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Dreaming with God

And yet another late night post. Funny, though, that as I am awake when I'm supposed to be asleep, I am thinking about dreaming. There are a lot of people in this world that shove their God-given dreams as far away as they can to try to live according to somebody else's dreams or standards. But those people really only "survive" because they are operating from the fear of what others think rather than what God thinks. It ends up being a lose-lose situation because the God-given dreams end up dying in a corner rather than beaming forth from the person who embodies them and blessing the world with their unique color and purpose.

The world needs dreamers who dare to dream. The world you to dare to be you. 

I have my desires, my hopes, my dreams. I once was an ocean full of sunken dreams that set sail too long ago to remember, and needed a raising from the depths and a fresh wind in their sails and some direction.
God has been waking my heart to His dreams, as He is putting His heart to my dreams. And it's time to set sail. There's no turning back, the course is set. And whatever He has planned for me is what I want. Wherever He goes, I will follow. The dreams in my heart are founded inside my desire for Him. And knowing God's heart is all I need in this life, I don't need anything else. God's heart... His crazy love... is my dream, my desire, my passion, my reason, my life, my all. No matter where I go or what condition I am in, if I am alone or surrounded, rich or poor, hungry or full,  cold or comfortable, God's heart and His love is all that matters to me. There's nothing else I hold onto.

Looking Both Ways

It's early Sunday morning, just a bit after 2:00am June 19th, and I feel as if this is the perfect time to be awake. I go outside, smell the Oregon rain-washed air, hear the water in the fountain falling softly, and then I listen to the sound of pure silence playing perfectly and somewhere behind all the other little noises. This is what midnight sounds like. The sun is on the other side of the world, and I quite like how suddenly this front-porch, which with the sun is a public thing, has become my temporary hiding place. I feel like this time of day is when I can think, when I can feel, and when I can breathe. Every now and again, a car will slowly drive by and remind me that I am not the only one awake at this hour. But I feel as though I am.

Dawn outside my room at the Heart to Heart Children's Village.

A year ago today, June 19, my time in Tegucigalpita, Heart to Heart Children's Village, Honduras was coming to a happy yet strangely unfinished ending. I opened to this chapter of life in my old journal and smiled as I breathed in the scent of the pages smothered with ink, food stains, and memories, and tried to read my scribbled-in-the-dark words which brought to life the vivid descriptions of the beautiful children and their full eyes, dancing and laughing and inviting me into their family, and teaching me about the simplicity of love. I packed these pages with ten days of Honduras bliss, and then I went home and had a lot of questions, a lot of thoughts, and a lot more pages to write.

So I put that journal away and took out the next one. When that one was done, I took out the next. I have written through seven journals since then. Huge journals with huge pages, I am talking. Thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of words...sit on the highest shelf of my closet and remember the things I told them to.

Maybe some of those secrets have grown old. But I dare believe most of them would still crack a smile, refrain a laugh, or shed a tear.

....Some memories I will hold in my heart forever, and some I will not, simply because I can't. Life can't be based on what I remember. I cannot live from my past, no matter how wonderful or terrible it might have been. To me, my journals are beautiful books: they are stories of everything that has happened between the depths of my heart and the depths of God's.

My words are my footprints through life, and footprints always leave a mark.... But there is a time when one must decide...which way to go now?

I have looked both ways: back by flipping through the stained pages of my journals, and forward... straight into the bright eyes of Jesus...full of more stories than my pen and hand could ever acquire.

I have looked both ways, and chosen forwards. How ready and how excited I am to pioneer onwards. I move into a story that is more real than what I've written with my pen, a future more tangible than my pages, and a destiny that hasn't merely been scribbled as riddles and poems, hidden between yellow pages for nobody to ever see, but a destiny that grows clearer, stronger, and brighter with each passing day for me and the world to discover.

I move in closer than before, I press in deeper than before, and I hunger harder than before; for I am after Jesus, and Jesus alone.

Writing My Own Story

My life is just one of many, but every life lived is worth telling. My life is significant because I am significant to God. As I write my story......as I live my life, I am encouraged by the fact that my story doesn't have to sound or be like someone else's. It's part of discovering who I am, and it's part of drawing closer to God and letting His love tell me who I am, and then letting that story and that grace flow freely from me.

I want to be filled with stories. And not just stories of pen and paper and some imagination, but stories of earth and Heaven colliding, the reality of love flooding in from every side, and Jesus using my hands, feet, eyes, ears and mouth to express how He feels inside. I want to be filled with these stories. I'm ready to know the unexplainable, remember the inexperienced, and live the impossible.

My Resolve

Well folks, the big day came and passed. I graduated from high school! Since my last day of school on Friday  until now - the day after graduation - I have been trying so hard to not only put words to my emotions and thoughts about this huge and inevitable turning of a page in my life, but actually find emotions & thoughts about it that would make sense to those who ask "soooo, how are you feeling about right now?" Haha.
So far I haven't come up with anything "profound" and "not-cliche" to say on what graduating feels like.

This morning I woke up and realized why: what this part of my life means to me isn't really about "getting out of high school," "celebrating all I accomplished," or even "moving onto something 'bigger' and 'better,'" nor is it about finally facing "the REAL world."

This event actually sooo comes down to being all about One thing, One person, and One love. . . .

I am out of high school now, and I have this serious revelation... this huge resolve... that I have the rest of my life to live. And in this life, there is only one thing that matters to me -- only this one thing. That One thing, One person, is Jesus.

No matter how overly-poetic this might sound, I am truthfully saying that after all my searching for thought and emotion, I cannot do anything right now but say how much I love God! .....

I am outrageously, unfathomably lost inside inside His love, and in turn, I can't help but just LOVE Him with all of my heart, with every fiber in my being. He is everything I live for and will live for until the day I die. Words cannot express this love, this passion burning inside of me; this passion to know Him more, this passion to just be with Him, this passion to love other people with His love, this passion to sit face to face with Him, this passion to live above what the natural says is possible and instead live only by what God says is possible and see Heaven here on earth! ...This passion to feel His every beautiful heartbeat, so that myself and, in turn, everyone I touch will be transformed into a testimony of the most wonderful, beautiful love in the entire universe: the one and only Love of God!


Right now, I am indeed a high school graduate. But even more so, I am a living, walking, talking, breathing testimony of the love of God. 

No matter what happens in my future, my comfort, hope, and peace is found in this amazing truth: I have given God my heart. He has my whole life. He has my everything, He is my everything, because everything He is.... I have realized.... is more valuable than anything else I have found out there. He is literally "out of this world." He is worth it. He is worth my life. He is worth my everything.

So here's to being alive
Here's to being lost inside of love, and in turn...
Here's to being found by love
Here's to the power of love
Here's to the One who is Love
Who is Jesus - You have my whole heart, my whole love, my whole life!

"I was watching You!"

I'm usually not a "quick post" blogger. Usually when I start blogging, it's a 99.99% guarantee it's going to be extremely long and potentially have ten different endings. (Can any other blogger here relate?!)

This one is going to be different, and be quick...short...(I hope, anyways.)

I was thinking about how I want to experience greater levels EVERY DAY of what God has for me. And though I've heard this before, and bla bla bla, it really hit ME today. (By "hitting" me, I mean... it became something real inside of me & not just going in one ear and out the other. It's something I am experiencing!) That is: the importance of being thankful. 


When I start thanking God for what that happened today, no matter what it was, it opens up room for more. I realized that thankfulness isn't the key to getting God to do something that He hasn't already done, it's simply recognizing how amazing God is and then in turn receiving a greater amount of hunger to see Heaven on earth, to see Jesus get the fullness of what He paid for on the cross.

Basically, it's not through our discouragement by what we didn't do, but through thankfulness and happiness about what God DID do, that we become completely happy people who experience constant increase in love, joy, and peace and see an increase of the Kingdom in our lives. :-)

So I've decided I can't let God get away with doing something good! I have to say, "I saw you there, God, I was watching you!" And thank Him for who He is and what He's done.

Colossians 2:8 ...and let your living spill over into thanksgiving.

Because He Loves Me

Time to write. So many beautiful earth-shattering and Heaven-invading events have happened lately. And as I write that very phrase, I realize "Isn't that a normal thing, now?" To see Heaven invade earth is what the one thing I am living and breathing for. My heart has been gripped by the One whose eyes know me and are full of the purest, truest, most beautiful love that I have ever known.I am changed. I can feel it in my heart, a sense it in my thoughts, I hear it in my words. Change.

I am letting the Fire out of the fireplace. I am letting go and letting God. I am beginning to understand what it means to utterly surrender, and in that, be taken violently captive by the Love of Jesus. And in that captivity, to have no other desire and delight than to love Him in return by letting my heartstrings be tuned to His heartstrings, and to have my heartbeat in rhythm with His.

From my journal today: "I am learning just how easy it is to love people when God's love lives inside of me. It's not about "getting' someone to understand something about God and do something about it, and it's not about talking someone into saying a prayer that they didn't mean. It's about having a real conversation, being real, being you, and letting Holy Spirit be Himself. I have always wanted the boldness -- to feel the burn from the aching and longing in my heart -- to see miracles and to pray for people and introduce them to Jesus. In the past, I have had the boldness to pray for people but have always been discouraged about myself during or after my attempt to offer an encounter to someone with Jesus..."

The reason why I was discouraged was because I was believing a lie. To preface this "lie," I would first like to say, lies always rob you of something. This lie was robbing me of walking in the supernatural, and the supernatural boldness to love people as Jesus did.

The lie was this: Lauren, you're not doing or saying that good enough. You just can't do anything right. You're always just doing so-so, and even when you think you give your all, you're only giving half, and still that isn't good enough. God's unsatisfied and expects so much more of you. So you're setting yourself up for failure, displeasure, disappointment, because frankly, you just can't do anything right.

I know that I am not the only one who has lived under the shadow of that kind of lie before. It's called the "You're-not-good-enough lie." Even reading those words.... it's pretty disgusting, isn't it? It's so complicated and gross! The subtle but murderous lie basically tells people that they are always missing the mark and that something is slightly wrong with them - always. What I found that lie caused me to wear was the unfitting blankets of Insignificance and Self-doubt, which is basically lack of confidence in who I am as a unique person. 


On Wednesday night, God rocked me and told me, guess what, that's a lie, And guess what, that means it's not reality! Then He showed me reality: I am standing in a wide open field in front of a tree, and Jesus is there next to that tree. I see His eyes, I can see right up close into them, even though we are standing a few feet away. His eyes pierce my soul. It's as if His eyes say 'I know about everything - all the pain, all the hurt, all the struggles.' At the same time, His eyes say, 'Lauren you are my beautiful bride and I am madly in love with who you are...come away with me and be mine!' His eyes also flood with tenderness and mercy. His eyes are full of liquid love, full of compassion, full of answers, full of hope.
There is a coat on my shoulders, and it's brown. That coat is called Insignificance. I stand before Jesus, he says, its time for that coat to be off of you. So in the vision I take off the coat and put it down next to the tree. Then I see something amazing. Jesus looks down at the coat, picks it up, and with one hand, throws it into the sky in the opposite direction - like a boomerang that can't ever come back. Jesus looks back at me and smiles. It was that easy. Then He comes up to me and starts dancing around me and sing this love song. I stand there and Jesus is rejoicing...over me.
There is another coat, he says. This coat is called Self-Doubt. And it's time for that coat to come off too. Again, I take it off, put it by the tree, and Jesus picks it up and flings it into oblivion. Then He rejoices over me. I see myself without those coats on, and I am wearing a pure white dress. I feel light and I feel free. I am free.  

So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. - John 8:36

I have never felt this free before: Free to live, free to give, free to be, and free to love Jesus and love people. Oh, to be ever aware of His heart beat for his people! And so I will stay there with Jesus, in the wide open field, wearing my white dress, and leaning against the tree with Him who loves me for who I am - not for what I have done. He loves me because He Is Love.

And the rest of the story could be told like this:
Because He loves me I do what I do; 

And I do what I do because He loves me.