a bunny running wild in daisies....

I have learned so much this week and feel so much more free that I can barely crunch it down in a short blog....but I'll try okay? So this week we had speaker Tiffany Thompson and amazing, dynamic woman who travels around with Life Promotions as a public speaker with Life Promotions speaking and various topics. The theme she chose for this week was P.I.N.K. An acronym about the promises of God in scripture. P stands for Precious are Your thoughts toward me Oh God...if I were to count them, them would outnumber the grains of sand. Psalm 139: 17-18 I is for Immeasurably more than anything we could ask or imagine is His power at work within us. Eph 3:20, N stands for Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you. Hebrews 13:5 and K stands for Kingdom of God is not of this world. John 18:36. You might think this all just sounds pretty cute and sweet, but these messages I found really powerful. On Monday, we all started out our lectures by walking down the beach and find a secluded dock where we could all sit in a circle and ask God to give us His thoughts of encouragement and insight about each of the 18 students here. When we began the process we asked God to reveal to us what he wanted to say to each student. A lot of people got similar mental pictures and words of encouragement for each individual which we verbally shared with them. For nearly every student I felt like God was speaking so many different words and pictures to me...they just came flooding in my mind and just about everything I shared seemed to really resonate with each of them, that I was certain God must have been giving me insight beyond my own. Go God!!! It was so beautiful to see how God loved each person here and was in desperate attempt to reveal more depths of how He saw and thought of everyone here!

Now, I have to tell you something that during this my whole life I have struggled my whole life with a fear of rejection. I haven't shared this with very many people at all. But I have been feeling this rejection a lot.....even here at DTS. Not that anyone rejected me, but I felt like they did. I feared they wouldn't like me if they really knew my past, my mistakes and some of the foolish things I've done. I was really careful about sharing stuff about me, for fear that if they knew they wouldn't respect me as much. I even carried myself around in the fog of believing not everyone really cared to get to know me. "Is something seriously wrong with me that makes me not as fun to hang out with?" I thought....and as I went along my life, it seemed like when others did reject me, break up with me, ignore me or simply not initiate hanging out with me, it was because I just wasn't worth it. And even though I knew that God loved me, I just dumbed myself down, and hide who I really was. So, as each other student got a chance to be encouraged...all 17 of them, I realized I was the last. After about 4 hours went by and everyone got so encouraged, my turn came...and I was so used to it....that it barely phased me, but my heart sunk a little and I didn't really know why...maybe it's because "I'm always the last....but I guess that's just the story of my life." I listened as the devil lied to me....and I believed. I figured I'd get the last leftovers of insights, the least amount of time and everyone was tired. But what soon took place utterly blew my mind. Every single one of my class mates fought for a chance to share with me what God had revealed to them and to encourage me. Myla shared how she looked up to me and was sooo glad that we lived close to each other and was looking forward to hanging out with me when we got back home, then another shared with me how she saw Christ in me every single day wanted to be like me when she grew up, still another shared a picture of a bunny in a field of daisies, running around without a care in the world. Only did I know that my favorite animal as a child was a bunny and that I love daisies. Then about 5 others shared how much they loved how I radically worship God and saw me as such a role model. By this point I was sobbing and laughing, completely overwhelmed that anyone saw me like that. Oh, how much I long to show Christ every day, and here was someone telling me that she saw Christ in me? That I glowed? That I was a woman after God's own heart like King David? and to have everyone unanimously tell me that I was a leader? I don't feel like a leader! I want to be but I don't feel like one. After about 15 minutes of listening to these words, I felt completely broken, like my heart was like a bunny in a cage, fighting to be free.....and then it happened!!!!!!!! The door of the cage opened and I saw myself as that bunny running wild in a field of daisies without a care in the world. Surely God revealed just a few grains of sand amongst the vast beach of His precious thoughts towards me!!!! I pray that God would reveal to you His precious thoughts! Because, even if you don't feel it, He has a lot of them....and He's dying to whisper them to you!