Sometimes worship is standing tall with hands raised in a multitude where the music is amazing and the lyrics are biblical and the joy in your heart is overflowing. You can’t help but sing because of the gratitude and delight welling up inside you has to come out and the most natural venue is through your voice.

Sometimes worship is when you’re alone. When all you can do is crawl up into your Abba’s lap holding onto the pieces of your broken heart. All you can do is sit and be still while His healing washes over you, and the only form of praise you can give are the frozen tears thawing and falling at His feet.

Sometimes worship is folding laundry or paying bills or cleaning the house. The mundane and ordinary stuff. But instead of viewing it as another chore, you view it as a way to serve God. You offer your laundry, your bills, your housecleaning as a living sacrifice and it becomes worship.

Sometimes worship means learning to open up and be transparent with others and share your heartaches and fears. Sometimes worship means learning to be comfortable alone with the silence of a dark room and learning to distinguish that still, small Voice that is only audible when you have ceased striving and are still before Jesus.

Worship is not an event or an activity that you schedule. It is a lifestyle that you cultivate, a discipline that you form, and a habit that you develop. Worship is far more than singing a song. Worship at its best encompasses everything you are and everything you do declaring the great worth of Jesus for the world to see.

So if Jesus is the highest value and the greatest worth, then why do I place my hopes and expectations and worth in something (or someone) else? It doesn’t make sense, but I still do. A friend described idolatry is taking a good desire and making it the ultimate desire. Worship is a reminder to ourselves that the ultimate absolute fulfillment of any and every desire of our hearts can only be found in Jesus.

So make it a priority to be the best worshipper you can be, at whatever cost. All that practice will make you a better worshipper when you get Home and see Jesus face to face.

Amen and amen.

This is just gonna be one of those nights where nothing spectacular comes to mind. All my usual brilliance (he said, sarcastically) has flown away for the night and all that’s left is a mild, very annoying headache. I’m not always going to be 100% on the mark all the time.

Some days, you won’t be your best. Some days, the best you can say is that you survived. You didn’t exhibit any of the fruit of the Spirit or have any of the characteristics of 1 Corithinthians 13 love. You were short with everybody, lost your temper over stupid stuff, and had an all-around majorly crappy attitude. But you survived.

And maybe, just maybe, you picked up a little more patience without realizing it. Maybe that one time you held out on your anger just a second or two longer than you normally would have. That’s a big deal, but you won’t see it at the time.

I think the key is to recognize a bad day as a bad day and keep trusting Jesus. Most importantly, remember that tomorrow will be a clean slate and a d0-over. Because Jesus is all about second chances.

So give yourself permission to fail big and stick around. Keep smiling. Know that God is using days like this to make you more like Jesus. That’s reason enough to smile, isn’t it?

Amen and amen.

How much of the time do we spend wrapped up in ourselves with our problems and our desires and our fantasies in our own little world? How much useless energy is spent in useless anxiety over possible futures that almost never come to pass? How many of us cling to old wounds that won’t heal and old grudges we can’t ungrasp? What’s the cure? To serve.

The best cure for your aching heart is to give it away serving others. To go out of your normal routine and intentionally make time to give a sympathetic ear to one who’s in pain. To go serve food to the homeless. To give an encouraging text to a friend who is feeling down and out.

The best cure for discouragement is to get out of your little world and go be Jesus to someone else in someone else’s world. You don’t have time for self-pity when you are lifting someone else up. God takes us down hard roads and rough places so that we can sympathize and bless those who walk similar paths. The fact that you lost a loved one makes you the one person best suited for helping someone else who is coping with loss. Your past of sexual abuse earns you the right to speak into the lives of those coming out of abusive situations. Your own battle with self-esteem issues makes you qualified to talk with that one who suffers with insecurities.

We are to be Jesus’ hands and feet, His heartbeat, and His love made visible to those around us. You may be the only Bible someone will ever read. I may not be able to prove my faith scienfically, but NO ONE can ever argue about what Jesus has done in my life. I am living proof, a testimony to the goodness and saving power of God in Jesus Christ.

As I have mentioned before, even if you are one small candle and don’t feel like your light reaches anybody, remember that all the darkness in the whole world will never be able to overcome the light from one single candle. All the darkness in the world has to flee from the light of Jesus shining through one obedient, faithful soul.

So get out of yourself and serve. It’s the best cure for saving you and me from ourselves.

Amen and amen.

Ususally when you hear the word supreme, you ususally associate it with chocolate. Or maybe that’s just me and my chocolate obsession at work again. But what is supreme joy? Here are some of my ideas about what supreme joy is:

Supreme joy is when you willingly surrender your heart’s desire to Jesus, not in order to gain something better, but simply because He’s worthy of it. To lay down that desire to be liked back by a certain someone or a desire to be recognized is hard sometimes, but it is as hard to do as Jesus is hard to love.

Supreme joy is when you do for others, expecting nothing in return, giving out of the sheer joy of giving. You are most like Jesus when you give sacrificially and unconditionally, because that was His whole purpose: to give everything– His life, His blood, His body– for your restoration and redemption and salvation.

Supreme joy is savoring the small, insignificant moments of life and not rushing past them in your neverending quest for a bigger, better tomorrow. It’s the laughter of friends, the shared joys and sorrows that bind us, and the common bond of Jesus’ love in us overflowing from one to another.

Supreme joy is being at peace at the end of the day, knowing that the Perfect Love of Jesus is casting out your fears and replacing them with hope. It’s being able to rest in Abba’s love and to finally be able to stop striving for other people’s approval, attention, and affection.

Supreme joy is fleeting in this life, because we are fallen and the foe we fight is a mighty foe. Our own sinfulness and the sinfulness of others comes in and wrecks our joy all too often. But supreme joy is also constantly just on the horizon, on the tip of your tongue, in the words of the song you can almost remember the name of.

My prayer is that supreme joy be yours this night. It is God’s delight to give you His joy.

Amen and amen.

I am OK with being a substitute person. I really really am. I will be the best friend I can be regardless, whether I was your first choice or last. It doesn’t matter.

Also, I am believing more and more that given time, Jesus can change and fix and heal ANYTHING. No matter how deep the hurt, how unbearable the pain, how broken and beyond repair. Jesus’ love can take ANYTHING and make it beautiful and good. Even in me.

I found out that my heart is not as whole and together as I thought. There are still wounded places where I have not gone in a long time that need healing. I pray for the healing of others, but don’t always recognize when I need it for me. But Jesus knows. And He started the healing process before I even thought to ask.

There are people I would like to read this, but if they don’t, that is fine. There are wishes I have that I have to take every day to the foot of the cross and surrender and say, Not my will but Yours. Even if Your will means my will be undone.

I am learning surrender and trust. To be still and know that God is God and He is always for me. That He waits for me when I am running after everything else.

I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder what the point of blogging and facebook posting is, but I keep doing it. Just like I keep trusting and believing when it seems pointless.

I have to tell myself again that what I feel and think lies to me all the time, so I can’t trust those. The heart is deceitful above all things and the mind is the first to be deceived. But Jesus is still the Truth, the Way, and the Life. No matter what I’m feeling at the time.

Amen and amen. And thanks for letting me ramble.

I used to think I knew everything. I used to think I had it all figured out. Not anymore.

Now I know there’s so much I’ll never know but I know this: Jesus is faithful.

I make all sorts of promises and manifestos about how I am going to make all sorts of great changes, then fall right back into old fears and lies. I can’t even last one day with my promises. But Jesus is true to His part.

I surrender a desire of mine to God, only to take it back and try to figure out some way to make my way work. I get my hopes all built up on a potential relationship, only to have them come crashing down on me, leaving me with a broken heart and doubts about myself. But Jesus never changes.

I can talk religious and spiritual with the best of them, but my thoughts are a cesspool and my attitudes stink most of the time. I am so very thankful mind-reading is not one of the spiritual gifts, or I would be supremely screwed. Jesus knows, and loves me anyway.

I can look like the most-together spiritually-mature person on the planet, but inside I am fighting back fears and phobias. I wear a mask that looks so real, people think it’s me. But it’s not. Jesus died for the real me.

What do I know for sure? Jesus. He’s faithful, He’s true, He never changes, He loves me no matter what, and He died for me. He’s my constant, my True North.

So what does it matter what anyone else thinks (and why do I obsess over what they think of me so much)? My goal is not to be popular, but faithful. My aim is to please One person, not many.

I will tell myself this story over and over until it really sinks in. I will tell you this story over and over until you can see it the way I’m coming to see it– as good news. The best news you’ll ever hear.

Amen and amen.