As I sat reflecting today, I realized that REVIVAL has been marked on my heart (the earliest time I am aware of) since I was a late teen/young adult. My heart has always been to find a way to JOIN together – knowing our hearts all beat for the same reason – to bring HIM Glory! 

I grew up in a sweet, little church where tradition was the ideal. And yet, it was also full of out of the box thinkers. I think most, if not all, of these thinkers were a part of the youth ministry (imagine that!). I remember being on the hiring committee (there were two of us teenagers on it) for a new youth pastor. We didn’t interview a huge number of applicants, but enough to know what we liked and what we didn’t like. 

At the end of the day, the short list for my friend and I was ONE. Jeff was a man unlike any of the others. He didn’t think like the other youth pastor candidates, didn’t talk like the other candidates and certainly wasn’t there to impress. He was simply there because God has laid a calling on his life. He unapologetically communicated a love and passion for Jesus and youth, there was unparalleled. His methodology, his demeanor and his grammar were quirky at best. What he lacked in the finesse, he amply made up for in his passion and his drive to help us fall more in love with Jesus. He wasn’t challenged by what had never been done, he wasn’t constrained by what other people were doing or what other people thought; he just went for it! 

God led, he said yes!

A few years into his time at our small church, he initiated a cross-church retreat. He went big! A hotel at the beach, paid speakers and band. And they came! 

I went from my senior year of dreaming and participating to years later taking teens and serving on the leadership team (even after we moved away). What began as a few hundred at some point exceeded six-thousand. While Jeff moved on many years ago, it is still a yearly event today, twenty-five years later, maintaining around four thousand.  What began as a DREAM and one man’s YES, God took and did immeasurably more than ONE could ever have imagined.

I am a dreamer at heart! My imagination knows no bounds, although my insecurities (the enemy’s tactics to lead me into a place of fear and unbelief) often keep me from charging ahead like my youth pastor. 

I want to go back to that place of jumping when the Lord prods. I want to be steadfast in the place of – if the Lord leads, He will make a way. I want to say yes, every time. I want to be like Jesus – and with Him, there are NO bounds!

I think one of the reasons my heart yearns toward such things (evidenced in the ministries I’ve been a part of and drawn to over the years) is that it draws you into the place of knowing “you are not alone” and that you are a part of something much bigger! People, we are about Jesus! What bigger thing is there than that? 

May we, THE CHURCH, “offer up to God all the glorious praise that rises from every church in every generation through Jesus Christ”!  May we be that emboldened and that united!  Let His praises ever be on our lips!

Will you say yes today?  Will you dare to dream BIG with God?  Will you trust Him with all the impossibles in your life?