Red Moon Rising: How 24-7 Prayer is Awakening a Generation

This book was a phenomenal read, with lots of impactful stories about what God is doing in places around the world. It is all about the 24-7 prayer movement that is going on around the world right now. This is such an amazing concept, to think about places being open 24-7 with people coming in to pray at all hours of the day. There was a group that had a 24-7 prayer session at my school, but I wasn’t able to attend. One of the things that it made me most wan t to do is be able to visit some of the places while I’m in Europe this summer.

Bad Stewarding

So, I like to think that I am generally a good steward of my stuff. I found out that this is not always the case. Since before I drove 144 miles to go home, my car started making a ticking kind of sound. I did not know what it was. I drove around Tri-Cities for a couple of weeks, and all the way back to Spokane with this sound going. It wasn't until four or five days later, driving home from a friends house that I finally figured out what the problem might be. My check gage light (normally only for when I'm out of gas) kept flickering on and off, and the oil indicator needle was going crazy. I've known that I'm way past due on changing my oil, but that's generally how it is, but I had no idea that I was almost out of oil. Running out of oil, if you don't know, is a very bad issue for a car. When I checked my oil dipstick at the nearest gas station, I realized that I was very low. It made me late for church, but at least my car made it there.

I've realized that maybe I need to work a little bit harder at being a good steward of the stuff that God has blessed me with.

The Cross Simply Put

For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; (Ephesians 2:8)

We have all fallen short of the Glory of God and sinned, and deserve death. God sent his son (Jesus) to die for our sins. This is foundational in Christianity. I was hit again with this reality in a place that I didn't expect. I was listening to Akon's Sorry, Blame It On Me and was impacted by the fact that what he was talking about (not specifically) what what Jesus did for us.

You can check out the music video;


Akon says that "Even though the blame’s on you, I’ll take that blame from you. You could put that blame on me." That is what Jesus tells us. Yes, you have sinned and deserve death... but I will take that blame and die on the cross for you. Even though Akon probably wasn't thinking about any of this, God still used it to speak to me.

Living Missional

I continually find myself coming back to thinking about how much more there must be to this life. One way that I think about my life, is looking at it being something that must be missional. My definition of missional is as follows.

Missional means purposely living every day (hour & minute) focused on doing Gods will. Missional living includes both an emphasis of our lives being focus not on the temporal but on Gods mission. Along with looking to Gods will, it also necessarily deals in concrete continual actions.

Over spring break, I was blessed to be able to go on mission trip to Salt Lake City Ut. The trip was phenomenal. I heard Renea (the Director of CBC’s NCM) mention the word missional, and started to think about it. The previous is what I came up with to comprehend the word. It flows along the same lines and another quote I’ve heard before (I’ve heard it attributed to a number of saints) “Pray as if it all depends on GOD, and live as if it all depends on YOU.” The mixture of waiting on God for everything, yet fully believing that you want to step out and act in practical ways is a vital concept in our Christian lives.

The trip was made up of in-reaches & out-reaches. Meaning we got to do things focused on the body of Christ (both within the team and outside of the team) and do stuff for people who where unbelievers. Probably the most exciting thing that I got to do was lead to different people to accept Christ into their lives.

Other than that we did a lot of other things;

• Fri 23 -- We started off the trip traveling to Boise ID, where we had an airsoft war.
  
  
• Sun & Mon 24-25 -- We got to spend time passing out DVD’s door to door. Salt Lake has a huge population of people in the LDS church. The DVD’s were put out by Good News For LDS. The movie focused on the teaching of the bible comparing it to the teaching of Joseph Smith and the LDS Church. It was really well put together.
  
  
• Tue, Wend & Thu 26-28 -- We did a lot of various activities. Each morning we broke up into groups and went out to do service (for churches, people, organizations). Early afternoon we would prepare for a kids club that we put on. Two of the evenings we helped at the churches food pantry and the third night we went and ministered at a youth group.
  
  
  

So, I guess I’m famous

I wanted to let all of you know that God is so amazing. A couple of weeks ago, I had a reporter call me from the Tri-City Herald. She was doing a story on Jubilee Youth Ranch. The reporter, Sara Schilling, interviewed me for like 45 minutes. I thought that was a long time. I was blessed to be able to share a lot of my testimony with her and that some of it could be placed into the paper. I didn’t realize how awesome it would be. She said that she wanted to come and meet me, and bring a photographer.

A couple of weeks later her and Rich (the photographer) came and visited me. They hung out at the RHA bake sale that I was attending, went to my classes with me. It was like I was famous. They had me posing in the back of the class during breaks (everybody kept whispering and looking back at us).

They hung out until 5 or so that night just talking (especially about God). I guess they met with my mom, for like 45 minutes too. Well, the article finally came out. It was in the Sunday newspaper (the most distributed edition) and was on the front page. The entire article is about Jubilee, but God’s story of restoration in my life is all thought it. The story itself took up 1/3 of the front page, and two entire pages on the 6^th and 7^th pages. I was absolutely blown away by the story.