My heart…

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My heart…it burns. it yearns to know. it aches to see. oh that I would be released to expierence what it is I have been called to see, to do, to be. Yet waiting, anticipating I sit. My heart aches. It yearns to know. My mind racing trying to find its way through this maze, trying to find the answer, trying to do the math. As if I can solve the issue. As if I can know it all. What is this that makes my heart burn.

It is you.

to know you .

to trust you.

God.

continue to awake love within me. That I would not stop searching for you until I have found you. For I will lay aside every weight, I will strip off the old woman, I will carry the cross, I will surrender it all to you. Just for the promise of dwelling with you. Here, Now, and forever. Let my heart never stop burning, let the ache never leave until you have all of me. I am forever yours.

This is what its come to…

Trust.

If it were easy, would we still learn so much?

It seems to be the thing relationally that is all to easy to question.

Can I trust you?

God can I trust you?

{let it be known, my spirit knows I can. It is my flesh that is being submitted to the truth}

I can feel as this next season approaches, I am to continue to let go of more. To strip myself from any and all old concepts of how I thought life was to go. Life is so much bigger, grander than I imagined. There are more possibilities that I thought well, possible. When God restores he does a complete work. In restoration it means you have lost something. The thing is about losing something is over time you sometimes forget about it, you forget what it was like with that thing. Sometimes when we forget to dream, when we let go of dreams we forget the butterflies it imparted to our belly. We forget the pitter patter that comes deep within our hearts that seem to want to explode out of us when we do that thing.

Then like a silent rushing wind dreams are breathed on.

Love is re-awakened.

You turn your head looking for the source.

You see nothing.

But feel everything.

Everything in you is at peace.

Filled with hope.

Joy pours from your lips that form a smile which turns into a giggle.

A giggle that then explodes into a deep belly laugh.

This is hope.

This is joy.

This is restoration.

So when you find yourself being restored, redeemed what else is there to do but to live the life you once dreamed was possible. No matter how big or small it may seem to your neighbor. You stick with what God has spoken to you and you run and you don’t stop until the day you are called home. And so my journey continues…

And then I am reminded of Hebrews 12:1. I read it and laugh inside as the very words I typed in this blog are written here in the word.

HEBREWS 12:1
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

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Blessings.

KJ

Late night thoughts.

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As I see my internship friends living there lives still in Kansas City I sometimes I wonder if going back to IHOP-KC would make life easier. If it would make my heart ache less, if it would somehow answer my questions. Now these questions don’t haunt me. They don’t cause me pain. They instead make me wonder at moments, they bring forth excitement. They cause me on nights like tonight to stay awake. I know the answer though. It wouldn’t. Life would still go on. I would still have questions. Possibly ever more there than here. So I do the only thing I can which is thank God for where he has each of his children, myself included. We are all on a separate journey. No journey looks the same in how we walk it out. I know in my heart where it is I am to be in this season. In the next season, well, that is a surprise for all:)

I can wonder, I can question. But ultimately it gains me nothing.

I can pray, I can read the word. That will gain everything.

Trust.

Hope.

It is the very essence of the christian walk.

Sole dependence on the man Jesus.

We are to walk not according to situations and circumstances, but rather according to the big picture. ETERNITY. My aim in life is to cultivate a lifestyle pleasing unto God.

It reminds me of last December in the prayer room at IHOP-KC crying out to the Lord not wanting to leave. Oh how my heart hurt in that season as I surrendered much more than anyone knew. And again I feel that season of surrender unto a season of miracles and HOPE.

This is tonights late night thoughts…

To Live

To live for just me is not enough.

To live for another is getting there.

To live my life for Him.

That is were it begins.

To live my life with arms open to others is what life is about.

This life is not my own.

I live to die.

I die to live.

Let my life be a sweet sweet offering to you Lord.

~

My heart cries for something more.

My prayers are for doors to open.

My God knows my coming and going.

My trust is in Him and Him alone.

 

{Sermon on the Mount Video}

{Womans Heart}

“A woman’s heart should be so lost in God that a man must seek Him in order to find her.”

{Infinite Ache}

In coming here to the internship I have been forced to stop watching the television, listening to secular music, and having unlimited internet access. We have no television here in our apartment and do not use the internet or play any secular music in our apartment. I have never felt such peace in a place before, My time is now no longer filled with 3-10 hours a day of watching television & being on the internet. Instead I find myself sitting here in the prayer room listening to the best live worship music for 5-8 hours a day. 2-3 hours classes on Intimacy with God, End Times, and the Book of Joel, 2 church services, and a small group. (Oh yah, I can’t forget interning in the Forerunner Music Marketing Office:) My influences now all revolve around God, Desiring to go deeper into the word of God to discover what real satisfaction and pleasure is,
seeking to know the God who calls himself the I AM.

To live in truth demands I let go of everything distracting and pulling me away from Jesus.
This can hurt. It does hurt. It means those things I so quickly ran to, too numb the pain are either no longer available or much harder to access. Everyones anesthesia of choice is different (Ex:video games, eating too much/or to less of a certain food, cigarettes, drinking, shopping, watching television for extended amounts of time, co-habitation, sexual immorality…) It means instead of the daily/weekly quick fix that so many of us run to when times get hard, when life confronts us with pain and betrayl we must press into the pain and the hurt and allow Holy Spirit to address the root of the issue. Numbing the pain has never and will never work. It is a momentary fix for an eternal desire that can only be satisfied by one. God. So often were afraid to let the real thing satisfy us, because it requires a letting go of what we call ‘good’. But God and God alone defines what is good.

Back up to Adam and Eve quickly. From the very beginning God defined what is good, in Genesis God told Adam and Eve to not eat of one tree in the garden of eden. Then satan came as a cunning serpent to Eve and proposed the lie (that satan tries to convince us of as well) that God is not good and doesnt have
there best interest in mind, and that ultimately she should define what is good by eating from the fruit and determine if its good or not.  The serpent told her that eating from the tree wouldn’t hurt her, but it would in fact make her more like God (she had forgotten that She had been created in His image.) Since the fall of man humans have desired to be the definition of what good is, it revolves around an ever-present self-centeredness that runs rampant especially in the western culture.  People are not motivated by revelation but by the lusts of the flesh, in attempt to justify their own sin and defend their desires. Many people, believers and non-believers have made peace with their sin, settling it in their hearts that it is their portion in life. Jesus never called us to make peace with sin. Scripture clearly states to wage war against sin!

So instead of running around trying to fill that ache by asking, begging people to tell us our identity, to give meaning to our existence. Which no person can do. This is were co-habitation and over attachment to friends lie. Surrounding ourselves with people in the same cycle of continually attempting to fill up on worldly pleasures. That will entertain the sins as we live in them. With all this being said, I want to emphasize that

I do not think watching tv, internet, and having friends is bad! It is when those things take the place of God. When we begin to fill our temple (we were created to be the temple of God) with things that do not reflect Him or His nature. If our waking thoughts are on how we can get our next fix, we need to  re-adjust were our time, effort, money is being spent on. What are we dreaming out? Seriously. What are we willing our minds with in the daytime?  Are we filling our minds with gossip? or are we abiding in the word of God. Let us ask God for the strength to choose His ways, over the so called pleasures of this world. When we allow God to have His way in our lives we are forsaking the temptation to live for ourselves. We begin to treat our time, money, and those around differently. We begin to look at things differently. We begin to understand that Gods leadership is done in love, for love. God desires that we  live in agreement with His heart. Im talking from experience when I say clinging to God and choosing to let Him love me in my weakness is so much better than running to that carton of ice cream or ‘getting away’. Because when I try and numb it I am left with an insatiable hunger that scares me at times because it only grows and I know that it cannot be satisfied yet I still try like so many people do. But whenI am allowing God to fill the ache within me, I go to be bed feeling satisfied and wake up hungry for more of Him, rejoicing in the joy that I feel.

We have an infinite ache within us. How are you filling it?

L.O.V.E.

{Filling His Shoes}

{Revelation 2:4}

“But I have this against you, that you have left your first love.”

Last night during the student awakening the Lord began speaking to me about how I had allowed and almost forced men in my life to attempt to fill the place were Jesus was to be. Were I so desperately cried out for a man to be strong, for a man to pursue me, for a passionate lover I allowed men to counterfeit  His love by trying to meet these standards. Were I have cried out for a man to love me, one that would in passion and in fury would come rescue me in pain, trial, and woundedness I tried to find a man to fit into His role. Day after day crying out for this, not understanding why no matter how kind, how passionate, how sensitive any man was it wouldn’t fill that desire in my heart that was burning more and more each week, each month, each year. The picture the Lord gave me about this was this:

Just as a little boy likes to put on daddys shoes and wear them, there is no way that little boy can fill His daddys shoes, there is no way that little boy can do the things daddy can do, or walk like daddy in those shoes. That’s not his role. They just wont ever fit. Plain and simple. ITS IMPOSSIBLE.

In this same way without encountering the real man Jesus and allowing Him to fill that desire to be loved will lead to dissapointment, failure, and confusion. Jesus is the only one CAPABLE of filling that place, that desire, He is the the only who can fill those shoes of my ETERNAL LOVER. No matter how many ways I try, no matter how many doors I open, no hand will ever hold my hand with the strength and tenderness that His does. No man can say the things Jesus says and have the same meaning, No man can or ever will fill Jesus’s shoes.

THEY WERE NEVER MEANT TO.

A future spouse was never made or intended to fill the place of Jesus’s love. Yet so often young men and women find themselves yearning for a love that will forsake all other loves, a love that will listen to there every word, a love that will be there through the good and the bad, a love that says divorce is not an option. Then there is the other side of the coin for the men and women that desire to be that love, and try and fill that place for the significant other in there life, because of there own lack in there lives. That need to give there love.

This Love that we desire to have and to give is Jesus. He placed a desire in us for PERFECT love with the intention that only HE can fill it. That from a place of knowing your loved, of knowing who you are IN HIM, and being filled from the inside out with HIS LOVE first; then, if the Father would have you marry, that’s when you would open your heart/mind to that idea.

“Do not awaken love before it so desires”

But as long as I feel lack in my heart, as long as there is that burning desire for something more than man you will find me in the arms of my beloved Jesus. Oh what a process this has been. I am finding day in and day out that the most simple of thoughts and ideas are the most profound ones that radically change my way of thinking and living life. I’ve heard over and over “no one else can love you like you love me lord” (Its a song here at IHOP). But until the Lord gave me that word picture of the little boy trying to fill daddy’s shoes it hadn’t clicked. Oh how I love how the Lord knows what we will get, what will make things click for us! He is so good.

*** I am going to be trying to update more. Once I get my camera I am going to try and start doing video blogs ***

L.O.V.E.