January 12

Well, here we go.  Today's blog is long... so if you are interested to read it, sit down with a cup of coffee and a bit of time:)  

I know you'll be reading this Dad, and you've been encouraging me to write again.  Thank you.  I have said before that I wasn't writing because I wasn't feeling inspired.  When I think about it now, that wasn't true.  I've been inspired...I've just been uncertain and afraid of what I am supposed to write. I was waiting for some help to know what to say... a sign I guess... a jumping off point to pull a lot of things together.  I've been mulling over some thoughts for over a week now...and the more I mull...the more the signs point to just putting it all down here and moving forward....because really this is the start...and it may be one more step in something really big - at least for me.

I started this blog because of something that happened to me about 18 years ago.  I grew up in "the church".... a small-town evangelical church.  I loved my church until I was about 16.  Up to that point, the church was somewhere that I felt I belonged and where I could learn to live the life that God had created me for.  Up to that point, I felt that my church supported me to live God's mandate of LOVE for the world that He created.  Then things changed...

The people of this church seemed to feel that the purpose of the church was to come together to fellowship and worship God. As I grew older, I felt that the purpose of the church was to be out in the community taking care of people - to serve the orphan, the widow and the oppressed.  I saw people being excluded, judged...and not just in our community, right within our church body...I saw people turning a blind eye to the needs of people...the pain of people... people who wouldn't act when it was clearly the right thing to do.    I began to feel excluded and judged...I saw people praying to God to cause harm to people's lives so that they might learn to follow Him...and I knew it wasn't right... And I couldn't be quiet about it, but the church leaders felt that I was just causing trouble... perhaps they thought I was just a kid who didn't understand - or who was just trying to cause trouble...maybe some knew what I was talking about and were afraid to act... either way, I didn't feel that I belonged there anymore....and even worse, when I applied for a church membership after my 18th birthday and my membership was denied, it was clear that the leadership didn't believe I belonged there either.  This church had been my home for almost a decade... a real home... where I had experienced real LOVE and fellowship with God and His people... and now I didn't belong...  AND I was distressed.  If I didn't belong in the church, who did?

Since my parents were upset by my decision not to attend, and because frankly I missed the relationship that I once had with the church and its people, I returned one Sunday.  But as the morning progressed, I developed this horrible sick feeling - literally physically ill.  I sat quietly in my seat for a moment while the congregation 'worshipped'...but I couldn't get this sick feeling out of my mind or body.  I bowed my head and began to pray...and something happened.   In my mind I could see an image of blood seeping out of the walls...and in my heart I could hear the voice of the Lord.  The voice sounded despairing and pained; "Cain Cain, where is your brother Abel"? I ran out of the service and cried.  I never told anyone what I had experienced until a few years later.

By that time, my sister and her husband were the youth leaders in this same church... and they hungered and longed for change in the church and for people's lives to be transformed by God's power.... but it wasn't happening.  As my sister poured her heart out to me, I told her that I believed God had a message for her.  At the time, I believed that my experience in the pew that day was a message for her.  Now I understand it was just a start.  This is what the Lord led me to understand about my gruesome vision.

He could no longer work in the lives of the people of that Church.  He had loved them and called for them to turn their hearts to Him.  He had called them and asked for their obedience, and in return for their obedience he would bless others through them in a way that they could not even imagine.  BUT the people of this church were not willing to give up their pride, their own agendas, their own self-interest.  Despite their songs and their prayers, the people of this church had turned their backs on Him and He could not work within them.  This was no longer His church... He wasn't invited to be part of their congregation anymore either.

In the last 18 years, I have been to a variety of churches...but none that felt like a new home.  My pain was strongest in my early 20s. I believed that I should be in a church - that I couldn't be a faithful Christian without going to a church where I could worship and serve the Lord.  One day, God quieted my troubled heart and told me I didn't need to go to church.  What??? He saw my pain and confusion and said simply, "Be still and know that I am God.  Simply follow me and I will reveal Myself to you".  Confusing but peaceful. 

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time with God.  He has spoken to me in so many ways, and the message has always centred on LOVE.  "I love you" he has said over and over again.  I have always believed that the purpose of the church is to care for the widow, the orphan and the oppressed, as in James 1:27.  This is taken from the New International Version (NIV):

²⁷ Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

In fact, if you would like to know more about the scriptural foundation of my own faith, check this out:  It is clear and it is powerful: http://www.openbible.info/topics/widows_and_orphans and http://www.openbible.info/topics/love.  And so, that is what I have tried to do in lieu of church attendance..live LOVE and take care of people...alleviate oppression and social injustice (please do not expect that I believe I have been perfect in this endeavour... more on that later). 

But through the years, I have missed the community, the fellowship of being with likeminded people.  I have missed the LOVE that only God can express through people who are sensitive to His heart.  I spent a lot of time talking to my sister.  I have to say that, most of the time she was supportive, but really she thought I had lost my way.  Until a year or so ago.... 

One day I get an excited call: 'I'm reading this book and this guy sounds like you!'.  She was reading Brian McLaren...and so I started reading Brian McLaren... and in Brian's words I received the confirmation that I was not a crazy heretic...but that the Lord really had been leading me on a journey of LOVE, and I started learning more about the journey that others were on.  Moreover, I believe I started understanding more about the people who feel the same way that I do... that God's people need to change things up and start loving and obeying Him in a way that we might not have understood before.

Then, more recently, my sister called me and said 'I'm reading something else and this guy sounds like you!...and Rob Bell's work entered my life. I started reading, again confirming and expanding on what the Lord had already been sharing with me...and then I read a chapter...dropped the book and called my sister. 

Rob was talking about Cain and Abel and the blood that cries out from the ground.  My spiritual world stopped and has been in slow motion ever since.  I'm not alone.  There is a community of people in this world who have heard the blood cry out...  And as of this morning, the Lord has even shown me that these people are gathering together across the nations - and on places like Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=4874281742165&set=a.2290080298744.133235.1451076434&type=1&theater

If you are curious about all of this, you have to read "Jesus Wants to Save Christians" by Rob Bell (another of my favourite is "Love Wins").  But this is part of what I read from the end of the Introduction to this book:

"For a growing number of people in our world, it appears that many Christians support some of the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

It's written in Genesis that when Cain killed Abel, God said to Cain, "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.'

God can hear Abel's blood?

Blood that cries out?

To understand this cry, the noise that it makes across human history, and its importance to the times we live in, we have to go back to the first book of the Bible, the book of Exodus."

I've been feeling like human beings across this world are self-destructing at an alarming rate, and this scares me because I want more for my children's future than a world of violence and destruction. I want to my children to raise their children in a clean and safe and socially responsible world, and I wrestle with how to model this for them... Then came Sandy Hook...

When the children were massacred at Sandy Hook ES last month I could hear their blood crying out from the ground.  I couldn't stop hearing it.  I cried over and over again and I felt sick and I called out to the Lord - "How can you let these things happen??"...my faith, my security in the Lord was shaken.  You see, God has told me over and over again, "I want to fill your life with LOVE and Light"... and I believe he wants that for everyone, not just me.  But how can God want LOVE and light for people... and yet not intervene when children are being brutally murdered and torn from the lives of their parents and families.  How could I live LOVE and feel secure in my relationship with God, if He could possibly allow that to happen to me?  And moreoever, I couldn't even understand why the massacre at Sandy Hook pained me so badly, when the reality is that children are murdered every day across our world... I am told that every seven seconds a child starves to death somewhere... people are suffering somewhere far away while most of us close to home live in perpetual excess...

Well, here is the answer I have to my questions so far.  We must live LOVE.  We have no other calling, no other mandate, no other choice if we want all of the good things in life that God has created for us and promised to us.  Every day, in every corner of our world, people are alone...they are suffering...they are separated from God's LOVE... God gave us the job to take care of each other and His world.  We are failing Him...He is not failing us.

Thank you to Carey Nieuwhof of Connexus community church in Barrie for your message this past Sunday which confirms what the Lord had already told me:  LOVE is a decision...and more than that I believe it is an ACTION... it is a verb....Here is Carey's message on the subject:  http://www.connexuscommunity.com/watch-online/likeitloveit/. 

So, here we are.... and what I know now is that I may have exiled myself from the church for a while... but I am not alone.  People all over the place... on their own... in churches... on Facebook even... are saying the same thing:

Something needs to change... WE need to change....our churches need to change. 

Mark 12:31 ESV
The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”        

1 John 4:8 ESV   

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Cross references:

Exodus 19:5 ESV

5 Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be wmy treasured possession among all peoples, for xall the earth is mine; 

 

John 14:15 NLV

¹⁵ “If you love Me, you will do what I say.

 

A message that is becoming clear to me is that the next step in the journey of LOVE is obedience... obedience to what God has commanded us to do... to LOVE Him.  But what exactly does that mean???  How do we save ourselves and each other by LOVING God???

 

Aloha,

Emily

James 1:27 : Mt 25:36

James 1:27 : Dt 14:29; Job 31:16, 17, 21; Ps 146:9; Isa 1:17, 23

James 1:27 : Ro 12:2; Jas 4:4; 2Pe 1:4; 2:20