He…overwhelms me.

i.  feel like.  i.  could EXPLODE.

GAAH!

my heart, my spirit is overwhelmed by the hand of God.  the goodness of God.  the patience of God.  the strength of God.  …I am overwhelmed by God.

I feel like if I just start typing, I will verbally spew so much into this post and it will turn into a 20-page, single spaced, size 8 font post.

a year ago today, I was packing up my apartment in the Keys, throwing away tons of yearbooks, pictures, notebooks… downsizing in order to fit everything I owned into my Scion XB (aka Zeva, akaa [also known affectionately as] the Toaster).  I had always thought my friends in the Keys were crazy when they’d talk about moving off the rock – I was determined to stay in the Keys because I love living in the beautiful islands, I love that my family all lives there, I love my friends, I love the culture, I love the weather, I love the landscape…(the list goes on).

the ironic thing is, sometimes God calls us to surrender what we love.  it’s like He says, “wow…I know you love all this, but trust Me – there is SO much more I have for you!”

and it’s up to us to accept His invitation, to take the leap of faith, and trust Him.

so for the past year, I’ve been interning under Continuous Worship ministries.  ok I won’t give minute by minute details.  I realize the average attention span is currently 12.882 seconds and so I want to stick to the point before I lose you.  (and yes, I’m totally making up the average attention span thing – but you totally know it’s true!)

but the past year of my life has possibly been the most amazing, most challenging, most stretching, hardest, best years of my life.  I have never felt more alive in my life.

I now know that even when God calls you to something, He’s not necessarily calling you to something easy.  but there’s such beauty in that – because when we are weak, His strength carries us.  He is shown powerful and through that, His Spirit works in and through us.

2 Corinthians 12:9
”Each time He [the Lord] said, ‘My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.’ So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.”

I have had so many weak moments during this past year.  so many times I wanted to just curl up in a ball and wait for the task at hand to pass me by.  so many times I saw the mountain in front of me that I needed to climb and just wanted to quit and go back to the Keys where life was relatively easy and comfortable.

I have clung to this passage in 1 Corinthians 2 so much over the past year:

1 Corinthians 2:1-5 – “And so it was with me, brothers and sisters. When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. ² For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³ I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling. ⁴ My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, ⁵ so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”

I always think of Paul as being this amazing speaker, this guy who never wavered in his faith and was so confident in who he was in Christ that he never feared anything.  don’t get me wrong – he was an amazing follower of Christ.  but he wasn’t perfect.  he had fears.  he had weaknesses.  but he knew the beauty of being willing to operate even in his weakness.

I have experienced God’s faithfulness in so many awesome ways over this past year.  His faithfulness to provide.  His faithfulness to lead me.  His faithfulness to be more than enough strength in my weakness.  His faithfulness to be patient with me.  His faithfulness to love me through the good and the bad.

I have experienced God’s grace in so many awesome ways over this past year.  His grace to forgive me when I doubt Him.  His grace to surround me with friends and family that love me and encourage me (and still love me even on my bad days).  His grace to use me even when I feel so unusable.

today I got the opportunity to lead the entire worship service (well, the music part) at church.  it was completely by God’s strength alone.  leading up to this opportunity, for years upon years, just the thought of being on a worship team made my stomach turn with anxiety, with fear.  so the idea of leading was always out of the question.

until this last time I was asked.

please don’t take this as me boasting about what I’ve done.  it is completely not that, and if it comes across that way, I will probably be physically sick to my stomach.

I say all this because I want you to know we serve a STRONG God.  we serve a BIG God.  we serve the ONLY TRUE God.  all things are possible through His strength when we have our sights on glorifying Him.