let the poor man jump!

hey hey :)

well, i have a had a whirlwind of a week! i don't know about you, but the combination of the initial excitement of holidays and christmas combine to create the craziest time of year, and i find my mind constantly blown at the amount of time i spend being busy when i have absolutely nothing that i actually have to do. just before christmas, i had been spending so much time with my friends, the same group every time, and i learnt very quickly that time virtually evaporates without you noticing when you have an amazing bunch of people and some good coffee.

this is all fine and dandy, living a comfortable life where the only people you see are the same you saw yesterday and the same you'll be seeing tomorrow, but it's not very... dare i say... godly. eek. whilst reading the scriptures, i was shown how jesus lived. he had his base support group, his disciples, but far out did he meet some new people, (and not all of them were people i'm sure he'd like to be hanging around). this challenged me. it wasn't at all that i was sick of my friends. in fact, it was quite the opposite. i told them i couldn't hang out with them for a few days and did something different.
in one week i got back into contact with five people that i don't see very often, two i hadn't seen in four years, and decided that i was going to dedicate some serious quality time with them. one ended up coming to youth group, loving it, and deciding to come every week from now on. one decided, completely out of the blue, to come on church camp. one, i soon discovered, was going to europe to pursue her dreams of being a ballerina and i was going to be the last friend she'd see before she took off for good. i have been used so powerfully over these last few days, not because of my strength or power or courage or anything, but because i simply did what i saw my father doing. when i am standing there as a vessel for god and asking him to use me for his glory, he does! i have had a really rewarding week.
i have no doubt that god is a bit like a professional diver, standing on the end of a diving board above a deep, blue pool. he desperately wants to jump. we wants to show off what he can do and make the crowd gasp, but then there's us, swimming in the water right where he wants to jump. he can't jump if we're blocking him. we have to swim to the edge if we want to let god do his thing. so where are you swimming? is there room for god to jump or are you blocking him off? hmm...

*prayer for the week* - that god will open your eyes to what he is doing around you and that he might use you at grow his kingdom.

i hope this week treats you well and you experience much growth and spiritual maturing.
god bless :)
oliveanddaisyxxx

spilled milk.

morning sunshine!

long time, no blog! i know i know, jordan you slacker! you have a blog and you have been forgetting to write! well, maybe i have saved you, because if i had something really good to blog about, then i would have done it. but i must not have, so i saved you four minutes of your life reading something that wasn't even my gold! well, that's my excuse anyway.

but this is my gold. recently i have been thinking about our circumstances and what goes on in our everyday lives that make us who we are. like, when we spill milk down our tops, so we have to walk the dog five minutes later, so we catch a man who is also walking his dog who is just passing us, so we can have a full length discussion about what it means to be a christian and to be strong in your faith. 

i always think about people who get hit by cars or who have car accidents; if susan had picked up her phone in the evening, she wouldn't have missed a call from her boyfriend and had to call him back, so she would have left for coffee 40 seconds earlier, which means she wouldn't have been crossing the road at that exact time those drunk teenagers were hooning around the corner and she wouldn't have died. ah. 

and now we see how complex god's plan is. if fred's grandmother hadn't been invited dancing on friday night by the man she met briefly in the supermarket, she would have come to visit fred, and fred couldn't have asked emily out because his grandmother would have been there. if fred hadn't asked emily out on friday night, she would have gone to that party on saturday night where she would have jumped into the car with that drunk p-plater and she had a car crash. confused?

so now we see that we are being used constantly in god's plan. like that time when i was in egypt and if the traffic hadn't have been horrible because, well, it's cairo, my family and i would have been home 20 minutes earlier and caught in crossfire between the military and the civilians. we might have died. or that time when my parents sent me to mackellar against my will and i then ended up inheriting eternal salvation thanks to my circumstances there. i could have gone to stella. my life would be veeeery different.

i always question why i have so many friends and such a stable christian family inside my school and why others don't. why do i have encouragement in my faith all day everyday when others have to battle being teased or put down because of their faith. or persecuted christians in places like iraq. why do i live so easily? what about those people who are the only christians in their year at school, and so fall away because they aren't receiving the community dosage they need? why not me? all i can say is that wherever you are is the best place for you, and it's where god is using you most. if you are no longer needed in a place, god will open up new opportunities and move you somewhere else to be used in another place. this is happening to my friend hannah, who is leaving mackellar to start life at newtown performing arts high. after seriosuly wrestling with this, why would god move her and take her away from me etc etc, i have realised that maybe i don't need her as much as i use to. maybe someone else needs her more now, and maybe i should let her go and be a blessing to the newtown community rather than keeping her for myself. although it's hard, god is in the small stuff. and it all matters.

check out this film clip. it's seriously sad, but i do want you to be thinking about where you are being used, and try to find out from god what it is that he is doing around you and what he wants to use you for. there's no use crying over spilled milk, because that milk was always going to be spilled, so that you were late to coffee, so that you forgot to let your rabbit out of it's cage, so that it didn't hop onto your driveway and get squashed under your mum's car. hm.

jason derulo - what if.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qQCx9mxV9g&ob=av2e

*prayer for the week*- that god will be using you at all times and that whatever he is needing you for, you will serve joyfully and be able to minister to those around you.