the 63rd.

music of the moment... Purely instrumental music [i.e. sans words] is a bit of a life-strategy for me presently it seems...

A psalm. One that I've clung to off & on the last many months like a child clings to floaties his first few bouts of swimming. I'm banking on Your promises God.

Teach me, please, again & again & again how to walk through a refining season YOUR way. One day at a time give me YOUR perspective. What do YOU see from Your wildly different angle? Arghhh I don't want to give in to aimlessness, distraction or hopelessness for so much as an hour. I don't wanna be numb, don't wanna believe the lies hissed in my ear that I've lost my ever-loving mind & am walking the path of a fool. Oh wait, I am a fool to one temporary, fading, mirage of a world. But not in Your world. Just teach me Father, again, to walk a dry spell properly with you, to STICK by Your side & abide. I flipping love walking new experiences with You, and new levels & layers of even the same experiences. and not just the "good" ones or "fun" ones or "easy" ones. HECK NAHHH...constantly hearing the invitation escaping Your heart through Your lips to me "Come. Come away with Me. I Love investing into this ever-expanding personal history with you My child. Oh, I LOVE it" keeps me ever-burgeoning with joy unspeakable. If I allow it to. I was telling a friend yesterday how continually astounded I am that there seems to be no "all dry" or "all good" seasons walking alongside this God. Even "mountaintop" seasons seem to be speckled here & there with hardships, humbling, confusion from time to time. And even "valley" seasons seem flowered with sooo much beauty, sooo many legitly valuable & fun moments of blessing, that it can actually take me a good bit of time to even reconcile the fact with God that I'm in a "desert" season. I like that. I like that, as it turns out, ol brother Paul was right, "I've found the secret. Want to know what it is? Here it is: contentment in God. That's right, discovering Him over & over & over fuels faith, joy, hope, vision & purpose for this journey of Love. Whether we're well fed & swimming in plenty or whether we feel dry as a raisin with little to give, just GIVE. Just LOVE. Test this theory. Just try it. See what happens..."

Psalm 63

A David Psalm, When He Was out in the Judean Wilderness

¹ God—you're my God! I can't get enough of you!
I've worked up such hunger and thirst for God,
traveling across dry and weary deserts.

^2-4 So here I am in the place of worship, eyes open,
drinking in your strength and glory.
In your generous love I am really living at last!
My lips brim praises like fountains.
I bless you every time I take a breath;
My arms wave like banners of praise to you.

^5-8 I eat my fill of prime rib and gravy;
I smack my lips. It's time to shout praises!
If I'm sleepless at midnight,
I spend the hours in grateful reflection.
Because you've always stood up for me,
I'm free to run and play.
I hold on to you for dear life,
and you hold me steady as a post.

visioneering. dreamcasting. healthily imagining.

friends, someday [hopefully sooner rather than later] i will have a brain in my skull that won't feel quiiiite so distracted & weary, and i shall be able to pen some of my own thoughts to paper once more.
however, until then, here's someone else's thoughts. someone whom i greatly respect:

"Vision Gives Pain a Purpose"
An excerpt from Kris Vallotton's upcoming book, Heavy Rain.
from ibethel.org

"Of course, I am not saying that if you imagine a pink elephant you are going to give birth to it. I am simply trying to demonstrate the supernatural principle of envisioning. The New Age movement has been teaching this [envisioning yet-unseen-realities] for years, which has led many Christian leaders to think that the idea is from hell. But the truth is that they are stealing our stuff, and by reacting to them we have lost the creative power of visioneering.

Okay, now let me be a little more pragmatic for a moment. This supernatural principle basically works like this: When we imagine something in our mind’s eye, a phenomenon occurs in our spirits that causes us to want to see with our natural eyes what we perceived in our hearts. Michelangelo put it like this: “I saw the angel in the marble and I carved to set it free.” He looked at a boulder with his natural eyes and with his imagination he pictured an angel imprisoned in the stone. This motivated him to relentlessly chip away at the rock until he could view on the outside what he imagined on the inside. When people envision something (especially something from God), it creates a naturally supernatural impetus to apprehend the vision and see it fulfilled, built, funded, and otherwise realized.

Solomon said, “Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained (wander aimlessly), but happy is he who keeps the law” (Proverbs 29:18, NASB). The King James Version says it this way: “Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he.” When people lack vision, they lead unrestrained lives. Their life’s motivation is reduced to staying out of pain or finding pleasure. This may seem like Easy Street, but it is actually the path to a mundane, boring existence, which ultimately undermines God’s divine destiny in their lives. As Helen Keller, who was born blind, said, “It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.” But when people catch a vision, they will “keep the law;” in other words, they will restrain their options to apprehend their vision. Vision not only gives focused energy that empowers us to say no to certain things and yes to others; it also gives us the courage to endure difficulties in the path to our destiny.

Here is an example: An overweight person goes to the gym to get in shape. But the morning after his first workout, he is so sore that he can hardly get out of bed. If he has a vision (he can picture himself with a great body), that vision will give his pain a purpose. It’s vision that causes a person to restrain his eating, reorder his schedule, and push past the discomfort of muscle pain to obtain his goal. On the other hand, it is very difficult to get skinny by hating being fat, because reacting to a negative rarely creates a positive.

Vision is the invisible manager that guides, encourages, and inspires fervent souls undertaking the Master’s supernatural assignment to prepare the planet for His re-entry. When I see saints exercising enormous self-control, showing great courage in overcoming difficulties, and demonstrating excellence in their divine assignments, I know it means that they have captured a vision for their lives.

I am reminded of the old fable of the three bricklayers all working on the same long wall. Someone came up to the first man laying bricks and asked, “Sir, may I ask what you are doing?”

“I am laying bricks,” he snapped sarcastically. “What does it look like I am doing?”

The man approached the second bricklayer and asked, “What are you doing?”

“I am building a wall. That’s what I am doing.”

Finally, the inquisitive onlooker approached the last mason, finding him hard at work briskly laying bricks with exceptional excellence and speed. “Mister, could I trouble you with a question? What is it that you are doing?” the man asked in admiration.

Still hard at work, the bricklayer answered, “I am building a great cathedral for God.” Which mason would you want working for you?

oh Mumford & Sons. you are dear friends to my eardrums. Mumford & Sons. "Awake My Soul"

How fickle my heart and how woozy my eyes
I struggle to find any truth in your lies
And now my heart stumbles on things I don't know
This weakness I feel I must finally show

Lend me your hand and we'll conquer them all
But lend me your heart and I'll just let you fall
Lend me your eyes I can change what you see
But your soul you must keep, totally free
Har har, har har, har har, har har

In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your life
In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your life

Awake my soul, awake my soul
Awake my soul
You were made to meet your maker
Awake my soul, awake my soul
Awake my soul
You were made to meet your maker
You were made to meet your maker

some current societal "norms" worth questioning indeed...

here's some telling, stirring, chilling & exciting excerpts for you to chew on from a book i'm currently reading...
"The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time." by Tom Sine.
goodness friends, this is a book worth picking up, praying in to & acting on.


"here's the problem for a new generation, [esp. those in their 20s & 30s] in a nutshell:
the double whammy of (1.)massive college debt and (2.)significantly higher housing costs seriously limits life options for those who want to make a difference with their lives.
[the cost of private college education has increased forty-fold from $700/year in 1958 to around $30,000 today. BUT the average summer job has only doubled or tripled in value, from $4 to $8-$12/hr. as a result, very few of the baby boomer generation had any college debt because they could easily work their way through college; whereas fully 2/3rds of students in the US today graduate with debts of $17,600-$23,000...not to mention the issue of increasing difficulty to acquire a job even with a college degree...]
research proves that we work far more hours, have less time with our families, are able to save less & less, and are less happy than we were in the 1950's.
in other words, the age shift makes it much more challenging for a new generation to get started and even harder to free up time or money to invest in the work of God's mustard seed conspiracy as an everyday lifestyle. those of us who are older need to help those in four streams [emergent churches, missions, mosaic/creative arts & monastic] and recent grads find innovative ways to meet their essential needs without spending such a large share of their limited resources.

numbers of us in the West have come to see the single-family-detached lifestyle model as the "norm", even though most of our forebears before World War II lived in extended or shared housing arrangements like many of the urban poor still do today. as we race into the twenty-first century, we are facing two conflicting trends. on one hand our global consumer culture and our growing involvement in the cyber world are influencing us to become much more individualistic. on the other hand, the cost of our individualistic lifestyle models is becoming increasingly more expensive than many will be able to afford. as a consequence, growing numbers of us will be pressured to consider shared and cooperative lifestyle models for economic reasons.

frankly, i think it is time for middle-class Christians to reexamine our love affair with our individualistic lifestyles and explore community and cooperative based models. these could enable us to more authentically embody the values of our faith, provide a bit more economic security, and reduce our costs so that we have more time and money to invest in the work of God's new order"

well said lawrence. well said.

"All men dream, but not equally.Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind wake in the morning to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous people, for they dream their dreams with their eyes open and make them true." - Lawrence of Arabia

upside down, inside out Kingdom. LOVE it. well, learning to.

oh Father.
make us a people free to be ourselves in You.
wildly free to celebrate the celebrations of others.
students of your presence. your words.
cultivating friendships in the beautiful bonds of commitment, not for what we can get out of them.
declaring & loosing on earth that which belongs in your Kingdom.
tying up & throwing out the things that do not.
learning to worship in Spirit & Truth--i.e. with ALL our being, at ALL moments- body and soul. and according to Truth- to choose to "only live up to that which we've each already attained" of the Truth, the Light you've given each of us thus far in our journeys alongside you.
make us free to worship unselfishly & undistracted. free to make you the be-all end-all, never a means to an end.
you ARE the end. the substance. the beginning. the finality.
thank you that you are ALWAYS up to more planning & scheming than i'll ever give you credit for. you are always up to FAR more pursuing of mankind & of me than i'll ever be able to return to you.
but this thrusts me, moves me, compels me to look at this tiny vapor of a life as my jar of nard to pour out- if i may somehow at least attempt to give all of myself- mind soul body being- back to you. through my thoughts, my choices, my songs, my acts. my hopes. my words. the thousands of small choices to believe and act on truth & in love every single day.
where your cloud stops, we'll stop.
where your peace inside us rests, we'll rest.
every invitation of weird secrets you share with us about total strangers, we will accept, agree with and act on.
we are of those who are aware of times & seasons, and therefore are more able to live FULLY ALIVE in each moment set before us daily.
may we never compare our individual paths with so much as one other human- but we shall be utterly giddy over our own paths with you.
why?
because you have painstakingly created & dreamed up this specific path of intimacy & friendship with me, with us.
i refuse to spit on it, spit on you by saying its not good enough & comparing.
You know what You're doing. and you have a plan. always.
i long for you. this longing inside me tells me daily that i was fashioned for another place. a place that is always closer than we think. closer with each passing day.
i love tears, they are investments that always yield a return in your Kingdom.
i love laughter, it is always healing and strengthening.
i make my agreements with you daily God.
because i will always make them with somebody.
always.
i say no to hell, to lies, to accusations always knocking on my door.
hell may be obsessed with accusations, not You.
not me, i pray.
we are all in this thing together. no "us" vs. "them"
some of us aware of the utter glory we carry about inside us, some yet unaware.
some of us have found the Home & get the sheer joy of being that "welcome Home" mat to all those around us. ALL those around us.
we are all the prodigal.
we are all the older brother.
we all are called by a never-before-spoken name...may all of us get the chance to stand alone before Jesus & hear it escape His lips some sweet day.
the only way we ever lose in this temporary life is to stop risking; to tell our hearts 'you can only love this much & no more'; to cheat our God, ourselves & others by believing the lie that we can live our lives on our own, lone ranger style, for so much as a moment.
the whole Vine & Branches thing. God meant that.
we're all on a royal setup- a magnificent conspiracy of Love.
only the servant leads.
only the humble really love.
only the eternal really lasts.
only the child-like matures.
the fire & pain deepens.
the hope unseen, REAL hope.
this world appears to spin madly on, but we are never without a choice in how we spend our days.
its the secret history with God, forged in the closet that lasts & that can never be snatched away in the least.
if you're unsure about the path you're walking, but choosing to jump up & down with glee about Who's walking with you; if you are prone to look side to side & compare yet give God your weak, broken 'yes' to believe Truth & focus on His eyes instead; if you fail & fall & act selfishly & get distracted yet get back up again & lean into the Source of all strength & love, well, kudos.
you are a raging success.
a RAGING success my friend.