Saved to serve

I have just had the awesome privilege to attend the Willow Creek Leadership conference. I was so incredibly challenged. It was superb. I was introduced to so many amazing concepts and ideas and left there with my mind abuzz and my heart beating just a little faster.

I have been praying for a long time for God to show me how we could 'do' church more effectively. But I'm not in a church I'm in an army so how do I do "Army" more effectively. I am reading three books at the moment Pathway to Purpose for women by Katie Brazelton, the Shack by William p. Young and IT by Greg Groeschel. Greg heads up LifeChurch.TV They are all amazing and everyone on the planet should read them.

But Katie is taking me through some really personal things. She dealt with my walk in integrity this morning. It was a difficult session and serious thinking had to really take over. How integral am I? She has a quote in the book by Charles Swindoll "When one has integrity there is an absence of hypocrisy. He or she is personally reliable, financially accountable, and privately clean.... innocent of impure motives."

WOW WOW WOW. I had some real hard cleaning up to do and so I spent a good long time before the throne just telling my Father all about it.

I was woken up this morning by God at about 3am. He needed to deal with me and so I couldn't sleep - I am studying for exams I write two in January - but he wanted me to get a new vision for our Corps. (pronounced Core) This is what he gave me

Our vision statement is an old one but we want to revive it "Saved to Serve" Our Corps really does service well. So If that is a natural strength of the Corps then we should run with it so this next year everything we do will be in service. We want to serve with excellence. The catch phrase we want everyone to catch on to maybe make it the official greeting "how may I serve you today?" We want the entire Corps to buy into this vision to make it theirs. Our Scripture verse for 2009 is Luke 4:18-19 - its the call on the life of Jesus and its the one he handed over to his followers. So we are going to ask God everyday "How may I serve you today."

I would love us to have t shirts made with Born to serve on them or something like that. We want the vision statement to go throughout the different ministries in the Corps. We want it to be translated into lots of different languages too.

Bill Hybels talked about Mother Theresa in the last session of the day before we watched a clip intitled A thousand questions. --Mother Theresa made a few vows in her time as a nun but the most profound was she told God "I will refuse you nothing". That's pretty dangerous. God may ask you to do the most impossible thing - that's always been my fear. I forget sometimes that He's my Father but then I remember what he asked His Son to do..... No I know He loves me and He will always love me but there are times when I want to limit His control over every area of my life. I would love for him to trust me with little bits of it. But I guess when I fully committ to Him He fully committs to me. Thats what a covenant relationship is all about but in the busy path of life thats not always easy to hold on to or to remember. But Mother Theresa didn't hesitate to say to her father "I will refuse you nothing". She also promised to be faithful in the little practices. I guess those are the things that no one else sees. Just you and Your Father who sees everything. Its difficult to be faithful in those moments. The the vow she made that really touched me was this "Even thous I don't feel his presence for long periods of time, I will seek to love him as he has never been loved before."

To love like that is amazing!! I made it my mission to discover what that means in my relationship with God. I love Him - I tell everyone I love him but to love him more than he has ever been loved before that obsessive - and I guess that's what he wants!

I am so thrilled to be loved by God and I am so thrilled to be his child. So pray for Pretoria Corps and pray for us as we enter into this amazing time of learning what it is to serve with excellence. may we know God's peace as we strive to serve our community as God would have us serve them.