Whenever and Wherever Part 2

Whenever and Wherever.  Those were the words that we started praying back in the middle of 2011 while living in Arkansas.  God brought us to Wellington, Florida in April of 2012.  It has been an unbelievable 15 months!  We have met some awesome people that will be life long friends.  The Wellington campus is just getting started.  I can't wait to see what God has in store here!

 

God has turned the page of our story this last week and in about a month, we will start a new chapter in our lives and a new chapter at LifeChurch.tv.  I have accepted a position at our campus in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and our family will be moving there next month!  It is with sadness that we have to say goodbye to everyone here in South Florida, but we know that God is in control and this is his next step for us.

 

The staff at LifeChurch.tv Wellington is incredible and I am blessed to have served with them.  You Wellington Lifers are equally as incredible!  Keep leading, keep serving, keep inviting like crazy.  Our mission is still the same and we can't do it without your help.  We want to lead people to become Fully Devoted Followers of Christ!

 

Praying God sized miracles for LifeChurch.tv Wellington.  Looking forward to God sized miracles at LifeChurch.tv Broken Arrow.  Whoever finds God…finds life!  

 

We love you, 

 

Bryan, Mel, Maylee, Maddee

Pray that the Lord your God will tell us where we should go and what we should do.  Jeremiah 42:3

Cry

I was having coffee with a friend the other day.  We talked a lot about faith and what audacious faith looked like.  I got back in the car and a song was playing that pretty much summed up our conversation.  Here are a few of the lyrics:

There is hope for the helpless
Rest for the weary
Love for the broken heart
There is grace and forgiveness
Mercy and healing
He'll meet you wherever you are
Cry out to Jesus

God is in the business of meeting us wherever we are, both in times of joy and sorrow.  He is there today while you're going through financial distress.  He is there today as your heart has just been broken.  He is there today as you cry out for physical healing.  And like a good friend of mine who just lost her brother two days ago, He is there as she and her family search for peace and strength.

The same power that conquered a horrible death lives in you.  Does that really resonate with you?  The same power that allowed Jesus to bust through the clutches of death's darkness into life lives in you if you are a Christ follower.  Cry out to Jesus with audacious faith.  Be bold.  No matter what you've done, no matter what you're going through, His desire is that you will cry.  Cry to your creator with everything that you've got in you.  Stand on the truth and foundation of faith because nothing can shake you off of that foundation if you believe.

The Bible talks a lot about faith.  There are a lot of verses that begin with, "It was by faith that ____".  So what is your statement?  Make it personal.  It was by faith that _____(insert your personal statement for healing, restoration, forgiveness, answers, etc., here).  Then believe it.

Do you really want to hear from God?  Do you really want His peace?  Do you really want His power in you...full on brute force make your hairs stand up on your body type of power?  Cry out to Him.  He will meet you wherever you are.

Remembering Dad 11/3/31-4/2/07

My dad passed away 6 years ago today.  I wrote this when he passed and it was read at his funeral.  In honor of him, I wanted to post it here:

Did you shake it up?  That was one of the last funny phrases we heard from my dad before he got really bad this past weekend.  It came to be a joke with mom, Melanie, and myself.  You see, dad had been drinking glucerna for months for his nutritional intake after it got difficult for him to put any kind of food down.  And although my mom and all of us had done it tons of times before, it never failed that when we would bring him his glucerna he would always ask, “Did you shake it up?”  Melanie brought him a can of it just a few days ago when he was sitting in his living room chair.  As she got closer, she smiled at him and started shaking the glucerna in front of him to show him she was doing it right.  That famous crooked smile came across dad’s face as he took the can from her hand.

That same crooked smile that would appear when he talked about his wife of 37 years whom he, as someone put it to me this week, truly adored.  That same crooked smile that would appear when he would talk about his family and friends.  That same crooked smile that would appear when he would win playing “chicken foot” dominoes with his friends.  That same crooked smile that would appear when Maylee and Maddee would play dress up with him and he would end up wearing a tiara and earrings, and that same crooked smile that I just saw this past Friday when the girls ran inside to tell their pa-paw about how their daddy ran and screamed like a girl because he just saw a big snake outside.

I’m going to miss that crooked smile.  It was extremely hard the last few days seeing him suffer like he did.  Even though he was in unimaginable pain, every now and then up until his final day on earth, he would still reach up and give mom a kiss on the cheek.  We all told him we loved him during those last few seconds and we saw him trying to say something back to us and we know for sure he was telling us that he loved us too.  I’ll miss you dad, but as Maylee and Maddee said to me after it happened…their pa-paw isn’t coughing or hurting anymore.

That crooked smile is focused on Jesus right now, and one day I’ll see it again when dad is standing at heaven’s gate waiting for me…probably with a can of glucerna in his hand and a rubber snake behind his back!

I Give Up

Do you want to give up on something?  Do you ever think that telling God you give up is a good thing?

I was talking with a friend today and he was telling me a story that happened a little while back.  In the story, he told me how he had come to a time in his life where he didn't know which direction to go anymore and he was feeling that God had something else for his life so he prayed these words...God, I Give Up.

You see, my friend had come to a point in his life to where he was tired of trying to write his own story.  He was tired of trying to be the orchestrator of his life.  Like a child, he cried out to his heavenly father and asked him to take over.  God, I give up.

I wrote those four words down as soon as I heard them because I think a lot of us need to come to the point in our lives where we lay everything down in front of God; our fears, our dreams, those nervous feelings in your gut that you get sometimes when you know a change needs to happen, and just say God, I give up.  I cant figure it out on my own anymore.  Show me where to go.

The Bible says to 'Seek his will in all you do and he will show you which path to take.' -Proverbs 3:6. Seeking his will means giving up on your own will, reading the Bible, praying, and listening for God to tell you his will.  By the way, his will is good and it's perfect.

 Give up?

Stretched

Nine months is a long time in blog world.  That's how long it has been though since I last wrote.  The last time I wrote I was living in Central Arkansas.  This time I'm in South Florida.  The last time I wrote I was ending a seventeen year career in banking.  This time I'm about nine months into being a full time Pastor.  The last time I wrote I had a smoking hot wife.  Well, at least some things never change!

God rocks.  That sums up the past nine months.  Flash back to July, 2011.  Me and Mel talking to our two daughters..."Girls, I don't know what God is doing in our lives right now but I can tell you that he's getting ready to lay something so big on us that we can't even begin to imagine what it could be."  Now if this me could have gone back and talked to the July 2011 me and told him what was going to happen in 2012, I would have told this me to lay off the crack and go back to the future.  God does crazy things though when you fully surrender to him...and to say that he laid something so big and unimaginable on us would be the understatement of the year.

S T R E T C H E D.  That word also sums up the past few months for me.  My faith has been stretched.  My mind has been stretched.  My gifts and talents have been stretched.  Life as we know (knew) it has been stretched.  I know now more than ever what it means to truly give your cares, worries, anxieties and life one hundred percent over to God.  You come to a point in your life and you realize that this story you are in, this best-selling adventure story that you are in, is God's story for you.  He's the author.  Let go, and let him continue to show you the next page, the next chapter, the next adventure.  It won't all be easy.  It all hasn't been easy during our transition.  Twists, turns, dead ends, and feeling like you're going Mach 3 with your hair on fire seemed like an everyday occurrence for a while.  But with God in front, we took everything head-on and are all the stronger because of it.  Thank God for an amazing wife and two amazing daughters.  I could not do this without them.

There's so much on my heart and so much that I want to say but I'll end this post with this...Happy 2013!  Let this be the year of no more "what if" questions for you.  Spend time with God and ask him what's next in your story.  Then do it.  There are people out there waiting on you.  God is waiting on you.