When You Give The Wind Faces

When slavery ends,

What will people say ended it?

-Melissa Russell

 

How do you explain impossible?

One of my sons regularly asks us to explain the meaning of words to him. My Jack Attack has Autism, which for him means he doesn’t think in abstract. Everything has to be shown. Every idea must have a picture.

My wife Sheri and I routinely explain an idea dozens and dozens of times before he can begin to reach a basic understanding. It is in the repeated demonstration that the idea begins to take root.

One of the best ways to teach Jack is to ask him to first look at our faces. Sheri will repeatedly demonstrate an idea while telling Jack to “look at my face.” As he intently studies her face, he begins to pick up on social cues for abstract ideas like sad, frustrated, happy, pretending, or his all time favorite: being silly.

I think the best way to explain the things that stir your heart is often to do the same thing: give it a face. I have rarely had my spirit stirred by bullet points…

I say all this because there is this movement of women my wife has fallen in love with, called the IF:Gathering. Whenever friends of mine hear about it and want to know more, no matter how hard I try I can never really explain it. It’s not because I’m a guy, it’s that it’s just one of those things.

So I try to give it faces.

I talk about this woman from my church I’ve known for a long time, whose girls my sister used to babysit when they were little. Her husband used to take us wakeboarding when I was in high school, and they both were youth leaders at our church for a while. I talk about how they were already awesome.

Then she got connected with the IF:Gathering.

It was like God blew up her entire life. She talks different. She prays with boldness. She uses the word anointed all the time. She full on dove in, and women all around our city, and even refugees in far off places, are loved as a result.

Or I say how they need to listen to one of our good friends whose personality is as passionate as her fiery red hair. She got everyone into this whole IF thing, even though she wasn’t able to explain it herself! She tried telling me what it was a bunch of times, but in the end, I just rested in the fact that no one can be that excited about something that is not covered in God’s fingerprints.

She is the captain, and we love the course she set so many of our church families on.

Perhaps I should talk about the silent partner? A bit of a one-woman party in a box. This woman is so captured by the idea of revival that she has been praying for our church and city ever since I have known her. Her faith is so deep and her generosity so bold, I’m not sure there are enough words to describe how she has impacted all the women in our church through her faith, love and holding all her life out to God with an open hand. She has helped pull off our IF:Local in so many ways that no one will ever know. And she likes it that way.

Maybe I should just talk about how IF has impacted my own wife. How the stirring of the Holy Spirit through these women awakened something deep inside her, and helped bring out a gifting of music and compositions that had been lying dormant in her for years. How I come home to her writing songs. Songs from deep in her soul that she doesn’t really think are that great, but when she asks me what I think, I can’t talk from all the tears. The songs of her soul just take my heart to God. It’s beauty upon beauty.

How do you explain things like that?

But it doesn’t just stop there.

What makes their stories so compelling is all the things no one sees. It would be inspiring to talk about their renewed faith when everything is just living in sunshine glory everyday with no bad hair days, but quite another to be thrown into the storm and still sing out praise.

When the journey leads to there.

I remember Sheri talking to me recently about how the IF leaders in Merced were getting together, and as they ate together and talked about upcoming events, they began to share about the many hard things each of them were having to walk through in their lives. How each was in the middle of burdens, broken friendships, financial struggles and felt just a weight to the journey at that moment.

It reminds me of a rant one of the writers of the bible, a guy named Paul, penned out as he was traveling across Greece sharing about Jesus.

“Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent adrift on the sea; many times on journeys, danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own countrymen, danger from the Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger on the sea, danger among those posing as believers…”       –   2 Corinthians 11

I have read this passage a few times, but it never had much of an impact on me until I was in college and heard a pastor talk about how the most interesting part of Paul’s rant is that none of those places were that dangerous until Paul got there.

When Paul showed up, all hell broke loose.

How crazy is that? His faith was so solid and the Holy Spirit blazed out from Paul so intensely that the only thing Satan could do was try to kill him over and over and over and over!

Jesus himself told us “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” John 16:33

He did not say this because He was running out of things to talk about. He said it because it is the reality of the path of God that there will be hard times, but God is still in control.

To put it in a way that speaks so loudly to me, I heard a pastor named Sherwood once say that, “God and the devil both want you dead, but for different reasons!”

The devil wants you dead because he knows he is on borrowed time when we start living, I mean really living how Jesus lived. So often the enemy is loudest right before the miracles come, and if evil can’t snag you anymore, it will gash at your family instead.

This is why Jesus wants you dead too.

Jesus wants you dead to your old life. We are all so tempted to put our trust in our status and position, or to see our finances or family as a sign that we are doing it right.

But you cannot take hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of you unless you die to yourself first. We must allow Jesus to not only move into our hearts, but also to redesign them. To let him rip out the greed, lust, selfishness and envy each day so that He can replace it with generosity, discipline, love and hope.

When this begins to happen in our lives, the game changes. As Jennie Allen said so fantastically at this year’s Gathering:

“When you have nothing left to protect,

and nothing to prove…

you become dangerous.”

I was in tears as they led the confessional moments on Friday night at this year’s Gathering. I watched all those phones light up whenever someone wanted to silently express the sins that were keeping them from living like Jesus, and I was in awe of the power of bearing out a common ache. It was beautiful to see the reactions of the ladies as they realized they were not alone in the pain.

That we are not all free.

That our families are still enslaved.

That our neighborhoods are filled with strife.

That our churches are bursting with striving.

 

And that we want off that carousel.

It’s why I support the IF:Gathering. It’s not made with me in mind, but the effect it has had on my family through my wife’s crashing into Jesus has changed it all for us.

It has changed our marriage.

Guys, you can try to patronize it all you want, but I have learned this lesson well the last two years: when your wife gets captured by the Holy Spirit – you’re next.

IF ladies breathe straight Jesus fire.

It is changing how we love our kids.

We pray more.

We love harder.

We give each other grace easier.

We have endured more together on this journey.

We have been up against more spiritual warfare than ever before and it has pushed us to link arms together. It is so beautiful.

It is changing how we love our church.

We almost left it all last year. We were so close, but God spoke into our lives through things like IF, and pushed us to not jump ship but to do the exact opposite. Stay and become so rooted in the church that leaving would feel like a death. So we did. And many of our friends did not. And that still hurts.

Not everyone will understand your journey.

It is changing how we see our city.

We are best known for being on all the lists that no city wants to be on. We are most famous for being a city that people pass through on the way to somewhere else.

Somewhere better.

If you went to high school here, you un-affectionately call it ‘Merdead.’ So far from the meaning of the city’s name, Merced – the city of Mercy!

Yet, so many at our church are talking differently now about our city.

We talk about how ‘something is happening.’ No one is genuinely sure what exactly is happening, but it is just in the air, like when you walk under huge power lines and can hear the energy crackling above your head.

God is moving in, and women (and men) all over are city are so expectant in anticipation.

So what is the IF:Gathering, in my opinion?

It’s a place where ladies can be real.

It is a movement that has changed my family for good. It is a weekend where we are all reminded again that we all hurt, faith is a hard journey at times, and that we are loved by a God that does not just offer freedom, but purpose.

A God who is calling us out to embrace the promise he gave Joshua in the bible that “I have given you every place on which the sole of your foot treads…”

Who is calling us to be the faces of God’s impossible.

Who is setting us free.

And…if the Son makes you free, then you are unquestionably free.   (John 8:36 AMP)