girls praying together

wow wow wow. Friday mornings have just become the second most exciting
part of my week (after Friday nights of course). It used to be pretty
great, cause it was the only morning when I could sleep late, but now
its really great cause I exchanged sleeping late for getting up early
to join up with a bunch of girls at Common Ground Church as we pray
for our community, the city, each other and our individual sphere's.

How the meetings came about is a story in itself. So many of us had
been feeling like doing something like this for a while, but we never
spoke about it to each other. Then all of a sudden a few of us got
talking and we realised that so many of us were desiring the same
thing. And on top of that, it turns out that the boys (who pray
together on Wednesday mornings) have been praying that the girls would
start something similar. So last week Friday we started meeting
together to pray with and for each other and its been incredible.

Its led me to spend sometime reflecting on how much God uses us when
we are unity with each other. (Interesting how the word, CommUNITY
implies that we need to be on the same page). We are only on our
second meeting but its so inspiring to see how God is speaking to us
on very similar topics, and when we get together we are praying around
the same things, and when we share the deep heart stuff that God is
doing with us as individuals, its so interconnected with what he is
doing with others in the group. God is definitely painting a theme
across all our lives, and its captivating to watch it unfold. It seems
like when we pray together God cements the things he is speaking to us
about as individuals. At the moment we all seem to have the same thing
on our hearts: Seeing God glorified in everything we do. We spent the
morning praying around that theme and we left feeling inspired and
humbled.

Its early days still, but its very exciting to see where this is
going ;-)

inside my head...

The last few weeks have been, for the most part, pretty hectic. the last 3 days in particular. In amongst studying for my test tomorrow, writing essays, reading English setwork books and applying for Honours at 3 different universities (and dealing the paperwork that come with said applications) I've hardly had time to stop. (I'm writing this while I wait for my 4o-something pages of study notes to print). I've realised one major over the last few days. This that I spend WAY too much time inside my own head. Driving, walking between classes, sitting in lectures, sitting on the bus, sitting in the library, studying at home in the afternoons...most of that time I'm mulling things over in my head. This is strange for me cause naturally I'm a person who processes things with other people. I understand something better after I've explained it to someone else, and I often can't make decisions until I've spoken to someone else. I'm wondering if there is a lesson in all this...something I need to learn? I haven't worked it out yet....maybe I should speak to someone about it? ;-)

my printer has stopped working, I think its time to call it quits on this blog and go fix it...by myself... ;-)

I wrote this a week ago after a conversation with a friend. Funny how you always think  more clearly after conversation is over....

2 Corinthins 5:16-21

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

1 Samuel 16:7

For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.

As Christians we are often ashamed of the things we did before we became Christians, and are scared to tell people about it because of what they might think. But I was recently reminded of the fact that God looks at our heart, and not at our outward appearance, or our works. So when we are saved, God is always looking at our heart, and our works are just a symptom of the state of our heart.

In the same way, before we were Christians, God looked at our hearts. Our hearts were hard and turned away from him. It doesn’t matter what we did during that time, good or bad, because it didn’t change the state of our hearts, or the way God saw us (Mark 7: 21-23, Luke 6:45).

So when we become Christians, we can let go of the things that we did before we were saved. We don’t need to be ashamed of them anymore, because God has forgiven us. We also don’t need to compare our sins to other people’s, and be ashamed because we did worse things, or more things wrong than they did. This is because we all had hard hearts that were turned away from God, we were all unrighteous and we were all sinners. God saw our hearts, and they were all sinful. So, whether we were jumping through moral hoops and religious rituals, clinging to some sense of moral self-justification, or whether we were throwing ourselves into the pits of moral compromise and doing whatever we could to hurt ourselves or God or others, it doesn’t matter. When you are saved, you are saved. You cannot be more or less saved than others, and therefore you cannot be more or less unsaved than others. What you did may have been terrible, but you were no worse a person than any one else who isn’t saved.

So as Christians we need to remember that we don’t need to hide our past from our friends, our church and our leaders. And we also can’t judge others on the things they did before they were saved. We were all in the same place once, and we are all justified by grace. 

Before I get cracking on my blogs, let me explain the name. 

I don't use hair gel (long, girl-type hair being the reason), but a friend of mine (thanks Rog) used it to explain how facebook, twitter and blogs are something we use to create an image, to show the world exactly what we want them to see of us.  Like hair gel, it creates a look and keeps it that way so we can control how people see us. 

I'm not gonna say that this blog won't do that. I'll try, but its probably impossible not to....So don't judge me on this blog. It'll probably make me look much better than I am :-) You're welcome to get to know me and all my flaws in person...

I'm just gonna be posting some of the things that I've been thinking about lately, and hopefully they'll be of use to someone out there...if anyone except my mom ends up reading this...

Happy reading!