Passion (Part 2)

"When You Move" Bethany Worship

Breath of heaven, fill this place Let Your presence come invade We respond to Your touch We respond to You Our hearts abandoned, open wide The door is open, come abide We respond to Your touch We respond to You Mountains shake when You speak Chains will break when You move Our hearts will melt in Your presence When You speak, God When You move When You move, God

We invite You in, come and move We invite You in, have Your way

As mentioned in my previous journal, Jack and I had to miss a couple sessions due to my little emergency. We tried that day to go online to watch the messages we were missing, but we were unable to. Lucky for us, the messages were posted on YouTube a couple days later, and we were able to watch them together.

The first message we caught up on was Christine Caine's (she is Jack's favorite). The awesome thing about this message was that it also had to do with shame. Christine started off by talking about how our culture heaps shame on us by telling us that there is something wrong with us. Shame gets its start in Genesis 2:25-3:13. Before the fall, there was NO shame! We were NOT created to know shame! This is where words come into play. There is life and death in the words that we speak. We see this in the scripture I just mentioned because Satan questions the authority of God's word. If you don't know what God says about you, you'll believe the lies of the enemy. To avoid this doubt, we can't enter dialogue with Satan. We need to know and live by what God says. And if you doubt the character of God, then it's going to be really easy to go against what He says. In the darkness, God wants us to bring His hope and light! Because Eve forgot that she was made in God, she was tempted to do the opposite. When you seek your fulfillment outside of what God tells you to do you will fall. This world needs Christians that are living by God's word to change the lives and hearts of others! When you know you're a son or daughter of the King, you won't be looking for that in other things! (I know I'm throwing a lot of exclamation points at you, but for real, this is all so so true) The enemy wants us to walk away from God and hide because of shame. To feel love, joy, and peace, we need to run to Jesus, because THAT is where we will find it. We will NOT find true love, joy, and/or peace from anything else. Are you willing to look like or be called an idiot?? Are you willing to stand out for God? Do not live bound by anger, bitterness, your past, or ANYTHING ELSE! If you are not listening to God, then you're listening to the lies of someone else! Replace these lies with truth! YOU get to choose what you want to believe.

Wow, y'all. I can't help but get emotional when I think of this message and the other messages from Passion. I LOVE how they go together, how they relate to shame, the lies of the enemy, and our purpose. There are SO many topics that could have been covered at Passion this year, the speakers didn't get together before Passion started to make sure their messages went together, it just worked out this way! Isn't that so awesome?? Isn't it awesome that God KNEW that people needed to hear the messages they did, that they needed to hear about these same topics, but each message revealing a different side of it? Like Christine said, this culture really DOES heap shame on us! The number of people that raised their hands to want to live a life without shame was overwhelming. God KNEW that this was what college students needed to hear this year, and that makes me emotional. How awesome is our God?!

Jack and I didn't end up listening to Sadie Robertson or Tim Tebow's interview until I got home, but I wanted to share the notes now since they all go together in some way.

The first interview was Sadie Robertson's with Shelley Giglio. Sadie gave some background on the past few years of her life. She was on Dancing with the Stars, she didn't know what type of schooling to do once she returned, and she was dealing with fear. She told us how obedience is more important than fear. You may not feel like you have everything ready, but when you step onto the battlefield, God will take over! Sadie was given the opportunity to give a message at Passion City a little while ago and told us how she prepared herself, how she opened her heart to whatever God wanted to share. She realized that if you want to see God be a radical God, then you have to be radical for Him. She started highlighting characteristics in the bible that she wanted to embody, something that I would personally love to start doing. The next thing in this interview really hit me because it's something that I needed to hear. Self-image and God-image. Self-image was something that I spent years and years struggling with. I used to wear makeup in hopes that people would think I was prettier. Then, while struggling with depression a couple of years ago I developed an eating disorder. Every time I was upset I would eat until I forgot about how broken I was feeling. The result of this over-eating was that I ended up gaining 30 pounds. It was then that my eating disorder flipped, and instead of over-eating when I was upset, I started to only eat one small amount of food each day. I was basically starving myself. This is a habit that even recently I have struggled with. Whenever I notice myself gaining weight again, instead of making the healthy decision to eat better or start exercising, I instantly cut myself off. I never went days without food, but there would be several days where I would barely eat anything. I limited the amount of food that I ate in hopes that I would have a flat stomach, in hopes that my body would look like the bodies of other girls. But doing all of this never made me happy; it still doesn't make me happy. Why? Because I wasn't trying to find my confidence in the Lord. While talking about self-image vs God-image, Sadie mentioned Hebrews 10:35. This verse mentions confidence IN THE LORD. We can't try to find our confidence in the things that can't provide confidence! My confidence is not found in my appearance, in my weight, anything like that. We have to find confidence IN THE LORD! Find confidence in God's view of you! Sometimes to achieve that you have to speak victory before you even see it. We can't experience the fullness of God with shame and fear taking over our lives. Shame and fear will still exist, but we have to believe that HE IS BIGGER! You don't have to be qualified, He just wants you to say yes and devote your life to Him.

While listening to this interview, and thinking of what Sadie said after, I thought of this one specific moment during Passion that I thought was important to include. Jack and I hold hands almost every single moment that we are together. There was this one moment when we were walking to our seats and Jack and I ended up letting go of each other's hands to get stuff situated after getting through security. Jack was walking in front of me, and I looked around at all the girls around me, thinking of how pretty they were. This was a moment that insecurity started to fill my head.

'I don't look like them.'

'I will never look like them.'

'They're prettier than me.'

As these thoughts ran around in my head, more ridiculous thoughts started to join them.

'I am not pretty enough to have a boyfriend.'

'He can get anyone he wants.'

'Why is he dating me if all of these girls are way prettier than me?'

It was then that Jack turned around, smiled at me, and reached out for me to hold his hand. It kind of made me think of the way that God looks at me. When I'm drowning in these thoughts, God is reaching out to me. He's saying 'I want YOU!' He's saying 'I created you, you're who I planned for you to be. I don't want you to be these girls around you, I want you to be YOU.' Just like Jack has never said anything negative about my appearance, God never has either. Like Christine said, "If you're not listening to God, you're listening to the lies of someone else." The enemy is filling my head with these thoughts in hopes that I lose focus on who God is. Like Priscilla said, "It would be a shame for the enemy to believe more about you than you do." The enemy KNOWS what God says about me! If I'm not finding my confidence in Him and His word then I'm not looking for confidence in the right place. When Jack gets upset that I cut myself down, God gets even more upset. He created me! He LOVES me!

The next interview was Tim Tebow's with Louie Giglio. They spent the first 8 minutes talking about football and then got into the good stuff. Tim talked about how you never know what God can do with something when you just step out with courage. God can take everything we're involved with and make it into something bigger! We don't have to be famous to be a part of something bigger. We may not all be famous, but we ALL have influence! We can't wait til 'one day' to influence others and live the way God calls us to live. We are only guaranteed THIS day. Being famous and living for ourselves is not how we will gain respect. We will gain respect from others through the work that we do, not by our titles. We need to live differently, display hard work, display the work of Christ, THIS is what will impact the lives of others.

*Now rewind to when I was still in Georgia.*

It was the second Sunday in a row that I was getting to go to Jack's church. The week before wasn't a regular Sunday, and this one wasn't going to be regular either since they had a guest speaker. The speaker was Sue Yeager. Sue opened up with the title of her message- Atlanta Brave. She said how generosity is brave and how your brave is somebody else's breakthrough! Sue told the congregation how we are meant to be thermostats, living biblically correct and not changing based on what was changing on the outside, instead of a thermometer, which is living politically correct and changing based on your surroundings. Being a thermostat requires being brave. Bravery is the conscience taken captive by God's word (Daniel 3:16-18 & 26-28). If you are following the footsteps of Jesus then you will not be bored or boring. Brave is Jesus. Jesus is brave, carrying the cross for us. Bravery begins at the foot of the cross. In Haggai 2:23 it shows us a promise from God. We know that all of God's promises are yes and amen. While we serve Him and live according to His plan we can guarantee that what He promises us for living that way will, in fact, come true. So who do you want to offend? With the world that we live in, you can guarantee that someone WILL get offended by what you say and how you live. If you're afraid to offend man, then you're going to offend God. BUT, if you're more afraid to offend God, then you'll offend man. You need to decide NOW who you do and do not want to offend. Here's a hint: we are living for the applause of nail-scarred hands! In John 4:18 it shows us that the fear of man goes away. To live brave, we must live unoffended and unashamed of sharing the gospel. If you live by compliments you will die by criticism! Don't let an arrow burst your heart UNLESS it FIRST goes through scripture. If this arrow goes through scripture first then REPENT of your wrongdoing. When you repent, keep in mind that your offenses were already nailed to the cross. When we get out of alignment, we need the help of the Holy Spirit. We all have our own ceilings, our own area that we can control, but beyond our ceiling is God room.

Sue wrapped up by listing a couple things that she felt God was telling her that people were struggling with so they could come up and be prayed for. She listed several things and then she said that she felt there were problems with lower back pain and my eyes immediately popped out. I have a curve in my lower spine that causes a lot of back pain, and my lower back had been bothering me since before I even left to go down to Georgia. But I kept telling myself that it couldn't have been me. Jack nudged me. I shook my head. And then I felt it. My lower back started to tingle. I still kept telling myself that it was probably directed towards someone else with worse back problems. Then my lower back started to pop. I looked up at Jack.

"Are you gonna go up?" He asked me. I started to make my way up towards the worship band that had just started back up with When You Move. I stood there for almost the whole song as everyone was being prayed for. When they started to repeat the bridge, one of the worship leaders started to walk towards me.

"Are you waiting to be prayed for?" I smiled at her and nodded my head. We introduced ourselves, I told her what I came up for, then she grabbed my hands and started to pray for me. She pulled away and asked me how my back was feeling. I told her about the tingling and popping feeling, and how my lower back was still tingling. She grabbed my hands and prayed for me again. As she prayed for me I felt all pressure on my lower back start to fade away. Then she asked me if there was anybody in my family that had back problems, so I told her that I had several family members that did, and she prayed for me again. As the song started to wrap up and people started to kind of break apart she grabbed my hands again and prayed for me, just me. She prayed for my school situation, my financial situation, and for my relationship with God, all without me telling her about anything that I was going through. I started to get teary-eyed. It's really cool how God uses other people to pray for you and encourage you even when they don't know the situation, they just get the feeling. I went back to my spot next to Jack and looked around me, like I had the week before, in absolute awe of the God that I worship.

But wait, there's more!

Later that evening we drove to Passion City, somewhere that I had wanted to visit since the first time Jack told me about it. We found seats, and then after a time of worship Louie Giglio came out with three other people. Louie started off this little interview by saying how God sees us. God sees us all, no matter how many people are in a room, He sees us. Genesis 16 tells us that our God is the God who sees! The first person to speak in the interview was a guy named Ryan. Ryan had been a door holder for Passion for several years, and one year, right before Passion, he was in a car accident that ended up killing his wife. Despite this pain, Ryan still decided to attend Passion that year. Losing his wife was a giant in his life, but Ryan said that when you're facing a giant you have to find the thing that is bigger than the giant! God is bigger than any giant we face! He let his pain become his platform and he let his healing come from Jesus like Psalm 23 reminds us and tells us all to do. The next person to speak was the same girl who was in the little preview for Compassion, Molly. Molly talked more about sponsoring her child, and how she asked God to work through her, which led her to sponsor her child. Sponsoring a child was not something that she had planned on doing or expected to do, but God had something else planned for her. A beautiful reminder that our dreams are small compared to what God has planned for us! The last person was one of the hosts for Passion 2018, Grant. Grant talked about his life growing up, how he was so attached to playing tennis, his identity revolved around it. Then he got injured. Grant brought up a great point that identity found in anything but God is FRAGILE! When his tennis life had ended, Grant got lost. He got to a really low point. But the rest of what he said made me teary eyed. He said that when you get to a place of giving up, God is bigger than the pain or darkness (like Ryan had said). God will repurpose you in these moments! It does NOT matter where you are today, God trumps that. God uses your broken pieces as ingredients for a new thing! Isaiah shows us that God makes beauty out of the ashes. There is so much truth in that, y'all. Louie wrapped up the interview by saying that the miracle is not that God sees, it's when YOU see the God who sees! What God is building may take time, but it will most certainly blow you away.

When I got home the next day I thought back to what I had prayed for at Passion, and what Molly had said at Passion City. I opened my laptop, found my bookmark, and my heart soared when I saw the little smile belonging to the girl I had been praying for. I immediately sponsored her. I may have more things that I have to pay for this upcoming semester, but I knew that there was a reason why my financial situation had been prayed for, I knew there was a reason that this little girl was still available for me to sponsor. I would much rather spend $38 every month to give someone a better life and the opportunity to know Jesus than selfishly spend those $38 every month on my own selfish wants. I would highly recommend looking into sponsoring a child, pray about it! It may not be something that you planned on, but your plans or dreams are small compared to what God has planned for you!

So, that is my Passion 2018 experience! I'm so happy to be able to look back and see all the awesome ways that God worked throughout this trip, all things that I would have missed if I let the enemy distract me with all the bumps. In our low points and in our high points, our God is great!

*Update because I just realized something LAST NIGHT! I've been home for about a week and a half and I just NOW realized this super awesome thing! Since Jack doesn't have school due to winter weather, we stayed up super late to talk and watch movies over FaceTime. Before we started our movie I got up to go to the bathroom and brush my teeth. I dropped something on the floor, and as I leaned down to grab it my back made a bunch of strange popping noises, similar to the popping noises I heard when I was at Jack's church. For some reason, I decided to lift my hoodie up to look at my back and my jaw dropped. Y'all, that curve in my spine that I mentioned earlier?? GONE! I have had this curve in my spine since grade school! It was so bad that when I would lay on the floor I could fit my high top converse in the gap between my back and the floor. It was so bad that I used to go to physical therapy in hopes that it could be fixed. For years and years I would look in the bathroom mirror and adjust my legs and spine to see what it would look like to have a straight back, and LAST NIGHT I looked in that same mirror without adjusting my legs or spine and my back is STRAIGHT!!! It's so funny that I discovered this last night. For some reason, I didn't feel right about posting part 2 yesterday, even though I could have had it 'finished' in time for me to post it. It was almost like God was saying, "Wait, hold on, Kendall, there's more to add to your journal before it's posted." Seriously, so so incredible. I've said it a bunch of times in this journal, but God is so so good. He was good when my back was curved, and He's good when my back is straight. What an awesome God I get to worship!*