Information Overload!

I think that it's going to take me a long time to process all that God is teaching me lately! It's crazy! The internet has been down at the center, otherwise I likely would have updated this a couple more times by now. Right now, I'm sitting in Tucson, Arizona again. Staying with some friends of Ryan and Juan Carlos, attending a seminar put on by Corazon Ministries. I think that God is teaching me about surrender. I'm not very good at surrendering. I like to be in control, but I need to let God take control of my life. It's only because of him that I am alive and I want to live for him because he loves me so much!

Learning Spanish is so much fun, but it's so mentally draining!! I've learned a lot of new words, but I want to know everything right away. I am excited about having 2 weeks to learn more!

This morning I changed my plane ticket, and updated my travel insurance to accommodate staying for an extra week in San Carlos! Praise the Lord there was a seat sale so the ticket I switched to was the same price as my other ticket, and I only needed to pay $60 to switch it, and $24.25 to update my travel insurance. The reason I'm staying an extra week is in order to actually see the ministry of Casa De Esperanza in action. The first group arrives on the 12th, which would have been the day after I left, before I switched my ticket. This trip has ended up costing me more than I expected, so I'm not entirely sure what will happen with my finances once I get back home...but, I'm sure the Lord will provide a way for everything to work out the way he wants it to!

I've been really impressed with the fact that A lot of the Mexican Pastors, though they have very little, give glory and thanks to God for what they do have. They are very thankful, and very generous to anyone who has a need. In the short time that I've been in San Carlos, I've heard a lot of stories of how God has been faithful. I've also heard a lot of stories of families struggling, broken, and in need of God's healing love. Pray that hearts will be touched, and that the ministries that Casa De Esperanza partners with, and that groups come down and work with would be encouraged, and renewed in order to keep going strong in their ministries!

Be thankful for what you have. If you've complained this week about how much money you make think about what life would be like for you if you made 500-1200 pesos ($37.79-$90.69) a week for work. The only reason we are able to breathe is God's grace!

Glory to God! (Gloria a Dios!)

Encouragement

Hosea 6:6

I want you to show love, not offer sacrifices.
I want you to know me more than I want burnt offerings!

Hosea 10:12

Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the Lord, that he may come and shower righteousness upon you!!!

Micah 6:8

No, O people, the LORD has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God!

Be encouraged! The infinite God who created the universe loves you, and wants to have a relationship with you!!!

Thoughts of a journey

I feel like I've been crying almost every day for a while. Not tears of sadness always. Tears of joy, thankfulness, wonder, gratitude, but also sadness. Feeling a fraction of the weight of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us. He took all of our sin, shame, and guilt. To give us freedom. The holy spirit is softening my heart. It's amazing what God does when you spend time seeking him. I wouldn't trade my relationship with him for anything! Just last year I was at a point where I realized that something wasn't connecting. It seems like a theme in my life has been trusting my mind  and my own understanding more than trusting God. I worked for years at trying to be righteous, trying to make myself a better person. I realized in may, I think, that I was focussing on trying to make myself worthy of God's love. It makes me feel kind of dumb to think that I didn't see it before...but that also brings me back to a place of being prideful in my intellect and ability to think and know things. : p I didn't realize that I was doing it to try to  make myself worthy of God's love. For a long time I felt like I was unlikeable. Unlovable. Not for lack of loving influences in my life, but I disliked myself, and because of that I  couldn't accept that God loved me unconditionally. Praise God for the healing that he's done in my life, that I I've been able to learn to love myself and others more!

A real relationship with Jesus will change your life! If you have a relationship with him and you feel like it's not changing how you act from day to day. I challenge you to invest more into that relationship! Think about your friends, if you don't spend time with them what happens to the relationship? It fades away. Learn to love like Jesus. It changes lives, not just yours, but everyone who you share that love with!

Arizona!!!

Good Afternoon,

It would seem that since Wednesday October 19th at 8:30am in Manitoba, time has flown by! Our first day travelling south, we drove from Winkler, MB, to North Platte, Nebraska. The drive was somewhere between 13 and 14 hours, with not a lot going on for scenery.

The second day of Travel, was considerably longer. We left North Platte, Nebraska at 7:00am, still in the same time zone as Manitoba, then drove for 17.5 hours, crossing two time zones to end up in Flagstaff, Arizona at 10:30pm Arizona time (12:30am Manitoba time). That was a long drive.

 Friday we woke up, went for breakfast, and headed to the Grand Canyon. We decided to leave the van in Flagstaff, in order to not waste fuel, since we would be heading back through Flagstaff after visiting the Canyon. The drive to the Canyon was about an hour and a half, during which I got to listen to Ryan and Juan Carlos speak in Spanish almost the entire way. I am catching some words here and there, and asking questions about how to say certain things. At the Canyon we took some cool pictures, did a bit more physical activity (Walking) than the 2 days previous, and headed back through Flagstaff to Tucson, where we arrived around 6:15pm.

We brought our stuff to the house we'd be staying at, then decided to go find a place to eat supper. We went to Applebee's, which was fantastic! They had an Asian Chicken Salad, and I ordered a half portion, which really wasn't half, more like 6/7ths or 7/8ths. The service there was wonderful, the atmosphere was pleasant. All around, it was a great experience. Then we headed back to the house, and watched a movie, after which I was so tired, I had a very hard time keeping my eyes open.

Today, we don't have to drive very far, and I am thankful for that. I spent some time this morning with Jesus, out on the deck of the house, with the warm sun on my back, and a beautiful view in front of me. It turns out this trip is probably going to cost me a bit more money than I anticipated, but God is good, and I am excited to see him at work in Mexico very soon.

We are staying in Tucson today, there is some shopping that needs to be done for Casa de Esperanza. Then tomorrow Juan Carlos is supposed to be in Phoenix doing some translating at a conference of some kind, and we'll be back in Tucson for night. Monday we are anticipating heading down to Mexico finally, the papers for the cars that we're importing to Mexico are supposed to be ready then.

All Praise and Honor to The Lord of Heaven's Armies!

Stepping Out in Faith!

It's official I'm leaving for Mexico on Wednesday, I'll be spending 3 and half weeks down there volunteering at a mission base called Casa de Esperanza, which means House of Hope. You can check it out online at http://www.koenesministries.com.

I am very excited about this opportunity to serve Jesus in another country. To experience another worldview, a different way of life. To learn and grow in my understanding of who Jesus is, and what he is calling me to in my life.

A lot of you will understand that I'm a restless person. I love change, I thrive on it. I need to change something pretty regularly in my life. Even if it's something small. I'm not content to stay the same. I am always changing, always adapting, always learning.

I'm at a place in my life where I want to know Jesus more, and deeper than I've ever wanted to before in my life. I spent many years thinking that I was doing fine on my own. I thought that I didn't need God in order to be successful in my life. I knew the right answers, and I said the right words. (Words are really important to me, I feel as though I articulate my thoughts well.) IT'S NOT ENOUGH! I am not enough. Without God in my life, everything is useless.

I am so afraid of becoming complacent. I want to know Jesus, I want to know the truth, I want to live in that freedom everyday. I cannot do this on my own. God is so big, and I am so small. Who am I to think that he needs to do things my way? Who am I to think that I should be able to figure him out. IMPOSSIBLE. I can do my best to learn his heart, to follow his heart, to put myself last.

I know a lot of great people who strive to know Jesus, and follow him in their daily lives. These people inspire me to try harder, to do more.

If we claim we know Christ, but do not read the Word of God and do what it says, our claim is useless. Some might say, "You say you're a Christian, but you don't even know what your holy book says?" It's not all about knowing the right answers, or having the Bible memorized from cover to cover. It's about knowing Jesus, and following him!

I want to weep for all the people who think that they're doing fine without God, they might have a lot of money, or a nice job, or fancy toys. Where is your purpose? What is the point of all that? I don't have all the answers, in fact, quite often I feel like I have no answers.

If my faith is something that I really believe in, it should change the way I act, feel, think, perceive things. It should shape all aspects of my life. Yet, so many times I fail to measure up. I am thankful to God for his grace and mercy, that it's not because of what I've done that I'm saved. It's through Jesus Christ who died on the Cross and was raised in order to allow me to come before God, and know him like a Father!

If you've made it this far, these are the thoughts tumbling around in my head, I encourage your questions or comments, email me at gerrygiesbrecht@gmail.com if you want to ask me any questions personally, if not, comment on here.

May all praise, glory and honor be God's forever!

Jesus

The other day, I was talking with a friend of mine, and we were discussing the reality that "It's all about Jesus." The Christian faith, is all about Jesus. Without Jesus there is no way we would be able to ever atone for our sins. No amount of sacrifices we could make would cover it. So...how can we sit back and not sacrifice anything to get to know, to read about, to learn about this Jesus who died and sacrificed his life for our salvation. Maybe we're slacking off hey? IT IS ALL ABOUT JESUS. Not how much MONEY i make. Not about how much TIME I have. It's all about JESUS! I'm so excited to be following him, and learning about him. WE NEED JESUS! Even if you think you have things figured out, and that everything's all good...you need Jesus. Maybe more so, since you don't realize how much you need him. What do you spend your time, money, and life on? Is it worth it?

MEXICO!!

I'm going to Mexico, very soon. I want to challenge you, if you read this to pray for the ministry where I'll be serving, Casa de Esperanza, which is run by Koenes Ministries. Also, pray for the people who will be working there all summer hosting groups, and for the groups that will be coming out to spread the love of Jesus in practical ways.

It's so hard not to sound prideful, but I think that it would be more joyous to serve God than money for my entire life. I need to be reminded daily of my need for Jesus. He is the only life-giver.

Read my last post, it's long, but I'd like some feedback!

Autumn Changes Lives.

I love Autumn, the leaves turning colours, the weather cooling down. It is a fantastic season. Autumn and I get along pretty well. One of the themes of Autumn is change. Everything changes in Autumn. The leaves change colours and fall to the ground, students go back to school, and youth starts up again. I love change. I think it's safe to say that I thrive on change. I am driven to change something in my life almost constantly. I'm not sure if this means that I need to learn contentment, or if I've been given a restlessness for a reason.

This summer has been a summer of growth for me, my relationship with Jesus Christ has become more real to me this summer than it has been in years. Often I feel as though the reality of my relationship with Christ, and the way that I think my relationship with Jesus are and should be are different things. This spring I began to realize that I needed to change something. Ha! Isn't that weird? I always feel like things need to change. The change that I realized I needed was to give up my skepticism, give up my "theologian's pride." Even though when I went to Prov I wasn't really into a lot of the deep theology stuff, I thought that since I was studying the Bible and learning a lot about God and who he was and is, that I was an authority on God. WHO AM I to think that I can know who God is from taking a couple of courses in college? God is so much greater than we can ever hope to know completely. Yet he still wants to know us personally, well, he does know us personally, but wants us to seek him and know him.

In less than TWO WEEKS, I'm going to be heading down to San Carlos, Mexico with Ryan Thiessen, and Juan Carlos. I'm going to be living down there and serving for 3ish weeks, doing whatever they tell me to do I guess. Why am I doing this? Firstly, in order to learn what it's like to see God at work in another country. To feel what it's like to give up my comfort, my safety, my job, my friends, my church, for a time in order to get to know God better. I'm sick of living my life as though I don't believe what I say I believe. It's about time I get real, and put my "money where my mouth is" as it were. I love Jesus Christ, and I want to go where he calls me. The amount of money I have in my bank account does not dictate what I can and cannot do for him. Since he controls so much more than finances.

It is so hard to surrender. It is so hard to think about all the pain and suffering that people endure every day because of Christ. It breaks my heart to think about all the people that live in North America and can't see how it's destroying their spiritual lives. It is SO HARD to realize how much we actually need God when we live with such blessings. We often don't turn to God, until someone we know and love, or we ourselves are in dire trouble. I want what I say and do to line up with what Jesus wants me to say and do. If you're reading this and are comfortable where you are, think about what Jesus would want you to do that's uncomfortable. What can you do in your day to day, that you know you should be doing, but aren't? I know there isn't any scripture in my post. Search scripture yourself. Jesus can speak through his words to you, even if you're not a biblical scholar. He's more powerful than language barriers, his love is more complete than the love you can feel from anyone here on earth.

Stop making excuses, if you think that you should do something, and it lines up with what God says in the Bible, do it! God will do some amazing things.

It's all about Jesus, all of it.

Discipline and self-control

So, I've never really been someone that would have said, when other people think of me, they think of a guy with a lot of self-control. And I've never really seen my self as someone with a lot of self-control either. This summer has been a really good one. I've spent a lot of time learning about God, myself, relationships. For a while, people could have asked me if my faith was changing my life....although most people don't ask you that. I firmly believe that if we have faith in and a relationship with Jesus Christ, that relationship will change our lives. I was very frustrated that my life was staying the same, I was just doing what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it. I DIDN'T need to rely on God for things like, FOOD, WATER, SHELTER, RELATIONSHIPS, FINANCES. I was self-sufficient, and stale. A lot of the reading that I've been doing in the Bible this summer has been in Ezekiel, which is a crazy book, those prophets did not live easy lives. God does things over and over to get the attention of his people, to let them know that just meeting together once in a while, and singing the right songs and saying the right prayers is not a relationship!!! He wants us to follow him throughout the week, in our everyday lives. He wants to change our hearts, and see us serve in compassion for the people around us. It's so easy to write off the world vision ads we see on tv, and the news about the famine in africa because we don't live there. We don't see people dying everyday because they're hungry. How would you feel if everyone around you was in danger of dying every day because they didn't have enough food? But that doesn't happen here in North America, does it...everyone has more than enough food. I'm sick of having more than enough. It makes me want to cry for the people who have nothing. There are so many people that have had their hope stripped from them, along with everything else. Why do we sit here in our comfy houses, talk about it, and do nothing? DO SOMETHING! If your faith in Christ doesn't make your heart break for those who are hurting, you may need to spend some more time alone with Christ, examining what it is in your life that is hindering your relationship with Christ. It's easy to put other things first in our lives, and we here this over and over, but do we really think about it. If ANYTHING is more important to us than Christ, and following his example of ministering to the sick, something is wrong...Our COMFORT cannot be our GOD, our MONEY cannot be our GOD, our PLEASURE cannot be our GOD! These are things that often take up the majority of my thoughts, doing what I want, when I want, so I can be comfortable. Instead maybe let's try LOVING GOD, and LOVING PEOPLE as ourselves. These two things will change your life! Jesus is alive and working all around, we just need to open our eyes to see it, and join him. He's working everywhere, it's not as though we need to go across the sea to find him at work. Let's go on a spiritual diet maybe? cut out all the crap. spiritual junk food. Jesus is real, and he says that if we seek him, we will find him. If we seek him with all our heart!!!

Summer!!!

I love Summer! Warmth, green things, water, sun, bugs. Well, I can't say that I like the bugs, but it's part of the package. I love being able to spend time at the beach, swimming, biking, walking, hanging out around the fire. I love camping. Going on sweet roadtrips with sweet dudes that I don't see very often. I love having time to reflect on my life, and refocus, and process through lessons that God has been teaching me over the past months. I really don't do that enough.

Another thing that I love, is getting to spend time with the people that I love. My friends inspire me, and accept me for who I am. For those things, I love them! My girlfriend is willing to follow me around to all sorts of events with all sorts of people who she may or may not know, and doesn't complain about it being awkward, even though it might be sometimes.

I feel good right now. I am content with where I am, and am excited about the rest of the summer that I have to continue to do all the fun things that I love, with all the awesome people that I know. I really don't have much more to say, except that God is good, and I thank him for summer!

Life Lessons

I'm not very good at writing long blog posts, so this will be a quick one. Life is stressful. I seem to always like to distract myself rather than actually dealing with stresses in my life. Maybe it is because I don't have the answers, so I try to put decision-making and dealing with problems off until I feel like I have the capacity to deal with them. Unfortunately, life doesn't stop happening long enough for me to figure everything out before I need to deal with it.

I try to lean on my own strength far too often. I am proud, I am selfish, I am unworthy. Despite all of these things, Jesus calls me his! I am his child, adopted into his family and he loves me! These things bring me joy, although I often focus more on the negative things, than on his truth and promises. God is good, even if life isn't all the time. His strength will suffice.

Be Blessed!

Taking a Break and Being Real

Hey all,

Being busy is good, and it sucks. I had two weeks off from work for Christmas, about half of that time was spent at gatherings and parties, while the other half was spent road-tripping to the west coast and back with some buddies. Throughout the whole time I realized that with how busy I was, I didn't have a lot of time to just relax. Granted, there were times throughout the whole "break" where I was relaxing, and spending time not doing a whole lot. The thing is, I think that often we try to busy ourselves, that it gets to be a bit ridiculous. We often forget to take care of ourselves, or even to know what that looks like. I have some thoughts on what it takes to take care of yourself. I'd say that I am a relatively stress-free person. Emphasis on relatively. There are things that stress me out at times, but I think that I am pretty effective at distracting myself from the things that stress me out.

Two thoughts: DO THINGS THAT BRING YOU JOY! and DO FUN THINGS, FOR FUN! It's super easy to get bogged down and frustrated with life, and the worries and stresses that get us down. It can be hard to want to do fun things, or take time to do things that we enjoy when we feel we have obligations to fulfill. Perhaps we all need to take more time to just have fun. I used to want to postpone growing up. I thought that grown-ups had all sorts of problems that I didn't want to have. They were always stressed out. I think that it can get to be that way sometimes, but we need to take time for ourselves, to do things that bring us joy, and fill us up with a love for life.

Sometimes it can be hard to think of things that bring us joy, when we feel as though it has been a long time since we felt joyful. I suggest trying to recall the last time you were really, truly joyful. What were you doing? Maybe try doing that again. Perhaps we need to take a page out of a child's book, and learn how to play again. Spend some time just goofing around, and not trying to pretend like we have it all together. It's hard work pretending to be alright all the time. I think a lot of times when I do that, I'm probably trying harder to convince myself then anybody else that I'm alright. As the body of Christ, we should share in each other's joys, and each other sorrows. If we just want to support each other in the times of joy, it would seem that we are missing half of the spectrum. If we take more time to play, we likely won't be as stressed. So play with your friends, do things that will bring joy to each others lives! Praise God for he has made each of us unique and with gifts to help each other out, and build each other up. You are all made in the image of God, and he loves you!!!

I'm a follower of Christ, but I don't know it all, and I don't have it all together. Life is messy, messy is real. I want to be real.

"This is the day the Lord has made.
      We will rejoice and be glad in it." Psalm 118:24 (NLT)