because He is good...

...i am up at 4:30 a.m., typing blog posts after hearing stories about the faithful provision of the Lord all.night.long.

it's truly been the best start to a year that I can remember.  seeing God fleshed out in the lives of my friends gets my heart on fire for Him in my own personal life.  and God has not only been revealed and glorified through the lives of so many close to me, but he's also used those situations (and my new devotional) to remind me that He sets the blaze so that others can see it and be transformed.

i almost didn't go.  i was tired, and late to bed last night after New Years Nashville.  i got up early (well, earlier than the rest of the comatose city) this morning for church and had been gone all day.  everything in me wanted to go home and go to bed. at 8:30.  but, i decided, it was stacey's last night in town, and my only chance to catch up and hear her stories from the world race.

so what began at just after 9, didn't end for 6 1/2 hours.  stacey shared her entire, crazy, ridiculous, nothing-short-of-a-God-sized-miracle testimony, and summarized each of her month-long journeys from the world race in this past year.  wow.  seriously, i can not wait for her book to come out.  even after hearing her stories, i want to hear more.  i want to hear them again.  and again.  and marvel at how God has been so tangible in her life, and how radical her transformation has been.

for a moment, i stopped and looked around. seven of us, from all different walks of life, having intersected with each other at very different stages and seasons of our lives, were sitting up at the wee-hours of the morn', cuddled close and cozy on trey's plush couch, talking about jesus.  about the freedom found.  about the anger and almost-swear words we feel towards the evil and darkness in the world.  about dying babies and sex trafficking and disabled chinese men and desperate africans and the underbelly of poverty.  and how, even in spite of such darkness, the light is still light. and that light is fully good.

i don't understand how the atrocities in her stories can take place.  even having not seen them with my own eyes, i know they exist.  in the dark corners of the world where it seems no one is watching.  but, He is.  He sees the hurt and the pain and the death.  and for some reason, He allows for it to exist.  and there is a tension in our hearts that isn't okay with that.

but where darkness exists, we have the opportunity to usher in light.  and when light begins to permeate, darkness retreats completely.  we must carry the candle for those living in eternal darkness.  God has placed the fire within us to light the way when the path is unclear.

that doesn't mean to shove religion down throats.  it doesn't look like forcing people into conversions.  it hardly resembles the "church" as we know it as a practically governing-body we've placed in the crux of our spiritual lives.  rather, it looks like praying in a language incomprehensible to those in need.  it looks like holding a small child in its last days, even when the death is unfair and anger-inciting.  it resembles doing laundry or working at a restaurant or teaching a 16-year-old how to laugh.

being the light in the darkness means looking like jesus.  and looking like jesus means being love.

stacey came away from 2010-2011 with many stories.  none of which anyone can take away from her as her testimony.  but these stories are not our own, no matter the emotional charge they created within our spirits as she fought back tears to share them.

God desperately wants to write each of our stories this year.  He wants us to embark on a journey with Him, an adventure spent fully in His presence.  but first, or perhaps eventually, we must learn what it looks like to be love and light in the dark spaces of our world.  and before we can light up Malawi, Thailand or Myanmar, we must allow that light to permeate the dark spaces of our hearts and lives.

i am thankful that God so graciously and generously has ignited a fire within us and given us others with that same passion burning to walk this season of revival with!  i sat astonished tonight thinking of how this group of people came to be; each story so unique, yet written with redemption and resurrection woven so tightly through out.  our God is so, so good to us.  and to think: this is just the beginning.