Since returning to Kentucky, the highlight has been attending a house church locally called The Gathering. I knew about this group coming back, but I really wasn't prepared for the great depths to which the Lord is moving with this community.

I have friends who are much better at friendship than I am, and they had been faithful while I was gone to keep in pretty regular contact with me. You know who you are. So coming back into the area, I knew that my group of friends in Bellevue were getting pretty involved with discipleship and had partnered with a group they where pretty familiar with in Ft. Thomas, even though I didn't really know any of these people.

God is intense! He faithfully moves upon us when we seek His face. It is so refreshing to have such authentic community!

This week I felt kind of like I had receive a laundry list from God. But it was great, exactly what I needed and was ready for. I felt like every point made by those present was something I had to respond to with an "oh yeah, I should really start living that out" mentality.

One of the largest things that God keeps rehashing these past few days is that my love relationship with Him should be my only true priority. All of the so called "blessings" we have in life are ultimately most often simply distractions. I was discussing this over coffee with a friend last night. Neither of us are really coffee drinkers, definitely not Starbucks junkies. But there we where, for the purpose of growing together in Christ. Is it weird that we both drank tea at Starbucks? I was afraid they might kick us out... But as we where talking about how perhaps we should rethink our definition of blessings, since most of the things we call blessings are just big distractions, God brought Philippians 1:22 to my mind. Now I think many Christians automatically recognize this "To live is Christ, to die is gain" passage, but I had just read it that morning, and had specifically realized that I still have never been sure of what "to live is Christ" could possibly mean. It sounds like bad grammar or deep philosophy, maybe both. But I had never really come to grips with that term, even though I had thought about this issue before.

But here is the truth. The only satisfaction and sustainance in this life is Christ. To use a Tozer analogy, God gave man all things to bless him, then man sinned, taking God off of the throne of his heart and continuously trying to replace Him by utilizing these various blessings as throne substitutes. The things which bind us are perversions of those things given us by God. To live is Christ. Therefore, to live is to experiance a constant love relationship with God, to be constantly pushing aside the broken blessings the world is holding up in our faces. To live is Christ. All else falls ultimately into the category of distraction. The only thing I should want is Christ's intimacy and the ablity to serve Him in what He asks of me.

To live is Christ.

To live is Christ!