Well, things here are full of change and mystery. God is affirming the dreams and visions of many in our small fellowship of believers and bringing new believers into our midst--which always creates new levels of passion and excitement over the simple truth of His cross. Nearly a week after the tragedies in New York and Washington, D.C. a group of us from a house church fellowship called Vineyard Central in Cincinnati took off on a prayer journey around the world--we started in Hong Kong and ended up in Eastern Europe. We gazed on the Nile while the U.S. dropped bombs in Afghanistan. Never did most of us feel so truly safe in my life--more than anything we felt the Father's desire to connect His church all over the world and how pleasant it is to know that we have brothers and sisters everywhere. It was good to come home for a season, though--to some familiarity. When you travel so quickly as a pilgrim and forget to slow down you suddenly feel as if you're looking through a window all the time into a people, never really in. Just when you think you've entered a language and followed its contours, determined to stay awhile among those voices -- to know them -- another landscape opens up, another tribe seems to come along with an even more beautiful tongue. And the previous place becomes a little dim. And so while we were blessed to find family everywhere it was so bittersweet to leave every time.

Most of all God continues to teach me about the importance of the secret place -- how often we as believers can focus so much on the Martha part of our lives to the exclusion of the Mary part (which is the "better part"!). That place where we act out of a true knowing that "I am my beloved's and He is mine" is so precious and yet such a frightening space for many. One of the things that God has been teaching many of my friends here is how to pray out of being the beloved. Someone once called it "bridal intercession" -- starting in worship and letting the intercession come from worship. It's like being Esther -- who threw a huge and lavish feast and dressed in her finest clothes for the king twice before she asked him her heart's desire for the Jews in his nation. At that point the king was so tender toward her that he would have given her anything; she had been loving on him. But the more my friends and I gather for prayer and start in worship--just spontaneous singing sometimes--the more we are amazed at the things that are being answered! He truly lavishes on us; it is almost embarrassing.