Going Deeper

I dig deep. I search self. Deep within lies an ache for God. Not just the passing warm fuzzies. Not the "I'm in the mood to have church" kind of passing whim or desire. My soul rumbles and my heart quivers and deep within the receses of my body there is a groaning and physical ache to feel Him near. I want to know what it is to live continually in the Spirit....where we walk together and talk together and converse and His presence can be felt. The children and I read through the YWAM books, and we dig and delve into Biblical truth and principles and we search through the Bible with a fine tooth comb...and the more I search the more insatiable my appetite becomes...deep parched dryness that can only be quenched by the Spirit of a living God that still moves and breathes and is at work within His people. How overcome with grief I am at the apathy of the church today. How absolutely grievous it is to watch the same people come and go and warm the pews and the chairs of a building every Sunday out of their obligatory commitment to do the "right thing" and raise "churched" children. How much more there is to Him.....the depths of His ways and the crazy love He has for me that I do not begin to understand. I know it...but I also know that I don't get it. I want to be that person recklessly abandoned to Him. I ache to raise children that walk in His Spirit and are armed with the tools to do battle and win because they know Him. They have knowledge, wisdom, discernment, vision, and passion. Oh that they are taught to recognize His voice, to quiet themselves to hear Him when He speaks and know what it is to go into immediate action in obedience. How much deeper are the life lessons of obedience that we instill into them on a daily basis. It is not just so that they will be a joy to be around and in an effort for me to maintain any amount of sanity....it is a life calling to prepare them for what it takes to live out their calling and purpose for Him. If they cannot respond to an audible person they can see and hear and touch how can I expect them to respond to the person of God whom they cannot physically see or hear or touch? It's so much more than a Bible story about a man and a woman in a lush garden, or some dude thousands of years ago that saw a fiery bush, or a guy that wrestled with God and had his hip socket dislocated. It's so much more than an hour spent in Sunday school to be well versed in Bible stories and a little Bible verse memorization in an attempt to appear like good little churched kids. It is the knowledge that God is very much alive and still moves mountains. He is so real that He can be touched and heard. That He can still move in dreams and visions.

The fire burns and praying...searching.....husband and I feel it. The passion is ignited and it shakes our family to the core. It is the call to leave the comfort zone and embark on a radical journey with a God that still moves and will use those that harbor the passion for Him. Restlessness grows and our hearts are stirred. Late night conversations long into the early morning hours contemplating the ways of Him and the depths of Him we do not yet know. We serve the same God that spared a mere 8 people and a ton of animals yet wiped out all of the humanity He had created because their hearts had turned way from Him and grown comfortable in their lifestyle. We serve the same God that parted an entire sea for His chosen people and drowned the oppressors. The God that shows no mercy for those that live in apathy and turn their focus from Him. He commands 100% of His people's heart. And of those that give 100%....those are the ones that He uses as vessels to change the world...one heart at a time.

I walk through the store with our many children and it is painfully apparent that we pause all of life wherever we go. Traffic stops, people everywhere around halt in their tracks, hands hurriedly fumble through pockets and purses to reach camera phones and begin clicking as we pass by. They take pictures of us walking, seated at lunch table, shopping. The rumbling of whispers can be felt vibrating the concrete floors, the fingers...they count, the heads....they wag, the tongues....they click, the eyes...they bulge from sockets. The comments...."I woulda committed suicide by the 5th one!!!", "She's gotta be insane!!!", "Oh Lord...just kill me now", "WHY would you ruin your life like that???!!!", "Can you imagine how miserable that would be???!!!", "Does she have nothing better to do??!!!", "Somebody give that poor woman a break and give her husband a tv!!!", "Such a shame. She's such a pretty thing to live in a shoe."...as raucous laughter goes round. "Hey lady....I just have to know....how big's the shoe??? I bet your husband's one happy man!!!".....more rounds of laughter. One man begins to swoop, waving hands obnoxiously high in air and then stoops and attempts to go in up and down bowing motions, hands as low as distended belly would allow, creating quite the spectacle. Laughing, he continues in mocking worshipful tones, "I praise you, woman. You have both my deepest admiration and sympathies. I am not worthy to stand on the ground you occupy. I bow low. Hail to the mother of all these children!!!". An embarrassing display of sarcasm, obnoxiousness and awe from stranger in public. Disgruntled people shuffle past us in disgust while other are frozen mid stride as they gawk.

And my heart is crushed. Not for the criticism, opinions or sarcasm but for the painful reminder of where the heart of the church is now. We live in one of the most saturated places of the Bible belt. These people we share this space with are the same people that sit on the pew of a church every Sunday...that flippantly throw out.."Yeah....I'm a Christian." These people are the same ones that give a thudded pat on the back as they raucously repeat "Bless ya', brother!!" with a good hearty laugh in passing every Sunday....that recite the same prayer before every meal while never cracking the Bible again until the next sermon rolls around...that toss a bill or two into the plate as it passes by. Do they know...truly KNOW.....the God I am beginning to glimpse? They don't see Him, they don't hear Him, I seriously doubt they ever feel Him. He has merely become a free ticket into heaven....a little "get out of jail free" pass to assure that you're following the straight and narrow. They've put Him in a neat tidy little wrapped up box that they bring out whenever it's convenient or to their liking...or when they're in the mood to give a little thanks once a year.

God is not about presenting Himself in neat tidy little packages. He's real and He gets dirty and he does business with those that these people rather pretend do not exist. He is a God that says children are a blessing....blessed are those that have many of them. He is a God that hears the weeping of the orphans, knows their pain and feels it as His own people turn away from His voice to care for them. He is the God that's wrapped around the base of the toilet as the girl tries over and again to drown the sorrows of her past and demands to know where God is....if he even exists. He is the God that stands and cries with the man that pounds his fists into the wall demanding to know why God has left him. He is the God that holds the heart of the mother cradling her dead baby in her arms. He is the God that sits on the bathroom floor and holds the shaking hands of a daddy as he catches his 7th born. He is a God of real life. He is not contained in a box or an aesthetically pleasing polka dotted little package. He is the unbathed man, drenched in sweat, with funky body odor standing on the street corner looking at me in my air conditioned running vehicle waiting to see if I stop to help the lowest and filthiest of society, the poverty stricken, the down and out, the hopeless. How short this life is to leave any human being hopeless. How self absorbed one must be..how full of fear....to pass these people up when I have the hope that I do and I possess the key to heal the pain that put them there. I do not live in fear. I do not fear people. I do not fear the unknown. I do, however, fear the wrath of a God that detests mediocrity and the heart of a people that no longer seek or serve Him. I fear a wasted life where I have done nothing to help. I fear staying in a comfort zone more than I ever fear leaving it. I fear apathy, mediocrity. I fear a life without change because He saw that He could not use me....that He found a resistant heart.

How crushed my heart is as I come to see that these people that mock or point and whisper at our entourage are missing such a bigger picture. They may not be called to adopt or have 104 children but how much grief lies within my heart at the mentality of human life. How cheaply life is regarded by the people that say they know Him. The same lady pushing her cart, clicking around in her high heels and flouncy dress having just emerged from church an hour before, is the same lady that prays to a god to kill her now if she had that many children???? And the woman dressed in her Sunday attire with church bulletin rising higher than purse rim is the same woman that would commit suicide if she were in my shoes???? Where is her God....the one that states children are a blessing and to care for the widows and orphans....says to encourage your brothers and sisters in Christ???? Where does that leave the value of human life....if His principles and instruction bring one such misery it's not even worth living to apply??? Does she serve the same God that I do...the same one that willingly sacrificed His son....the little boy he watched birthed in a barn...the one he watched grow from boy to man only to have thorns pressed deeply into his head, his body shredded by whips, and brutally nailed to a cross as he felt physical, real, human pain???? Does she serve that same one that gave His son up yet His principles bring such misery with them that they are not even worth applying to her life????? Where is the heart of God within the church.....within His people????? Where is the passion and abandonment to Him???? Where are the people that can say..."You know...I know I couldn't do what you're doing but I support those that do. And since I serve a God that says children are a blessing I have 10 kids I'm supporting in the Philippines"...or Africa.....or India????

The world has become so wrapped up in self satisfaction that anything that brings discomfort is discarded. It is replaced with short lived comfort in an effort to fill the joy void and the soul needs that scream to be met. It has been replaced by food, sex, money, material possessions, all that bring short lived happiness but never fill the gaping chasm of the soul. All in an effort to avoid the discomfort of a God that requires action. So society grows fat and lazy and immersed in a culture where sexual content cannot be escaped, food lies within reach at all times, money that is poured into cars, vacations, toys, and houses while the heart and soul grow stagnant as they seek to avoid Him and their heart is dulled to His voice. Instead of radical acts of obedience they forget the orphans, the widows, the man on the street corner that they avoided eye contact....waiting impatiently for the green light to escape the discomfort of his presence. They forget the vision....or they never had one because they've never truly known Him to begin with. Bigger pictures of carrying out His precepts and ministering to those that surround them do not exist because the bigger picture is centered around self satisfaction and total self absorption. It leaves no room for a God that requires venturing beyond self and experiencing discomfort...digging in the trenches to do His work. They leave that up to everybody else...."cause somebody will step up and do it". It has become the work for all of the "somebody elses" because they, after all, go to church, they toss their buck or two in and they walk away....and they've done their part. Did they think about where that dollar's going to go? Did they picture the face of the little boy with the huge dark eyes sitting there cross legged and still hungry? Did they picture the face of the little girl with black pigtails, picked up only to be fed that day, bedded down in a room with 25 other cribs in it? Did they see the face of the 8 year old girl that's lived in the orphanage all her life? Or the mother so frail she can't even lift her toddler from the dirt? Probably not.

I want to go. I want to be used in extraordinary ways. Because the world is bigger than my little life. There are needs that we can be meeting....needs that exist in other countries but needs that also exist right beyond our front door in our sleepy little near non existent town. I want my children to know the world is bigger than them and it's bigger than their comfort being at the forefront of it. I want to experience the phenomenal because we are willing to live on the edge. And in living on the edge we are free to experience the Lord to the fullest and know Him in ways we would otherwise never come to know Him. Absolute trust. Embracing Him for everything that He is. Embracing the edge....and jumping off.

I'll go to the ends of the earth for you, Lord. We will go where your Spirit leads. My heart longs to adopt the sibling group so large that those children will sit unadopted or be torn from each other in an effort to be placed. I'll paint the old man's house down the street. I'll teach my children what it is to serve you in every way. My heart aches to be the testimony of your love, mercy, grace, strength and patience as we walk through the store and draw the attention of crowds. Reckless abandonment to you, Lord. Take it and use it in whatever ways you can. Show us where to minister beyond the walls of our home. Show us where we are needed. Move us. Uproot us if need be and plant us where we are needed and can be poured through to effectively carry out your purpose and the bigger picture. Ignite passion in the heart of your people, Lord. And light a fire in the heart of the people you bring us into contact with. Let them see it's more than just having a ton of kids...it's about the willingness to live an extreme life and be taken to greater depths than we've ever known before. My heart aches for the presence of you. Give us direction and guide our footsteps so that they are completely in line with what you have planned for our life. Here is my heart Lord. We are completely submitted to your will so take it, use it, and show us what comes next.