Revived!

Praise God! Hallelujah! Let me do a little follow up on my last post. As usual, I dreaded and was fearful in vain. I'm learning not to- slowly. I'm learning a lot actually. Classes aside.

Moving on!

Up here at school we've been having revival meetings all week with evangelist Steve Pettit. The first night was a hard message to swallow, but very much needed. It was about how God takes us to the end of ourselves so we have to lean on Him wholly. It also covered how we cannot escape sin in this life and how we shouldn't be weighed and/or controlled by it.

That hit home.

How long had I been trying to walk in my own strength? How long had I been sinning and unconcerned? I'm not sure I could put a date on it, but I do know it's been longer than it should have been.

I don't even remember what the message was the second night, but I know that afterwards my heart was heavy. I needed to get some things straightened out. After the service was dismissed, I went outside and wandered around trying to think of someplace quiet to go. The Grind was obviously going to be too loud, the dorm room is usually too distracting, the Rec Hall was slowly filling up, so I headed towards the Dining Hall, praying it was vacant. It was, for the most part.

I wandered in and sat down at one of the round tables and cracked my black Bible open to the Psalms. I found myself reading David's psalms about how horrible and heartbroken he was over his sin. As I read, I found myself praying the same words that David did. As weird as this sounds, I connected with David that night. I really started understand why he wrote what he did.

Anyway, as my reading progressed, I found myself confessing and asking for forgiveness. The more I did so, the more at peace my heart became. Soon, like David, I was praising God for His mercy, forgiveness, and perfectness.

Afterwards, I just wandered around outside and was silent. There was nothing to be said, to be sung, to be thought. The peace that flooded my soul brought such joy that I could do nothing but be silent.

Hmm... what more can I say about how God is working? Well, I'm learning something everyday about how to keep my focus on Him. And I'm learning that God is a God of details. He likes to take care of them. So do I. Which is probably why I make myself crazy and God keeps me from having time to even think about details. :o)

What else is there to say about this week? It's hard to remember when so much stuff happens in a day! Weeelll... I've managed to write a few good poems. It's amazing how God can take heart ache, sin, conviction, and release and turn it all into verse! I'd post them here, but I want to get everything copyrighted before I put it on the internet. So, if anyone wants to read it, hunt me down and ask to see it. I usually carry my notebook with me.

Okay, after staring at the screen for five minutes and finding myself completely unable of figuring out a an ending to this little post, I settled on a quote.

If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quiet intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.

-C. S. Lewis