In a last minute change, I chose to go to a women’s conference instead of ACU’s Homecoming, and it was a great choice! The speaker was a woman who has served with Campus Crusades for Christ for over 20 years in an Asian country where I have also visited on a short term mission trip. As a special bonus, the conference was videotaped so that the DVDs could be produced and delivered to Christian women in her country and potentially other countries, so as I soaked in the message it was a blessing to know Christian sisters around the world would also be given the same opportunity even if they lived in a country opposed to Christianity.
The speaker has been presenting this message for a few years now and has a powerful testimony that she has coined “Beauty for Ashes” based on the passage in Isaiah 63. Much of the message was from the second half of Isaiah, but also focused on how Satan uses painful experiences from our past to start telling us lies. While I’ve studied that before, this speaker brought out new concepts I hadn’t thought of and also some practical ways to identify the lies and purposely counteract them.
While I feel blessed to have lived a fairly “charmed” life without much trauma or drama, I was shown that sometimes even “small” events in our life set the stage for future struggles with truth & lies. But learning the power of God’s Word and His Truths are the most powerful weapons against darkness and I’ve been encouraged to go back over the conference notes and principles in the last few weeks.
While the weekend would have been great by itself, that Saturday night my friend Katie and I went to see Amy Grant sing with the Dallas Symphony! Amy has long been a favorite singer of mine as one of the “big” Christian stars when I was growing up and then again in recent years as she released two albums of hymns. I hadn’t seen her live since college, but it was a fun night. The first half was 30 minutes of four short symphony pieces and then Amy sang about an hour and a half – including 2 of my favorites “El Shaddai” and “Sing your praises to the Lord” (with a wonderful orchestral intro!) Bonus – they were selling two of her old albums for $10 so I’ve been enjoying the treasures of “Angels”, “Thy Word”, “Jehovah” and “Now and the Not Yet” – the title of this post.
We are caught between the “now” and the “not yet”. Lord, come quickly.
p.s. Post title is an Amy Grant song from her album “Straight Ahead” – see the last paragraph.
