My inclination is to still be angry at those who wronged me. To be frustrated by the “circumstances” that made them do what they did. But… I know, I really know, that is not what Jesus did. Life is not a bowl of cherries as they say, but in fact an endless series of opportunities to “consider it pure joy… when you face trials of many kinds”.

Some trials are harder than others.

But often, the answers God brings are more amazing when the trial is more draining.

Last night, Jen’s parents called, just to say hello… and to tell us that a friend gave them a check on Sunday for us. These folks had helped us with our Lord, Hear My Voice CD… and so I had called them about 2 weeks ago when I was still looking for funding options for this current batch of CDs. I left a message saying we needed some financing options, and wondered if they would work out some kind of loan with us.

Well, I never heard back from them until the end of a really hard day… when my father-in-law said he was mailing us a check from them for $3000.

Three Thousand Dollars.

That is half of what we lost, and a little more than half of what we need.

Amazing. Just amazing.

We still need around $2500 more, but apparently God is having fun giving it to us, rather than funding the credit card companies. 🙂

We’ll keep ya updated. 🙂

Today I have had $6000 taken from me, along with that, the chance to make at least $60,000 more… and along with that, rejection after rejection in e-mails, and phone calls…

And the mower wouldn’t start.

It has been a completely crushing day, and this is my day-off. My day of relaxing and re-energizing for the week ahead. Not only am I finding it impossible to regenerate (that’s a little Star Trek for ya there…) … I am just devastated.

I know God can do more than I can ask or imagine. I know that he provides for us (read a couple entries below about how he did this past weekend) And, truthfully, from the pit of this day… I do see ahead to where he will provide for us in a way we could not have imagined.

But right now, my stomach is churning, I am angry, and sad, and beat up… and it’s all over money.

God is the owner (and provider) of all the money. So, I will wait for Him to provide. We are expecting the Christmas CD to sell very well this fall, and even hoping that the sales will wipe out not only the debt from making the CD, but our enormous existing debt as well. That is very possible, even likely.

But we need to MAKE the CDs first.

So again, my plan from last week has been crushed by unfortunate timing (is what I was told)… and there is no other foreseeable way that I can make it happen.

I am pressed, but not crushed. Persecuted, but not abandoned. Struck down, but not destroyed. I am blessed beyond the curse, for his promise will endure. That his joy’s gonna be my strength. Though the sorrows may last for the night, his joy comes with the morning…

(Darrell Evans – Trading My Sorrows)

We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed and broken. We are perplexed, but we don’t give up and quit. We are hunted down, but God never abandons us. We get knocked down, but we get up again and keep going.

(New Living Translation – 2 Cor 4:8-9)

I’ll keep you updated on what God does through this.

PHOTO CREDIT: nfl.com

We remain big Buffalo Bills fans, even though they lost the game… gave UP the game… on the LAST play of the game today – 4th down… a crazy catch at the back of the end zone.

Perhaps a glimpse at how the season will go this year? 🙂

0-1 and counting…

You hear people talk about God giving them faith to do something, and perhaps you think… that’s silly! Faith comes from ME, not from God. He gives me something to have faith IN, but not the faith.

Well, I would agree with that. But I would add that perhaps there is some truth in the second part of that. “He gives me something to believe in…”

Do you remember the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal? Israel was deep into idol worship and ignoring the True God who loved them. Elijah was given the task by God of reminding them (often) how badly they were choosing. Well, one time, he challenged all of the prophets of Baal to take him on in a god-vs-GOD match-up. They accepted.

The story itself is hillarious… there is trash talk and taunting from Elijah, and just plain silliness on the part of the bad-guy prophets. They dance, and yell, and cut themselves trying to get their god to show his goods… but since he is in fact IMAGINARY… they get no where.

Then Elijah steps in, and sets the stage for the impossible (just read 1 Kings 18 for the rest of the story…) and then he says this:

1Kings 18:36

At the time of sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed: “O LORD, God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, let it be known today that you are God in Israel and that I am your servant and have done all these things at your command.

Those last (and underlined) words stuck out to me as I read it. At your command. I had always imagined that this was a clever scheme Elijah had dreamed up. We don’t have any account of how God had instructed Elijah to do this, but we do have this line. [I] have done all these things at your command. I think that is so key to the way that God works.

God does not expect us to come up with the miracles, and ask him for them. It seems to me that God’s pattern is to initiate our faith with a leading to believe him for something that is unbelieveable.

We see it here with Elijah… he asks God to prove that everything he was doing was not just possible, but actually AT GOD’S COMMAND. GOD initiated this whole “stunt”… to show his greatness. Elijah was not making God perform, he was proceeding under the assumption that in fact God WOULD perform, since apparently, God said he would.

I did not just decide that God was going to give us the watershoe… God put the strong leading in my heart and in my head that he wanted to do something. (Read the story for more)

Noah did not decide to build the ark. Moses did not decide to go to Pharaoh and wave a wand and make all those plagues appear and dissappear.

God is the initiator. He prompts us when he wants us to trust him for something.

We actually do this with our finances as well. We do not ever ask for money for any music performance. I felt strongly that God wanted me to do this when we started, and he has continued to provide crazily in that way. It wasn’t my idea… I want to ask for money quite often… but God reminds me gently that he has a better plan in mind.

And so I believe.

It is my own faith, but it is instigated by a loving Father who knows how He wants to reveal himself to me and through me.

And boy does he! 🙂

So, the more you walk with him, the more you will hear him, and the crazier the thing he asks you to do… do it. And I am pretty sure the reward for crazy following will be crazy to follow suit.

Sometimes it’s just really fun to see how and when God does stuff.

Earlier this weekend, I commented to Jen – only half joking – that we really had no money (even the cushion we had for a while in savings was gone, because we spent it on what it was saved for, the new CD…) and that we weren’t about to make any since our only gigs this week were coffee house gigs!

(At that point, we had only pulled in $6.50 in tips from our first of three coffee house gigs…)

So, I can actually laugh since I know that God will most definitely come through. We’ve been here before, and I know we most likely will again… it is a sort of cycle. God proves himself to be amazing by providing for us when it looks bleakest… and then sometimes we even get a nice little cushion of comfort… and BLAMMO… it all falls to pieces.

God wants us to trust him, and not our money or ourselves, or anything else really… and the way that He seems to do that in us is to remind us that everything we have and actually, what we do, is from Him.

SO…

Last night… a cool encouraging night (except what I wrote about just below this…) and we made about $100 or so. Cool. About what I expect from a coffee house night. Nice. No Biggie.

Then tonight, we drive almost 3 hours to a place where there are usually smaller crowds… it’s a Christian event (again, see the entry below) and sometimes I wonder if it really is worth it? I really love the family who runs it. They are so cool, and encouraging and great. So, that right there almost makes it worth it… but… does it really when money is so tight?

Well, we did it, and I told stories a bunch tonight. In between songs… even got to tell the water shoe story (for background on that story, see this blog.) But really, my main emphasis was on faith, and seeing God do amazing things through and around you when you trust him big-ly.

And then he did.

First, cool stories at the end – of people being moved by what was said or sung. That’s always great to hear. Very specific workings of God in people’s hearts. One lady said that a song we did at the end gave her a new perspective on the death of her son just a couple years ago. Wow. Very cool.

And then we sold several CDs and a couple T-shirts… a good night for such a small crowd, and a repeat visit place.

THEN, I opened the envelope from the people who run the coffee house as we were driving home late at night. Jeff had handed me the envelope just before I mentioned to him that finances had been tough, but that it was OK, cause I knew God was planning to do something great where we could point to him and say that He ROCKS. 🙂

The check inside was for $500!

That blew us both away! This is a small place, not many people… that is not coffee house kinda money! And, now we can pay our bills this week!!!

So, so, so, so, so crazy!!!

Awesome.

A small amount… (sorta) A small “victory” … but exactly what we needed right now.

Thank you God. It is so fun to watch you love us. 🙂

We came out of the coffee house last night refreshed and encouraged and pumped full of wonderful confections. 🙂 Life was good, the people were friendly, we had just shared some really great stuff about the Kingdom and our God that hopefully encouraged everyone to enjoy life with Him even more.

I was loading our van and a couple yards over I saw red and blue lights flashing on the side of a house, and my christian fun-night became almost empty.

I don’t mean to say that it’s not good to encourage each other… I really think we need to do that, and spend lots of time together loving each other and encouraging each other… we are the body of Christ… and we need to take care of our body.

But when I saw those lights, I immediately thought… it’s not about a night of fun in the basement of a church… it’s about knowing who those people are who are hurting, who are trapped, who need to be loved and shown the love they have from their Father…

We know a guy who just a few years ago had many visits from the police to his house. He has had a history with alcohol and the many negative things that it makes you do. But today he is one of the coolest guys I know. He is real, transparent, trying to figure out what God wants for him and his family, and just growing more and more like Jesus all the time.

And we are somehow responsible for that!

That is the crazy part right there. They have (he and his wife) attributed their changed lives to us before, and it is actually pretty funny, cause we didn’t do anything! We didn’t sit down and sing them a song, we didn’t preach them a sermon, we didn’t invite them to church (well, not much at least…) we didn’t go through the four spiritual laws with them…

I think we just loved them.

And isn’t that what it’s really about? What did Jesus do more? We read about days where he healed people all day long. He spent lots of time just taking care of people’s physical and emotional needs. He just loved them… because he did.

I love that I get to sing to a room of Christians who can be encouraged and reminded that Jesus loves them so completely that they can be free to live life letting that love overflow to everyone around them.

But I also know that sometimes we catch it all before it overflows.

We need to be where we are. We need to be known in the community. We need to know and be known by our neighbors. By the people we work with. We need to have eyes open to whom God has placed in our immediate proximity and how we can share life with them.

So, when the police lights are flashing on the side of their house, we can help put pieces back together. Not as the judge, but as someone who understands and humbly loves because we have first been loved.

Just being available to love… seems like a more effective way to be a part of the Kingdom.

So make some love connections out there, people! (And then love the folks He connects you with) 🙂

So, today has been crazy once again… just spent MOST ALL of the day trying to catch up on financial arrangements… moving money here, tracking money there, looking for ways to creatively make everything happen… and… God is good… he continues to provide for us even when I do a bad job of keeping track. 🙂

But in the middle of all that, and booking several concerts as well, we got a call from a friend. She lives in California. She called for no other reason than to just see how we were doing!

That was cool!

And not only that, she said that she had been listening to one of our CDs today and was again moved to tears by one of the songs.

You know… that’s just cool. Cool that God would encourage us through a friend like that, and cool that she would listen and do it. Cool.

There’s a reason we call her “Sweet” Melissa… 🙂

What a happy girl! She is so fun!!!

This is our (complete) bountiful harvest from my super gardening skills this summer. It was our first attempt… 🙂

Sometimes, when life is so busy, it actually helps me a LOT to do something totally different. 🙂 The lists for today are completely overwhelming again (I’m almost out of the woods, though, by the way…) but I had made a commitment some time ago to play ball with my ball-playin’ friends starting in September.

So, this morning, I got up a tad early, headed out and played ball for about an hour at the gym around the corner from our house. It was great. I was bad. And winded. But a good diversion from the harried life that has been my summer.

Not to mention good exercise…

So what did I do when I got home… a little before 10am? Instead of freakin’ out cause the day is starting so late… I mowed the yard! 🙂 It needed it, and Frances is on her way… so …

I mowed the yard.

I am finally getting things started here around 11:47am… and I’m good with that. Actually feel a bit refreshed.

Different is good.

(Isn’t that an Arby’s ad, or something?)

Was just outside taking the trash to the curb, and as I was walking along the sidewalk, the sun hit it just perfectly revealing tons of spider web crosswalks and a few snail or slug trails. And as I walked by I hit a few more higher-altitude spiders…

We are not alone…

🙂