revival is hitting the fan

im not sure if anyone has heard about the stuff going on in florida, but basically a 3 day 700 people conferance has now been going on for 33 days! the reason it has continued is because God has been showing up and performing amazing miracles, people have gotten out of wheel chairs and healed from all kinds of sickness and disease.

all very exciting for florida, but this as they say is where the plot thickens. a few excited individuals from ireland have gone to see it first hand, they have had the faith passed on and are now kicking out the jams here.

last night i went to a fairly rough bit of belfast to a very ordinary elim church which is almost impossible to find! but when i got there i found group of people who were hungry and open to God. and when He showed up it all kicked off, in that meeting alone there were people healed from deafness (actual bones in the ear which had degenerated were replaced with new ones) arthritis, back pain and a couple of people got to know Jesus for the first time. i was with a guy who is partially sighted and i got prayer for my hips, neither of which were healed on the night, but man it was exciting.

it was so beautiful to a rough belfast accent talk about having received healing and being full of God's love and power, it was free and available to everyone, the main guy was totally honest saying he would have loved to have said they had all been praying for this for years but actually he was totally surprised by it and had no reason why God should have shown up there like that; "im just a skinhead from tigers bay who was a glue sniffer, why should God visit me?"

but its on its there and im feeling like this is the tip of a most awesome iceberg....

choose where you bleed

Life cannot be lived too far without picking up a few cuts and wounds. It shouldn't be surprising to sometimes feel like crap or a bit lonley. Instead of holding it in and having it brust out on someone find a safe envirnoment and express the issues. Choose where you bleed. For me it was going late to church even when i didn't really want to but on the floor in prayer and frustration, surrounded by beautiful music, i was able to let out and begin the healing... maybe its a group of friends or ur family but if your cut you have to bleed...

sometimes you best isnt good enough

i was working really hard to get some visuals finnished for a band last week, so i didnt have any time to promote our clubnight... the gig went well, but on tuesday night we had 5 people show up. i had been doin my best but it wasnt good enough....
got me thinking that sometimes life is like that, i have hung out with ladies in africa who work physically hard all day and still cant feed their children and when they can the food is so poor it still leaves them mal-nourished. sometimes your best is not good enough.
for all those jobs, positions and courses, there are thousands of applicants per place, there must be hundreds of people who do their best but it isn't good enough.
sometimes in a relationship you can make a mistake, and after it do your best but its not good enough, its still broken...
maybe thats what hope is for, to look at the same situation the next time and say my best will be good enough...

to live... ?

to live we must make a difference, we must attack the darkness and injustice we see in our world in our city, in our family, in ourself. A mindless pursuit of affluence, comfort, security and status will leave us restless, unfufilled and worn out. Each of us has a destiny and can radically change much more than we would ever dare to believe.

We are familiar with our desires and hungers and how to satisfy them but its temporal and shallow without understanding them in the bigger picture of who were made to be.

Such sublte and complex issues require a deeper understanding, we are more than the sum of our parts, fate, hope, chance and gut feeling are much more than passing feelings. They are pointing us in the direction of spiriuality and beyond a maths equation or physics model. We need to be in touch with our creator, understanding his passionate love for us, His Son's passion and Spirit's inspiration... we need to do more than scratch the surface to journey into who we are.

understanding surpasses intellect

Intellect and knowledge are generally triumphed in the western world as being the best and most useful elements of humanity for reasoning, living and proving points by. But when it comes down to it I dont think they are nearly as important as we make out. How many times do we make a decision in our mind and then do the total opposite? Ill just go for one drink we tell ourselves, because logically we have to get up tomorrow and we're a bit skint. But then in the situation the connection of friends, the craic, the new experience of that night over powers all reason and we do what feels right.

In politics etc how many leaders state their manifestos on honour and caring for the working people and schools and hospitals, but when it comes down to it make choices out of fear and self preservation.

In the context of Christianity, i have recently been having a few discussions about particular theological points, which may or may not be that important, these people argue that we should strive to discover as much as possible intellectually, as if it was the highest form of human knowing.

However, I think it has to be deeper, it has to be more mysterious, behavoir modification through reasoning is powerless in the face of all consuming passion. The greatest acts of humanity, of bravery of hope of tolerance and love, flew totally in the face of reason. Therefore to limit knowing God to the intellect or claim these other aspects of humanity are not important or trustworthy is to live in denial of how we really live and are.
Jesus was alive he burned and hurt and raged, he wants to give us new hearts that will provoke us against our own intellect to act in love. To be in relationship with Him is an adventure that connects with every fabric of our being not just logic or reason.