Brothers.

There is probably nothing and no one on this earth that has caused my heart more joy, more tears, more excitement, and more anguish over the years than brothers. I'm not just talking about the two I'm related to, although they are definitely at the top of that list, as they're the ones I am most tied to and thankful for. But I'm also talking about quite a few guys in my life--some of whom are my true brothers in Christ, and some of whom I have for years prayed and longed to see become that. I have brothers I know personally, and brothers I more know of (a group which stretches to include some music artists whom I feel connected to in part because of their music). But for me, on a certain level, they are all, undeniably, my brothers. I care about them on a deep level, and want to see them become all they can be, all they were created to be.

God has abundantly blessed me with many awesome brothers in Christ over the past few years--men whom I'd trust with my life and who can make me smile just thinking about them. I count it an honor to be "related" to these guys, to be able to share some portion of my life with them, and to get to know them well enough to pray specifically for what I see the Lord doing in and through them. God is building some incredible men after His heart in this generation; I can vouch for that.

As for my two younger brothers (who are stuck with me 'til they die or I do), I may never have words for how deeply I love them nor how fiercely I desire to see them become the men God has called them to be. My life and my sister's would have been dull, ugly, and pretty glum without our two youngest siblings and their laughs and adventures, and even their snide remarks about being taller than me. As much as they've aggravated or frustrated me at various points over the years, they have helped shape me in ways nobody else could, and I count it among my richest joys to be their sister. Greater things are yet to come in both my brothers' lives, and I cannot wait to see it all unfold.

There are also guys I've either grown up with or come to know at some point along the way, whom I've specifically felt called to pray for. I don't believe God puts anyone on your heart for no reason. Because of that, my heart will continue to cry out for them to see Him, to know Him, to yield up their lives and find that real life begins at that point of surrender, that the plans God has for them are so much bigger and greater and harder and infinitely more worthwhile than anything anyone but Him could ever dream up. I can't pretend my heart doesn't often break when I see or think of these guys, whom in my book are still brothers though they may be distant from our Father; but beyond the pain of hurting for where they're at, I see hope. I see potential, because I know God didn't put them on this earth for nothing, any more than He laid them on my heart for no reason.

I fight for my brothers. I don't just pray for them soft and sweet. Sure, maybe I do at times, but for the most part, when I'm praying for any of my brothers, there's this sort of growl that rises up inside my soul. It's often a battle, a pleading with the One who is stronger to overthrow the attempts of enemy forces to thwart His plans for my brothers' lives, a blatant defiance towards the lies that either say there's no hope or that the place they're at is "good enough" when God's still got bigger plans for them.

Because no matter how far any of my brothers have come, the fact they're still breathing means their purpose on this earth is not finished yet. I've been blessed to the point of awe to see God answer prayers that asked Him to do more than I knew to ask in brothers' lives. There are deeper and greater and harder and more glorious things ahead.

So bros, whether I've tossed a football or a frisbee with you, played tag or "dogs" or Jedis or Nintendo with you when we were younger, worked with you, or just talked with you; whether I've known you for a month or a decade (or more)...chances are, I've prayed for you (for the vast majority of you, it's been too many times to count). And it's not that I don't pray for my sisters; but there's something that kicks into gear when it comes to praying for my brothers that's incredibly hard to describe. I want to see each of you become all you can be, but even as you are every single one of you has blessed my life in one way or another.

So run hard. Love deeply. Surrender recklessly. Look up.
God's plans for you are better than I can know, but I'll keep looking for glimpses of them. And I won't stop praying for you.

Rak khazak!
-Kala

Notes on Music, Part 2: What Prayer Has to Do with It

I feel like I'm more or less stumbling through this series on music and worship. Despite my attempts to plan out the order of what to bring up when and how to arrange the topics of all that's been welling up within me and germinating for so long, it seems I just have to take things one step at a time and let it build upon itself as I go. Left to myself, I'd be prone to wander off and leave it unfinished, but God's not letting me off the hook with this one, and He keeps pressing things on my heart which inevitably force themselves out through typed words on a screen.

Words like prayer. 

I don't know what connotation that word has for you, but for me it pulls at the corners of my eyes and mouth as it stirs up memories of thousands of moments over the past few years of my life in which God has drastically altered and deepened my perspective on what prayer is, where its purpose lies, and why it's important. It's been a journey (one I'm more than a little certain is still far from over). Among all those moments that trace it are sprinkled tears...laughter...fear...joy...anguish...wonder...trust...timid faith...surrender...confidence...uncertainty...desperation...expectancy...awe...and triumph (and probably a lot more descriptors/emotions, but you get the idea). 

So what is prayer? The simplest definition is that it's a conversation. And I know I can't be the only one who's ever convinced myself with my flawed reasoning that there's no need to pray because God already knows what you're thinking, what you've done, and what will happen. It's true, He's all-knowing and fully aware of all that (so often much more aware than we even are). So maybe some other terminology will help clarify: prayer is communion. I know, I know--that's a religious term. But I think it gets to the heart of the matter a little better. See, prayer is more than just words. Sometimes prayer has no words; sometimes it's an internal groaning or longing or a song in your soul that can't even be put into melody. Sometimes it's an expression of things only He can understand. Sometimes it's a plea, sometimes a praise.

Prayer is where your heart, mind, and soul collide with God's. 

 So what does prayer have to do with worship? Everything. Prayer is worship. The point of prayer, ultimately, is worship. Because when your heart is laid bare before the One who made it, when you get a glimpse into His heart for you or for someone else, it results in worship. When you pour your thoughts out to Him and let His Word change the way you think and the way you reason, it inevitably drives you to a deeper adoration of the One whose thoughts will always be higher than yours. When your soul is engaged in His mission on this earth, your will surrendered to His, your eyes watching for His promises to be fulfilled--you experience His greatness on a deeper level, and it produces worship. 

Prayer changes things. I serve a God who is perfectly capable to do absolutely whatever He wants and who doesn't have to include us in any way at all to do it. And yet He chose to let us take part in His work. He didn't have to. He is perfectly able to be God. He's good at it. So good at it that He chose to work in this world in a way that no one but Him would ever have even considered. I mean, seriously, would you give somebody a job to do when you already knew they didn't have the ability to carry it out? Would you hire a preschooler as a college professor? A high-school dropout as a foreign diplomat? A teenage pop singer as a war general? We as people look for the most highly qualified to fill a position. But God takes a position only He can fill--the role of representing Him in this earth--and chooses to use broken, helpless human beings who are utterly incapable of doing anything without Him (He supplies us with the very air we breathe, for crying out loud!). Are we a perfect representation of what He's like? Not even close. Which is how we become an even more perfect demonstration of who He is. 

You see, if I could be perfect by my own willpower or ability or know-how, I wouldn't need to know God, much less depend on Him. If being His representative on this earth meant that I never failed or faltered or in any way fell short of His excellence, nobody would ever see His power, His glory, or His redemption. Because if that were the case, people wouldn't see Him; they'd just see me, being perfect. If I never wronged anyone, no one would be able to glimpse God changing my heart and causing me to come back to them asking forgiveness. If my feelings were never hurt by another's words or actions, no one would see the fingerprint of His forgiveness in my life. If I never failed, no one would see the story of His grace in my life, redeeming my failures and proving God's might in my life as He enables me to overcome. If I never had to wrestle with sin, there would be no victory over it. And if I could walk this life out perfectly all by myself, nobody would ever glimpse the incredible beauty of the Church as one Body made up of many members and parts, working together, forgiving one another, helping each other, serving one another as we all serve Him.

Prayer emphasizes our dependence on God. It reminds our souls of their position: unworthy but loved, helpless but empowered by His Spirit, finite in the presence of the One who is infinite, broken but in the hands of the One who makes all things new. It reminds us Whose we are, draws us to worship, and sets our lives on a trajectory of accomplishing His will in this earth. 

Ever notice how often praying for God to change someone or something around you more often results in Him changing you? In a way that's central to much of what I have to say in upcoming posts. When we hear terms like revival or think of God's intentions for this world, we have a tendency to think in terms of others. We zoom out to a larger scale, of how much better life would be if other people would conform to His will. What we (myself very much included) so often fail to consider is the fact that when it comes down to it, no one really wants to be left on the sidelines as an onlooker while all the action happens, do we? If everyone around you experienced the transforming power of the Gospel in ways that turned their lives upside down in the best possible way and sent them running hard after God, living for His glory...would you want to be on the outside looking in? I know I don't. I want to be in the middle of the action. And that's where all of us--each and every one of us, if you call yourself by His Name--are meant to be.

We get to participate in His plans for this world and how they play out. 

God didn't give you a front-row seat to the big game. He chose you to play on His team. It's not all about you, nor is it meant to be, but you are meant to be a part of it. And that too, should lead us straight into worship of the One whom it is all about. 

Prayer increases faith. When you ask God to do something, you're also placing your dependence on Him. You're placing your trust in His ability to cause everything in your life to work together for your good and His glory in the end. You're placing your hope in His love and faithfulness. You're placing your faith in Him even when you can't wrap your mind around how things could possibly work out. You're submitting your will to His and acknowledging that He knows better than you do how things should go. The more your heart and mind gradually become transformed to look more like His, the more your prayers will start to look like His (yes, God Himself prays for you.). And when you see prayer answered? It leads to worship. 

It feels appropriate to finish this post with a song, yet again. Not sure if this will become a pattern for this series, but this song pretty well sums up the desire and purpose of our hearts being made to look more like our King's:

Plans

Lately, I've been in or around quite a few conversations in which someone (sometimes myself) has said, "I don't know what it's gonna look like." And, believe it or not, those words have been deeply encouraging to me.

You see, I have grown up amid a culture that preached to me continually the importance of having a plan. When I was in high school, I was told I needed to set goals for myself, both short-term and long-term. I needed to have clear aims to focus on, self-imposed "deadlines," so-to-speak. Because, if you don't have a plan and don't know where you're going, you're obviously not going to get anywhere or do anything worthwhile with your life...right?

I struggled with this because at that time I honestly didn't know what my future was going to look like. There were a lot of things I could see myself doing as a job, but when it came to choosing what to pursue, I felt completely at a loss. Adults in my life told me it was okay to not have a clear picture just yet, as I still had several more years to figure it out before going to college and picking a major, etc.

But then something incredible happened. Just as I was starting to formulate my short-term goals for what would happen once I graduated college, God intervened. He started to nudge me down a different path than anything I had ever considered. As I walked a little hesitantly down this new path that started with putting college off for a year to attend Ellerslie, I tasted for the first time the sheer bliss of having only a general sense of what God was about to do in my life. I knew He had been clear that this was where and how I was supposed to spend the next few months (actually, at the time I thought I would be there for a full year), but as for what it would look like, I had no clue nor any way to predict it. Ellerslie was just starting up the summer I went there; there was no predicting just what was going to happen with students from all over coming to this tiny town in Colorado with the goal of pursuing Christ together.

Since that summer, it seems every major step I've taken--and even the smaller steps, too--have followed a very similar pattern of knowing where God was leading me but not having any kind of a clear or easily-articulated picture of what it was going to look like. And over and over again, I've seen God work in amazing ways, doing more than I ever could have imagined. His thoughts aren't like ours; He sees the big picture, as well as every tiny and minute detail that goes into it. Consequently, His ways are different than ours--they're higher; they're better (Isaiah 55:8). And they tend to look crazy or even a little more than crazy in the eyes of the world, because they don't follow the same line of thinking as our limited point of view. His plans often cause us to take risks--risks that don't make sense, even to us at times. But they always cause us to rely on Him more and in ways that we wouldn't otherwise.

And that is why I get excited when I hear someone talking about starting something new or doing things differently, and those words, "I don't know what it's going to look like exactly," come out of that person's mouth: because in those words I recognize a sense of willingness to let God take the lead and orchestrate the steps in carrying out whatever dream or desire or "goal" the person may be talking about. It's in those times where where we don't know exactly what will happen next or what something is about to look like--what an idea will look like when it's actually being lived out--that our faith grows and our hearts begin to taste the deep joy of allowing God to have all there is of us.

"The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps." -Proverbs 16:9

When People I Respect Break My Heart...

My confidence is not in people; it’s in Christ. Were it not for that, by now I probably would have been much more deeply shaken when people who are leaders in my generation give me reason to lose a measure of respect for them. However, it still grieves me deeply to see that kind of thing happen, especially with leaders who are Christians.

Lies can be powerful, but the Truth is stronger. Which is part of why I am not personally shaken in my beliefs or my stance when I see someone else believing or teaching a lie. But at the same time, witnessing that kind of thing always hits me squarely in the heart, because it grieves me to see anyone deceived themselves and/or deceiving others without knowing it.

I am currently in the middle of the third book in Ted Dekker’s Circle Trilogy, which have been my first introduction to his writings. These books are amazing and have deeply encouraged me in my own writing because of how poignantly and powerfully they display the Gospel through fiction and fantasy. Many times while reading these books, even though I haven’t finished yet, I have paused in awe as I witnessed within them something I have begun to glimpse in recent years about writing and its purpose. The ultimate purpose of writing is to communicate the truth, and fiction and fantasy provide an incredibly unique and—I believe—needed (at least to an extent) opportunity to talk about things that are real in terms of things that aren’t. Good writing will always, invariably, express at least some aspect of reality—be it human nature, a particular society or culture, whatever. But the most important thing any of it can point to is the reality of the things of God—who He is, what He has done, how He interacts with people, how He is at work in our world.

The Circle Trilogy contains a powerful and creative view of creation, the Fall, Christ’s sacrifice, and the new life we now have access to. Which is why I love them and part of why, when I found out Ted Dekker was coming out with a new sort of mini-series, I trusted him as a storyteller and expected to see the Gospel again within a different fictional premise.

He came so close.

But rather than the glory of the Good News, in the latter part of Eyes Wide Open, I instead found a painfully watered-down message posing in its place. The moment I started to realize where Dekker was going with the story, I started in shock and felt my heart tighten in a mixture of anguish and anger from the blow.

If it was only about me, I wouldn’t care this much. I learned a long time ago to “eat the meat and spit out the bones” when it comes to reading. But it’s not about me. That anguish and anger I felt? It wasn’t directed at Ted Dekker. It was directed at the subtle lies the enemy has somehow woven into our culture and which I suddenly realized Dekker had fallen prey to in some form.

Let me break away from this for a moment to give some explanation surrounding things here. In Eyes Wide Open, one of the main things Ted Dekker is confronting is self-image, which I agree with him is something that a lot of Christians struggle with. One of his main characters is a girl who is convinced she is ugly and who struggles with her external sense of image. I don’t want to act like all girls wrestle with this same issue of feeling the need to be pretty or beautiful, but I’ll admit that I, too, used to secretly lament that I felt I was fairly plain-looking and not attractive.

I haven’t believed that in years. 

What happened? Well first, I met the One who looks not on the outward appearance, but at the heart. Then, I realized just how vile and disgusting my heart was. Over the years, my sin had ravaged the thing and turned it into an icky, slimy, wretched, self-centered mess. But the same One who saw that even more clearly than I did, had already done something about it. He stepped into human flesh and lived a perfect life and died the death that alone could atone for God’s own, just wrath over the wickedness that otherwise would have forever separated me from His holiness. “He fought death, beat it, gave His life to the public,” as Flame says in the song “Joyful Noise.” He conquered sin and death and offered me new life in Him—His life.

Now my life is His, not mine. I died to my old self, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. I get to share my life with the One who gave it to me in the first place! And right around that same time when I started to truly understand who He is and who I am in Him, my feelings of insecurity slid to the back burner and then gradually started to disappear. I stopped caring about what others thought of me, because I was beginning to care more what God thought of me. And, not because of my own merit or anything I had to offer Him, He loved me. He loves me because of who He is, not who I am. He is love. And Love reached down to fight for the soul of a feeble, rebellious, selfish young girl so that He could draw her towards Himself, the only One who could right what was wrong within that soul. He performed His surgery, removing my heart of stone and transplanting His living, beating heart within my chest. It was all Him.

And where I defined my confidence and identity as coming from started to change from myself to Christ, I found I no longer had to worry about what I looked like—my physical appearance or people’s perception of me as a person—because it just didn’t matter anymore. All I really started to care about was what God thought, and because of Christ I am justified in His sight. God looks at me, and sees Jesus’ sacrifice that has washed me clean and given me access to enter before Him and to commune with Him. And at the same time, amazingly, He is aware of my sin and continues His work of sanctifying me—leading me in repentance and helping me to love and trust Him more with every step.

Returning to the book: in Eyes Wide Open, Ted Dekker presents a message that is based on a somewhat-subtle distortion of the Gospel. And I don’t think he did that on purpose in any way. The idea is rather prevalent in our “Christian” culture today, firstly, that salvation is all about us. Don’t get me wrong; it is and it isn’t. Christ did not die merely to let us feel better about things or to give us a better life, just like He didn’t die just to get us into Heaven after we die. Jesus said He came that we might have life, and have it abundantly. He also said He is the Life, and that the only way to the Father is through Him (John 14:6).

See, something crazy happens at salvation. You die to yourself so that you may truly live—experiencing Life as it was meant to be, united with God. And, according to Scripture, you find your life and your identity in the person of Jesus Christ. (I highly recommend reading Romans—Paul explains all this much better than I can!) God doesn’t step into your life to empower you to live like you want; He steps into your life to empower to live like He wants—what He created you for, which also turns out to always be what is best for us in the first place. Crazy, huh?

But see, there’s this lie that has crept into some people’s understanding of all that. It’s loosely based on parts of Scripture but not the whole—saying that because God created everything good in the beginning, we’re still basically good at the core; the good’s just been somehow clouded over by sin. Again, I recommend Romans—specifically chapter 3—for anyone wondering what the truth on the matter is. (Paul spends about half the chapter explaining why nobody is good or righteous in God’s sight apart from Christ.) This idea so many people have swallowed, though, says that our “real,” “true” self is buried deep down there somewhere, and that it’s what God sees in us and that He wants us to discover. It says that when the Bible talks about “dying to self” it’s talking about rejecting the “fake” you, the sinful one.

But it’s not. It’s dying to you, your desires, your life, your plans. That’s a hard pill to swallow, which is probably why the more palatable idea offered by the above ideology has become so popular. But when you truly die to yourself, surrendering all that you are and offering it up as a sacrifice to God (by the way, sacrifices die), that’s when you’re ready for real Life to set you free. As often as we focus on ourselves, God did not create us to live an existence that revolves around our own little lives. He made us to get caught up in something much bigger—His existence, His story, His plans. To know Him. We have to die to our own will, so that we can be set free to live in accordance with His will—which is life and peace and hope and joy…eternal Life (see John 17:3).

A side-effect of the idea that our “true” selves are good at the core is something that is voiced by one of Dekker’s characters in Chapter 20 of Eyes Wide Open: “You cannot love anything or anyone more than you love yourself and you can’t truly love yourself unless you see yourself whole. If you secretly disapprove of any part of yourself, you will secretly hate part of the one who made you.”

Love yourself…nowhere is that commanded in the entire Bible. If that was such an important component of what it means to be a Christian or to be set free to live as God wants us to, don’t you think He would have mentioned it at least once? Nope, again and again throughout Scripture love is characterized by a willingness to offer up itself, to give of itself for the sake of another. In fact, Jesus actually said that your love for your self and your own life should look like more like hatred in comparison with loving God, or else you are not His disciple. 

I know that some people have acted like certain passages imply that we're supposed to love ourselves, and if you believe that's the case, I beg you to go back and read the context of those verses. See if that's really what God is saying there. Also, keep in mind that human reasoning about what a verse says or means will always, only, invariably be that—human reasoning.

We love others because God first loved us. It’s not dependent on us or our ability. Like everything else about our lives, when we accept Christ’s gift of salvation, everything comes to rely on not us, but Him. Our identity is wrapped up in who He is—for apart from Him we can do nothing, and without Him we are worthless and without hope.

But we have Him! Because of His great love with which He loved us, Christ died to impart to us the Life that we could not live apart from Him, and He gave us Life in abundance. We get to trade in our identities—who we once were—and embrace who we are in Him—redeemed, rescued, restored, made alive to God in Christ, bearing His Spirit whose fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Galatians 5:24). “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).

It’s obvious that Ted Dekker is addressing some major issues with Eyes Wide Open—identity being one of them. For that, I do respect him. I don’t want it to seem like I suddenly hate him or think he has terrible motives; I don’t. But like all of us, he is human and capable of being deceived. My prayer is that he would see the infinite beauty and know the peace that comes with the truth that our identities are not to be based on anything outside of Christ. It’s not up to us to do anything but believe and rely on Him. When we do that, we embark on the most glorious adventure of all: the life we were made for, a life spent knowing Him, more and more.

And the more you get to know Him, the more you get to know the person He created you to be. For that person cannot exist without Him, and will grow to look more like Him every day. 

{Philippians 3:7-16}

“My identity is found in Christ. Any other identity will self-destruct.” -Lecrae 

When Writing Becomes an Act of Worship

Two and a half years ago, God asked me to give up something. At the time, I wasn't sure if He meant put it on hold for a while, or actually give it up forever. All I knew was that He was asking me to trust Him and to entrust what had become one of the defining aspects of my life into His hands. This exchange took place early on in the summer of 2010, during my time at Ellerslie LeadershipTraining. I had come to Ellerslie with as clear of an idea for what my future held as I'd had up to that point, with several specific things God had highlighted that I felt He was calling me in. Among those things was writing. And it was special to me. 

See, a few years before that was when, through one comment from my Dad, I first began to realize I had any talent for writing at all. During the remainder of my time in high school, I began to branch out and write more than just school assignments and journal entries. I embarked on writing stories, and about a year before Ellerslie came around, I had written the first draft of a book meant to call my generation to rise up and live out what we say we believe. I felt strongly that God had led me to write it, and reasoned that therefore I was supposed to pursue self-publishing it once I had opportunity, which wasn't likely to happen before my time at Ellerslie was over. In addition to this completed draft, I had several stories in-progress I had been working on.

But then, when I least expected it, God asked me to give it all up. He wanted my gaze on Him, and though at the time I could not understand why He was asking this of me, I knew I needed to trust Him. The summer of 2020 was life-changing for me in more ways than I can probably come close to describing, but in the area of writing it was also pivotal. What I could not see then, when a large part of my identity was wrapped up in "what I could do for God," was that surrender was to be the avenue to something greater than I'd ever dreamed. God was drawing me to a life of worship--of adoration and communion with Him, not just part-time, but constantly. 

Surrender is not a one-time event. It means a constant, repeated act of choosing to yield to another's will. The beauty of true surrender to Christ lies in its continuation and the way God uses it for His glory. 

For me, I went through a season that summer where I literally could not write. It wasn't that I felt I shouldn't; it was that I tried over and over again, and found my attempts clumsy and inadequate. Part of it was that I was encountering things I had no words for, no way to adequately describe. In fact, that was probably a larger part of it than I realized at the time. But the reality, for me, was that for a time my ability was stripped away from me. And during that time, rather than collapsing into hopelessness, I found myself further enraptured by my God, by who He is and what He was doing in and through and around me, and lost sight of me and my own abilities. I became more satisfied in Christ than I had ever been before, and found that He truly was enough, even if everything else in my life was taken away. 

Toward the end of the summer, God surprised me by giving it back. We had an "assignment" of sorts, to write or compose something, some sort of remembrance, of what we had seen God doing during our eleven weeks of Basic Training. And as I sorted through the many things that had taken place in my own soul and those around me during that ridiculously short amount of time (for it seemed like so much longer, considering all that happened), inspiration struck. I found myself writing in a way I never had before, not just with the way I was trying to use an analogy to describe something, but with the sense of worship that accompanied it.

I had prayed during the writing process of that first-draft book I finished the year before, but by now something had changed within my soul. It wasn't just that I enjoyed writing more now that I had walked through a season without it. Something had changed, and suddenly writing became an act of worship. 

Two and a half years later, I am still in the process of discovering what it means for writing to be a form of worship. See, worship isn't just singing songs on a Sunday morning. It's more than a feeling that fades with the situation. Worship is a spiritual posture of surrender and trust and reliance and sweet fellowship with the God who created us to know Him. And it's meant to characterize every aspect of our day-to-day lives. If those in heaven are constantly worshiping the Lord (see Revelation 4:8-11), then "on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10) looks the same, doesn't it? "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen. I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship" (Rom. 11:36-12:1). It's the beautiful, indescribable, joyous surrender and communion with our Creator that we were designed for. 

And recently, quite possibly more than ever before in my life, I have been experiencing times spent writing that are indeed simultaneously times of worship. I'm no longer writing for myself, out of simply a desire to create a story. It's not about trying to write something that will merely entertain people anymore. During a recent car ride on the way home from visiting relatives up North, I typed out just under two-and-a-half pages (which may just turn into a later blog post) about how I now perceive writing and why I write. 

But in the end, it's not about the writing or even what it produces. It's not even about the impact or effect it could have on others. Ultimately, it's about the worship, because that is what I was created for. Not stringing groups of words together on paper so that they make sense or prove some point. Not eloquence or lack thereof. Worship. 

Because we were created to live and thrive in a constant state of worship, of prayer, of communion with God. So "worship" may look different at different times. One moment, it may be singing to the Lord, and the next, it may look like loving the person next to you the way that God loves them. Sometimes it looks like picking up trash, and sometimes it looks like having a conversation with a close friend or a complete stranger. Sometimes it looks like getting alone with God, and sometimes it looks like sharing the Gospel. Sometimes it means painful sacrifice, and sometimes it means crying tears of astonishment when you see what God is doing or has done. Sometimes it looks like being completely still and silent and reflecting on God, or waiting on Him, listening. Simply put, worship means living in the center of God's will, every moment. Seeking Him, seeing Him, knowing Him more with each passing day. Sometimes, it even looks like sleeping--peacefully resting in His promises while you lose consciousness for a time...

And sometimes, it looks like writing.

. . .