A while ago at a church camp during a time of worship I suddenly saw a picture of a rainbow pouring it’s colours through blank white puzzle pieces that were joined together. What did this mean?

At this camp, different people were trying new things, a friend of mine who used to be a gymnast/dancer in her teens, but hadn’t danced in a church setting for a number of years, was dancing in church again, other people were painting during worship, others were rapping etc. That’s when I saw this rainbow pouring through the puzzle pieces, constantly moving.

I felt God say to me, never to box someone into something, but allow His promises and expressions of worship to flow through them even if it’s not how you necessarily saw them. So what about the puzzle squares, they have pretty rigid edges?

While God’s promises and expressions should flow through us, we also need to live our lives ‘shaped by integrity’ as Proverbs 3:3b says in the TPT. Let your life be shaped by integrity with truth written upon your heart. That’s how you will find favour and understanding with both God and men – you will gain the reputation of living life well I was wondering the other day what constituted of a life well lived.

Don’t you just love it when the answer to your question jumps out of the Bible?!? I know this isn’t the only answer to this question but I wanted to share it. This is from The Passion Translation Proverbs 3: 3b-4.

What stood out to me was that your life is SHAPED by integrity, meaning it has form, it has boundaries. The definition of integrity that I found this morning was: Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. It is generally a personal choice to uphold oneself to consistent moral and ethical standards. In ethics, integrity is regarded by many people as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one’s actions.

Ps Katherine Ruonala often says that when she was a young woman in her 20s with three young children and working through depression and other issues, she would share with people the dreams that God was giving her about seeing the sick healed and people in her circle would dismiss her but she kept pushing into God, hearing the Word, allowing her life to be shaped by the Word and seeing herself living out the promises of God. She immersed herself in who God said she was. She was committed to standing by her prophetic vision.

 

I love her book From Wilderness to Wonders which really details this process of how she grew up into the promises God had for her, how she used her prophetic words to fight for her future, and she used her words to keep speaking out the promises of God’s Word over her life even when it didn’t look like what she knew and saw in her heart.

She would listen to hours of footage from revivalists like Kathryn Kuhlman, John G Lake and Aimee Semple McPherson, because she knew that God has that for all of us to stir that up within herself.

Linking up at Five Minute Friday  

How do we know we are making progress?  I remember my mum telling me of the time when she walked into the loungeroom and asked my much younger three year old sister what she was making in her toy kitchen and she said she was making progress. Progress soup and would mum like some?

I think we would all like some progress soup.  To know we are achieving our goals.  Some are simple like making beds and cooking food and others are bigger, life long dreams we have inside us, because God has called us all to dream.  We are made in the image of a God who dreams and dreamed, but knowing how to balance it all is wisdom.   God has placed something Big inside of each of us and on the way to that big thing, ordinary days can seem mundane but we need to live each day well.

And I’ve learned that simply going up to someone and asking if we can pray for their ankle as they hobble along can transform an ordinary day into living big and brave.  Because when I grow up, I want to be brave

I heard a question that said what would you do if you were ten times bolder and ten times richer?  Your answer should be inspected closely.  I said I’d travel up and down the east coast of Australia in a kombie van doing prophetic stuff in the beach towns, and maybe I need to look at that answer closer.  But in the meantime it’s implementing that daily, stopping to write someone an encouragement, inclining my ear to hear what God could be saying to them, always trying to see through His eyes and not mine.

And not putting someone in a box, just because I’m familiar with them; championing their dreams in the middle of their mess.

I had a dream recently where one of my pastors came to me and said, ‘You are full of the Holy Spirit of God, and don’t cut down your dreams.’

And another pastor was sharing of a vision he had of Jesus coming in and slumping down at a table like a sad kid.  The man said to Jesus, ‘what’s wrong Jesus?’  Jesus replied, ‘I’m bored, since covid my kids have forgotten how to dream with me.’

I read in another of Katherine Ruonala’s books recently,  Living in the Miraculous , how the passions and desires in our hearts are often the very same that God wants to use to stir us up to action, and how we should daydream with God about what the world would like if we stepped into those daydreams, and then to ask for the strategy to live it out.

This is very similar to what Andrew Wommack talks about in his book The Power of Imagination. 

God has so much for us, if we can just begin to dream with him.