Yesterday morning after completing my devotions and blog entry, I finished the last 3 video assignments for the Boise State Univ. project I’d committed to doing.  I don’t know if I’ve explained much about this.  I accepted the project because the two creators of it are “professional friends” from work I’ve done in the last 8 years.  I’d worked individually with each of them on other projects and now they were working together and I had a chance to be part of it.  I accepted it without any reservations–in fact, I accepted it thinking how fun it would be to work with two such competent people again.  It hadn’t crossed my mind to talk to the TEAM–God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit.  Well, you can predict the ending.  Yes, I could do the work and I did it.  However, all through the project I knew I was spending time on something that was not motivated by this critically important TEAM.  As I finished yesterday I had this weight lifted from me and this morning I feel like a new person.  I’ve made a firm commitment to confirm with them before I say yes again.

I was feeling so good yesterday about finishing that project that I text Kathy while I was out picking the raspberries and told her we were going out last night.  Kathy was gone for the day.  She was telling me last night that she told our 10 year old granddaughter who was with her that grandpa had asked her out on a date.  My granddaughter thought that was really neat.  I’m not a very romantic guy so I’m thinking this is something I should do more often–the grandkids are watching!

My journal had a verse at the top of the page this morning I was writing in.  It reads:  “The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning…. The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him.”  I thought when reading it that it is a wonderful set of verses.  I look where they were from and they were written in Lamentations 3: 22-23, 25.  Even when we are lamenting over our past sins and mistakes the truth of who God is never changes.  I’m so very grateful for the solidity of this anchor in my life. I want to be a much better listener to God’s Holy Spirit in my life now that I’m awake to His Holy presence within me.

At 3:05 am I was awake and my mind was recapturing the events of the previous day.  I had met with a man from our step study that was ready to do his inventory and I am his sponsor.  I got home from his place and sent several emails, went to town to get supplies for the upcoming Celebrate Recovery nights, worked on a Boise State project and lastly, our quartet sang for a dear pastor friend who is no longer able to navigate much from his home.  We went to his house and did a personal concert for him and his wife.  So, at 3:05 I was awake but what I was really being awakened to was what is behind each of these activities–relationships.

My life journey, as I write about in my book, was all about hiding a past of abuse that would annihilate any chance I’d have for success (I believed).  I learned well to “do” things well so I could be worthy of a relationship with people.  I’m told I’m a relational person and I do see this in myself somewhat, but when I was awake to this before I cringed that somehow the truth of me would come out and any friend would then flee.  Somehow, last night, God was showing me that even though I may do activities, when all of them are completed what is still left is the relationship behind the activity.  I’ve actually had individuals in my life who have talked to me at length regarding this topic but I’ve always downplayed their research as being just the way they were wired.

What has truly awakened me to the truth of relationships and the importance therein is this rich, new relationship I’m realizing with God’s gift:  The Holy Spirit.  My relationship with Him is not about me doing, it is all about me being with Him and He in me.  It’s so incredible to me that I’ve heard this truth all my life and only now begun to actualize it in my being.  The impact is transforming.  I used to fear tremendously close relationships because proximity always allows the other person to see and find out things I knew they couldn’t know about me.  That fear is mostly gone now. I know God is wanting me to wake up to His original intent for us in having relationships with one another.  I am truly grateful for this awakening.

Today is my first day to be fully awake to the fact I am alive and filled with God’s Holy Spirit.  It seems I ought to be ending this sentence with an exclamation mark, but I need someway to express the depth of this statement.  Galatians 2:20 says:  “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”  I now realize the truth of the part “I no longer live”.  That damaged human spirit I have been wanting rebuilt all these years is now replaced.  This is what is so incredibly amazing to me. Thank you Jesus!

Last night was a night of tests.  It started with Kathy texting from Oregon where she has been all week with her sister.  I was responding to the text when my phone froze.  The keyboard on the little screen disappeared and I could get the screen to do nothing.  I dropped my phone in my pocket and headed to church for Celebrate Recovery.  Upon arrival I had several people to talk to arranging my being gone for a couple weeks visiting relatives in California (my two sisters–Bonnie and Alice).  I was going to make a list of the songs we were singing from my phone but I couldn’t access anything.  I went in to the sound guy to get the songs from him I’d forwarded last weekend to find the entire sound system was down and we wouldn’t be able to do any of the arranged songs.  We also wouldn’t be able to do the testimony as it was a video testimony.  So, as we started, I called everyone up to the front as we do, announced the problem and prayed.  I said we weren’t there to do anything but thank God, and turn this night over to the Holy Spirit’s leadership.  We sang choruses and hymns most everyone knew without any accompaniment. One of the men who had been experiencing many home crises in his family’s life was present.  He had redone his testimony and had it on his phone.  He volunteered to share it.  As the evening ended I had one lady come up to me telling me how a newcomer to us last night had come feeling very down and depressed.  On her way to Deer Flat she’d been listening to a CD of older songs and then our worship was an almost repeat of them except it was live persons now singing them with her.  She was so grateful!  My share group was so touched by the testimony.  We had a newcomer in it who had been abused sexually as a child and so had the one giving his testimony so it resonated with this newcomer.  God’s timing is perfect and His leadership is also perfect.  How often I forget this.

As I got home, my phone started working and it is fine this morning.  I think God just wanted a moment where our only attention was on Him which is what we intend each week, but last night in a moment of desperation and I was reminded that no technology, no work of man is ever to replace the work of God.  I want my work to be only in harmony with what God has planned.  This morning, in less than an hour I am meeting with a gentleman who has been coming to our men’s step study.  He is doing his inventory with me which is one of the toughest steps to do–come clean about every hurt, hang-up and habit dominating your life. This man’s story is much like my own.  In times past I would be most uptight having to listen to my own story coming from someone else.  I would be trying to steel my own emotions so I wouldn’t lose it.  Today however, I go as a child of God and coming along side another one.  I remember that “I no longer live–Jesus Christ now lives in me.” I know God will be present as He already is.  Praise His Holy Name!

If I were to tell you I had another rich lesson on spirit would you close out this blog and never come back to it?  I hope not, because either way, the lesson happened.  Yesterday afternoon I met with a pastor friend and introduced Celebrate Recovery to him.  I was prompted last week to contact him and the meeting we set was yesterday @ 2:30 pm.  He is very interested and so in the near future we will build a plan for this to begin taking place.  While there he gave me a book entitled:  He Loves Me! by Wayne Jacobsen.  He said he knew I’d enjoy it immensely.  I thanked him and went on my way.  Last night was our weekly step study.  The lesson was READY.  The ready title is about whether you are ready to receive the positive changes God has in store for you once you’ve begun to come out of denial and address the hurt, hang-ups and habits that have been weighing one down.  The last question starts as a statement and ends with the question.  It reads:  “Sometimes it is difficult for us in recovery to see the positive changes that God is making in our lives.  Have you been able to accept and enjoy your growth?  How?”  Up to this time in the lesson I had been struggling with the questions as they lead up to this last one.  I was having to relive my lifelong need to coverup my past.  I even said that living out in the open as a school principal, a church attender and volunteer, a singer of gospel music, a husband, a father, a neighbor were all camouflage in my mind.  If I did them well no one would have to know my past.  In each case, if they knew, I’d be divorced, fired, told to move and disowned.  I now know this has been Satan’s deception but there are lingering moments and last night was one of them.

This morning I was journaling about all of yesterday and talking to Jesus again about spirit.  It was very awakening for me.  I wasn’t kidding when I had said last night about my thinking about the need to camouflage who I was by what I did.  Now that this was all out in the open–I’d said it to the group of men, I saw my broken spirit seemingly for the first time.  I was actually doing all this “good living–camouflage living” to protect and coverup what I thought I wasn’t.  No one knew anything about it–just me.  I was the only one thinking this.  This morning, I finally got it.  My spirit was broken from my past and that’s real.  However, a broken spirit is no need to run and hide–camouflage as I’ve always thought I needed to do.  So this is what Christ revealed to me in the midst of my devotional time–He said, “Earnie, this is why I give you my Holy Spirit.  It is whole and complete.  You don’t need to worry about this broken spirit anymore.  I give you the very Spirit of My Father who created you and loves you.”  The tenderness of this is still so raw I have to cry again.  My word, how old am I, how long have I worked on this in my life?  Yet, this morning, I am able to finally see and hear what Christ has been waiting for me to understand and accept.  I received His Spirit with open arms!  I don’t need to protect a broken one anymore.

I think God put the schoolhouse back in the center of my path this morning as He wasn’t done with the lesson I thought I had finished last week.  OK, I’m stepping out again, but this time I am stepping out with a brand new spirit.  It is mine and it is a gift.  He told me I get it because He wants all His kids to have it.  Wow, I’m still in the WOW of this.

Well, the journey is having trouble continuing this morning–as least from writing about it.  Our power was off a couple hours during the night and it messed with the internet connections.  All seems to be good now that I’ve rebooted 3 times but my time is limited in that I’m suppose to be leaving in 5 minutes for a day of work I’m committed to.

I loved what one of my devotionals had to say this morning.  It was differentiating between a failure and failing.  If we stumble in our journey or fail, step into sin, whatever happens, it does not make us a failure.  When we become a failure is when we turn our back onto Christ and His Holy Spirit’s leadership.  We do need to get ourselves regrounded in Christ but that doesn’t mean we are a failure.  Yes, we failed, but our heart is still on track and we get the rest of our body in line with our heart.  There is so much more I want to learn about heart living because my heart is the home of my new creation’s spirit.  I know my journey will keep bringing new learning about and I look forward to each lesson.  In the meantime–I’m off to work!

This journey is an amazing experience once I get my role as a team player in place.  Let me explain.  You know that the past week I’ve been in a schoolhouse receiving direct instruction on spirit-filled living.  At the end of last week I stepped out of the schoolhouse having received some sound instruction on this and I was ready to start this way of living.  Yesterday our pastor preached on a topic that wasn’t entitled this, but the theme of the message was:  Faith is Obedience.  This is what living a spirit-filled life looks like–living by faith out of obedience to the Holy Spirit within.  All this was topped off with stumbling into watching Fireproof last night on TV.  The kids were gone and I was checking to see what was on and found it on the UP station.  I’ve seen this movie several times but saw the movie for the first time as a spirit-filled person.

If you know this movie you know that the key couple are at the verge of their marriage ending in divorce.  He is a fireman and she works at a local hospital.  His dad introduces him to a 40 day challenge to complete before he makes any final decision.  He accepts it.  Here was my wake up.  In the first 20 days of the challenge he was completing it by DOING the assignment each day.  It was getting him no place and he was about to quit.  It was then his father asked if he’d been reading the scriptures attached to each day and of course he hadn’t.  That was something for his dad to do, he wasn’t into that spiritual stuff.  It is here however that the young man realizes the love he is seeking from his wife is parallel to the love God was seeking from him.  This reality hit home and he accepted Christ into his heart.  The scene now changes because all of a sudden he is completing the last 20 days BEING the assignment rather than doing it.  I found myself seeing my life.  I’ve worked so hard to be never realizing the “be” is the faith part of The Holy Spirit living in me.  My human spirit was badly beat up as a child and I’d learned to protect myself and doing good work.  I never saw myself as the boy with a spirit or a man with one.

This morning Christ shared Matthew 7:7 with me:  Ask and it will be given to you: seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened unto you. For the first time I saw this scripture as an invitation to the fullest life possible.  I asked Christ for the fullness of His Holy Spirit and He is giving it to me.  I am seeking Him and the door is being opened so that I can now live a life of obedience in faith only–faith that I now trust with all my heart, soul and mind.  The fear is now replaced with anticipation.

I write this with all humbleness of spirit.

Happy Father’s Day to those of you who are dads and grandpas.  I like this day even though I do the BBQ’ing and made the homemade ice cream.  It means family comes together and that is the most rewarding part of all.

So, I’m going back to this spiritual awakening I’ve been experiencing.  This morning’s devotional time was another moment of greater understanding.  I was pondering this part of The Holy Spirit living within me, in my heart.  I was once again in awe of this but wondering how I connect with it in my heart?  It was then I was nudged to recall that The Holy Spirit is the premiere Spirit–not human flesh.  He lives in the heart of our spirit.  We were born with spirit and in the heart of our spirit he waits to reside as we give Him this throne.  I have been locked into the thinking of “human self/heart” only as far as heart goes.  The life blood our human heart pumps throughout our human body is the same as what the Holy Spirit does to the very spiritual lifeblood of our spirit when He takes residence in our spiritual heart.  I think this is what gives us our new creation.  Wow!  Once again, this may just be something I needed to get into place, but in so doing, I feel even more attached to this gift–The Holy Spirit than ever before.

PS  So just in case some of you are wondering, the raspberries are really doing well.  I delivered 2.5 gals to my kids yesterday and have made jam and frozen a couple gallons.  Now, on top of that, I picked another 2.5 gallons yesterday afternoon.  We will have some of them on homemade ice cream later today.  Yum!

As you know, the past few days have been in the schoolhouse planted right in the center of the path my journey is taking me.  Two days ago I’d never expected the simple, yet profound learning from these couple days that have come about.  After writing the blog and posting it yesterday I was talking this through with Kathy.  I then needed to make a couple phone calls before I started on the work I was doing in the morning related to the Boise State assignment.

One of the phone calls was to a person I suddenly realized was the one God was wanting me to talk to all along about my Spirit-filled living questions.  After I’d asked her about the original reason for calling I asked if she had time for a second question and she said that was a good time.  I went on to ask her about living in the Spirit each day.  I knew she’d been attempting this for many years and wondered what she could tell me about it. She surprised me by saying she thought I already did this.  I told her my hangups about it:  spirit lives in heart which is the home of emotions, dad’s statements of killing my spirit when I was growing up, dad’s teasing and tormenting about my own emotions like crying when Lassie did something wonderful in weekly TV program back when I was a boy, etc.  I also told her I always saw emotions as a weakness and my own tears as such.  After telling her all of this she said what was simple, yet profound.  It was, “Oh, so the voices of the past are still haunting you with their messages.”  She went on to say how much she hates Satan and the awful deceiver he is. She told me that when I talk and tears come she is confirmed within her own Spirit living in her that what I am saying is authentic from the Spirit within me. Spirit speaks to Spirit in this way.  She said she has known many times when man’s spirit was speaking and it never was confirmed by the Holy Spirit within her.  You know this through the tender response within your own Spirit.  I then said I had always thought this tenderness was part of my weakness ridiculed by dad.  She reinforced the fact that this is part of Satan’s lies and deception and my dad’s confusion at the time.  So, you know what was amazing when this conversation was taking place?  I began to shed tears on the phone feeling the confirmation of truth by God’s Holy Spirit within me.  The Holy Spirit living within my friend was confirming to the same Holy Spirit in me.  I finally saw the truth and strength in this rather than the weakness in this.

So, it seems odd to say this, but today I feel like I can go back on the trail again.  The lesson of the schoolhouse is learned for now.  I sure hope this lesson will mean something to a reader and if so you’d let me know.  Our God is a tender, intimate, loving God who is also Almighty.  Isn’t this AMAZING!

Yesterday had me sitting in the schoolhouse receiving my lesson on spirit-controlled living.  In reality of the day it was more about spirit-controlled hearing a lesson for the first time fully awake to the fact that I have The Holy Spirit within me waiting to take the controls if I will just let Him.  The conceptual side of spirit-filled living sounds so wonderful.  I have always wanted this.  Now that I’m fully awake to the need for this in my life I find myself wanting to dig my heals in just a little.  My human side is at risk somehow, it seems.  As I’ve actually lived through yesterday I found myself tormented at times with my selfishness.  I have been bringing this to God this morning for His clarity.  The first thing I read was I John 2:1 stating:  My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin.  But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father.  He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous.  My devotional went on to say that “The Father understands that you are not going to be a perfect Christian.  You will falter and fail, but He will not forsake or abandon you.  His grace is sufficient for you–each and every day!”

It is at this time in my life I wish I could talk with my Grandma Wreting, Elijah or someone else who lived by the Spirit’s indwelling and seemed so obedient to this lifestyle.  I wonder if they had this same struggle?  If so, how did they deal with it and learn to surrender that willful tendency of our human nature when it is in conflict with what one knows is  The Spirit’s leading?  What I do know is that there is no other way I want to live.  I never again want to willfully live my life.  The new creation Christ gave me is for Spirit-filled living.  I want to be on track with this new lifestyle.  I know I’m not so young anymore–I turn 66 in just a couple weeks.  However, I feel like a child in this new and improved way of living.  I don’t want old age stubbornness clicking in now.  I want someday to hear, “Well done good and faithful servant.”  I’m staying on this track one day at a time and hopefully learn well the steps to Spirit-filled obedience.

The journey of yesterday had me sitting in “a schoolhouse” which was planted in the middle of the path my journey has me taking.  In that schoolhouse is the Spirit of God–The Holy Spirit.  I know this sounds ridiculous but stay with me for a moment.  There are some key elements to living in the Spirit of God that need to be learned and grounded by actual living each day if we truly intend to be living by faith as Christ directs us to live.  I am no authority in this and sure don’t want to sound this way.  However, this blog is intended to let readers in on what God is working me through as I learn to live each moment of each day in His Presence and completing whatever He wants me to do in each day.

If you have read I Kings you know that Elijah is an epitome of man living by faith and obedience to God’s Spirit within man.  As I read more of this book within the Bible I begin to see that Elijah’s living of each day isn’t so much different than ours.  Yes, the time in history is entirely different, but I’m talking about the drama of daily living and struggling to know just what to do this day that is in congruence with God’s intent for me.  So, Elijah confronts King Ahab telling him to gather the priests of Baal (450 all total) and prepare a sacrifice.  They do this and at the same time Elijah is preparing a sacrifice to the One True God.  A half a day is spent trying to get the gods of Baal to burn and take their sacrifice but nothing happens except man’s actions.  Elijah then prays intently to God and God burns up and removes all of the sacrifice to Him right there in front of all the people.  There is more to this, but for Elijah his obedience to God caused him to flee the threats of King Ahab’s wife Jezebel.  She said Elijah would be dead by tomorrow because he had slain the 450 priests of Baal for leading the people of Israel into worshiping a man’s god.  After Jezebel’s threat Elijah flees.  Of course, God takes care of him by sending an angel who feeds him and the story goes on.  It is all found in I Kings 18 & 19.

So, what is all of this saying for me today?  Actually, for today the lesson is simple.  I have always worked for man and done so to please God and connect as best I could to God’s Spirit I thought I could sense now and then.  Well, today it has become abundantly clear God no longer wants me working for man but for Him.  Just as God’s Spirit led and cared for Elijah He will do the same for me (us) if we follow Him.  Instead of working for man, I want to work for God and do this with man.  Seems like a simple shift in the words of a sentence but it is actually life-changing for me.  I’ve got to stay with this for a while so I feel somewhat grounded but this is the message of today.  I’ll stay in touch.