City Church...Be-Loved...Love God...Love Neighbor...Love Orlando...(repeat)

Wow! I had such an amazing day today. It started out with a 1.5 mile run and a 40 minute swim at 6:15am. I saw God's beauty in the bright orange sunrise and it took my breath away. After my time of exercise, I went onward to our Nine12 workshop with Candice Blomely. What an incredible woman! She taught us all about Accumulation and how to live within our means. We got to create a monthly spending schedule and looked at our debt. I was blown away by the areas in my life that I can truly cut back. I love that the motivation behind getting financial secure, organized, and free is to be able to become a generous giver. I want to help people so badly and I have just been feeling like I cannot do that monetarily right now, but I would sure like to do it with my time.

Candice went on to teach us that our money is God's money. It was a very powerful way to think about it. Everything I have it God's so who am I to take ownership and play the "mine" game. As if He hasn't given me enough, I am going to make excuses about how I do not have enough to give back to HIM? Craziness...

Ted closed out the morning with "The Offer." He explained to us that he and the other members of the leadership team had been praying and asking God for ways to reach out to the people of Orlando. Our church has been blessed to have a Mercy fund which money goes into each month to help any member of our church that may be in need. Well...God has been so good, that we haven't had to spend that money hardly at all. So Ted has said that instead of waiting for a need to arise, he was going to put that money in our hands to allow us the opportunity to meet the needs of the people in Orlando. We each got an envelope that contained $200. All we had to do was promise that we would be prayerful about how God wants us to utilize His money, speak with our City Groups about our ideas and thoughts to use the money, and then ulitmately in a few weeks come back with an empty envelope and the stories of how God used us to bless others. This was world rocking for me!! I have recived money before, but never with the intention to give it away to people in need.

I cannot even begin to describe in words how powerfully this affected me, but I will say that the Lord was so present in that room this morning. I felt like He was giving me my mission in life. To make money and give it away! I have the envelope sitting on my kitchen table and I have begun praying and asking God to use me as a vessal to carry out this incredible task. I will keep this blog updated along the journey and am hopeful that I will be typing powerful stories of Christ's Hands In Action!!