Give Yourself Away part 2

Prayer Warriors: read closely.

I wrote a quick instant message of thanks to my friend at Avicom. She's very obviously the force behind my refrigerator full of food, and apparently headed up the Zoe Means Life meeting, and has been supportive and instrumental and overwhelmingly kind through the last weeks.

I told her that God was using her mightily.

And she told me that she knew. She could feel it.

A quick rewind: about six months ago, she was telling me she had never set foot in a church. It just wasn't a thing her family did. And that some relatives of hers went to 'Cultbrook' - a clever moniker for the Milwaukee area megachurch Oakbrook.

She wasn't bitter. She just didn't go. She didn't get it. Didn't understand why or how she'd need it. But that was then.

Since then, I've prayed with her and she's met Zoe. And she's been moved to help.

I told her that there are forces screaming right now that she's feeling anything. Howling that she has brushed against the strength and peace of The Spirit. And I told her that she has a unique bit of experience: she gets to see the face of Christ in the actions of people around her. Hear Jesus talk through His Church.

Those same evil forces are going to do everything they can to keep her from knowing. They're hoping they can get her to consider it all a feeling like a crush, or a fit of anger.

I want her to know. Don't you?

7But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.