The Scattering....Prophetic Voices?

I was listening to the God Journey Podcast this week. If you haven’t started listening to this – please do. Husband and I carve out 45 min a week to do this together. It is fun and also challenges us with almost each podcast. It is part of the Dying of the Cloth With Grace that I wrote about the other day. If you are new to the whole thing, start with the last 3. They are great.

Anyway, Wayne and Brad were talking about how people are doing outside the box of the institutional church. A commenter was saying that he felt that Wayne and Brad were not encouraging people enough to get into a “group” for regular fellowship and worship and teaching.

At this point, I do believe that Wayne almost began to speak prophetically. I bet he would not think that was what he was doing but it sure resonated in me that way. I transcribed the following from the last few minutes of the podcast “Enjoying Real Relationship”:

“In reading through the minor prophets, how often God says I’m going to scatter my people, scatter my people, scatter my people. Then there are other passages that say, ‘Then I will gather them together again.’ And I honestly, and this is the closest I get at times to feeling like I get a heartbeat from God’s voice in things like this, I do feel like God is scattering his people away from their false gods of religious institutions that we served more than Him. (The places) where we got false notions of who God is. That God is scattering his people so that they will find Him again. And then I believe God is going to re-gather these people. But He is going to gather them in a way that is more healthy and whole. (He then talks about all the lumber people are carrying around to build a newer and better sheep pens) He goes on to say, “You watch over the next 5 years the way God will begin to connect brothers…there are going to be ways that God just knits people together as relationships bear fruit.

This gave me a lot of hope. It makes sense to what I am seeing. It makes sense of all the great people that either had to leave or got thrown out of their “pen.” In a huge sweep of history there have been many times that people of God have been scattered. Maybe that is why we feel a bit scattered and disconnected. Maybe they felt like we do. Maybe it really is a part of what Father wants to be doing right now.

Another reader of Wayne's blog said this about the church - again I believe a prophetic voice:

It is clear that God is shaking up organisational church all over the place. When praying the other morning he gave me a picture for the church I left (since then many others are exiting as well) but which I think is applicable worldwide. He showed me a glass beaker punched all over with holes and water was pouring out of the holes. But what was so amazing was that as the water landed on the table it did not remain in little droplets separately but it made a pool which was held together by the surface tension. If more water came near it and joined it then it became one with the first lot of water so you could not tell which was which. God is far more interested in the contents than the container and those contents do not need a structure to keep them together.

Could we be participating in the next big “Move of God?” We could be…. but sorry….. those words still creep me out.

Dying the Cloth with Grace

I have always maintained that the message of Grace had to be absorbed into my life bit by bit. It reminded me a lot of the process of dying a cloth. You can take a cloth and dip it once into the dye and it will take on a light shade of the dye. You can dip it a second time and it takes on a bit more color. Dipping again and again produces a vibrant color of the dye that it is dipped into.

The first time I read Wayne Jacobsen’s writings (who writes so much about Grace in anything he is writing or talking about) I told Husband that I felt as if I needed to listen to the book (He Loves Me) again and again. I felt as if the “cloth” of my spirit could only absorb just a little bit of this wonderful Grace that he was speaking about and that it would take multiple times of hearing it to be able to wrap my mind and my spirit around this concept before it began to make a major change in my actual life.

(btw, I capitalize the word "Grace" because I believe it is a "who" not a "what," a person, not an idea)

In reading the book, “Families Where Grace is in Place” I again had the same feeling about being dipped yet again in this vat of dye called Grace. I realize that there are areas of my life that it is really helpful to have Grace applied specifically to that one area. The area of Grace that this book addresses is of course marriage and parent/child relationships. It is a life changing, life giving message to these relationships and I can already see how it is beginning to give me perspective on what is God’s job and what is my job. How I can give input into Husband’s and my children’s lives but I don’t have to effect the actual change. Nor is it my fault if change is not the outcome.

The biggest way I tried to effect change in the people around me was to be the BEST wife and mom that was possible. I felt if I could be the perfect mom that my kids would love me enough to want to obey me. That if I was the best wife for Husband that he would always choose what I wanted. That if I could be the BEST member of our CLB (church left behind) that they would never question my loyalty.

It was amazing to me that this was just a form of manipulation. I was manipulating the people around me by trying to not make any mistakes. No wonder I got so very tired. I used to say I (my personality) was nothing but the sum of all the expectations of others. I never understood that this was MY FAULT. Of course I was nothing but a bag of expectations – but they were my own expectations – put on me by me.

And I was tired. And I was worn. And I was ready to give up.

But Grace gets this job thing right. It is not my job to control people – not through anger, or sham or threat or by being the best you can be. Grace says, “This part is my part, that part is God’s.” Grace says that I don’t have to make people do what would make me happy. Grace lets me be me and it allows others to be themselves – and above all Grace loves through it all.

Erin nominated me for a “Subversive Blogger Award” yesterday. I decided that if this new message of Grace and the color my heart is being transformed into is “Subversive,” then I accept the award with great delight.