Land Down Under Post 4

Looking back at Holy Spirit week and looking forward to Lordship week! Yesss go Jesus!! SO much happened last week... and being that it was Holy Spirit week, if you're afraid of spiritual stuff or are a little freaked at being filled with the Holy Spirit, then BEWARE.

Gettin' FILLED

We had a super awesome speaker this week named Pablo, or as my British friend would say, "just a man called Pablo." (There are so many little strange things that they say in England that are almost regular but just weird enough that it's a little funny.) So we were learning about spiritual gifts and about being baptized in the Holy Spirit, and it was super interesting. He also explained that God gave us natural gifts and spiritual gifts, and that we shouldn't make our passion just become a hobby. It made me realize that I can't just be a musician on the weekends or every once in a while; God wants me to use it as a mission. So anyways. It was the end of the week and Thursday night was a super awesome night filled with prophesying and worship and prayer. That night, Pablo challenged us to speak out what we wanted. I just started telling God, I want to not be sad anymore. I want laughter. I do not want to be sad anymore! I want to LAUGH. God heard me, but I didn't really think so that night. Then one of my friends came over and prayed for me and my friend, Charlotte. She told me that she felt like God just was looking at us with so much joy and grinning so big like the Cheshire Cat. She said that He wanted us to have that too. We finished up and I still felt like I was missing something. So the next morning, we had worship. One of my leaders came up to me during it and asked me if I wanted to try to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. And I wasn't going to say no to that! So she started praying for me and I was just listening and opening up to anything God wanted to do. Then it felt like the back half of my body got filled with lead, and I just went down. Fell straight backwards. It kinda scared me, but my leader, Hannah, kept praying for me. And all of sudden, I just started dying laughing. SO hard. I was laying on the ground and laughing... at nothing in particular, but everything at the same time. Laughing at the joy I had inside me that was unexplainable, laughing like I was being tickled, laughing at all of the hurt that had tried to stick with me, laughing at my laughter. There were tears running down both sides of my face and I just felt like God was asking me, okay, what else do you want? And I was so so happy that all I could think about was AH I WANT THE STARS JESUS!! And then I saw this dark sadness (I've struggled with pretty rough anxiety and a little depression for a couple years now) permanently leaving my body into a night sky, and all of the stars coming together and flying into me to replace it. Pretty kooky stuff, but I will never look at the stars the same. Then, I saw my leader get up and start praying for my friend, Charlotte. Next thing I knew, she was on the ground laughing with me!! After what seemed like 10 minutes (apparently it was closer to an hour) we both sat up with so much joy. Then she looked over at me and just said two words. "Cheshire Cat." We were so on top of the world. The prayer from the night before made sense now. So that was a cool experience I will never forget. 

Prophesies and such

Pablo came and prayed for a lot of us, and was able to speak directly into each of our lives. It was super cool to hear stories of God's provision and His prophesy as well. Then at the end of the last day's lecture, Pablo prayed and then looked right at me. We hadn't talked much and he didn't know much of my story, but he said to me, "Don't stop writing. You touch people and will touch people with it. Publish. I can see your words flying off of pages into all the nations." So that's cool!! I really do love writing, but don't have a ton of confidence in it, especially in songwriting. So I've started to challenge myself to write more songs and maybe start writing other things too. We'll see where God takes that. 

Performing on my own

I don't have too much stage fright, as long as I'm with someone on stage. I do not like being alone and I haven't ever really performed by myself. I just feel a lot more comfort with harmonies or with just moral support next to me. So I wrote a song this week for Tanner, and I thought that it would be a good opportunity to try to perform something on my own since we had one of our open mics last night. So I did it. I went up and performed, but with my capo two too high on my ukulele, which I didn't realize until I reached the chorus of the song. At that point, you're already too far in to go back. So I powered through in my head voice. It wasn't exactly how I wished my first alone performance of an original would go, but it's a start. And I'm just glad I did it so I can have some experience. I'm thinking about doing an EP when I get home!!!