Finding God In Each Season

Dying Now to Live Fully “Time: 1:09-12:07”

• “. . . you’re right on time on your own path. You’re right on time.” So right now, “discover how holy your path is, how personal it is. How personal this Jesus is. How really good He is.”

• “I feel like I kept hearing the phrase ‘back from the dead.’ I feel like I’ve come back from the dead to tell you something. . . . there really is life on the other side. . . . we actually get to die now so that we can actually fully live. This is amazing. It costs everything. But then all of a sudden we reemerge and we found out we had everything we needed all along, we just didn’t know it. And we kept trying to insulate ourselves with different definitions and identities and personas, until all of those just didn’t work anymore . . . they work for us until crisis hits.”

• “It’s been said that by the time we’re twelve we’ve already determined what we believe about God, ourselves, and everyone else in the world and it’s not necessarily through conscious teaching, it’s through subconscious training.” “There’s something that happens in us when shame comes into the picture and we split ourselves between who we really are and how we present ourselves to the world.” To survive, “our tendency is to actually get more and more insulated and smaller and smaller. It’s an intriguing thing. We come to the world wide-eyed, as children, ready to experience and learn and we don’t know shame until we’re taught it. We don’t know, until we’re told otherwise.” “And I do believe that the way Jesus walks us through our path is this beautiful undwinding of all these things that we subconsciously were taught through the fallen world system. He gives us a new mind, a new way of thinking, a new way of perceiving. He restores things back to the original goodness . . . Our story didn’t start in Genesis 3, with the Fall. Our story started with original goodness.”

• Amanda shares how when she went through the ending of her marriage she had to face “everything I ever feared, every subconscious principle reality of fear.” She shared about discovering that Jesus is teaching her “how to walk through” her pain, instead of saving her from it. “He teaches us how to walk through every season, including winter when things die off. There wasn’t a lot that survived the fire, I’ll be very honest with you. . . . But . . . it just got so good. It got so much better. He really is as good as you think He is, but so much better than you think He is.”

• Amanda teaches that sometimes worship looks like bringing all of ourselves, not leaving parts out--even when that looks like “screaming into a pillow for a long time.” We have to bring “everything with us, as an offering: ‘I’ll give You my anger. I will give you my resentment . . .” and “not just for a quick turn around. This isn’t a microwave.” “Honesty is . . . the baseline. It’s the healing baseline ‘cause it returns things to ourselves, like it returns ourself to ourselves.”

He is With You - “Time: 12:09-18:46”

• “And if there was just one thing that I could say to you . . . it would just be that God is with us. God is with us. God is with us. God is with us. God is with us.”

• When the angels announced the arrival of Jesus to the shepherds, “they don’t walk the shepherds through every season of the soul. All they say is, ‘Guess what? There’s good news. It’s for all people.’ Good news! It’s about to get so good!”

• “Today there’s an army arriving, an army of healers. There’s an army of war nurses to tend to you, to tend to the spaces in your own heart that . . . need some time, they need some love, they need some care. They [these spaces in your heart] don’t need to be yelled at. . . . you’ve been fighting for a long time.” “This is the Christ that I have run right into. It’s a silence that’s filled with hope.”

• Amanda shares about being at dinner tables with friends where “they knew that they couldn’t say anything and I knew they couldn’t say anything and so we sat, we just sat together. Those are some of the most healing experiences I’ve ever had. All of it counts. All of the prayers for breakthrough, all of it. But for me, probably the most healing thing I’ve ever encountered is Jesus in the quiet. Jesus in the solitary moments. Jesus in the loneliness. Jesus in the suffering.”

Encounter Time - “Time: 19:10-41:56”

• Amanda introduces the encounter time by saying, “Rather than me telling you about this, I would love for all of us to walk away with a memory, an experience of the Christ meeting with us at worship school, not just in somebody telling us about Him but in our own personalized path of transformation.”

• “Take three deep breaths,” “close your eyes,” “enter into a place where the pressure is completely off,” and get relaxed in your chair.

• Then Amanda prayed, “Jesus, thank You for Your presence. Jesus, I thank You that Your presence is right here, right now, not just in a coming kingdom, not just in an afterlife equation. Right here, right now, right in this moment, would You make us aware of Your presence? Would You open our eyes, open the eyes of our heart, open the eyes of our imagination to be able to see You, to be able to visualize Your goodness personified. I ask that You would reveal to us exactly what we need in this moment. Give us one word, one word to meditate on, one word to think about.” Then Amanda leads them saying, “When you get your word, when you feel the word, can you just put your hand on your heart? Only words of goodness, kindness, forgiveness are allowed.” 

• “I just want you to bless yourself. I want you to repeat after me, ‘I bless myself to receive all that Jesus paid for. I bless myself to accept my own worthiness of love, connection, and belonging in the family of God. I bless my soul to become wide awake to the goodness, to the presence of the Christ with me always.’ Just stay there.”

• “And whatever you need to do, if you feel like crying, or if you feel like writing, or if you feel like just staring at the sky, feel free to do that.” Amanda asked the sound team to play a song, saying, “I woke up and listened to this over and over and over again and I just felt something being healed in my own heart.” The video stream is paused, but the audio continues playing “Give Me Jesus” and instrumental music.

• The music fades out and Amanda asks that the students “stay in that space” and put their hand on the student next to them. To explain the activation, Amanda says “I don’t want you to say anything over them. I just want all of us to sink into a moment where we feel the presence of another person standing right next to us, standing right beside us.” Then she began to pray, “Jesus I thank You that You are this close. You are the Friend of all friends.”

• “Now to wrap up, I just want you to repeat after me: God is with us. God is with me. Right here, right now, for always. Spring, summer, fall, winter, every season of my soul, it all matters,  it’s important. I am worthy of love in every single season. Bring this to mind, Holy Spirit, bring this to mind every time I forget. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

• In the five minutes remaining, Amanda asks the students to get out paper and “write whatever it is that you felt, whatever it is that was brought to mind, or a prayer, or something you’re asking, anything.” Then she said, “at the end of it, I would love for you to just simply write the reminder ‘You are with me.’”

• Lastly, Amanda ended the session with a quote from John O’Donohue: “May all that is unforgiven in you be released, may your fears yield their deepest tranquilities, and may all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love.”

Prayer

Amanda did not say a final prayer, other than the one at the end of the encounter time.