humble beginnings

I am in a coffee shop now and ran into one of my future roommates. 4 out of the 5 of us often run into each other here because as we wait to move into the house together, we are all commuters and sharing homes with friends or relatives, so we are slightly homeless and the coffee shop is relatively undiscriminating and lets us come in and out as we need. Please pray for us. We are planning to move into a house (quadraplex apartment) on one of the highest crime blocks in our city. The whole block is full of low income apartments and full of tons of needy kids and parents. While i was in mozambique i had far fetched dreams of moving in on that block and ministering with the families even in crack houses. So far all of us moving into the house will about double the white demographics on the block. haha, God uses akward people and akward groups of people. The 5 of us planning to move in now, (Jill, Melissa, me, Ben, and Russell) are mostly new friends/strangers to each other and need some prayer for following God together and supporting each other in unity and love and just getting to know each other so that we can grow as a team there. The process of moving in has long been delayed, praise the Lord, probably for our own good, but they finally closed on the house, and are waiting for some of the people who have been squatting there for years without paying rent, to move out, and then to renovate somethings and then we can move in. A local church bought the house, and we are the random group God is putting in it. He is up to very creative things. Anyway, so i think we are all in a bit of an impatient, hope defered, slightly frustrated place, and just need to press in in hope, believing and eager expectation for the redeeming, transforming love of the Lord. God is bringing together people from all over the city to pray for and support and be very interested to see what incarnational love looks like here. And i am interested too.

Lower still, lower still. More love, more love. Just fill me up and tip me over and pour you out. over and over. i want to live in the flow of the living water. thank you Jesus!!!

Zambezia Mozambique Outreach Video

Mozambique1
this is about 7 minutes of streaming audio with singing from our friends the christians and orphans we met in Zambezia Mozambique and one song from a friend in Kenya

it should be available for at least a month on this link. You should be able to view it in Windows Media Player

Initmacy before fruit

I was reading the story in Mark 9 about Jesus healing the boy with an evil spirit. It is when the disciples could not drive it out, and it was manifesting violently with seizures etc. And Jesus calls them an unbelieving generation and then tells the doubtfully believing father, that ‘everything is possible for him who believes’ and then later tells the inquiring disciples that ‘this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting’

I have wondered about that story before, why say ‘only by prayer’ when Jesus clearly just rebuked it like many other times… And as God has set me on this course for intimacy with him, as he has begun to show me over and over again that ‘fruit comes from intimacy’ and I see that Jesus over and over said “ I do and say only what my father is doing or saying’ I see that his ministry flowed only and always out of intimacy with the father. And I believe that when he answered his disciples who had been lacking in faith to believe they had authority over this particular evil spirit, as he said ‘ this kind comes out only by prayer and fasting’ I believe he was referring to intimacy with the father. Intimacy produces that faith. Greater authority comes from greater intimacy. The more time we spend with the King, in his Kingdom and in his palace rooms, the more we believe that we indeed are sons and the more faith we have in his bigness and in our authority as his sons.

So yes, my quest is for more authority against evil, for more power to set the captives free and to break the yoke of injustice and to see His love come to people in desperate situations. But really my quest is for Him, more and more of him. He is changing my focus from fruit, to intimacy. From wondering how people can/will come to drink living water, to coming to get more and more saturated in the stream of living water myself. And then maybe I can just step back as a soggy sponge and let him spill out of me onto others and then I’m heading right back into the stream.