Hi Family!
Summer is flying by toooo fast. But it's been lovely. Hope yours is too! The kids and I got to spend a night in Duluth with my son Ian (most of you know him as Sam. That's another wonderful story! http://www.thegiftofsam.wordpress.com/) Those are a few pictures, and videos, from our time together. It's all just too amazing and we can't really get our heads around it! He's in Alaska for the summer, having a blast with his "love for all things northwoods" that he got from me :) He looks and walks and gestures like a young version of my dad. And he loves his family, all of us. And we've gained Don & Kiki and Karli, his family! What an amazing God we have! This fall, we hope to get to UND to see him play rugby as much as we can.
We have been meeting on Friday nights to worship & pray with students and any adults in the community who join us. It's been great. This is sort of what a Friday night looks like - I say sort of, because they aren't always exactly the same. People start coming around 6. Those are actually the enlightened ones who know they can get coffee if they come that early. :) So we drink coffee and hang out, pretty much all around the house. The kids play. (Eli just WAITS for Friday nights!) Sometimes we stroll the gardens. (http://www.downtoearthgardener.wordpress.com/)
Then, by 7:30 or even 8 sometimes, pretty much everyone who is going to show has arrived, and we gather in the great room (it's 30'x30'-ish so it fits everyone) and pray. Lately, we have been praying some specific things: that during worship, when we sing our thanks and praise and adoration to God, that His glory would saturate the place, that it would saturate us.
I heard recently of a study done (it's in a book and I can't remembe the title right now, sorry!) of people in a room together. It has actually been proven that the heartbeat of the person in the room who is the most influential- affects the heart rate of everyone else. Hmmmm. Does it follow that when God is there (where two or more are gathered....) HIS heartbeat affects all of ours? He is obviously the most influential in the room. He wants His glory to be over all the earth. It's His desire.
So with that in mind- and knowing that God wants to transform us, bringing us from glory to glory...we pray before we worship that He would have his way with us. That, during worship, when that glory comes and sometimes it's uncomfortable in that glory and we want to run do something- even something noble, like pray for the sick or just pray/talk, or have an altar call or whatever....we've been feeling like the Lord just wants us to be quiet. To not get nervous in the glory. To let Him put his finger on whatever he wants to in our lives. To transform us so that we look like, sound like, act like, smell like Him.
So we've been doing that. After singing to Him, soaking in Him, sometimes being flat on our faces in front of Him, we just wait. It gets quiet. We just- be - in His glory.
Because transformed people transform cities. And campuses. And nations.
Then, after a fabulously uncomfortable time, we pray. For each other, for our city, our campus, the students coming in, our county, the reservations, anything else pressing, our nation. Whatever comes up.
We want to be a people who is accustomed to extended times in the glory. We want to be a transformed people.
So that, family, is what Friday night looks like. The enemy tries to intimidate us and tell us that we're not doing any good and we should quit. We are learning to ignore him, and act in the opposite spirit. God will bring his kingdom, He will pour his spirit on this generation, He did give us Isaiah 49 and He meant it.
We've finished the relationship series, and will start again at some point. We are starting a Tuesday night prayer meeting. And we look forward to fall, and what God will do.
May God bless you all HUGE!! We love you!
