Beauty amongst Ashes

Who would have thought that we find a group of prisoners calling out beauty in a place that is black as the night. Today coming into the prison - a men zone of drugdealers. Feelings of fear, shyness and respect are winding through my inner being. I feel like a deer and I wonder if my inner feelings are mirrowing to the outside. We are going through a normal routine of program, when suddenly heaven seems to open and a men choir of prisoners starts to sing. The disciplined voices mix together with simplicity. A bucket drum resounds under the pressure of toothbrushes. We are getting 2 Songs presented, that tempt me to jump out of my seat and dance crazy. Of course thats not appropriate in prison, nor for me in a men zone.


I am thrilled about the Beauty that suddenly shined least expected dark area. My amazement calls out tears, that are hard to hold back, when we hear all those songs are self written. I can see Beauty made out of Ashes. I am thinking, what would happen if the world gets the chance to see that. Is it just my heart, that has started to resound to the wind of simplicity and creativity. I would love to shout it out loud of what God does in the least expected. How we can see more of  him in our everyday windows, if we are willing to spent time looking at it.


Thank you God for blessing me today. Looking through a window that is dear to your heart. 
We are getting to know, that in June they start a DTS in that prison. I feel like falling out of my seat - a paradoxy that is hard to believe. I am amazed at our contacts:


Some facts: 50 prisoners, a need of 50 bibles and teachers & program are already set. 


My thoughts wander off... 50 people learning more about a personal relationship with God. 50 single lifes, that get the chance of hope. Chaging their course of life and not only their life but also people they are surrounded with.


God breaking through in peoples life, where its least expected. He is changing history again. He is faithful. He has done it in my own life...

Still on a journey

I am feeling alive again. I wish I would have written more the last weeks so you could get a better picture of my journey. Sometimes you should listen to a friends suggestion no matter how old, busy or wise he is.

The last days I have been traveling. I took time for me alone. A better way to say it time for my heart. It was screaming while I had a hard time listening. Finally when I heard it, but I thought the message sent from the last days was already old. Sometimes its good to have God as a translator when you thought you had figured it out and made a decision he still reminds you on the place you are standing when your thoughts have started traveling on their own.

Well, anyways I started my journey to spent some time in the presence of my Lord and savior. If you have come so far reading and you hear or feel an urge in your heart stop reading and spent time with him!

I had borrowed a book from a friend (Leota's Garden by Francine Rivers). It was a god given moment when I saw it in the shelf and as soon i read garden I knew I should read it even I already have four I started on and nit finished. ( a "sickness" I have developed lately that comes from not having time to listen of what to read- well sometimes at least)

I feel like sometimes its not easy to have intimacy. I think about my relationship to my heavenly daddy and to a couple that I am watching while I sit here. Its not that you had a fight going on, maybe like you have been living next to each other for days while you thought you had a dialog going on.

I have been spending time with HIM again. I realize it was short before drowning. I followed his advice to join a seminar "An Artist in Gods Kingdom". I thought he was crazy when I heard him saying that, just as he wouldn't know me and the language I am speaking. Well, I followed, grinning, what an adventure would he bring me on.

What did I learn on this 2-days journey. I guess i understood a little bit more about my heart. Like you start traveling and what you find behind a nice place is what you didn't know you had lost before starting traveling-an understanding of your own heart.

I feel I realize that my excitement for artists and my dreams are just an reflection of what I couldn't see for a long time. I am an artist! I color and change the pictures that I painted. I am trying to communicate with the colors I spent how we are made to experience our fathers love. It's an expression coming out of an overflow of him teaching me how to live.

One problem I feel we all share: We want to be understood and sometimes I wonder if this is where all our attention goes instead of starting to breath and be defined by our lover. Do you understand? ;-))

The wilderness

Lately the word "Wilderness" has been coming up over and over again. 
I am about to write a blogpost about wilderness and it all starts with me thinking i have figured it all out, when the search for a good picture is opening my own horizond for different forms of wilderness. Have i thought it´s the same thing? the same for everybody? Maybe the wilderness is individual. Fitting to our understanding, timing and seasons...

I am reading Habakkuk 3:17
"Even I face this circumstances of a wilderness,
I will rejoicce in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my saviour."


Wilderness, are this what we call as well the desert times, the dry seasons where we go through hardships? Yes, but i feel the wilderness has many different names. I guess the most known one is the period of God´s absence. Can he ever be absence?
I read this quote some days ago: Spiritual hunger intensifies with the absence of God. I can feel this hunger rising up inside of me...it feels so known.

The wilderness a place of pain, desperation, lonelyness, brokeness. It´s the same place i realize that i have been growing and prepared. It seems the wilderness is individualized. It has its own timing and price. When i look back, after being there it should be an oasis - my tears have been watering this place. 

"The wilderness is teaches 2 things: First, that God has lead you there and while you are there you figure out why he brought you there - to show you he is good in the end."

I feel like i have heared this before. It´s the valleys that he is teaching us. It`s prayer that leads us out of the wilderness. How many times have i experienced this process of being there in the desolate place, longing for a way out and realizing the one who brought me there is also taking my hand and leading me out. A long that way is laying mystery. Growth has been happening without seeing. Where i have been looking for an answer, i followed eyes filled of love leading me back onto the way of everlasting...

What are we looking for?

I have been laying in bed, sick, for quiet a while now, when a dear fellow of mine brought me a serie of DVD´s called "Anne from Green Gables" Even i was not quiet in a mood i started watching them and by finishing the second part i got caught in attention about the following sentence:

" It´s not about what the world can give us, but what we can give into the world."

Aren´t we all looking for something. Isn´t the deeper longing driving us out of our shell and bringing us on a journey. Is this the wrong starting point? driven by a deeper longing? Or might that be some kind of a help to not get us settled with the ordinary, but follow our dreams, desires and longings. Do we maybe have to step out in order for us to realize, that all what we were looking for was already put inside of us. 
I am thinking about me and my journey. After being in many places, looking around, just longing to come closer to God´s heart, to find the place where i would never be unsaticfied and than watching a simple movie, having heard the same message over and over again. It feels like this simple piece of the ordinary, is bringing me back to my own heart. To my own heart, where heaven is living, dwelling and expending. The place of hidden treasures. The source of my dreaming and romancing. The home of my creator. The birthplace for all the things, the world longs for maybe waits for - just to be different ;-)

What do you see?

When we stand in front of a commond bush, is there anything more to see than Blackberries?

When we look at a work of art, we know there is something there more than paint, but is there something more than the picture?

When we walk through our day, do we see more than our attitude, circumstances we know there is more than the person we meet, but is there something more than we can see?

The soul, though at all times hidden, is at all times revealed, expressing itself through everything we say and do:

 This would mean we would see and understand a lot more of this world, a person or their heart if we would pay attention to the special thing, that we seem to miss all the time. Do we have the eyes to see it or does it need special glasses to see? Are we even willing to stop and pause to spent a little second more to grasp a glimbs of a hidden treasure that comunicates more than we see in the first place. And if we would stop and listen and see, would it change maybe our own history or circumstances - just like in a ferrytale...

Sometimes we all have seen it or at least sensed it. And if we can´t put our finger on it, it puts its finger on us, tapping us on the shoulder urging us to stop and look and listen to what God may be saying to us through them. 

How many times have we seen but ot learned, wathed but not wondered what lesson this person´s life could be teaching us?

It just makes me remember a sentence I know so well: God has a voice in everything, but i can miss him in anything:

Just yesterday i had been proven wrong when i borrowed a movie of a friend and could not share her excitement of how many principles of God are in that movie. Well together with a friend we invited God to speak to us through this movie and in the end we both were wrecked, because he spoke not only in a subordinate clause but both of us got a humongous lesson teached each at the place we were standing in our lives.

I don´t know about you, but i so want to become a great treasure hunter and see through the eyes of the invisible. I want to be able to pause and watch and learn from the open window i see right in that moment.

Creativity

The oil, that makes my wings soft and able to fly.

The powerful pution that makes my eyes become alive.

The medizin that waters my soul.

The foundational thought of creativity became flesh when you created me.

Thank you Daddy!

2 Things i learned today

There are 2 Things i learned today:

1. We reach for God in many ways. Through sculptures, scriptures, pictures, prayer, writing, worship and through them he reaches for us. His search begins with something said. Ours begins with something heard. His begins with something shown and ours with something seen. Our search for God and his search for us meet at windows in our everyday experience.

2.The way of seeing begins with respect. The way we show respect is to give it a second look, alook not of the eyes but of the heart. But so often we don´t give something a second look because we dont think there is anything there to see.
To respect something is to understand that there is something there to see, that it is not all surface, that something lies beneath the surface, something that has the power to change the way we think or feel, something that may prove so profound a revelation as to change not only how we look at our lives but how we live it.

How wonderful!