I just read this passage from “The Normal Christian Life” by Watchman Nee. I’ve never thought of it this way and it really brought some illumination to my heart. 

I hope it encourages you like it did me:

“When the Galilean boy brought his bread to the lord, what did the Lord do with it? He broke it. God will always break what is offered to him. He breaks what he takes, but after breaking it He blesses and uses it to meet the needs of others.”

I pray that my brokenness becomes blessing to others.

I grew up listening to a lot of music with this little label on it. I’m not proud of it. It’s just what I was drawn to. I was a teenage boy, enchanted by this gritty world of urban life of which I had absolutely no experience. I lived and breathed hip hop music.

As I’ve aged, I’ve become quite a bit more sensitive to explicit lyrics in my music. I rarely listen to new hip hop artists or albums. I do, however listen to a lot of rock. Even some metal. That stuff can be just as explicit as some of the hardcore gangsta rap albums I used to buy.

The funny thing is, just the other day I threw on an old school hip hop album replete with f-bombs and all gun talk you could stomach. I sang along (without actually saying the curse words of course, I am holier than thou) and didn’t bat an eye as I did it.

Later on that evening, I previewed a brand new metal album (Protest The Hero’s new one, if you must know) and there were explicit lyrics galore. After sampling the entire album, I just could not bring myself to purchasing it. Even though the music sounded amazing, it just didn’t feel right.

I don’t know what that means. I don’t know why I can listen to explicit lyrics on an old album that I used to play all the time, but I couldn’t stomach the lyrics on a brand new album. Maybe one felt like my past and the other felt like my life today. I just couldn’t bring one into the other. I just thought it was strange.

Can you relate?

“I have come to build and to be rebuilt”

Our tour guide Salo told us that this is what the Jews say when they return to live in Israel. I found this statement absolutely profound. It made me ask myself, “Have I come to build or do I just focus on being rebuilt?”

First, A Little History

There are a multitude of scriptures pointing to the restoration and return of a remnant to Israel (e.g. Is. 10:21-22; 11:11-12; 14:1). As you can see I’ve been reading a lot of Isaiah lately! In the early 1800s “Zionism” was founded as a political movement dedicated to the creation of a Jewish state. With a number of snowballing circumstances over the course of the next 100+ years, concluding with a year-long war with the Palestinian Arabs, Israel declared their independence in 1948.

Since establishing their independence, Jews have been immigrating to Israel in droves. Immigration to Israel is referred to as aliyah (literally, ascension). Under Israel’s Law of Return, any Jew who has not renounced the Jewish faith (by converting to another religion) can automatically become an Israeli citizen. 

As they have returned, the Jews have undergone the process of rebuilding their land. The Jewish National Fund is an organization that is involved in the reforestation of the land (over 240 million trees planted), creating sustainable agriculture, soil conservation and solving the water crisis by creative means.

At the same time, many Jews who return to their homeland are being healed of the scars of the past. I visited a Holocaust museum in Israel which was a powerful demonstration of not only the brutality and atrocious acts unleashed on the Jews, but also the resilience and hope of a people that were not exterminated by hatred and evil. Many have suffered from feelings of anti-Semitism and the return to their homeland provides a refuge and a sense of pride and belonging.

Am I Building?

All this made me reflect on my own life and begs the question “Am I building?” Much of Western Christianity revolves around accepting Jesus Christ as savior and getting your pass to heaven. Everything else is just done in anticipation of that day.  We go along with our lives and manage to fit God in there along the way. There is a huge focus on having our lives rebuilt but not so much of a focus on building anything here that lasts.

I realized that its time for me to start building. I want to see transformation not just in my life, but in lives of those around me. I want to see my community changed. I want to see Jesus break into South Florida. I want to build something that lasts.

I love how Bethel Church in Redding, CA says that they want their city to be a cancer-free zone. That’s what it means to build for the kingdom. I want to see Jesus’ prayer of “on earth as it is in heaven” fulfilled.

God is doing a work in the hearts of Jews and he is preparing a remnant for His return. He is using the Gentiles to provoke them to jealousy (Rom. 11:11). I want to use their motto and let the Lord not just rebuild me, but to use me to build His kingdom on earth, as it is in heaven.

We are familee!!

As I reflect back on my trip to Israel I think about how perfectly God crafted our group. While I couldn’t see it in the beginning, God was forming a group of people that would become tightly knit, like-minded, and forever changed by an amazing journey.

I remember the very first meeting before the trip and as I looked at the people that would be coming I thought, wow this is quite a random group.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure that we would all mesh.

I counted a total of 4 people that I had spent time with outside of church. The rest I had either only seen in passing, had brief conversations with or I didn’t know at all. Our group comprised of singles, married couples, old(er) and young people.  It was a pretty diverse assemblage.

In our final meeting before leaving, we met together at the house of my pastor. It was there that something changed. Although most of us had not spent much time together, I could already see the connections beginning to form.  As we entered into a time of worship at the house, I realized that I was with a group that was totally committed to worshipping Jesus.  That’s when I realized that this was probably going to be good. Little did I know how good it would be!

As we arrived at the airport and began our long journey to the Holy Land, our team had already begun to gel. Rarely did a moment pass when we weren’t either talking about how awesome God is or laughing out loud at something silly. Even after being cramped into coach seats for 12 hours, we arrived in Israel in great spirits…though a bit jet lagged.

The next gift was our amazing tour guide. I remember the first thing that he said to us was, “My name is Salo and for the next days, you will be my family”.  How true that came to be! God blessed us with an amazing man that was completely in tune with the spirit of our team. His parents were raised in Poland and they emigrated to Venezuela when he was a boy. He was raised there and Spanish is his mother tongue so understandably we were a little baffled when our Jewish tour guide spoke to us in a heavy Spanish accent!

Over the course of the next 11 days, he led us on a prophetic journey through the wilderness of the Negev, the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem and the peace of Galilee. All the while, he brought the Bible alive through his narrative. Along the way he let the Spirit lead him to where we should sing or pray or just sit and meditate. It would go something like, “Maybe here…a few of us pray” or “Katherine, maybe you make a song.”  Then as we left a site, he would inevitably say “Okay family, we go!” It was awesome!

As the trip was drawing to a close, I felt such an intense connection with the entire team. There were 24 of us total. It makes me think of a phrase that A.W. Tozer used, “Fellowship of the Burning Hearts”. That’s truly what we were. Everywhere we went, we exalted Jesus. We were all invariably linked by our passion for worshipping the King! 

Before I left for the trip, I remember thinking to myself that I wished this person or that person would be on the trip and how much more fun or profound it would be with people I knew more intimately. In retrospect, I couldn’t have selected a more perfect group of people to share one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. 

I am forever changed and I come back with new perspective and more importantly…new familee!