Holy Tired-ness!!

Every day only comes once. 

The above statement doesn't have anything to do with what we talked about today, but at the same time it has everything to do with everything we talked about this week.  Every day only comes once, and everything matters to God.  Not just big, massive moments of praise or big, massive miracles, but also the little things too.  Like talking to a friend, riding a bike, sitting on the shoreline and enjoying a sunset...writing a blog.  God created everything that we know as matter, and everything God created, matters to God.  Matter matters.

Today Nat talked about the Holy Spirit.  He talked about how the Holy Spirit is not an, "it" and The Holy Spirit is completely uncontrollable.  The Holy Spirit is God, after all.

Nat mainly talked about how the Holy Spirit moved within the church, and how the Holy Spirit is almost completely disregarded in modern churches.  He gave us the following quotes:

"The church is the church only when it exists for others.  To make a start, it should give away all its property to those in need."
-Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison

"Every day
I am afraid
That He died in vain
because He is buried in our churches."
-Dorothee Soelle

Nat then posed us with a question: Is Jesus ACTUALLY the Lord over your entire life?  At the beginning of the book of Acts, Jesus is literally Lord and King over the community.  Every thing they do is with Jesus in mind first and foremost.  Jesus and the Holy Spirit were the ones who made it possible for humanity to sit down with God and be in relationship with Him.  Nat said this: "The Spirit brings us into Jesus' story, and by entering Jesus' story, we enter into God's story."

Nat talked about the Holy Spirit in regards to suffering.  A lot of people get frustrated when they suffer and don't see results from their suffering for God, and their suffering inadvertently becomes about them, and not God or the church.  Nat presented the idea of Stephen again.  Stephen was stoned to death after giving a radical statement.  Stephen's stoning opened Paul's eyes, and that led to a massive spread of the gospel.  Stephen never saw the fruit of his suffering, but He trusted that God/The Holy Spirit was using His suffering in the greater story.

Nat then left us with a final quote considering suffering and The Holy Spirit: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad, petty, unsexy ways every single day."(David Foster Wallace).

Then Nat left, and we had several hours of intense prayer/worship/fellowship.  It was awesome, but extremely tiring.  So I'm gonna go, and I can't promise I'll make a post all weekend just so I can relax.  But we'll see.

Catch you all later!