With God, it used to be when I did something good I thought, “He’s proud of me.”Now I wake up in the morning and it’s like, “GOOD MORNING!! I LOVE YOU!” It’s transformed me; even in the way I receive His love. I don’t have to do anything and He’s so proud of me. He thinks the absolute highest of me all the time.

So now I’m living from that place of security.

Lately, it’s less about my head connecting to God and more like I’m just enveloped in the essence of who He is. He lives inside of me; it’s way more fluid now. It’s like the least I’ve tried to relate to God and the most I ever felt known by Him. I honestly didn’t really read my bible for a while [when I was in Israel]. It kind of just felt like I was in His presence all the time; it was so deep inside me.

I’m surrendering all of the ideas I had about what transition would look like. But what I’m surrendering to isn’t this religious idea of the ‘will of God.’ It’s actually the desires and passions inside me I had previously silenced because of what I thought God wanted from me. He is constantly taking these things I had always pinned as my weaknesses and saying, “Look, when you partner with me in this, it becomes a strength.”

I don’t really think of it as ‘submitting to His will,’ it’s just walking hand in hand with Him.

***

I sense very much that’s also what UChurch has been through these last 5 years. It’s a relinquishing of the systems and structures that held the place of what we thought God was asking us to do. In reality, it was what we thought we needed to do for God. Now we’re just coming into alignment with the Spirit. Instead of trying to do what we think He wants, we’re just joining into what He is already doing!

I was gone for pretty much 3 years, travelling and in and out of the city. When I came back there was this huge difference. In the church I remember of the past, you saw the elevation of the individual. You kind of saw this ‘glorifying’ of missions.

There was that element of performance or “Hey look what we’re doing for God.” I think the Holy Spirit was doing incredible things in Calgary at the time, but then there was this great burnout. It was like everyone got tired of doing all the things we thought God wanted, at the same time.

It was like suddenly we exited Egypt, and we were in the wilderness. The only thing was it didn’t feel like the wilderness, because it felt like we knew what we were doing! Maybe that’s the biggest difference I see in the church right now: then, we thought we knew what we were doing. Now, it’s like we recognize that we don’t know! We’ve surrendered that sense of knowing; we’ve actually yielded ourselves to the Holy Spirit’s plan.

Coming back, even for short periods, the number one thing I battled was my spirit sensing UChurch changing and suddenly my role wasn’t the same. At first I wrongly associated that with unbelonging. It wasn’t that I didn’t like UChurch anymore, it was more, “Something is happening here and its foreign to me. I’m ok with it, I just don’t know what it is.”

Now I see a community of people where we are yielding to the space given by HolySpirit to express, receive, and to share. I love Tic Tac time at church - it gives my heart an opportunity to engage with the people around me. And it sets a precedent:this is actually what’s important; this is why we’re here.

God is shifting the old ways of doing church; it’s not about Moses. It’s not about one guy standing up front on a Sunday. It’s about the empowerment of every single person in His body. It’s like civil society empowerment in a church setting, you know? He wants his body to know that each of us is equally important; not only to this church, or to the world, but to ourselves! We’re the ones who are accountable to the fullness of what God wants to do in our own lives. I think if you’re coming to church and not willing to consider your own role in all of this, then of course you’re going to be uncomfortable. What you came to get isn’t going to be given to you here.

***

The thing about this new season, this promised land, is that it required a lot of surrender. In me, and in the church. What’s inside of each of us becomes our full community; what God is doing inside us is also what he’s doing in the church.

There were things that I had fallen asleep to, and He’s awakened them. He’s given validity to them and made them seem plausible again. Not just plausible, but they’re really happening! It’s been a long season that’s felt like slow motion. But I feel like now, when things get going... they might really get going. It’s super cool.

Yet, in order for that to happen I’ve been wrestling through this uncomfortable season. You don’t get to skip a step in surrendering to breakthrough, none of us do.To completely surrender to breakthrough, you have to surrender so much so that there’s no hope of a breakthrough. And just when hope is gone, there’s the breakthrough!

That’s yielding.

There were basically three years where I attended Father Heart Schools [on and off]. I knew I was being deeply transformed, but nothing obvious came of it. God really rocked me, but I had no idea what was happening. But something had shifted in me,

I felt like I entered into a new freedom. It was like God was saying, “Remember the things I put in your heart? I want you to have them!” The Spirit really released me to step into the things I had wanted to be doing my whole life.

I think the part of me that’s creative and artistic has slowly had a platform to surface on, and I’m really thankful for that. I had always really loved creativity, but I’d never really done anything with it. But now He’s doing things with it; He has really highlighted it.

And yet it took a lot of discomfort to get here. It took a lot of the seed dying, and just thinking in the midst of it all, “One day it’ll reach the air again.”

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