Happiness and Joy..

crazy weekend; i think i drove over 600kms this weekend, but it was worth it :) It was good hanging out with my girls in Huntsville - we shared and celebrated Irie's last weekend as a single! and we celebrated the official 323 - it was awesome! You know there's happiness, where you laugh because of good times, good jokes, funny stories...and then there's joy - when it's God-blessed, a gift from Him that brings not only a smile on your face, but a warmth in your heart that you know is something eternal. Seeing my close girlfriends move on to the next stage, with a godly guy in a Christ-centered relationship gives me pure joy! It's that same feeling when you watch someone proclaim their faith in Christ and get baptized, or when you hear of someone come to Christ finally, or when you listen to an amazing testimony - these are the times i know that I'm experiencing the fruit of the Holy Spirit! Well, I praise God for the OMC (along with the stigma, jokes and attitude) - if you look at how we've come to know each other, there are so many different inter-minglings of life - I know God took great lengths to bring us together and I'm so thankful to Him and for them.

I guess we coined the term OMC b/c of that year of contemplation of the benefits of being single for God...Probably coincided with the year(s) of 'Amazon women' in CCF...but I'm happily seeing the eventual disbanding of the official OMC, but with no doubt, we're gonna be one of those life-time cell groups for sure.

Summer Conference..

God works through unexpected twists for sure..though the original English adult speaker was away, we joined the teens and I was challenged by the messages...and ironically, I was most challenged by a Christian movie (which I had initially thought was going to be another cheesy film) they played on Sat night called Time Changer and it really got me thinking about how many things have I compromised in my daily living? The premise of the movie was to show the dangers of teaching moral behavior without teaching Jesus as the absolute authority that moral behavior is for. So a Christian scholar in the 1800's travels to today's times to see our relativistic society that the contemporary church has come to accept and realizes how wrong it is to advocate Christian behavior without teaching that Christ is the source of morality. Anyway, it made me think of what I've come to accept, and even adopt in my own life. Breaking the Sabbath, allowing the misuse, and perhaps even my own misuse of God's holy name (I know I say OMG without even knowing it); 'secondary' curses like damn, crap, hell, ass; crude jokes - either making them or laughing at them, standards in watching movies...there's lots. Bonhoeffer in the Cost of Discipleship laments over how much the church (well, ME cuz I comprise part of the church body) has let the world seep into it..how it has knowingly compromised God's holy standards for the sake of being 'approachable' to the new-comer. If we compare how short we (contemporary Christians) fall against the measures of the 'old-school' Christians of the 1800's or those in the 1600's, or those in the New Testament days, how much more do we fall short of God's perfect standards for us? Sigh..anyway, I hope I can try to be more disciplined in the things I can work on..James 2 is one of my biggest challenges..

this is soo long..i just have a lot on my mind!