The Royal Wedding

So, I know I'm a bit late but I was just finally able to watch it and OH MY GOSH!!! I loved it! I loved everything about it! I loved Kate's dress, it was perfect!

I loved the trees in the church, they were amazing!

 (I mean bringing trees in is a great idea!)

I know it may seem silly, but well.... I promise there is a little more substance coming, bare with me while I get my wedding giggles out!

I've always loved the royals, I mean let's just be honest here, I keep my stud earrings and rings in this little plate on my dresser.

Seriously, it's true, I just had to dump them all out to take that pictures!

And if life could be just as I want it, this would be one of my many hats.

But alas, it is not, I don't even own it, I just tried it on in Sea Port Village last weekend

So I'm sure you're thinking, "Oh gosh, Sarah has lost her marbles, I bet she ordered a William and Kate plate too!" Well, in fact, I did not. (not that I would mind if someone bought me one ... my 30th birthday is less than 2 months away!) I only started to follow the royal wedding about a week before it occurred and that only because my best friend asked me about it and I had nothing to say. I had to tell her that I hadn't been following it at all. She was surprised and then I realized I was too! (I mean come on, I own the man's parent's commemorative plate for crying out loud!)

But here's the deal, as I sat and watched it this morning, I was totally captivated, the whole thing was absolutely stunning! But really the thing that captured me the most was the service. Really, I'm not kidding. Did you actually watch and listen to the service? It was amazing! Okay, so of course I know for some the service was nothing more than a bunch of memorized lines that they repeat back every week when they go to mass... but that is just sad, because the words were rich and full of depth and beauty! (By the way, did you notice they had a song commissioned just for their wedding ?! That is also pretty rad! But not the most important thing of course!)

Aside from the prayers and reading and vows (not that I am down playing those at all, like I just said, I thought it was amazing) the Bishop of London kind of blew me away with what he had to say!  Now of course, I have no insite into the personal nature of Kate and William's relationship with God but seriously, the Bishops words were so powerful! What an amazing charge to the couple as the start their married lives together! Now I know that marriage has been on my mind a lot lately as Adam and I just celebrated our anniversary but even still, I was challenged by the royal wedding and I was not expecting that at all! I expected the whimsy and beauty but conviction from the Holy Spirit through the words of the Bishop of London was not on my list of things to be expected!  (I actually started jotting notes as I sat infront of my computer!!!)


(The message starts at 31:40 and go to 38:55, if you want to see it)

Here's some of the gems the Lord got me with as I watched this morning:

* Marriage is intended to help man and woman to become what God ment each one to be, their deepest and their truest selves.
* Spiritual life grows as love finds its center beyond ourselves. Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of the spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self the richer we become in soul. The more we go beyond ourselves in love the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully reviled. In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life.
*Marriage should transform as husband and wife make one another their work of art.
*There must be no coercion if the Spirit is to flow.

I was reminded just what a mystery marriage really is and how amazing it is that God lets us be involved in his picture of how Christ relates to the Church.

Christ is loving and wooing us on a daily basis and it is through those things that we really are becoming our truest and deepest selves. Christ is always ready and willing to bring us into a more fuller life. He is transforming us into His work of art so that the Holy Spirit can flow freely in our lives!

It really is so beautiful and so shocking and so humbling.
And I am so glad the whole world got to hear it!

Blessing be upon the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge as they step into a mystery far beyond themselves!

Passion

I was up late, like really late, last saturday. I couldn't sleep. I had A LOT on my mind.
So, I decided to get it out of my head.
I wrote this:

-------------------------
Passion can be so good sometimes, but other times it just keeps me awake at night thinking about all the things I can't change. Things that I know don't please the Lord, things I know that need to be stopped and yet to stand up and say something would be seen as "intolerant" or me being a "crazy hippy" or me "pushing my ideas on people". So many times I just want to scream from the roof tops, "You are believing a Lie!!!!"  But I can't because someone might think it was rude. That I was being too "in your face" with my personal opinions.

I hate that I'm seen as way, way, way too liberal by some and then way, way, way too conservative by others. Ya know what? I'm actually trying to live my life according to the Lord's leading and it's changing me, changing me from the inside! But what do I get for it?! I get passion. Passion to stand up for what is the truth. Not the truth according to So-n-so, but the truth, the real, honest to God (because he created it) truth. But what do I do with that truth?

It's so hard to actually follow Jesus. It's actually rather lonely. Sometimes I feel like I would have more friends if I was willing to compromise a little bit more. Other times I feel like I identify so much with John the Baptist because he was seen as a nut case! But really he was a prophet. He saw Jesus and he spoke the truth, a really inconvenient truth.

I feel like Satan has the United States so blinded to the truth that people are calling things that are bad and wrong and down-right evil, good. You would think that as Christians we could see through Satan's lies but often it seems like Christians are just as blinded by them as everyone else.  Sometimes even more blinded than the world because Christians say things like, "well, it's in the Bible" or "this is the Lord's will" and they just take the injustice. The Lord's will is never injustice! 

I don't have a clue in the world what to do about all this that is brewing inside of me.

For now, I'm just going to try and get some sleep.

But I'm going to seek the Lord, I'm going to seek him hard. I need to know if this is a passion that is of my own strength or if it is a brew that the Lord put there because He has something for me to do beyond stay up to late thinking about what I would say if I got the chance. Maybe He's starting to prepare the way to give me the chance to speak some of this out (or maybe not).

I want so much to please the Lord. I want so much to do His will. But it is so hard when what you are doing, seems so wrong because our world is so screwed up!
---------------------------

Then, the next morning, I hear Buzzy say this at church.

"God wants to take your passion and wrap it in a holy boundary"

I was kind of in shock when I heard that come out of his mouth. I stayed for second service and he said it again!   And he said it in the context of a message that was centered around a VERY UNPOPULAR topic, "human trafficking/ slavery".


I was kind of inspired! Maybe the Lord really does have something coming...  

Isaiah 5:20
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!