Dancing Barefoot

"Come and see a Man who told me all I ever did!" The Samaritan woman couldn't contain her excitement after her encounter with Jesus. She ran into the city where she lived, a disreputable woman, and didn't care what anyone thought of her. She had just seen Jesus and heard His astonishing declaration that He was the Messiah, and she wanted everyone to know about this amazing Man.

The change in her drew everyone's attention. She totally threw socially acceptable behavior aside and proclaimed the truth with joy and delight. Why? How could she do that? Because she'd looked into Jesus' eyes and seen the beautiful truth for herself. He is the Messiah, the Savior of the World! He's the One who loves us without condition and spread His own arms out to die for the wrongs we've done. The embrace of the cross takes us into the embrace of His heart--forever!!!

"These shoes will pinch a little," Jesus told me just a few days ago as I tried once again to take on a responsibility I wasn't meant to have--the desire to share had turned into a need to convince. But Jesus isn't asking us to persuade others to believe our testimonies, only to share what we have seen and heard. When we've looked in the face of Jesus, what other arguments are necessary? He says it's the work of the Holy Spirit to convince and change a heart and bear witness that someone's spoken His word. It's for us to be like little children--delighted and transparent in our 'eyewitness' sharing of our faith.

Have we seen Jesus? Can we, like Akaine Kramarik and Colton Burpo who have seen visions of heaven, say with wonder, "He has the most beautiful eyes!" Has Jesus looked at us, as He did His first disciples and as He did the Samaritan woman? Oswald Chambers said in My Utmost for His Highest that in the place of the heart where Jesus looks at us, we become soft and pliable to His touch. We're changed, melted from the inside and out with a love that overtakes all fears, questions, and self-consciousness.

Todd Burpo, who narrated his son's experience in Heaven is For Real, says, "What is childlike humility? It's not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of guile. The lack of an agenda. It's that precious, fleeting time before we have accumulated enough pride and position to care what other people might think." I'm not sure I've ever been unconscious of what others think of me. But I'm learning to be. I'm learning to dance barefoot in the grass, that amazing field of grace songwriters Big Daddy Weave and Amy Grant have written about in their songs: Field of Grace and Out into the Open.

Todd Burpo put his finger on the spot the Holy Spirit has been seeking to revitalize in me--that child-like honesty and joy deep in the soul that presses me to say exactly what I know to be true without trying to fit it into other people's boxes. Jesus said in Matthew 18:3 "unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Todd Burpo says of this passage after his son's experience, "[W]hat is required to enter heaven...is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard."

What areas is the Lord desiring to revitalize in you? What 'boxes' of human wisdom and argument do we need to question and toss out? The Infinite desires to be known or He would not have come down to earth as a humble Carpenter. Jesus wants us to rediscover the wonder of who He is. I've discovered that when I throw wide open my arms and accept Jesus for exactly who the Word says He is then I again experience the Divine swirling me upon into the heavenly.

And I dance there with my Beloved--barefoot in fields of grace.

Standing, Arms Wide, Freefalling into Grace

"You'll need every bit of what you learned at YWAM," Jesus said to me a few days ago, and now I understand what He meant.

I need every bit of grace and mercy and freedom from judgment that Jesus extends to start this blogspot because fear would slap ducttape over my mouth. Two years ago I gave up my blogspot about Scripture jewels to return to China, and now I'm a divorced mother of four young children, immersed in a second year of college, studying secular psychology. What do I know about the perfect Christian life? Nothing, but I know the truth that Gerald May wrote: "Grace is God's passion." So here I am, letting go of fear and freefalling into the arms of beautiful grace to share again.

My heart overflows with all the goodness God has poured into my life, and I feel like TobyMac in his song Tonight, "Like a river no dam can hold, being driven by a Source overflowing our souls." God's grace and mercy are so big, so wonderful, and so gentle to the wounded heart that, like Peter and Paul before the Sanhedrin, I "cannot help but speak the things which we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20).

Isn't Jesus wonderful? Isn't He the most beautiful Man who ever lived? Doesn't He hold our hearts with such joyful love? For surely His heart rejoices when we rest our souls in Him. So I invite you on this blogspot to join with me in sharing what Jesus has done. We're His witnesses of His mercy and grace, and the world needs to hear it.

When I talk to people, I talk about "My Jesus." Why do I do this? Because we need a personal Savior. Jesus is real and close to each one of us when we call to Him. When we accept His testimony of Himself, recorded in the Bible, He becomes for each one of us "my Jesus, my Savior, my Healer, my Deliverer." The world needs to know this Jesus. They need to experience what A.W. Tozer said, "We can seek God and find Him! God is knowable, touchable, hearable, seeable with the mind, the hands, the ears, and the eyes of the inner man."

When I say, "My Jesus" I mean the Savior of mankind who lived and bled 2000 years ago and rose again, triumphant over hell and the grave. Hallelujah! The Father has left His record of proof in the documents composing the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible. He authenticated His life, death, and resurrection in a way that puts secular history books to shame, preserving and declaring the truth by His Spirit, confirming to our hearts and minds that we are adopted as His children when we fix our faith on Him and not on our own efforts or the devil's lies.

So help me, please, all of you who rejoice to know this Savior, in discovering more and more of our precious Jesus, falling even more radically in love with Him, and rejoicing in the passionate depths of His love for us.