i repent...

.:forgive me:.

a few nights ago i went to a worship service at the base in Montana. it was so comforting to walk into a place filled with the presence of God and with people who were responding to it.

i miss community, a lot.

i was so comforted by God that night, i couldn't help staying as the service was dismissed but the worship team kept playing.

so there i was, half of the time singing and praying, half of the time just observing people responding to the Spirit in their own unique, oblivious-to-the-world ways. and then it hit me, this overwhelming knowledge that i had much to repent for.

this is what i realized and why it became important for me to share this with everyone.

i have neglected the gifts that God has given me.

i have failed to make holiness a priority in my life.

i have given the opinions and responses of my friends greater weight than God's opinions and responses to my thoughts, my words and my actions.

i know that God has given me a mandate to speak out prophetic words, to lead worship, to call out truth, to wage war on the enemy and to exercise discernment.

i also know that it requires my participation for these things to be made real in my life...and that is where i have failed.

that is why i want to apologize not only to God but to you, my closest friends, my community, my family.

by not allowing the Spirit to move through me in the way i know it does, and desires to always, i feel like i have cheated you.

i have failed to love you to the best of my ability because i haven't been letting God love you through me...i've been trying to do that part on my own.

forgive me.

challenge me.

hold me to my word.

be challenged.

i am left with this lingering sweetness of how gentle the conviction of God can be on a willing heart. even my ability to be willing i give him complete credit for. i am inexcusably and incurably selfish without the Spirit moving in me.

i am also left with many more questions than answers.

how can i stir up the gifts i've been given?

how can i encourage you in the gifts you've been given?

how do i allow for the supernatural to be a constant influence in the very natural and even sometimes mundane pattern of my existence?

holiness. gifts. willingness. awareness. repentance. love. Spirit. life. friends. family. strangers. worship. Jesus. me. you. ??????

thanks for listening.

keep me in your prayers.

i'm wary of the possibility that i could receive revelation and grace in a situation like this and that my response would not exceed the singularity of a response like this to actually become a change in lifestyle.

i never want to be in the presence of God and not leave irrevocably changed.

I realize...things, about myself, when I spend enough time in the in-between-things silence that comes in seasons like this one.

There is no real flow to my life these days, other than the fact that faithfully it is tomorrow every time I wake up, and then it becomes today. And today I get up and go to work, at least for the first several hours.

My feeling of displacement is likely attibuted, at least somewhat, to the increasingly fewer hours of daylight, and my exhaustingly regular habit of waking up and starting my day when those hours have yet to arrive.

Can't people wait till nine a.m. for coffee? I suppose not really.

It's an imbalance, like a string of non-moments attaching themselves to the justification of dollars per hour as I wait for the living part of my life to resume.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind working. In fact, I like my jobs. Both of them. All three of them (starting tomorow). It's just that the very nature of transition is to feel neither "here nor there", and that is an odd place to be. It leaves me doing niether "this nor that" and feeling oddly neutral. Like I'm in neutral, coasting downhill until I can engage the gears and start my climb into the mountains. This does though bring me to discovering things, about myself mostly.

When given to contemplation I usually go a little stir crazy and try to occupy myself, divert myself, entertain myself....and generally I'm busy enough not to have to try too hard.

However, lately it's been different. I feel alone even when I'm with people, like at work, and it lends to taking the time to actually think and feel what I'm thinking and feeling, instead of being busy enough to "process that eventually" and give my attention to taking care of whomever I might be with.