Living My Faith Out Loud

ok, so I know I haven’t been blogging much and it’s not cause I don’t have alot to say! I will be back to my old self shortly, this week I have 2 finals due for school then it’s break time for me!!! I decided to take the summer off so I could go have some fun and I am so excited! I am still teaching my Bible study but that is fun and not too much work. I also don’t want to be stressed out about school when I need to be focused on Africa! We have a meeting this weekend and we get to meet the parents of the teens that are being entrusted to our care for 2 weeks in South Africa. We are going to do lots of fun and goofy team building things so it will be fun.
I still need to prepare for that and finish up my lesson for my Bible study Sunday. I had 35 women sign up for my class, woohoo! Who says God ain’t movin’??? He is rocking our church!

No, I did not fall off the face of the earth! I have been too busy to blog which is sad when you think about it!
I have been just plain old busy. I feel like I haven’t had a day off for the last several weeks, probably cause I haven’t!
Come Saturday, it’s all about ME. No phone, no work, no email, no laptop, no nothing! Me, Jesus, my Bible and the pool. Feel free to pray for a hot sunny day in Maryland for me!
I have declared Saturday as the official National Rachel Day. If your name is not Rachel and you need to declare a national day off for yourself, I hereby grant you permission to enter your name and make it National ___________ Day.

The picture is of our shirts that we all wore. Ain’t it the coolest?? One of the youth interns designed it and we had them made for everyone. GodTV was there filming and they saw us (how can you miss 100 people wearing the same cool shirt!) and asked us to come to the front of the stage, which was way cool! If you get a chance to watch it on GodTV, make sure you look for us!
What an awesome weekend! I can’t believe I survived to tell about it. I think there was something like 16,000 people there. The speakers were great and very challenging and the music, for the most part, was awesome. Ron Luce has an incredible heart towards the teens in this generation and I can understand why. It is so heart-wrenching to think of the things they are struggling with. When I was a teen, I had my own struggles but they are no way near what these teens have to go through with today. The media is stealing their innocence and trashing their minds.
It’s so amazing how the Lord speaks to us if we just listen to Him. Here I was at this event to help with these teens and I was convicted! I felt like the Lord was challenging me. Ron Luce was talking about our relationship to the Lord. Are we a seeker, student or stalker? It was such a great message. I want to be a “God stalker.” I want to pursue Christ and I want to pursue righteousness and holiness. Ron focused alot on the media and music we listen to. Tye Trippon was a cool dude and he also challenged us about what we are watching and listening to. So many people don’t realize that what we watch and listen to go downs to the depths of our soul.
I became a Christian in 2001 and when I did, I stopped listening to secular music, reading non-Christian books, and quit TV cold turkey. My past consisted of a lifestyle of drugs, alcohol, immorality and many other things that I made the decision back then to not look at anything that did not feed my spirit. (click on my testimony in the side bar under labels to read my full testimony)
During the last year, I started renting some tv shows from Blockbuster. I had knee replacement surgery and was home for quite awhile. I heard so many things about 24 so I rented it and I got addicted. I love Jack! At first, I had a check in my spirit because there was so much violence. After watching a few episodes, the spirit check went away. My heart was heardened and I thought to myself, well, it’s not that bad, right? I also started to watch CSI, all of them. The orginal one, NY and Florida. I love anything forensic and I love to learn but I gotta tell you, I got lots of checks in my spirit about watching these. I told myself that is was ok because there were no commercials to infiltrate my mind, but in all honesty, many of the episodes carried storylines that had to do with very ungodly things.
When I came home Sunday from BattleCry, I renewed my convenant with Him to not watch anything that was not honoring to Him. I canceled my Netflix subscription and prayed that He would help me get back on track. Some call me crazy but I don’t care. Some call me legalistic but I don’t care. I don’t want to put anything unholy in me and if people call me names because of it, I say bring it on!
We all only have a certain amount of time each and every day and I choose to sow my spirit not my flesh. You can’t serve 2 masters, you can’t live with one foot in the world and one out of the world, you can’t watch tv shows and movies and listen to secular music without it effecting you. I have lots of friends that tell me that watching a few shows at the end of the day helps them to unwind and unplug and after all, what harm can come from it. My biggest issue with it is that I hear over and over how people don’t have the time to read the Bible or pray but they have time to watch Lost or Survivor every week. We wonder why we struggle with things and the answer is clear. How much time do you spend feeding your soul with the things of God? How much time do you spend feeding your flesh with the things of the world? Everything we put in ourselves will be life or death. If it ain’t feeding your spirit or glorifying God, then it is death. I am not legalistic in my thinking about the media, what I am is a Christ follower who will not allow the world to influence my thoughts or my behavior.
I don’t mean to condemn but to challenge you like I was challenged this weekend. Can you imagine what the world would be like if Christians started to choose holiness and stopped spending our money to support wordly things? If we read the Bible every day and studied it and actually put into practice what it says to do? We would have revival like never before. We can change the world. We do have a voice. We have the power. Will you pick up your cross today?

I am so excited! Tomorrow we go to BattleCry and I know something extraordinary is going to happen.

• 1 out of 11 attempt suicide each year
• 1 out of 10 fifteen year olds and younger have gone through family divorce in their life-time
• 58% have been involved in objectionable content on the web
• 40% have experimented with self-injury (are “cutters”)
• Use of prescription drugs (Ritalin, anti-depressants etc.) by children/teens has increased
• By the time the average child graduates from high school, he/she will have watched 19,000 hours of TV including about 200,000 sexual acts and 1 million acts of violence
• 1 in 10 high school females have reported being raped at some point in their life
• Fear of violence in schools is now the leading “worry” of public school teens
• 48% of high school seniors are sexually active (had sexual intercourse in past 3 months)
• 91% say there is NO ABSOLUTE TRUTH
• 75% of teens in America believe the central message of the Bible is, “God helps those who help themselves”
• 53% believe Jesus committed sin (40% of born again teens believe Jesus committed sin)

Our teens DESPERATELY need godly influences in their lives. They are crying out for help. All we have to do is take a look at what happened at Virginia Tech to realize that people are hurting out there. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I know the One who does and I am going to end with this Scripture because I think it sums alot of our problems up:

2 Chronicles 7:14, If My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

I am reading The Best of A.W. Tozer and he most defintely is one of my favorite authors. I love to read books that challenge me to live a life worthy of Christ. I need all the help I can get! Here are a few excerpts:

The pursuit of God will embrace the labor of bringing our total personality into conformity to His. I speak of a voluntary exalting of God to His proper station over us and a willing surrender of our whole being to the place of worshipful submission…
The moment we make up our minds that we are going on with this determination to exalt God over all we step out of the world’s parade. Let the average man be put to the proof on the question of who is above, and his true position will be exposed. Let him be forced into making a choice between God and personal ambition, God and self, God and human love and God will take second place every time. However the man may protest, the proof is in the choices he makes day after day.

Good stuff! It made me remember what a pastor said one day, “look in your checkbook and you will see where your heart and treasure is.” He challenged us to add up where our money went for an entire month, which I did. It was very disheartening to say the least!
It is so hard in our culture to see our time, talents and treasures as belonging to God 100%. He has blessed us so that we can help Him to fulfill the Great Commission. Obviously, it’s not a matter of God needing these things, it’s a matter of where our heart is. What is important to us? When we make a purchase do we stop and think to ourselves, “this belongs to the Lord, am I spending it in the best way?” I am cringing even as I write this. When someone asks us to serve somewhere, is our immediate response a grumbling in our heart? Do we think to ourselves, “I am too busy for this!” Unfortunately at times, this is my response. I get so caught up in me that I forget my main purpose in life is to glorify my Creator and be a vessel that He can use.
Another great excercise to see where your heart is, is to add up your hours of where you spend your time. I spoke at our singles retreat a while ago and the subject was being a fully devoted follower of Christ. I made up a little spreadsheet so everyone could log where their time went. It was a hard excercise because like AW Tozer writes, the proof is in the choices we make every day. How much time to we spend on ourselves? At the gym or the beauty salon or getting our nails done? Those are not bad things to do but the challenge is this, of our time, how much is spent on us versus the things of God?
The point of these excercises is not to condemn but to help us to be aware of our choices. The pursuit of God requires us to make choices every day. It requires us to pick up our cross every day. It requires us to love the unlovely, give when we don’t want to, get off the throne and put God back on, give freely of ourselves, put others above us and the list goes on and on.
What will you do for Jesus today?

These past few weeks have been physically challenging for me but praise God I see the light! I ended up back on my couch Thursday and Friday because I tried to push myself too hard at the beginning of the week. I coulda, woulda, shoulda…
Anyways, I am still coughing but feeling much better. I can breathe a little easier and my lungs feel like they aren’t going to blow up anymore!
I am so excited because yesterday I sponsored another little girl, she lives in India. She is 6 years old, like my little girl in Swaziland. One of my goals is to meet both of them, how cool would that be? I have been reading a lot about India and the brutality there. I don’t even want to write about it here because it is so heart- wrenching. I can’t believe that we live in America and complain about what we don’t have and there are millions who would love to have our trash. It just doesn’t seem fair.
Well, I need to go take care of somethings so I will write lots more later.