Hey guys!! How's everyone doing? Well, if you're in High School you should be doing awesome, considering the fact that it is SPRING BREAK! Except, if like Kadileigh, you have to work... YUCK! Anyways, It's been a while since I've blogged, like Luke (thelwproject.blogspot.com, check it out!) mentioned I was kind of having a dry spell. But anyways, I am reading this book called Gutsy Faith. It is really good! You should all read it. But in this book it talks about the intimacy between Jesus and God and what their relationship was like. When I came into work this morning I was reading it and it was talking about the story when Jesus feeds the crowd. (Matthew 14:13-23) Before I get to far off on that let me tell you about my thoughts in the past week or so. I have been thinking about our intimacy with God. I have been examining my relationship with him to see what it really looked like. As I have been seeking God, he has been revealing to me the importance of seeking him. And first of all one of the most important things about that is we can see who he really is, his real characteristics, and fall more and more deeply in love with him each day. So, we were all created in his image, right? So, we also need to seek him to find out exactly who we are, or who we are supposed to be. We all know we are supposed to be christ-like, but how can we do that if we don't know what Christ is really like? So when we seek him, we will find him, he will reveal himself to you, and then we will begin to see who we are really supposed to be? Okay, anyways, back to the feeding the crowd thing. When Jesus came to the shore, there was thousands of people standing, waiting for their last hope, Jesus, to come down and just touch them. People who had diseases, people who were possessed, prostitutes, robbers, lawyers, doctors, anyone who needed healing, whether physical or mental, were gathered there just to be touched or looked upon by a man they had never met, just heard of, that could supposedly heal them, their last hope. Jesus got off the boat and scripture says that "He saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick" Jesus was probably tired and hungry, he had been at sea all day with the disciples, but instead of just walking past them to go eat or sleep, he had compassion on every single one of them and healed every single one of them. The author in the book Gutsy Faith tells you to imagine it, Jesus walking around saying a prayer for every person who needed healing and God granting it. When Jesus was done the disciples came to him and said send the crowds away, the day is over and we are starving. Let's go eat and Jesus said all of these people are hungry too, feed them. The disciple said we only have five loaves of bread and two fish, there is no way this can feed over five thousand people. Jesus told them to pass it out and said a prayer to God and blessed it. Okay i'm saying all that to get to this: Jesus had such an intimacy with God that he knew EXACTLY what he should do, and when and where he should do it. He knew what he needed to ask God for and when to ask for it. You know when you and your friend have been friends for an extremely long time and yall have become extremely close, You begin to know what the your friend is thinking, you can look at them and know exactly what is going through their mind, well that's how Jesus and God were. Jesus spent so much time with God that he knew what he was thinking. He became so intimately connected with God that he knew what he was thinking every minute so he did everything God asked him to do because he knew why God wanted that. So, this is my question: How intimate are you with God? I know that I am not as intimate as I should be at all, but I deeply desire the intimacy of the relationship the father and the son had. Anyways, that's whats been on my mind lately. Any thoughts, opinions, verses, oppositions, comments, leave them. I love reading you guys' thoughts. I hope you all have many adventures to tell me about this week!!! I love you all! HAPPY SPRING BREAK!
April 14, 2009
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2 comments:
EXACTLY! I totally get this and I too desire to be more intimate with Jesus Christ and I guess a lot of times the main reasons for us not being as intimate is because we spend our time doing things rather being with the King. But in the Bible it tells us that Jesus often slipped away to pray and that is why He had such an amazing relationship with the Father is because He took the time to be alone with Him and love on Him and begin knowing His heart. If you haven't read Authentic Beauty by Leslie Ludy you should def. get it. I am in the process of reading it and it is blessing me so much. love ya!! have a good spring break!
I was reading this last week - thought you would like it:
"Henri Nouwen (one of my favorite authors also!) tells a moving story from the country of Paraguay. It is about a doctor who cared very much for the poor people in his little village. He would often treat them free of charge. But others—the authorities, the police, the government in the village—didn't like him. They didn't like his politics. They thought he was stirring up foment among the poor people. He was too popular for them to take on, so instead they kidnaped his son. They took his son, arrested him, put him in a jail and tortured him. They tortured him too much and the son died.
When news of the son's death spread throughout the village, they wanted to hold a huge demonstration march. They wanted to carry his body through the village and demonstrate to the media, to the newspapers, what had gone on. But, the father said, "No, I don't want to do that. I just want a funeral in the church here in the village. We will show in our own way."
When people arrived for the funeral, they had a surprise in store. The father had taken the body of the son just as he had found it in the prison cell on a blood-soaked, dirty mattress. Instead of being all dressed up in a nice suit in an expensive coffin, the corpse in that little village was naked, lying on this mattress covered with scars. It was the strongest protest imaginable. What that father did was put the injustices of his village on grotesque display.
Henri Nouwen goes on to ask, "Isn't that what God did at Calvary? He spread out for the whole world to see the injustice of this world. The cross in one minute showed what kind of world we have—a world of violence, a world of cruelty, a world of injustice, and what kind of God we have, a God of sacrificial love who gives Himself for us."
Is God unfair? It depends on how closely you relate God and life. I challenge you not to confuse God with life. The question "Is God unfair?" is very different than the question, "If life unfair?" No one was exempt from tragedy, pain, disappointment. Job wasn't. The other people in the Old Testament were not. Even God himself, when He came to earth, was not exempt from unfairness, from pain, from tragedy.
The story of the Gospel does not end there. If you want to find some disappointed people, read the stories of the disciples who were around Jesus when He died. They had waited and followed Him for three years. He was the hope of their world, but they were disappointed. When the time came, everyone of them—blustery old Peter, emotional John—left Him. They were afraid for their own lives. Life hadn't worked out. They were disappointed people. That was Friday, Good Friday, the day that Jesus died. But that is not the end of this story.
The end of the story, of course, is on Sunday when those same people who were cowering in the shadows suddenly came out of hiding. They realized the story ends not with tragedy, but with Good News. When some of those same people, like Peter, sat down and wrote about suffering to suffering people, he had a wholly different tone. You read nothing of the questioning, of the doubts of a Job, or even of some of the Psalms, because Peter saw in person what God had done on Easter Sunday. He took the tragedy, the worst tragedy that could be imagined. He took the unfairness, the worst unfairness that could be imagined."
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