Blessed By God Through Jason Gray

Jason Gray concert at The Vine Church of Walker, MI with my whole family is awesome!

I am so grateful about everything this weekend. I don't regret driving 9 hours from Minnesota - hoping to experience what the Holy Spirit might want to show me. I feel blessed about every aspect of coming. I needed to hear and experience what the Holy Spirit shared WITH me.

As we sat on a blanket in the grass together, The Spirit "Reminded Me Of Who I Am," and what I'm "Becoming" with Him. My family needed to hear this and experience this... The whole trip was worth it! I can't think of anything to complain about it!  "Nothing Is Wasted."  (I want to go to these concerts and be blessed, encouraged, uplifted, and have my spirit fed every weekend!  Thank you, Jason!  Thank you, God!)

I was thinking about Jason's story of the woman who tried to heal his mouth by speaking in tongues and marching - while holding his tongue - but it was even her wanting to heal him that gave my apologetic heart pause... IS that the God I know?  Is "healing" here ultimately what our Father is even after?

I used to think this way myself - walking past someone in a wheelchair at Walmart and wanting to touch them and have them walk again - bringing the healingness of God personally to their lives... but I think there's a second, more important - more immediate - need, or healing, of people's lives here than "MERE" physical renewal... And, we don't need physical healing to know God is present in our life. I think that's what Jesus was saying so often to the people who wanted (without knowing it), a "lesser" healing - a lesser connection.

I think there is a deeper, ever more present, and pressing healing that each one of us needs more desperately than any other kind of fix, and that is the reconnection of our hearts/spirits in intimate relationship with God.

If we're in a wheelchair or on crutches, have a speech impediment or hooked up to machines in an ICU, the real thing that matters to God (even more than our temporary Disorder) is whether we know God WHILE we stutter, stumble, fall, or are "taken out" by others...

Knowing God is knowing us, and loving that God is loving us, I think far outshines or outweighs the really "lesser" (in context) "needs" of our bodies and lives here. I mean, if we've got the Holy Spirit in our lives, it means God is with us now, and with that deposit (guaranteeing our future with God), what is sickness or handicaps or broken families or fear or loneliness or shame...?  Compared to knowing God, is there anything in all creation that we can't survive, endure, or live without IF we have this connection with God? If we have this relationship with God, then, in time, God promises to make the total wrecks of our lives new again. (I can't even really fully understand this as I'm writing, but THIS is the hope we have because of Christ. I personally struggle with waiting for my life to be remade all new and shiny again. I want all the hurts I've done to others and myself that I can't make right, be made right by my friend, God, who says He can do that for me and wants to.)

I think God thinks there is nothing that HAS to be healed in our life.  I think He thinks we are good just the way we are... What I mean by this is, I think He just loves us unconditionally... I think God might say something like, 'I love you whether you stutter or not.'  But the God I know, I think would go further still... I can imagine Him continuing, 'Actually, I like the way you talk.'  (And, if you want to know the whole truth about it, I do too.  If this is you, then it IS you.  Embrace it.  I do.  I know God embraces you... He embraces all of Us.)

I think it matters not that we DO anything or become anything here...  If a child is born crippled, or if I became a paraplegic and could do nothing for the rest of my life, would God still love us?  Of course!  Would He love us any less?  Of course not!  I don't think God is very concerned (or better said), I think God prioritizes need - real need - and deems whether our hearts are repentant and we're trying to follow his lead, (or even just wanting to know him and have a relationship with him), as higher on the "importance scale" than all of our other issues, disabilities, handicaps, shortcomings, flaws, foibles, mistakes, hurts, temporary rebellions, etc., ...

With all my heart I want to tell people that I wish them well, and healing, and all the best of things here... but I wouldn't want to change your life at all if that might mean that you wouldn't follow after God in your life here and that I wouldn't get to see you again in the new earth - in The Mended Wood.  (I hope I can make some music with you there on that eternal day!) I want you to be encouraged - as Jason Gray encouraged me this weekend and Again And Again as I think back to that night, and listen to his music, along with my whole family - listening to God's message to us through him live, and on all his CDs - day after day, Over and Over and Over.  I feel so grateful!  Jason Gray keeps being God's mouth and words to me.

Leave a comment