Understanding through Wine and Cigars

God has been radically transforming my heart over the past few weeks especially last night and I am captivated at this new understanding that I am gaining on some of my long held questions in life. I have always wondered what was the point to wants and desires and what all of us should base our decision making process upon. I think I finally understand it.

For those of you who don't know these past four months I have been prophetically blind as to what God is doing. It has been one of the most intense, crazy, hardest and most difficult seasons I have lived. Yet in it I have learned to trust. Learned to rest secure in my salvation and God's greater plan. I have learned to embrace the fact that we are a body not one man. I have learned to love not lecture. Most important I have learned to rest on the knowledge and understanding God has given and use that alone as the basis of my current decision making process in this season however long it may last.

I think for me all I have learned this season goes back to understanding what true love is. It goes back to focusing on the horizontle plane rather than the verticle for a time. Jesus obviously really didn't mess around in the second half of John 2 He threw over money tables and had a side to him that was frustrated with peoples defiling of His house. In all His infitude and wisdom though as the first part of John 2 talks about He didn't give everything that was absolutley necessary like the wine with His first miracle in Cana. And I look at my way to approaching ministry and I realize that foremost love is patient as 1 corinthians 13 talks about.Love is,yah, not giving people what they want all the time, yet at the same time sometimes it is doing and giving those things you never thought you should give. We should live with smiles on our face, yah, consider the consequences but rest secure that God has you under His wing and will protect you as Isaish talks about. As I corinthians 8 talks about as well in verse 10-12 we are called not to live a ministry of absolute necesssity because it can cause our brothers in Christ to stumble. We are to be not of the culture but always realize that some ways the only way to reach a place is by a necessity of fulfilling desires that arn't necesarrily really necessary.

After I got back from the freshman welcome dinner last night I went out with one of my roomates to a cigar smoking party. As I was sitting there with everyone smoking around the bonfire but me and a few others and how they really didn't have anything to say until they were "buzzed" as they called it. I realized something I never realized before that some men because of circumstance and the way they are need a totally radically different way to get deeper with one another than simply let's get in a circle and talk about our problems. We as christians brothers to them need to be patient and not tear their heart apart. I have used this technique for honestly all my life in getting deeper with men around me but the thing is it can't be this season's response...

I have realized over the past couple days a strong desire within me is just a desire to have some other guy partnering with me in ministry not necessarily someone who I can talk to about anything but rather someone to serve with. I had the oppurtunity to lead with several wonderful men of God over the course of highschool and the bond that is there I know that is what I miss. In my quest to attain oneness with Christ I ended up forgetting the fact I will have all the time with Him in eternity. This life is a season in which we are to focus not only on the vertictle with God but we must focus on the the horinzontle with the people that are here. We don't need a radical new ministry, we need a transformation from the inside out. Realize though when the Spirit is prompting to bless you with sharing in the response of someone else. Never take it into your own hands, though. Never. It robs God the glory He is most certainly due!

JG