Unleash

My church debuted our new vision statement recently. It is,

"We will be a thriving community of Jesus followers unleashing relentless love to our broken world!"

I like it, except for whatever reason the phrase "broken world" has always rubbed me the wrong way, if I'm being honest. But I'm all about unleashing things, especially relentless love. And I happen to love exclamation points!

Anyway, it's all very exciting and I'm thrilled our church is finally taking action. I've had about all I can take of talking, more action I say! To find out more about it, go here. The point of all of this is to say I was asked to be on the blogging team. So I thought I'd share with you, my faithful readers, the blogs I write for that website.

Here's my first one. I'm working out the kinks but hey, it's my first shot so keep that in mind. Without further ado...my thoughts on unleashing.

So when I first read the email that asked me to be part of the unleashed blogging team, I kind of giggled to myself. I thought surely they had the wrong gal. I’m still fairly new to my unleashy-ness. I’m not great at memorizing Bible verses (in fact, I’m only real confident with John 3:16, after that everything else is fuzzy). I’ve always been that person who doesn’t take myself very seriously and thinks the people who do take me seriously are somewhat delusional.

With that said, know I come into this as a kind of poser. I don’t have any different kind of handle on life than you all do. We’re all in this together and together we’ll figure out how to unleash our various talents to the unsuspecting public. We can do it, even if we only know John 3:16.

I wanted to talk to you a bit today about unleashing. One of my favorite parts of the Bible is when God asks us to be childlike in our faith. I’ve found that the times when I feel most aligned with God, the times when I feel like I feel Him the most and see His heart the most, I’ve let any preconceived notions out the window.

We adopted Tariku from Ethiopia in April 2008. There were a few people who thought we were crazy to do so for various reasons. We didn’t have a lot of money in savings accounts; we didn’t have any money in college accounts for our other children. We were only 25-years-old; we had a baby at home, etc. With those (somewhat valid) excuses I knew God was telling us that was where He wanted us; and as scared as I was of following Him, I was more scared of NOT following Him.

So my husband and I became childlike, we let go of some of our “adultness” and just followed God. In doing that, we were taken straight into the heart of God. Into Africa, amid orphans and poverty and various forms of “the least of these”. And we’ll never be the same, nor do we want to be.

Kids don’t need to see to believe. My eldest son, Trysten, wants to be a Ninja Turtle when he grows up. He’s 5 and has no doubts this will be possible if he just sets his mind to it.

I want to be like that. Instead of becoming a Ninja Turtle, I want to give the world clean water. I want to show love to the orphans and the widows. I want to be light in the darkness. I want to unleash relentless love to this world.

Some may say becoming a Ninja Turtle is more likely than any of that; but with a God like ours, I think my childlike belief that it could happen might just make it so.


Oh, and this is the picture I gave for my headshot. I think it shows my unleashy-sassy side.