(Please forgive if this post isn’t as well thought out and coherent as it should be. I’m still processing everything that happened over the past few days.)

This past weekend was our 2007 Reality retreat which we titled “Unshackled.” It was an amazing time of refreshing and renewal for me personally. I have been really struggling for a while now, maybe the past year or so, where God has seemed very silent. Looking back at that time, I realize that God’s silence had more to do with me slacking on my duties as His child. He wasn’t silent, He was just waiting for me to listen. This retreat was just what I needed and it seemed like God reached down from Heaven and wrapped His arms around me and He still hasn’t let go.

The weekend did not start out very well for us. Cassie had a very bad day on Friday and she wasn’t in the best of moods when she got home from work. After we dropped off Lily with our friend Nikki, ate dinner, worried about the failing brakes on my car, and then we got stuck in traffic we ended up getting there about an hour later than we hoped to. We came in during the middle of worship time, and this was worship I’m not used to at Tri-City. Shane and Kathryn Marquis, the guests for the retreat, are very free in their worship and it just flows from singing to prayer to scripture without the polish and structure we’re used to at our church. Worship with Shane and Kathryn is more of a conversation than singing of songs. It took me a few minutes to shake off the stress of the day and to open up to what the Holy Spirit was doing.

Before we left for the retreat, we prayed and I kindly requested that God give us some answers to questions about our future over the weekend. We’ve been weighing several different options for our future, but God was making us wait for an answer. Well God answered me very clearly when Kathryn was singing the words of the 139th Psalm.

“All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.” Psalm 139:16b-18a

As soon as those words came out of Kathryn’s mouth, I was overcome by emotion.  God spoke so powerfully to me in that moment letting me know that He knows exactly what His purpose is for me and that He will reveal it to me in time.  I felt freed from months of doubt and questions.  I was alive and filled with the Holy Spirit.  It was awesome.  (I haven’t come down from the high yet.  I hope it never goes.)

I could go in to depth about everything that happened over the weekend, but this post is going on long enough as it is.  I will just share a little more about our one on one time with Shane and Kathryn.

First let me say that I hope everyone who will read this has a chance to meet Shane & Kathryn and be ministered to by them because they have an amazing prophetic gift.  They took the time to meet with everyone at the retreat who wanted to talk to them.  It was late on Saturday night before Cassie and I were able to be ministered to by them.  (To be honest, Cassie double-dipped and spoke with them by herself on Friday night while I was busy with some of my leadership responsibilities.)   Now I am a natural born skeptic and I have been in the Church long enough to know that there are the real deal prophets (my boy John Burton, for example) and there are lots of impostors (watch late night televangelists).  Right away I knew that Shane & Kathryn were the real deal because within 2 minutes they had confirmed prophecies that we had received 2 years ago in Manitou and even something one of my college professors told me almost 5 years ago.  I am not comfortable sharing everything they said in this public a forum, but it was incredibly affirming and uplifting.  Let’s just say that God has big things planned for Cassie and I and I’m amazed by it.

So you remember when you were a kid and your mom warned you not to mess around because someone was going to get hurt. Well that happened tonight as the guys from Reality were playing basketball. Curt messed up his ankle really good after going after a loose ball. What that means is that Jeremy and I spent most of the evening in the emergency room waiting for X-rays and doctors.

One of the things we did was share our emergency room stories, and it’s scary how many more trips to the emergency room I have made than an ordinary person. I guess a combination of being overweight my whole life and being clumsy is not a good one.

Curt is doing well and should be fine, he actually wanted to come hang out with the guys after he got released from the hospital. We talked him out of it. If I’m never in the emergency room as the patient again, that would be fine with me.

I’m going to be busy for the next few weeks with several design related projects. First, I’m working on an overhaul of the Reality website. A few months ago I simplified the website to make it strictly informational for people who are curious about our ministry. Now that Reality is “under new management,” we want to make it more interactive and do a better job of keeping it updated.

We’re also working on designs for a new series of Reality t-shirts. Thankfully, I’m outsourcing the design work to my brother Drew and a few other people who are artistically inclined. If things go the way we want them to, the shirts are going to be very cutting edge and will be something people will want to wear.

I’ve also changed the theme here on the site to something pretty simple. I like the clean and streamlined look, plus who doesn’t love the bottom bar that so many websites have nowadays? What do you think of the look?