Monday, August 26, 2013

Finding myself in Awe of our God

Because we live in Tacoma, we have the joy of being able to view the majesty of Mt. Rainier on a regular basis.  It is truly awe-inspiring.  However, after living here for 3+ years, I often find myself looking right past this miraculous mountain.  It has become normal to me.  But then there are those moments, when the mountain has been hiding behind the clouds for weeks or even months at a time, when it bursts back into the spotlight and I once again find myself standing still, jaw dropped, in awe of it's beauty.

Unfortunately I often find myself in the same situation with the God of the universe.  He is no less majestic today than the day I first met him personally.  But because he is a daily part of my life I often find myself treating him in a "business as usual" sort of way.  It's crazy to even put it in words.  But I truly find myself viewing God as someone normal.  Shame on me.

Well, yesterday God gave me a wake-up call.  For those of you who have been following Jesus for an extended amount of time, you probably know what I am talking about.  We get into our routines.  We believe God is real and worthy of worship, but we start treating him like any other aspect of our life.  We just loose our sense of awe.  And then, when we least expect it, he bursts back into the forefront of our lives and reminds us of just how unworthy he is and how awesome he is.

We have been praying for our friend Tiffany to give her life to Jesus for some time now.  We met her at one of our community dinners during March into April.  Tiffany and my wife Kelli have become fast friends and really our families have just become really close.  Tiffany has been wrestling with God, even pursuing him, but hesitating to surrender her life to him.  We've been praying and praying.  Then yesterday, during the response time at our worship gathering, Kelli and Tiffany came to me right where I was sitting and told me that it was the day.  She was ready to trust Jesus!  Another couple in our IC was sitting next to us and was able to celebrate the moment.  It was truly awesome!

At the end of the gathering we got to introduce Tom Abbott, who we were able to send to Seattle to plant a church almost 2 years ago.  He got to share all that God was doing in Seattle, introduce his core team, and share with us how we could partner with their church to reach Seattle with the gospel.  The fourth part of our vision as a church is to send missionaries to plant new churches.  I was in awe of the fact that God would use our church, still in it's infancy, to do just that.

Immediately after the gathering I took 3 out of 4 people in to a meeting about our first global mission trip as a church.  God has given us the opportunity to team up with another church in our area to send a pioneer group from The Pathway to learn about global and short term missions.  It was amazing to sit back and soak in all that God is doing.  To think about God taking a group from our church all the way to South Africa to plant the gospel is nothing short of miraculous.  It's humbling.  It's awesome.

I'm reminded of a song that we sing a lot as a church.  Our God is greater, our God is stronger, our God is higher than any other.  Our God is healer AWESOME in power.

Just basking in the awesomeness of God today.  I think we should all do this more often.

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