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Monday, January 23, 2012

chosen, part 1.

some precious lady friends. 


Hey ladies!
So, last week – I had the huge, huge, huge honor of leading a breakout session at the Chosen Conference in Charleston, SC. Chosen was a conference for all women – to point them to Jesus and to celebrate the fact that He calls us to Himself, chooses us for His glory and His pleasure and His purposes. It was such a sweet time and I was really overjoyed to get a section of that time to breakaway with some women and discuss the idea of how our being Chosen relates to how we can speak life. And specifically, how we can speak life to other women online.

is there anything better than a group scripture doodle session ?

Through that little session, I shared my story of how the Lord has walked me through accepting some influence He’s given me, called me to speak life to women, and then how He’s teaching me to be quiet and say something. I am still seriously in the midst of figuring all this out, but I thought it might be good to share with some of ya’ll these pieces of the story – since I really think He wants us all to be walking in newness of life, speaking life as much as possible. Not for our own glory, or so that we’ll be known as women who speak life – but because if we’re in Christ, we know LIFE. And why in the world wouldn’t we want to share it?

just SOME of the hundreds of volunteers who put on Chosen

So here’s where I started sharing my story with the ladies:
I always knew I had a struggle with being dramatic. Drawing attention to myself. Talking too much. Over the years, the Lord has helped me – it’s still a struggle, it’s still very much something that you’ll notice when you meet me, but I’m believing that the Lord is healing, slowly:). Anyhow, it was that issue that kept me from blogging, inititally. I knew I had a problem with attention seeking and talking about myself, and blogging seemed like the fast track to feeding that problem. Until a met a woman who said she wrote a blog with the intention of ministering to other women. It didn’t really matter if my heart agreed, I saw an open window and an open excuse, so I started myself a blog.

your truly doing some VIGOROUS hand talking
I started (my old blog) Babes Having Babes in 2007 and wrote about um, I’m not sure what. My hair, outfits, my cute little baby. Sometimes I actually WROTE. I think about eight people read it and I don’t remember how they found it. And then some things started to happen. I got pregnant again really quickly after having a baby, that precious baby was diagnosed with a fatal genetic disorder and then cleared of having it, we decided to move to Seattle to run a maternity home, we moved cross country, we had that precious second baby, we told hilarious and wild and precious stories of working in the maternity home, we got pregnant with a third baby, the Lord called my husband to church planting, we had that handsome prince of a baby. And all along, more and more people kept reading. Maybe to keep up with the crazy things the Lord was bringing about in our life, or maybe just to see if the train was gonna wreck, or maybe to see if I’d ever lose the baby weight – but they kept reading.

one of the precious rest spaces in the "boutique" at Chosen. So fun! 

And in the fall of 2009, I realized that the Lord was giving me some influence with women. I was pretty much landlocked, at home with three babies under three, very little money, and sharing a car with my husband. I was thousands of miles away from my former community, and my real community – the women I was doing life with were just as busy as I was. But here were these women, online, who I could sit down with at naptime and interact with. Pray for, laugh with, be challenged by, and share what the Lord was doing with.  I had a voice with them and they were on my heart, and that was a God-given influence that I couldn’t create by any means of personal promotion and that was precious. 

But, what in the world did He want me to do with it? 
................................

I'll finish up talking about the rest of the breakout over the next week or so. 
I do want to say - just as soon as the dates are released, you're going to want to mark your calendars for the Chosen Conference 2013. 
I'll be there FOR CERTAIN. 
Seacoast Sisterhood, thank you for a wild and precious weekend. 
Father, thank you for pouring out your Spirit. 




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