Passion for Identity to be Found...in a Pub

This is just me processing, so please take it all with a grain of salt and remember grace. I don’t pretend to understand all I see fully, but I seek to do the best I can with the insight I am given.

I’ve been living in Ireland for about a month and a half and yesterday was my first pub day. It’s just generally not a normal thing for me to go to pubs and the only thing that pulls me there is the possibility of hearing live traditional Irish music. I have loved Irish music since my first exposure to it—something just lights up in my soul when I hear those melodies.

So, it was a little Kansas girl’s birthday and we ventured into the scene…and it was a scene, not pretty. I just couldn’t get comfortable—and partly it was that none of my silly expectations were met. We trekked to several pubs, none of them had live music going and then we finally stayed at one pub, but when the music came on at nearly 11 o’clock, it was all just rock and roll covers. I’m watching Irish students trying to be American singers and everything in me realizes how wrong this is: I just know that this nation is one which has a beautiful soul, hidden underneath a lot of despair and regret and things lost. And when I see them just copying someone else (and my culture at that) and not being true to the creativity, joy and hope which is central to this nation, it makes me go a little crazy inside. I know there’s more. I know you were made for ore. I know that joy and deep hope can burn in you—if you’ll just move forward into knowing who you are and what you are made for.

When we finally left, I went winging out, kicking my legs in the air and just ranting about passion that draws people in and identity and…it was overwhelming, this rising up in me. I just love my city and I hate to see them living half-hearted lives when so much life is available and offered to them. And I don’t hate pubs, I might end up playing at one of them in the future: I just hate seeing people be inauthentic. We were each made unique with beautiful gifts and talents which, when handed over to the Lord, will become beautiful glimpses of all that He is in all His creativity and joy and diversity. I want people to become completely themselves, aware of their identity and redeemed to go victoriously out to become all that He made them to be.

That’s all I want.

That’s it really.

That’s all I want.

This school has been incredible. And the girls want to get out and do life where others can see, not just be in our building. So we are going to go out and do some ‘busking’ (street performing) next Saturday, the 5^th. Please be praying for us as we go, that the atmosphere of the city would be changed, and life would come as people stop and ask, what is this?

There is a deep hunger in people, that they can’t recognize or access on one level because they’ve never been exposed to anything which causes the hunger to arise.

Pray for hunger in Sligo city. Pray against ritual and legalism and that people will have encounters with the living God.

Choosing the Selah in Life

Discipleship.

It’s a word that keeps becoming clearer even as it gets fuzzier. It involves being deeply involved in lives, realizing their struggles and calling them deeper, while at the same time having to look yourself in the face: “Can I ask this of them when I know at times it hasn’t been true of myself?”

It’s seeing a whole life: it’s fears and triumphs, moments of surprise and victory, celebration, defeat, and saying, “My life is worth that. I will see them through whatever life throws at them, simply because they are worth it.”

It requires love.

It requires faith.

It requires letting go of yourself, all the while trying to analyze yourself: “Am I doing this right? Am I doing a good job? Am I…?”

I was given the word “selah” at the beginning of this school. The word that is so confusing to all Biblical scholars and others trying to interpret the Bible that they just call it a “pause” and link it to other terms (often relating to music) that they know.

That word though, in all of its confusion, makes sense for this season in my life. There is so much I need to figure out—that I truly can’t on my own. I am wading into the deep, unknown territory—doing and being asked to do things that I have no clear bearing on—all the while so aware of my faults and fears, all that makes up the very imperfect me.

And yet: Selah.

Pause.

Meditate.

Realize that some things just aren’t about figuring out…that some things are meant to just make you take pause, breath in again and remember who is God.

Selah.

Let go of trying to figure out your own life and remember His.

Selah.

You’re life is out of your control, out of your understanding…and that’s a very good thing.

I am doing my best to enjoy this ‘selah’ part of life, this place where I pause, meditate and pray. I am proud to know (as He reveals Himself) who God is at this point in my life and come to trust in Him deeper as He calls me to deeper things. In the tasks and appointments and life-goings on where I am without answers, I wait, pause and pray.

Selah.

My God is with me.

Selah.

He promises peace.

Selah.

He will perfect that which concerneth me…Selah

Nothing Profound...Just Trying to Process

I’m listening to a song called “Quiet Peace” by Justin Byrne as I sit in a café by the Garavogue River, trying to process my beautiful life. I'm just a simple, everyday girl who keeps following God and is amazed at the spaces she finds herself in. Sunny in Ireland? In Ireland? Reinstated to her calling when she thought it was all over? Who is this God I serve? I will never reach the end...

Do you ever have those moments when you realize, ‘This is too beautiful for me?’ And then you stop…and you realize that it is not up to you to determine what is or isn’t good enough for you. It was never your job (as our speaker last week made us repeat over and over “He’s Almighty God and He’s not taking applications”) to determine how much you were worth or where you should serve or how it should all play out. It was (and is) my job to draw ever closer to my Creator and follow as He leads. The brokenness I and my friends have experienced in the last years is not due to any fault of God: there were human beings with human choices involved.

Each one was listening to or deliberately disobeying God, choosing to disregard words and direction they had given them or even just forgetting to ask. There’s a whole spectrum. We all make choices, for good or ill; and even slightly misdirected humans can cause catastrophic damage. Of this the last few years of my life have convinced me. So my determination is to lean in, as far as I can, with all my human failings on board, and get to know Him.

The leading brings me to this spring-like day, amidst a group of silly, beautiful young women, each with grace and beauty that they hold, so many gifts in them already, each learning, just as I am, how to submit these gifts and graces to Him so that He may fill them fully with Himself.

Himself.

I’m learning that that’s all I want. That’s all I need, that’s where I find myself and how I even find myself here. Here, the place He asked me to go…

I honestly shouldn’t be here. I didn’t have the funds until I started to move. I bought the tickets on faith, with little to no idea that I would get to go (and even less faith). There was nothing that I saw in me that made me qualified. I knew that. But I also knew how He was already working in me, so I kept my eyes and heart open, following the leading that He gave me.

And now: restoration has become my lot. The verse that I was given in Isaiah 40 a few months ago becomes more true day by day, as restoration and comfort become mine:

Comfort, O comfort my people,

    says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

    and cry to her

that she has served her term,

    that her penalty is paid,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

    double for all her sins.

I have been paid double for all my brokenness. I stand restored, in favor, because of His work in my life.

Even this week, I was honest and open with our speaker. I knew Isaiah 61 was for me and that part of being able to offer all that the Lord promises in those verses comes from going through those things. Well, call me the brokenhearted one who has been bound up!

The truth is, and will always be, that grace is sufficient. Not unmerited grace, like they like to call it, but actually being able to live out your life for Him because you have been given His life. Resurrection and His power now stand in all the places I was so broken before.

My whole life is about pursuing Him. That means, for now, living in Ireland, cooking and living with and speaking words of life to a precious group of girls. It may mean that I work with refugees in the future or find myself teaching again, or in an orphanage or any where! I am not the determiner of my fate. But this I do know: Jesus lives in me and my pursuit is after Him. He has blessed me beyond measure and I don’t see it stopping. I love being His…that the world may know. That the world may know. That may sound trite and simple, but Jesus is not an idea or someone I talk with every now and then anymore…it’s more. He’s life and I know that as I move with Him through this world, atmospheres have to change. Not because of any power of my own, but because He’s moving. How else do you explain a summer’s day on October 1^st in Ireland?

My life is made beautiful for me.