Where Have You Seen God Lately?

This question was asked of me recently, and in light of my lack of updating this blog I thought what a good question to respond to. *and if you are brave enough after reading all this, you are invited to answer the question yourself.

I have seen the Holy Spirit at work through our small group.

Angela's House

Through a connection to a woman in Ruston to Fletch Hyacinth in our small group. The short version of the story is Fletch saw the condition of the house she and her kids were living in and he felt that after seeing what he saw he couldn't not do anything about it. Our small group after hearing the story decides to join Fletch in helping out. We raised around $3000 mostly just from our group and have built on a 20x16 room on the back of the house. We started on Easter weekend and are now about to put flooring in this weekend. It has been amazing to see the changes and the sense of hope Mrs. Angela has been showing. She has cleaned up her house and is trying to clean up the yard. It is just another step of her trying to clean up and take control of her life. I was there last night listening her tell her story to a neighbor. She was just talking about how God has brought her from the low place she was in to where she is now. It was fun to know that we are apart of that story (we may be the tail end of her story so far, but we are there). I hope that this is a bit of a catalyst for our small group trying to live deeper and richer lives that looks more and more like the life that Christ really intends for us.

I have seen Jesus in the establishment of new relationships. Because of Jill and her desire to see and help the world. We have opened our home to students to stay as a part of the English language program. Jinnapang(see earlier post) is from Thailand and it was a complete joy to have her stay a couple of months with us. Through her Jill and I have made many new Thai friends. People that I would have never ever met that are apart of our life now. I am so thankful that my wife found out about and made this opportunity happen. On the spiritual side it has been pretty challenging for me to have discussions with someone that not only comes from a country on the other side of the planet and English being a second language, but also doesn't have a Christian background. Most everyone I have ever talked with whether Christian or not has at the least a similar understanding of how the world works and of God whether they believe or not. So it has challenged me to 1. try and explain what I believe. 2. It has made me really think "what do I really believe?" It has been a joy to discuss similarities and differences between Buddhism and Christianity with these new friends. These new friends have been coming to our small group, have helped out at Mrs. Angela's house and come over for dinner. I hope they have experienced the love of Jesus through just seeing how we love each other and take care of each other.

I have seen God at work in the lives of the people taking Financial Peace University that I am teaching right now. We have split the class into two nights. My brother Chuck and Michael Brewton are helping lead on Sunday nights, and I am leading the Wednesday night class with Mark Graham. The course is 13 weeks long. We just finished week 10. At the beginning of the course I asked everyone to write down on a note card how much debt they had (not including house mortgage!), when we added up the two classes total debt my heart sunk. It hurt so bad to see that between 30 family units (some single and some married) we had a total of $1,005,000 in credit card, car, student loan, and medical debt. These are just the average people in our community and at Trinity UMC that are just in slavery to this debt. So where have I seen Christ in this? In just 10 weeks these families have worked very hard on changing their behavior. They have doing crazy things, like trying to live on a budget with a plan, doing the 'baby steps', like doing the debt snowball (sample form), they have sold things, they are trying to take control of their life and they are starting to see the fruit of that. Last night I asked them to write down on a note card how much of that debt they have paid off just since the start of the class. And this is only from the Wednesday night class (and not everyone was there last night) they have paid off a total of $61,000 in just 10 weeks. This is the power of applying God's principles in stewardship to your life at work! I am seeing these peoples lives change.

So where have you seen God lately?