Praise

On June 7, 2017January 13, 2018 By happyreignIn Heather, Kingdom ConceptsLeave a comment

This is heaven’s secret weapon on earth, and it is my secret weapon. Even though I have it tattooed on my arm, I didn’t realize it until later. I’m not talking about a religious stream of words engulfing eternity aimed at a distant enthroned God either. I’m also not talking about dancing in white dresses in the front of a church with prophetically painted flags.

Heaven is whimsical and mysterious, but also entirely practical. What is the good of any of those above forms if when you walk out relationship you are critical of the people you live or work with, if you berate yourself, or are pessimistically ‘real’ when it comes to life.

Whatever you do unto other people, you do unto God; basic heaven 101 stuff right there. Well, have you praised him lately?… in other people? One of the windows of life I entirely love and adore is really seeing an experience or event or circumstance in another person’s life and getting to celebrate it with them, even if they haven’t begun to celebrate it themselves yet. I have concluded that this is praise.

I could dance on top of mountains and high buildings, but I love cheering someone on as they take their first step at the bottom of the mountain; often it’s the hardest one. I love laughing in the face of other people’s self doubt when they surprise themselves about what they’re capable of. I love celebrating who people are, even when they’re forgotten to see their divine shine. It really is there all the time. This is my joy in life and it will not be taken from me.

Praise is the water that freedom and life grows in. And I’m not talking about lying to people either. Or puffing them up. The glorious part about praise is that it’s all true. Love never sets honesty aside, they’re completely compatible. Do you know you will be surrounded by praise in heaven? Not just of God, but all of culture will celebrate and not condemn? No one will remember or bring up the bad stuff, ever, to you again. No one will accuse your heart of evil, but your goodness will be known to yourself and others, just as He is good? Rest in knowing he has no end in celebrating with you, about you, and is excited about what’s to come.

…and I see this. Not even that you would make a perfect piece of pottery one day, but that you have already begun a beautiful journey of process that involved risk of failure and therefore required courage.

Character Covenant Creativity

Family Freedom Gift Giver

Joy Judgement Kindness Trust

Love Praise Prayer Self-love

Creativity

On February 28, 2017January 13, 2018 By happyreignIn Heather, Kingdom Concepts, PaintingLeave a comment

Oh Creativity. Creativity is powerful. It transcends the mind and enters the soul. It moves the heart and causes us to feel winds of life. Creativity enters our senses, whether through interior design, music, cooking, art, or dance, and so much more. It’s the theater that causes us to cry and the fashion that leads industries. Creativity is the solution to the worlds problems and the builder of bridges that speak across the barriers of language.

Heaven is the origin of ideas. Heaven is the place color comes from. It’s the revealer of the unseen and the origin of society’s progress. The words that form the books that causes revolutions are the fruit of creativity and original ideas. Liberty is expressed through creativity. Life is witnessed through expression. Our participation with creativity reminds us we too are the outlets of divine beauty in addition to our counterparts in nature.

Songs awake emotion buried deep beneath life’s experiences. Have you drank from the river of creativity. Is the taste fresh in your memory? There lies a thin veil between endless original movement and sound and our present reality. Everything is accessible. Anything is possible. Do not belittle or underestimate your innate ability to create.

My admonishment is to discover how creativity lives through you. It may be in computer coding, wood craftsmanship, the making of the perfect coffee drink, how you express financial spending trends, how you cause your loved ones to experience your love, the painting of your own nails, or even the style of your walk.

Life is made alive, life is made fun, through creativity. Creativity is a muscle that grows stronger the more you use it. Unique and new expression causes the sparkle to return to our eyes and causes childlike wonder in our spirits. Elementary education may unrecognize and underdevelop the power of creativity in young people but that is in part because its hard to quantify and we’re taught it doesn’t make as much money as practical skills like math and science, although both of those fields can be saturated with creativity as well.

In actuality creativity sells like Gold in any culture. Fashion, film, television, writing, singing, performance, advertising, theater, design, art, musical skill, fine dining, and the like, the best in all of these fields are priceless in their hiring and sought out all over the world. Creatives shape the reality everyone experiences every day, including the look of your home, the device your reading this on, the clothes your currently wearing, down to the packing of the food you have in your fridge.

I cannot communicate the importance creativity plays in God’s kingdom and the synergy heaven shares with life expressed through humanity. Our expression, humanity’s expression, is like the flower in bloom of our species. It appears not to have a necessity just as a flower but creativity is the beauty and aroma of our generation.

Character Covenant Creativity

Family Freedom Gift Giver

Joy Judgement Kindness Trust

Love Praise Prayer Self-love

Family

On January 3, 2017January 13, 2018 By happyreignIn Heather, Kingdom ConceptsLeave a comment

Happy family standing on the beach at the sunset time. Parents hold in the hands inscription "Family". Concept of happy family.

Intro

In my mind family and the trinity are the same expression. God himself lives in community. Three in one. The individuals within God, the trinity, are separate persons yet one. They have individual expression, purpose, function, and yet are one. They move separately yet are one. How God relates to himself, or how the trinity relates to one another is the self-sustaining heaven humanity gets to partake of. Everything is satisfied within God himself, yet he invited us to experience the glory of his nature. And not only to experience it, but embody it through him indwelling within us. I no longer live, yet Christ in me.

Living Heartbeat

Family. Let’s start with marriage. God said let man and woman be made in my image. Himself, not fully expressed in man, or woman, but their functioning together. God could have made us asexual able to regenerate ourselves but he didn’t. He purposed for two genders to live their lives together, living it through him, by him, and in him, as two separate beings functioning as one. He said I have made you one flesh. Of course wedding partners don’t become Siamese twins but they are one person, one flesh, not a trinity but a binity? And then comes the third element, children.

We are never called to be one with are children, but one a larger scale we are called to be one as Christ’s body. We are all called to be one. How do we all become one? How do we become one with our spouse? Our children? We become one with Holy Spirit. Well you already are one with Holy Spirit as he lives inside of you and your spirit is one with his, but when we become one with him, we become one with someone who is already one with that other person, whether it be your child, your spouse, whomever. Fear in our relationships doesn’t lead us to love others well, Holy Spirit does. And often loving others well often begins with healthy love for ourself.

This might have gotten a little confusing but we don’t become one in family by forcing it. Any family with a teenager has probably seen that doesn’t work, but God is one with his children, he knows them, he knows you. Everyone wants to belong somewhere. Everyone wants to be accepted somewhere. These wants and desires have their origins in the innate purpose of family. If the church is ever to become one with each other, it is not a matter of church membership. It is a matter of holy spirit living. But this post isn’t my church post, this is my family post, but perhaps, just perhaps the function and purpose of the two are the same.

In the absence of family, or even with a healthy one, God is family to us. The trinity is our eternal family, always has been, always will be. Our natural families merely reveals his expressions. He is our mother, he was our mother’s love to us in our lives, that was him loving you. God is our brother, our friend, our counselor, our husband, our leader. He is all those things and so much more. He is the love you are experiencing every day through the people around you. It is him. He is that love. He is actively in love with you through your family, or those who play that role for you in your life.

Why Not?

So if family is created to be so wonderful and amazing and heaven on earth, why is it so often not? I’m not even referring to mine specifically, just in general it seems so many hard things can come our way through family itself, the very thing meant to be a blessing to us. Whether you feel misunderstood, neglected, abused, or abandoned, you are worth far more than any negative thing a family member believes about you. In fact you are a blessing to your family. God can give you love for your family with healthy boundaries even if they don’t have them.

You can not change people and others actions and words are out of your control. But you have the power to fully control your thoughts, actions, and words and when the opportunity arises, you can love. You can think and speak blessing. You can ask questions and listen. You can celebrate and you can serve. You may not be able to make others love you but you can celebrate them just as they are still fully possessing the full value of Christ’s sacrifice.

Interdependent Beauty

I know that my husband embodies Christ to me. And God wants me to get that. He wants me to connect that reality to my mind even beyond my heart. He wants us to be interdependent and needing one another. He wants life to be enjoyed being shared. This can also happen through community outside of the conventional family structure. The same healthy exchange of love is still lived, witnessed, and experienced through friendship and covenant amongst people outside of traditional marriage roles. But that’s still family. It still embodies the destiny and purpose of family.

Summary

The family entity embodies the presence of God. It can be heaven on earth as God lives through and in the participating people. We are not slaves or zombies, we get to live the fullest expression of ourselves in complete freedom and that reveals him as we get to love others and share life with them in all its ups and downs. A family living in the strength of love reveals the exchange that has eternally existed within the Godhead.

The kindness in your tone towards your husband reveals him, the empathy you show towards your wife reveals him, the joy you share your children reveals him. Heaven is community living in healthy love. No self-destructive or other-destructive behaviors. This is where things are headed. Loving people loving people. Family is meant to be the canvas that reveals a servant lover, a humble savior, a faithful friend. Healthy family is the breeding ground for courage.

Family is a safe place to fail. Without faithfulness beyond failure, it is not love and you can catch up on that in my other piece called LOVE. This piece on family may expand later but this is all I have for now. Moving along.

Character Covenant Creativity

Family Freedom Gift Giver

Joy Judgement Kindness Trust

Love Praise Prayer Self-love

Covenant

On January 1, 2017January 13, 2018 By happyreignIn Heather, Kingdom ConceptsLeave a comment

Introduction

We serve a god not of contract but a god of covenant. The idea of covenant is largely lost on the modern western world. Nothing is forever. There is always a loophole, fine print, an agreement that’s been arranged, an appeal. Prenuptial marriage arrangements, abortions, and a world of child support regulations, etc.,we swim in a world prepared for escape, a way out, an exit.

What if that wasn’t the way things weren’t meant to be. What if there was glory in taking responsibility for our choices. What if there was honor in being faithful, in following through, even when everything’s gone to shit. Even when convenience is lost and it seems as if all hope is gone. Welcome to covenant. The essence of covenant is something unbreakable.

Covenant = Freedom

That’s where the idea of blood came into covenant. As long as my blood is coursing through my veins, as long as there is life in me, our agreement between one another stands and is alive too. Covenant is an irrevocable thing. This can seem a suffocating concept, but when its in your favor, covenant is the one thing that causes the breathe of relief and the removal of all fear. This thing is unchangeable and isn’t going anywhere.

I could’ve researched covenant but I don’t think one understands it until they’ve experienced it. I am in covenant relationship with some people. No matter my mistakes, no matter my failure, no matter my performance, love and connection is still the standard of the relationship. Understanding is something enjoyed as life experience is shared within covenant.

Good always overcomes evil. My experience of covenant in this life was the recipe for the uprooting of rejection within me. Someone’s commitment over the period of years was the only thing that eventually quieted that voice in my mind that whispered, “You better perform right, or relationship will end.” The fear that would haunt, “If you fail too much, you will be abandoned and justifiably so. Rejection will be what you’ve earned and deserve.”

When people won’t be distanced, won’t be pushed away, won’t believe the worst of you, the barriers for the needed self-protection of independence dissolve. Covenant between people in regards to union is the antithesis of abandonment and rejection.

Covenant Anyone?

In Jewish culture, marriage is a covenant. The terms of covenant would be laid out in a dinner with both families present. The groom-to-be would lay what conditions he would fulfill if the covenant was received. After finishing stating his end of the deal he would offer a glass of wine to the bride-to-be. If she drank, the covenant terms were accepted and the covenant locked in place but not consummated yet. It was a the beginning of a covenant that was soon to come.

At the last supper, Jesus was proposing to humanity as a lover right before their eyes. He said the terms of this covenant was the laying down of his life – his very blood – in exchange for redemption of all loss, union, and fulfillment of design. He offers us still the cup of his blood and the brokenness of his body in the vulnerable offer of our inclusion in himself and righteousness unto peace that is a free gift. He says drink of me. You must drink my blood and eat my flesh he said.

It was his invitation of union. God doesn’t half ass anything. He’s an all-in kinda guy. This is the indestructible union of spirit with no fine print clauses underlying our relationship with him. Covenant is the only way he presents himself to us. I will never leave you or forsake you, he says. Nothing can separate you from the love of Christ. All this extreme and dramatic language starts to taste like candy when it leaves no room for a draft of rejection to seep through, no room for the whispers of the coldness of a contract relationship to rear its head.

Conclusion

God is not into contract relationships, and his relationship towards you was set in blood, his blood and nothing in heaven or hell can legally undermine this spiritually, and eternally binding contract that God has made with humanity—with you. Nothing. Breathe. The nature of your relationship with God is indestructible and unthwartable by any force. This is the environment of safety meant to provide any child of God with the limitless freedom his secure love provides. This covenant is the foundation of joy.