What a Coincidence!

God will never cease to amaze me by what leaps and bounds He does things in my life. The last three days have been so powerful for me I’m not sure where to begin. I guess I’ll refer back to what I’ve said several times in the past: I don’t believe in coincidences, not anymore. If you follow this blog or know me at all, you know this summer has been more or less an identity crisis for me. I’ve spent most of my time re-learning who I really am and what I want in my life and where my heart is.

Naturally, as I finally try to close this uncertainty in my life, Nathan comes from Santa Monica to preach at Emerge and speaks from Colossians; he talks all about identity and the necessity of knowing who you are. I think it’s funny actually. I imagine God watching all of us, knowing just how clueless we are, running around like we can find the answers on our own strength and then He sits back chuckling when we finally get that slap in the face of understanding at the precise moment he commanded it. God definitely has a sense of humor and I think He likes it when we can chuckle back at his cleverness. But I digress. So Nathan and Jess came to the East Coast to spend time with their families, which means the rest of us were blessed with them at church. Friday night was the young adult service and BBQ. I love hearing Jess sing, she always puts me into this wonderful state of worship. Then coincidentally the worship team played the exact song that has basically been my anthem since last week. Nathan, as I mentioned, preached straight into my heart about the necessity of knowing who you are and it has really convicted me. Then we all spent the evening outside with lots of food, laughter, and friendships. There was just so much peace. I also realized I’ve fallen in with a completely different crowd at church these days, and it’s so refreshing to actually be me rather than so-and-so’s-someone-or-other.

This morning I was blessed again when both Nate and Jess took the stage for worship, it’s been a while since they were both up there; I miss that. Heather and Jess sang a song together that was so, so beautiful. There was so much emotion and grace pouring out of these two strong women of God that I can’t imagine anyone missing the significance of what God does in all of our lives, whether we understand it or not. Nathan brought us all up to date on the Clarity plant and all I can say is whoa. I’m in awe of what God is doing through them. I was out there just last summer for two days and it was great but things have grown so much since then; I really don’t know what else to say about it except that I’m in awe. I was so glad I got to talk with them both after service for a minute and Jess brought up something that coincidentally came into my head during service (with no provocation from what Nathan was discussing). It has the potential to turn my life on its head and I’m thrilled for the idea, but I want to spend some time in prayer about it before I start talking about it here in specifics. I want to make a decision on this with as little worldly influences as possible; so, I apologize for the vagaries at the moment, but I’ll fill you all in when the time is right.

This evening I went to the bible study in Coopersburg that I’ve been attending for a short while now. It gives me so much encouragement to be involved with so many different groups of believers. We’re constantly being called to be missionaries in our homes, schools, places of employment, etc. that I think we hold this image that outside of our church no other Christians exist. It’s like how all the news we see on tv is bad and depressing, and you see the same things so often that you basically forget that anything good is actually going on until you see it for yourself. So for me to spend this morning hearing about the growth of a church in LA, sit in worship in Mount Pocono, and then attend bible study in Coopersburg is such an encouraging thing. But I digress again. I’m starting to feel comfortable at this bible study, which is exciting for me. I know a handful of people by name now, I don’t awkwardly sit on the sidelines but participate in banter about the world cup or lady gaga, and people actually know my name and come up to me to chat after we’re done. I’ll come back to this thought in a minute, however.

The message tonight was very compelling for everyone. We’ve been reading through Matthew 5 and tonight we discussed basically how our words no longer hold any meaning. There’s so much dishonesty, lies, exaggeration, sarcasm, and so on that when you really think about it, why do we ever think anyone is being true about anything ever? Jesus said to let our ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and our ‘no’ be ‘no’ and that’s that. I won’t go into the whole teaching here, but it was very enlightening. We also discussed the whole notion of turning the other cheek and lending things to others. Again, I won’t explain the whole thing here, but every person in that room was spoken to directly, there was no way around it. We got into small prayer groups and found that most of us were on the same page with a lot of the issues we raised.

After this, I was blessed again because God used me to comfort and encourage someone else. The world would think we’re mad but it takes a group of Christians to understand that being used isn’t a bad thing at all because when God uses you and you know He’s using you, there is no better feeling. Anyway, the biggest struggles of my past were able to help comfort and advise another. While I obviously don’t want anyone to feel pain or suffer, I feel so blessed that God allowed this connection to happen between this person and myself so that I can allow God to show his grace to her through me.

I spent a lot of time thinking about this on my way home tonight (I suppose it helps too that it takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes to get home from there) and I think I discovered another aspect of my calling. I’ve said that travel and writing are my number one and two biggest passions and I’ve toyed with the idea of missionary work. Regardless of what my ultimate calling may be, and going back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about finally being comfortable and making friends and things here, I think part of who I am is to be a connector (for serious-lack of a better word). What I mean is, I’ve realized over the years (but never really thought about it) is that I’m a very eclectic person and I’ve got friends from every clique, style, age, race, region, and whatever other distinctions you want to make. Something I’ve always been good at has been finding something in common to connect over with people. I’ve got such a ridiculous array of experiences, hobbies, interests, and so forth that I don’t think I’ve ever found someone I can’t sit down with and after a few minutes of awkwardness be able to find something we share and make a connection with them. Go figure, today I coincidentally realized the reality of this and how important this ability is as a Christian. In keeping with my vagueness from earlier in this post, this could become more useful in my future than I originally thought.

So like I said, this weekend has been blessing after blessing after blessing. It was just last Sunday that I recanted all of the nonsense I’ve been involved in but it feels like that was months ago. God has done some crazy things in my life in only seven days. It’s times like these that are the most humbling, when you can see how different you are in seven days time and know that you had nothing to do with it. But I guess that’s just another coincidence of having Jesus in your life, isn’t it?