I love to express what I feel called to say. Writing helps me to open up my heart and do that. I hope that what I write helps you in some way. I hope it makes you think, encourages you, or inspires you. If it challenges you or if you disagree, I hope you know that I respect your right to have a different point of view.
In a world shut down by the pressures of conformity and compliance, I find writing to be a glorious opportunity to fully, humbly, and honestly open my heart. When I write I bask in the freedom of joyous expression and celebratory creativity.
I find the process of connecting with the inner flow of creativity to be extremely exhilarating so I’ve trained my mind not to interrupt as my heart runs with ideas and inspiration. Instead, I let them fly off the keyboard and delight me with their dances. (I can always edit later.)
Writing from the heart is a wonderful way to discover the glorious more — the part of life that we often neglect, reject, or negate — the joy hidden and dormant within us even during our saddest moments. When I’m quiet, pondering, and expecting I don’t have to find the words, the words of life find me, fill me, comfort me, and thrill me.
Contemplative writing, even if no one reads it, is a great way to discover the spiritual aspect of life. It’s one way that I connect with my Creator, the living Jesus Christ, and surrender to His loving guidance and to His beautiful gifts.
The biggest identity problem is the inability to identify Jesus. He’s with “the least of these,” but we don’t recognize Him. He’s present when we gather in His name, but we overlook His reality. He’s knocking on the door of every human heart asking to come in, but we seldom notice His presence. He’s everywhere, but we too often live like He’s nowhere to be found.
Use this Bible verse to help you overcome the big identity problem. “In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loves us.”
Through the presence and power Of the risen eternal One Who loves us, Christ-followers Are called to do more Than merely survive In this fallen world. Through Christ in us We are empowered to thrive From glory to glory As flourishing branches Abounding with fruit Through direct attachment And ongoing surrender To Jesus the living Vine. In troubles and trials We are called to overflow With the New Wine Of HIs presence.
What I love about where I live isn’t location dependent. I find it everywhere I go.
I love the beauty where I live but when I travel, it shows up along the way and in every place that I visit or stay.
I love experiencing heart-to-heart connection with people in my city, but when I’m away I encounter some fresh new heart-connections with lovely people every day.
I love the joy, the kindness, the hope in where I reside, but when I leave for a while, I always find reasons to smile.
I love the presence of the living Jesus who flows through my heart at home, but when I roam around the country, He still overflows through me.
I’m all in with awe. It’s a positive emotion that blows my mind, transcends my comprehension, and keeps me in a state of wonder, ponder, and gratitude.
When I am in awe, I find great beauty and astonishment both in my surroundings and within my own mind and heart. The emotion of awe is so wonderful to me that I have spent most of my life training myself to continually look for it, focus on it, and contemplate it. Making it my habit to behold beauty (not just with a glance, but with an ongoing and appreciative gaze) continually beacons me to let the emotion of awe fill my heart. And I do!
The longer I stay in a state of awe, the more I find myself aware of a sense of glorious and inexpressible joy and the more inner peace I feel. An amazing kind of love flows from out of my inner being.
Some keys to are are:
Observation: Notice the positive things in your surroundings and in your life. Don’t just see them. Admire them as if you were seeing them for the very first time.
Meditation: Open your heart and let it be touched (and even deeply moved) by all the good experiences and the good things that are in you and around you.
Appreciation: Express gratitude throughout the day to people and to your Creator, even when you don’t feel it. Before long your expressions of gratitude will release the real presence of gratitude and awe.
Focus on the awesome: Although some negativity, pain, and evil are present in everybody’s surroundings and in everybody’s life, fasten your focus on what is wonderful and amazing.
Talk and write about the awesome things you see and experience.
For about 8 years, I have been seeing numbers repeated 3 or more times. It happens most on digital clocks. At lease 3 or 4 times a day I will notice the same number repeated 3 times on a digital clock. After all these years I’m still in awe every time I see it. I also often see even more that 3 repetitions of the same number on my odometer.
Throughout each week indescribable positive things happen in my life that defy statistical odds and send me into an orbit of awe. I live a life of amazement and can only attribute it to the reality, love, presence, and working of the living Jesus Christ in and around me. For this I will be eternally grateful and abounding with awe.
We live in a famine of awe. However, if Christ-followers would freely testify about what God has done and is doing in, through and for them, churches would be full of awe.
Perhaps goal planning isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. People like to set (and even to write down) all types of goals that fail to motivate them to take decisive, direct, and consistent action. Those goals do little more than produce frustration and discouragement.
However, there is another way to find goals than by setting them for yourself. That way is much more effective and motivating. That is the way of goal recognition — of the balancing necessity in front of you and the passion within you.
I ask myself two questions: 1) “What do I need to do for today and tomorrow and for the future of myself and those I care about?” and 2) “What am I deeply passionate about doing and how can that help me answer question #1?
Those two questions are about goal recognition, not about goal setting. Goal setting tends to be mostly based on our superficial desires (like what people will think about us or how much money we want to make) and not based on a fuller view of what we and our dependents truly need. Also, goal setting is frequently based on feelings of obligation and often overlooks the deeply meaningful desires that come from the depths of our heart. That’s why we usually aren’t consistently motived by goals that we set for ourselves.
However, goal recognition can set a fire in your heart that will keep you moving and working until you arrive at the vision, and it manifests visibly in your life. Why not ask yourself the two questions today and begin to discover the goals that are waiting for you to recognize them and to implement their peace and joy in your life and in the lives of those around you?
Here’s a simple summary. For goal recognition, embrace your responsibilities with creativity while you embrace your passion with joy and let them work together to show you the goals that will put a fire in your heart.
What is discipleship? Discipleship means being sent to make more disciples in the power of the Spirit!
I woke up with this thought this morning: “True Christianity is a new normal for how to live life. (‘Christ in you, the hope of glory.’)” Jesus is always sending His people, but we aren’t always going where He sends us.
As Christ-followers we are all sent into the world to share, to show, and to serve in the presence and power of the risen Jesus as we are led by His Spirit each moment. We are all sent to go and make disciples and to be Christ’s witnesses right where we are and wherever else He sends us. Like Isaiah we need to say, “Here I am, Lord, send me,” and say it every day!
Jesus didn’t just send a message to be taught. He sent you to be the light of the world. If you’re not aware that you’re Heaven-sent, you’re overlooking the truth of the Gospel. God sent His Son to live in you so that He can send you to show people His love and to demonstrate His presence to all you encounter.
At the end of each day I should be able to say “I went Where I was sent.”
Who took the place of the twelfth apostle? If Peter correctly applied the two verses he quoted from the Psalms, no one human could take and “dwell in” Judas’ place but throughout the centuries there have been millions of “sent ones” who have shared the message and shined the light of the present-day reality of the living Jesus, under the direct, personal leadership of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus gathered disciples and called them “sent ones” (the English meaning of the Greek word “apostles”). First, He sent out twelve. Later He sent out seventy. One of the original twelve betrayed Him. Another openly denied Him three times. All of them fled when He died. But when Jesus rose, He assembled 120 of His disciples and gave them the rock (see Matthew 16) and foundation of direct personal revelation through the coming of His Spirit at Pentecost and suddenly 3,000 more people were “cut to the heart” and called to be disciples so that they too could be sent to preach and testify to the reality of the risen Jesus. A movement began that day and although the world has greatly resisted it and fought to stifle it, that spiritual movement has never stopped.
Too many Christians live like Jesus is nowhere around and nowhere to be found. To only talk about Jesus in the past tense or in the future tense is to miss out His presence and reality in the present moment.
Jesus is everywhere not just somewhere. You can experience Christ’s Spirit-led town hall meeting in a house, on a Zoom call, in a meeting room, on the phone, in a church building, in a park, or anywhere. All it takes is a willingness to gather with one or more Christ-followers to listen to Jesus and then say and do what He tells you to.
Everyday Jesus hears What you think And He knows What you say.
Open your heart To testify And be a part Of the town meeting Jesus is building.
True emergency preparedness requires Jesus. A human plan will never be enough. A human plan can supply survival supplies and physical relief, but it can’t strengthen and supernaturally heal the broken hearts of people who have suffered great loss. Only the living Jesus Christ can do that.
Because the risen Jesus Is physically unseen, That doesn’t mean That you should be unaware That He is everywhere. How wonderful it is To wake up and find That Jesus hasn’t Left us behind To deal with life Through our own mind. Don’t be confined To a Christ far away. Now is the time To be fully aligned And surrendered to “Christ in you The hope of glory!”
Freedom Declined
To be defined By your desires Is to be confined To their control.
The confinement of Jesus Christ to organized religion removes the conscious awareness of His presence from everyday life. Look to the living God as your spiritual source, not to a preacher! Jesus told Peter, “This was not revealed to you by flesh and blood but by my Father.” Paul said, “I did not rush to consult with flesh and blood.”
Notice Jesus today. He’s not hiding from you. Really? Yes, really! Any moment can be a Jesus moment. Why not now?
We assume that physical matter is real because we can see it. But it’s really not real. Everything we see with our physical eyes is not what it seems to be. It is an illusion created by collections of microscopic empty balls consisting of energy sparks that are orbiting empty space (with the exception of a few mystical/subatomic “particles”) at a lightning-fast pace. We are stuck in their cosmic illusion, so we live like it is reality. However, if there is reality, it must exist beyond the illusion of physically matter which will eventually come to an end when the energy balls all collapse.
The very thoughts that I have written here and that you are now reading reveal that human consciousness (though encased in physical matter) is beyond it. Without the transmission of physical matter my ideas are being transferred from the inner (intangible but real) me to the inner (intangible bur real) you as the nonphysical you reads them.
The inner fitness To be Christ’s witness Is released within people Who obey the promptings Of the Holy Spirit.
There’s an inner power flow That lets people know That the risen Jesus Makes His followers grow To be and to live like Him. Without that inner flow We can’t an effective witness And demonstrate His presence Because we have nothing Supernatural to show. Always surrender to Jesus And let the inner rivers Of His Spirit freely flow Everywhere you are And everywhere you go!
You won’t be an effective witness for Jesus Christ if you aren’t seeing and experiencing Him working in your life. Perhaps people don’t testify more about what Jesus is doing in their lives because they aren’t experiencing His presence and His working.
In order for Christ’s light to shine through you, you have to open your heart and let people see what He’s doing in you! There’s no limit to the power that can be released through Christ-followers who will testify about how Jesus is working in them!
An unspoken testimony has no power to impact people’s lives. It is time for churches to allow and to empower people to show and tell what God has done for them! When Christians aren’t allowed to freely be a witness for Jesus in church, it’s crazy to expect them to openly be a witness for Jesus in public.
Jesus said that His followers will be witnesses (people who will boldly proclaim what they have seen and heard Him say and do) not just preachers who merely lecture about what they have learned by studying. Since Jesus said that, shouldn’t churches allow them the freedom to testify when they gather in His name?
If you are a believer you have been summoned to testify about Jesus! To many Christians get so caught up in one man’s “call to preach” that they forget that all Christ-followers have been summoned to testify about Jesus!
Gravity and sin are invisible forces that pull down toward the ground. Life is an invisible force that mounts up as an eagle. Testify to life.
