Starting out amazing and ending on the same high note, today was a definite improvement from one week ago. Hardly any of the emotional nonsense, and an overflowing amount of enjoyment with friends, church and art.

I haven't had the opportunity to play my bass in quite a bit (though IMPACT is on the horizon ;)), so playing in the worship band helped to set my mind right a bit more. A verse that stood out to me today while I was playing:

Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart.
Commit your way to the LORD,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light
And your judgment as the noonday. Rest in the LORD and wait patiently for Him ...
Psalms 37: 4-7

The message that Lyle Bundy shared had so many relevant words; it was about "silence" and how we easily we can miss what God is saying/where he is leading because of the noise we fill our lives with. Here are a few points/phrases from that:

• In Matthew 1:23, we learn that the name given to Jesus, "Immanuel" means "God with us".
• Noise is the equivalent of "spiritual suffocation".
• "If noise fills the air, we don't have to think."
• Often we attempt to fill the void we feel with people and friendships ... because we fear being alone.
• It isn't from inside the thunder or the raging wind that we hear God ... it is out of the silence that comes the "still small whisper of God." (1 Kings 19). Lyle compared the whisper heard by Elijah to the proclamation given to Mary ... "God is with us".
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, speaking about the devastation in his country, once said "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this is happening."
• C.S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, said: "You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

The rest of the afternoon/night was filled with fun times hanging out with Jodie, Erin, Michelle, Courtney, Jennifer, Matt and Tim ... chips and pizza, Anastasia, Veronica Marrs, india-ink tattoos and so much more. I even managed to get to bed before 1 am ... very nice.