Church Hurt...........

Happy Monday my friends!

As you know Sunday I lead worship at Fellowship Church and I feel like it went pretty well. I was nervous but once the music started and the songs began I just focused on making my own connection with God, and just placed it all in His hands. My brother and his wife came and once I saw them in the congregation I felt a little more at ease. Although I would love to have this position I can only trust that whatever decision is made that it will be God's will. I hope that a decision will be made soon, because I have to decide rather or not I should accept the position with the school board at one of the after school programs because I know how many hours I put into practicing the last two weeks and I would not have that luxury if I chose to do all three jobs. My preference would be to add the position of worship leader to my already permanent part time job that I have been at for over 8 years now, this would also allow me to be actively involved with my kids extracurricular activities, such as soccer. If I take the after school job I would miss most of Nick's games and a few of Allie's and I would rather not miss any if at all possible. Please be in prayer regarding this above my own desires I want to be in God's will.

I want to thank all of you who reached out to me on Saturday and Sunday about leading worship, I cannot begin to tell you how much it meant to me that so many of you sent prayers and encouraging words and even followed up afterwards to see how it went. I am truly blessed with some amazing people in my life.

I want to talk a little today about 'church hurt'. Most of us know what 'church hurt' is and many of us have even experienced it, but for anyone who does not know, basically it is when either a church body, or group of people at a church has done something or said something that deeply wounded someone, so deep in fact that some have chosen to have nothing to do with the church because of it. This can be anything from being publically humilitated, alienated, spoken lies about, gossiped about, etc..I have to be completely honest right now about how angry this makes me. We, as Christians, are representatives of Christ, and when we fail to show love, grace and mercy then we are not Christ like at all! Matthew, Mark and Luke says that if anyone causes someone who believes in Jesus to stumble that it would be better if they tied a large stone around their neck and be thrown into the sea! That is how important our roles are as Christians.

It would kill me to think that I hurt someone so badly that because of me they may never know how truly wonderful it is to have a relationship with Jesus Christ. How horrible to think that we as humans could cause a pain so deep as to turn people off to what Jesus has to offer them. How incredibly selfish and arrogant. As you can see this really lights me up and I don't mean in a good way more like an atomic bomb type of lighting me up. I don't even want to imagine how this affects the Father, but I am guessing, based on some of the stories I have read in the Bible, that He is NOT pleased.

Being a Christian takes complete surrender, it is all or nothing. There is no lukewarm, it is hot or cold, you are in or you are out. It is a way of life that must be lived out everyday, in every way, with everyone, not based on this or that religion or doctrine of faith, or altered depending on your mood or the mood and actions of others. You could say "but we are only human", no we are not ONLY human, we have the Spirit of the living God dwelling within us and we need to allow Him to do everything it takes for Him to make us more like Christ and the only way to do that is by feeding that spirit instead of the spirit of human nature.

If you have been deeply wounded by a "Christian" or church body, I am so sorry that instead of experiencing the love, grace and mercy of a loving Savior, all you experienced was the ugly side of the sinful nature of humanity. Jesus loves you and truly desires to have a personal relationship with you and longs to heal the hurt that you carry around deep inside of you caused by the people who should have shown you the love, grace and mercy of Jesus. Don't cheat yourself out of the best relationship you could ever have, and don't let anyone, past, present or future, be the reason. There are millions of people walking a path of faith, and many of those people will fail horribly at being like Christ, but there is only ONE JESUS and it is Him that I encourage you to give a chance and I happen to know He has been waiting on you.