Glory

Hello friends! I am continuing to flourish over here in Australia, and I thank you all greatly for your prayers and encouragement.

For the past week, God has continued to train me and has placed in me a strong desire for more of Him and more of his gifts. I've been talking to a lot of teachers and praying with my bandmates for the spiritual gifts that God has for us and asking Him to enable us to love people more and more. I am incredibly thankful that God has placed me in the band that I am with here at Hillsong for my classes. They are ridiculously encouraging and are completely following after God with all of their hearts. Every Wednesday, we have an hour long prayer meeting where we grab a guitar and sing our hearts out and then blanket one another in prayer. It is incredible.

I've been talking to a lot of my friends about employment and different places I could work. Yesterday, I talked with my friend Michael about where he works and what they do. He said that he works in a production company warehouse and that they need more people to take on a lot of casual labor and help out in the warehouse. He said that I would be great for the job, except that involves a lot of heavy lifting. Thus, last night  I started P90X. I know that I've only got about 40 days until the beginning of Summer, but if I do as much as I can in the natural, I know that God will do the supernatural and strengthen me for whatever job that he has for me.

My favorite teacher at Hillsong so far is a man named Duncan Corby. He's my teacher for New Testament Introduction. His classes are always the most interesting classes that I've ever had and have completely changed my way of reading the bible. I used to read the bible to just find quotes that applied to my life and different verses to help me while I was struggling. While this is helpful, it isn't really that interesting. Duncan has helped me realize that each of the books of the bible was written for a specific purpose and that the writer was attempting to address an issue with their book. This is incredibly cool, because now I can go back and try to figure out the purpose of the book through the context, audience, and information that the author chose to include.

Duncan also encourages us to be really grounded in our words. Which is incredibly helpful to me, because it helps me to create really solid definitions of words that I usually only refer to in "church language" and define in a really ethereal way. For example, Glory. I've always thought of glory as one of those things that you really have to "feel" and can't really put a definition to, kind of like a feeling of warmth, or a feeling of affection. However, If I'm going to write songs that are really powerful in the church, I need to have a real idea of what I'm saying. So, through a word study, I started redefining Glory. Instead of some sort of undefinable thing, I've realized that glory is more along the lines of deserved, obvious, greatness. God is infinitely glorious, and for us to "glorify God" is to make his deserved, obvious, greatness more visible on the earth. That's an easy definition, but it really adds a lot more meaning when I sing or think about glory.