Driven By Desire

Growing up in a Brethren Church, there is one thing that no one really talks about, The Holy Spirit. Now, I'm not entirely sure why this is not mentioned much in my church. I think partly because the power that comes with The Holy Spirit scares a lot of people and when you go to a conservative church no one really wants to talk about it. That is not to say that we do not believe in The Holy Spirit as Brethren's, because we do. And it is talked about, but only in the sense of we believe in the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Aside from that, nothing else is really mentioned. We definitely never talked about the cool things you can do through The Holy Spirit, like speaking in tongues, prophecy, healings and so on.

So over the course of the next few months after my youth group and I had been introduced to true, passionate worship we had fallen head over heels in love with it and in love with God. We wanted to be in worship constantly and were driven by a desire to know Him more and see what He wanted us to be doing for His kingdom.

It was no longer enough to just stay confined to our church and be experiencing God's love and mercy there and keeping it all to ourselves. We wanted to spread His love. We wanted to be lights in our community and share with others. We could no longer contain the love we had for God and needed a way to share that. But not only that, we wanted to know more about Him. We felt this incredible love, but what could we do with it? We wanted to know how we could impact the world and make a change.

So Ryan felt that the next step in drawing closer to God would be to introduce us to The Holy Spirit. He started out by talking about it at bible study and giving us scriptures to read that talked about The Holy Spirit and finding our Spiritual Gifts.

After learning about this for a while he introduced us to some pretty inspiring videos. Now generally when we were told that we were going to watch a movie at bible study or in Sunday School no one was excited. We never looked forward to them because the movies we were shown were rather boring and cheesy. However, these videos were anything but boring, and far from cheesy.

We watched a series of videos put out by Wanderlust Productions. These videos wrecked everything for us, in the most beautiful and desirable way. The first video in the series is called Finger of God. This video was all about the miraculous. It is directed by a man named Darren Wilson who traveled all over the world recording miracles. That's not all it is though. The video is about the heart of God. It shows us how God is desperately seeking after us and how He wants to be close to us. It is about how God views each and every one of us and what happens when He places His finger in our life.

This is the cover of the movie case. If you ever want to go watch it this is what the front should look like.

One of the most incredible parts of the movie was when Darren went to California. He visited a college that on Friday nights the students who attended there would do "treasure hunts". Now let me tell you, these are not your average treasure hunts. They are Godly, Spiritual treasure hunts. They start out with a time of prayer and meditation. The students would all sit in a room together and just pray out and then listen to what God wanted to tell them. He would give them words and images. Then, everyone would discuss what they got from God and they would go off into the town and find people who fit the clues. When they found the people they would pray for them and sit and talk with them and just love on them. They weren't shoving the Gospel down anyones throats, they were just loving on them.

These treasure hunts inspired my youth group to do our own version of them. We have done quite a few since watching the video for the first time. However, you will have to wait until another post to hear what they were like and what all happened during them. But these videos have radically changed how we view God and how we think God views us. Each one of us now has our own personal very intimate relationship with Him and it is the most amazing and precious relationship to have.

If you are like I was and do not know much about The Holy Spirit and what is possible when you allow The Spirit to work through you, I challenge you to start to seek that out. However, let me warn you, once you seek out The Spirit you will be wrecked. That's not something that should scare you, it should excite you. It will give you a whole new idea of what it means to be a Christian.

If you are curious about the videos by Wanderlust Productions you can find them on their website, www.wpfilm.com. The other two videos that he has put out since Finger of God are, Furious Love and Father of Lights. They are incredible and worth watching if you desire to know more about who God really is and what He is doing in the world right now.

It Started With One Man and a Worship Song

My youth group and church has gone through a lot over the years. We have had youth pastors come and go and different couples work to try and be advisors of our youth group. However, I'm not going to give you all of that background information quite yet. I'm going to start off with the beginning of a new journey we started.

It was my sophomore year of high school when we hired our new youth pastor Ryan. I personally was very skeptical of him because I had seen numerous other people attempt to come in and help the youth grow their faith and build a solid spiritual foundation. Most of those attempts did not end well at all. However, my parents told me they thought I would really like him and that he was different so I was suppose to give him a chance.

At first he seemed like all of the others. He would tell us the same exact bible stories that we all heard every year. At this point most of us could practically recite them word for word. We did not want to just hear those stories anymore, we wanted more than that. We all were looking for something deeper. We didn't want to just hear about the Jesus in these stories, we wanted to know him and have a personal relationship with him the only problem was, we had no idea how to do that. Thankfully, Ryan knew how.

He started with worship. He used one song in particular. None of us had heard it before, to be honest none of us really knew how to worship or what it meant. It was not something we were taught or did growing up. But Ryan knew all about it and was ready to show and teach us. So he played the song "With Everything" by Hillsong for us. He didn't tell us anything about the song. He just told us to sit there silently and listen, and we did. We sat still and quiet through the whole song and when it was over he asked what we thought. We all said we liked it and that it was a good song. Then he asked how long we thought the song was. We all answered 2 maybe 3 minutes. Much to our dismay the song was 10 minutes long. We had no idea. And that was it, we were all sold. We found a way to get close to Jesus, and it was through music.

This song was the start of everything. It was how we knew Ryan was different from all the other youth pastors we've had and how we knew he was going to change our lives and our relationship with Jesus. This song was the beginning of the journey for all of us. Below is the song. I hope you listen to it and fall in love with it the way we all did. It holds a lot of meaning to me and the rest of my youth group. Who knows, maybe this song will introduce you to worship and give you a deeper more personal relationship with Jesus.

My Second Family

I'm Miranda Moore. I have gone to the same church since I was born. It wasn't until I came to college that I had ever attended a church service other than the church I had gone to my whole life. To some that may seem odd, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Before I jump right in and start telling you some pretty crazy stories about what my friends at church and I have experienced so far in our walk with God and just crazy stories in general I am going to need to give you some background information so that it will all make sense later.

The church that I attend at home and have been going to since I was born is the same church that my mother was raised in and has gone to all her life. It is called Akron Church of the Brethren. It is a rather small, conservative Brethren Church in Akron, Pennsylvania.

My Church, Akron Church of the Brethren

Most of you probably have no idea what Brethren is, or where Akron, Pennsylvania is. So let me explain, Akron is a tiny little town located in Lancaster County. Yes, where all the Amish are. No, I am not Amish, I am Brethren. Now on to what it means to be Brethren. The easiest way to explain it is that it is incredibly similar to being a Mennonite. So if you know anything about Mennonites we are kind of like that, but we also have our differences (it was once explained to me that the difference between Mennonites and Brethren is that Mennonites are good singers and well we Brethren are not at all).

There are many different forms of Brethren Churches; however, the Church I attend is like a combination of all of them. We are very conservative in some of our views: up until this year, we were not allowed to have drums in our church, we do not allow dancing of any kind to be done in our church, we believe in living at peace with everyone, and there are many other things.

There are also ways in which we are not as conservative, such as clothing. At my church we do not wear cape dresses and most of us do not wear coverings, although there are a few that do. The majority of us wear normal Sunday church clothes, nice pants, dress shirts, skirts, and dresses. There are even a few that wear jeans.

My church is relatively small and everyone in our church is related to at least 5 other people, so we are all just one big family. Since it is small that means we had small Sunday School classes growing up and an incredibly small youth group. My Sunday School class always consisted of me, my friend Kristen, and my cousin Matthew and that was it. Being that there was only three of us from the age of five until we were in seventh grade we got to be incredibly close.

Our youth group was a little bigger than three, but not by much. We generally have a total of eight people: Kyle, Cambrie, Jess, Megan, Kristen, Matthew, Ian, and myself. These are the eight people that I am the closest with and have grown so much with, both in my faith and just growing up. One might think that since there are not that many of us we wouldn't get along or we would fight a lot when we go on trips because we would get so tired of being with the same eight people all the time. Well, for us that's not the case. There's only eight of us so if you're mad at one person that only leaves you with six other people to talk to and well that would just get even more annoying. We are all very different but we all get along so well. Since we are so small there is no room for cliques so we all just hang out with everyone and we all love each other.

My youth group and some others from a work camp in North Carolina.

We have had so many adventures together and so many amazing times. I look forward to being able to share the good and bad times with you and hope that you are excited to hear about the crazy stuff we have done and the ways that The Lord is working in our lives and where we think we could be heading in the future.