream of consciousness as it just flows. Life is amazing and awesome, but as I attended a Bible study last night for the first time in what seems like forever (8 months to be exact), I suddenly looked around and remembered...

FREEDOM

I've been living in a vacuum for a very long time....maybe it was the crazy dream in March, the barren wasteland of my heart in April, moving to Texas in May, the depression and mourning and silence and alone-ness of June and July, the quiet acceptance in August...and as I started to breathe again, to live again, to exist outside of just being this floating survivor of some awful shipwreck in the middle of my life....hanging on desperately to any little thing, uprooted from the life I loved, cast into this place where nothing was stable, and the only reality was a lifetime of disappointments and dysfunction staring me directly in the face...it was all I could do, most days, to just stand firm and be faithful and obedient....to be healthy and whole in the deafening silence of asking, and seeking, and knocking....as God has breathed a whole new unexpected and brilliant life into me over the last couple of months, the rough season of 2012 has made sense. And although I've started to come out of the wilderness, it's been cautiously and quietly.

But last night....for the first time in such a long time, my heart began to stir to do ministry. As I listened to some heartbreaking assumptions and opinions on marriage, and heard the bitterness in the voices of women, and the underlying prisons of their entrapment, the word that kept reverberating in my heart was...

FREEDOM

The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captive and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed (Luke 4:18).

I forgot...that freedom is the ultimate reward of life lived in Christ...that an unbelievable amount of Christians are still enslaved to those bonds....that freedom is only as good as we choose to make it, as we choose to keep it...that it's one of my fundamental messages of resurrection to others...that my life is full of freedom and redemption...that I long to share it...that I long to be what Jesus was in that verse....to be the catalyst that points to HIM to heal and set free....

I've sat here and wondered what had happened to my passion for ministry....and it hasn't been lost, only put back so that God could do some work in me, so that He could bring me to a new mountaintop experience, and teach me new things, and draw me closer, and give me a blessing greater than I imagined to take me into the next place...

And yeah, admittedly, I'm still pretty inwardly focused, because there are big changes going on, and new things coming that demand my full attention and commitment right now....but a new heart for ministry is also being birthed in me during this process, and it comes around full circle and goes right back to the core of what I believe encompasses full joy in Christ, and that is...

FREEDOM