The past five weeks have been among the best and easiest and most wonderful weeks in ministry I've had. The wave of the Holy Spirit is 10-feet high at worst, and all I'm trying to do is ride it with the gusto of a professional surfer, which I'm most assuredly not.
As someone described to me a couple of days ago, "We don't usually have so many people except at Christmas, and we've never had people joining the church and the baptisms like this. Never."
Not really knowing this, I sat in amazement. I told the person sitting in my office that it's the Holy Spirit. The person said, "I know you've got more than a little to do with it." We could debate, since I'm not willing to go that far, but I admit it is more than rewarding to see this happening, to see momentum starting to build.
Club 316, our youth ministry, is becoming front page news, as it will probably be this coming week in the local paper as we have the Ice Cream Olympics tonight. Not exactly sure what that is except I know a local fire truck will come by at the end of the evening and spray the ice cream off young bodies.
I got the go-ahead to go to Kansas City in October for the Church of the Resurrection Leadership Institute. I pray I will be able to bring back plenty of things for that to our churches.
We're planning a huge cleaning/painting Saturday later this month to re-do what has lay stagnant upstairs in this wonderful building for quite a while, prepping for coming Back To Church Sunday and our new Sunday Small Groups.
We've ordered a new coffee maker, and I'm seeking money for tables and such for our new coffee hutch for Sunday mornings.
Ride the wave, ride the wave.
Then it hit me...I had better be careful. We had better be careful. Why?
"The apostles returned to Jesus from their ministry tour and told him all they had done and taught. Then Jesus said, "Let's go off by ourselves to a quiet place and rest awhile. He said this because there were so many people coming and going that Jesus and his apostles didn't even have time to eat."
The wisdom of that fairly drips off the page. I strongly believe that when we're closest to seeing that wave I keep talking about, we need to be most careful. Most of the time the "evil one" doesn't even bother with us, we're so inconsequential to his plans. But let us see the wave and begin to ride it, and the next thing you know, someone will step up to stop it. They won't even realize they're doing it.
That's our enemies tactics.
So, what do we do? Go off to a quiet place and rest awhile. Prepare yourself with prayer. Step outside the success and see where you've come from, which often is from the mundane.
Don't think that's the end of the spiritual success, which always comes from God. Immediately after this, Jesus fed the 5,000, because a huge crowd formed even as they tried to relax.
The point? Go when Jesus sends us. But be prepared for the struggles that can follow those wonderful moments. That's life, too.
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