Rain, Drowning, and a Burning "R"

Oh, and 'R' is for Righteousness

I'm not just real sure why I'm blogging right now ('blogging' is such a weird verb). But today was a really cool day. It rained crazy hard, probably harder than I've seen since I've lived in this house... It reminded me of Isaiah 55:10-11 "For as the rain and snow come down from heaven and do no return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it."

Isaiah 55 has a really sentimental place in the Mozambique team. One weekend, it popped up everywhere in separate conversations with people who were completely disconnected from each other relationally. It popped up again tonight with Colin, a guy on our team. So that's cool...

Anyway, 'drowning' came up tonight during Mozambique prayer. A few months ago, one of my closest friends, Blake Slatten, got a mental picture of me drowning in God's Glory. At first I'd swim down and go deep, then come up and ask for permission to go deeper. After a while, after getting more and more permission, God said, 'you always have permission, you don't even have to ask.' So then I swam down into the darkness and drowned in His Love. He killed me with His Presence, and that's exactly how we have to live. Dead.

We started prayer off with complete darkness, with Sigur Ros playing (gah, I love them). We usually light candles, but we just sat in the darkness, and told God we'd follow Him into it. We claimed that we will walk by faith and not by sight. It was pretty powerful.

I hung out with a supercool friend tonight, too. We went to Starbucks, and after ordering, we noticed everyone was staring out the window, and someone was on the phone with 911. We went over to the window, and there was a burning sign on the business next to Starbucks. The "R" of the name was on fire. Not that that's important, maybe I just typed that cause I title these posts before I write them. Yup, that's it. Well, it is pretty cool that the 9th of every month seems to have a lot of significance, and FIRE has been a huge theme for me for the past 6 months. Oh, and not that it really has anything to do with the R being on fire (I just like any reference I can make to Sesame Street- see intro sentence), but the theme of Righteousness is pretty heavy right now. My friend I hung out with (did I mention she was supercool?- I don't know why I think that's a single word) talked about that tonight, and I remember it being a recurring word yesterday, but it popped up again in prayer tonight... in Psalm 34:15- 'The eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry.' and verse 19- 'Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all.'

Anyway, that's about it.

Night!