My Passion in Life

My heart is on FIRE. I walk around with an ache, a longing, a burn - I love Jesus more than I love anything or anyone else in the whole world. I desperately want to BEHOLD His face and His glory! Out of this place of knowing him, comes the desire to grow in the supernatural, to see the power of God on this Earth, to do the things Jesus did! I want to live a radical, crazy existence...to laugh until my sides burn and to spill joy out onto others. I want to commune with the Spirit of God, to be forever in love with Him, to stand up for life and destiny and truth and justice and mercy. Jesus is my passion.

Why This Blog?

This blog really began as a place for me to share about my journey as a revivalist. I am so hungry for revival, and I'm absolutely in-process. I figured it would be great to have a place where a twenty-something-year-old girl could be honest and vulnerable about what it's like to grow in the prophetic, what it's like start doing "treasure hunts", what it's like to pray for people and see them get healed, and and what it's like to long to see God move in her life, family, church, and community as she takes the Kingdom and the gospel everywhere she goes. 

I'm not at a famous revival school. I don't know everything. My theology might not be perfect. My application might be even less perfect. But my heart is filled with love for God, love for his people, for the Body of Christ, love for those who don't know God yet, and love for this beautiful world we live in. 

There Must Be More

Although I attended Charismatic/Spirit-filled churches (or whatever you want to call them) growing up, I didn't get a lot of practice on how to live a supernatural lifestyle. My dad had a fantastic library of powerful books, and I poured over every single one....there were books about revival, the lives and ministries of history's great healing evangelists, the gifts of the Spirit, and the desire of God's heart to move powerfully in our lives and in the world - but reading these books didn't seem to make something "happen" all of sudden. I always thought I would eventually see these kinds of things, but I didn't know what it was going to take! I kept looking for “the formula”.

My senior year of high school, I started attending a Bible study that we jokingly called "Sponges". Two ladies from church led the study, which consisted of digging into the Scriptures, listening to Heidi Baker tapes, soaking in God’s presence while playing International House of Prayer CDs (hence the name “Sponges”). We practiced praying prophetically over another, praying in the Spirit, and we attended a great Graham Cooke and Jack Deere conference in the Twin Cities, at a Lutheran church that was part of the Lutheran renewal movement.

After high school I went on to become a proud Badger at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During my five years at the UW, I was part of the pioneering team of a local chapter of a national college student ministry called Chi Alpha (www.chialpha.com), and that's where I first began to explore what it looked like to be an active participant in taking the Kingdom of God wherever I went. However, even though I took a few baby steps in that direction, and read Sean Smith’s Prophetic Evangelism and Bill Johnson’s When Heaven Invades Earth and was deeply struck by what they shared, I was distracted by the massive workload at Wisconsin’s very competitive business school. Looking back (and even while in the midst of it I felt this way), I wish I had gone after the Lord even more. I believe I would have seen much bigger things, if only I had known to go to God and say "Help! I'm so busy, I don't know how to pursue you and still do my work with excellence!" Now that I know him even better, I know he would have helped me do both. It seems obvious now, but it required a measure of faith I didn't have then and didn't ask for either.

As part of fulfilling degree requirements, I spent a semester abroad in Italy during the fall of my fifth year. Due to the intensity of my studies, I attended class and then went straight to the library, and was often gone from home from 8 AM to 10 PM.  Miserable with the material I was studying, I would spend 45 minutes deep in my books and then I would reward myself with 15 minutes of listening to worship music or a piece of a Bethel sermon podcast while writing in my prayer journal. I had quite the home-to-school commute, too, which included both walking and riding the bus and taking the tram. While I walked, I feasted on the fall beauty, praising God for his awesome creation, and then I would hop on a bus and pray in my heart for strangers that I felt the Lord was highlighting to me. My heart ached for the city. There was sadness and gloom and weariness all around me. I could feel the love of God for these people, and I could sense his longing to have them for himself. With my iPod playing and Misty Edwards singing about wasting her life for Jesus, and my own heart screaming "Yes, I will waste my life for you!", this period of time ended up being foundational to truly stepping into my destiny as a revivalist with 150% commitment. I experienced accelerated growth while spending time with God in the Secret Place, which interestingly enough, was often while I was out and about in a foreign city of 2 million lonely people. I rarely had good, solid internet access, and calling home to the United States was extremely expensive. My cell phone only contained enough money on it to make short, quick calls. I was unplugged from the rest of the world, even while in the middle of the economic center of an advanced country like Italy. And God met me in one encounter after another. I look back on that season as one of the sweetest times in my life. It was me, Jesus, my iPod, my Bible, and unsatiated hunger for more. I remember just dying, aching, for class to be over with so that I could put my earbuds in and soak in the presence of God. Sometimes I couldn't stand it any longer and would begin writing letters to the Lord while class was still going on. My hunger and longing for God grew and grew and grew, till I experienced for the first time in my life a prolonged season of being truly lovesick for Jesus.  That word has taken on a whole new meaning for me!

My encounters with God in the Secret Place really set me on fire in a whole different way - it was simply in the being with him that changed me and gave me the measure of faith I needed to step out a lot more. He put his finger on a couple things in my life and asked me if I would be willing to do anything for him, even if it meant letting go of some of these things. I said yes. A difficult but beautifully close season with the Lord ensued, as he stripped things off my life that were keeping me from being completely sold-out for him. Living for God requires a great level of sacrifice. There is a cost to following Jesus, but in exchange you get more of Him. And He is so worth it.

I'm still growing, changing, learning, but I know that right now I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, doing exactly what I'm supposed to do.

I work in the marketplace, am deeply involved in my church, and my heart loves Jesus and burns for revival in my life, my family, my city, my state, my country, and the world....

Small Beginnings

In conclusion, I have read a lot, I have seen quite a bit, but I'm done with just reading and seeing - I want to LIVE it out myself, in my own daily life. And then in turn, I want to help others discover that walking with God, truly walking with God, was NEVER meant to be boring.... My beginnings might be small, and I'm nowhere near where other revivalists are at (like my amazing brothers and sisters at Bethel Church in Redding, CA), but I'm on the road, moving from glory to glory!

 
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