Friend? Best friend?

A friend is defined (by ever-so-reliable dictionary.com) as so: "friend (noun)- a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard." I define it as someone I can rely on, someone loyal, someone trustworthy.

Trustworthy. There's a cool word. Worthy of my trust. So often I find that I trust the "wrong" person with a secret- it always seems to end up spiraling back to me. Something I've realized in my own life is that I'm often so ready to trust the other mortal humans around me- those who are just as flawed as I am, and yet I'm holding myself back from trusting Christ, almost as if I don't or feel like I can't be sure that He is worthy of my trust. Why don't we treat Christ as someone who is worthy of our trust? Has He ever failed us? Has He ever given up, decided our case to be hopeless, walked away in disgust? No! He has not, and He never will, like it says in Deuteronomy 31:6, "Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the LORD your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you." Did you catch that? NEVER leave. NEVER. In fact, He goes with us. That, my friends, is quite the promise.

Something else about our friendship with Christ is that it's the best friendship we can ever have. Seriously, if you think about it, a best friend isn't that uncommon. But a best friend who would die for you, even when they knew everything about you, even when you'd given up and turned your back on them before? That's true friendship. And friendship like that can only be found in our relationship with our creator, Jesus Christ.

Phil Wickham!

I'm not someone who really enjoys change. Let's just make that clear. I also don't like making decisions that involve anyone other than myself. So yeah...I tend to sick with old routines and habits, along with styles, favorites, ect...you get the picture. Because of this, I don't usually update the music on my iPhone. I tend to get some music on there and just stay with it, partially because I'm perfectly happy with what I have and also because once, when I was attempting to update my phone, I cleared it of all data. Yeah. Not a happy camper. :[. So I now try to avoid changing it around if I can. Anyway...last night, my brother had just gotten all this new music, and I *really* wanted to put the new music on my iPhone because I was sure I'd get a chance to listen to it throughout the week. (For all of you who don't know, public school tends to leave you with a TON of time in class to do whatever you want. Seriously.) I plugged my phone in, and several...mishaps...later, I was happily removing my iPhone from his computer, very proud of the technological achievment I had just completed. I had downloaded 2 new albums from a "new" artist (new to me), Phil Whickham.

Wow. That's all I can say.

This Christian artist reaches a depth in his songs that I find missing in a large majority of Christian media today. Let me post for you some of the lyrics from my current favorite, After Your Heart..

"Let's be the revolution that lives for holding nothing back, nothing back,
We're after Your heart, after Yourr heart,
all of the walls now, are breaking apart,
live like we see it, love like we mean it,
this is the start, we're after Your heart."

And then...

"Love with no conditions,
It lives for holding nothing back, nothing back"
"We're after Your heart, we're never going to stop, untill we reach You."

This song, along with "Home", really grabbed my attention. All of the songs are fantastic, it's just that those two happen to be my favorites :].

So please, go check it out! Honestly some of the best Christian music I've heard in a long time.
http://philwickham.com/

Emily

Silence.

Today, I went with my family to the local ice skating rink. I am not a fan of ice skating (ughhhh. so not my favorite AT ALL.), so I chose to just sit and watch my siblings zoom around the rink. As I sat on the side of the rink next to my brother (who was reading the 6th Harry Potter book....I can't wait untill he's finished so we can talk about the series! :D!) I was thinking about being silent. Honestly, the last time I can remember being absolutely, totally silent (with no distractions) is about...3 weeks ago. And that was for about 20 minutes. Yeah. Not really a past time I regularly invest in. I'm thinking about changing that...I think that being quiet is really a discipline. When we are quiet rather than loud, we have more time to think and reflect- to pray, to talk to God, just to muse over our latest thoughts. In Psalm 46:10, it says, "'Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the natoins, I will be exalted in the earth.'" And Proverbs 29:20 says, "Do you see a man who speaks in haste? There is more hope for a fool than him." I think that it can really benefit our relationship with God and our earthly relationships if we could just learn to hold our tongues and just be silent.

the Fellowship of the Unashamed.

Hello everyone,

Thank you SO much for your comments on my last post! I just read them this morning (apparently my email won't notify me if there are comments...hmm...) and I got a huge grin on my face while I was reading them. Thanks for being so faithful in your readings!

Anyway, this past weekend (Feb. 5-7), I went to Spring Hill with my youth group. We had a blast-the band was Red Umbrella, and our speaker was John Vermilya (go to his website or something...google him! so great!). He was fantastic! I came away very challenged in my faith. The theme for the weekend was "One life, one faith, one God" and the prevailing question was "If we are truly disciples of Christ, are we showing that in our lives?" I think that we, as American Christians, don't always evaluate things from the perspective of "how is this glorifying God", and we instead make up excuses about "not wanting to be too extreme" or "not wanting to scare off the non-believers we are trying to reach." The conclusion I've come to is this: we (especially as Americans) are very accustomed to and expect our "comforts"- cell phone, iPod, laptop, car...you know what I'm talking about. We get so caught up in our selfish desires for these things, but we never stop to ask God about where He wants us to spend that money/time/whatever. We say that we don't want to be "too crazy" in our faith, but how is that even possible? How can we become "too extreme"- the more we surrender to Christ, the more like Him we can become. In this movie we just watched in my history class, called Schindler's List (not my fave...), at the end of the movie, the main character is looking around, realizing the Jewish (the movie is about the Holocaust) lives he would have been able to save, if he had just been willing to let go of _____. He is brought to tears and realizes that so many people could have been reached, if he had just not been so selfish. I don't want to be like that at the end of my life- when I get to heaven, I want to know that I had used everything that was entrusted to me to fully benefit God's kingdom to the extent I was able. I guess I just think...how can we kid ourselves any longer? God can see through our excuses. He isn't fooled. Let's just stop trying to fool everyone around us and turn our lives to Him. Not that we can do it on our own- in fact, far from it. The more we surrender to Christ, the more we must rely on Him. I know this isn't as easy as I'm making seem (ha! easy? no way!) but in 1 Corinthians 13:11, it says, "When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me." Am I putting my childish ways behind me? Notice that the Bible doesn't talk about this time between the two stages of life, where the writer was going through "adolescence". Why are we, as American Christian teens, allowing ourselves to go through that stage?

Anyway, yes. Those are the thoughts that I've had over the past week... I'm tired of the excuses and compromises. I'm ready to give it all, because that's all this life is about.

Em

oh! Here's this sweet quote- kinda sums up what I've been thinking about.

"I am a part of the fellowship of the unashamed...The die has been cast. I've stepped over the line...I am a disciple of His. I won't look back, let up, slow down, back away or be still. My past is redeemed, my present makes sense, and my future is secure. I am finished with low living, sight walking, small planning, smooth knees, colorless dreams, tame visions, mundane talking, chintzy giving, and dwarfed goals. I don't have to be right, first, tops, recognized, praised, regarded or rewarded. My face is set, my gait is fast, my goal is heaven, my road is narrow, my way rough, my companions are few, my guide is reliable, my mission is clear. I cannot be bought, compromised, detoured, lured away, turned back, diluted, delayed. I will not flinch in the face of sacrifice, hesitate in the presence of adversity, or negotiate at the table of the enemy. I am a part of the fellowship of the unashamed."
-Don Ray (missionary to the Congo, 1940s)