Hello! It's hard to believe that I'm entering into the last week of this first semester and that I'll soon be home and then off to Kenya! This may be my last blog in South Africa. Between finishing up the leadership conference and preparing to go home I started to wind down and I guess not be as focused as I maybe was at Alabanza. Little did I know that God had other plans. That He was not even close to closing down but rather preparing to move unlike ever before.

            God has been teaching me about His Spirit, the Holy Spirit. I feel like often times the Spirit isn't given as much acknowledgement as part of the trinity. This past week God gave me an in-the-face reminder that His Spirit is not just very much alive, but also present, inhabiting and moving through His people. I started studying in Acts and basically the whole Bible about what it means to receive the Holy Spirit and like the disciples in Acts, be baptized by the Spirit. I don't want to preach on my blog or drown you out in theology; I just want to share this experience of God's power and His overwhelming grace. I've been praying about what it means to receive the Holy Spirit and more specifically what it means for my life. I believe that you do receive the Spirit when you are saved but just like you are no more or less saved when you are baptized, you are no more or less saved when you are baptized in the Spirit. It's another proclamation, another step in opening up yourself and surrendering yourself and allowing God to work through you.

            After reading about it in Acts and basically the whole Bible, and praying a LOT   about it, I really felt like God was calling me out. So about three days ago during worship I experienced a whole new side of God, His Spirit and just want to testify to the intimacy that He is calling each of us to. That night He just confirmed prayer in my life. I truly felt His presence like never before and a true physical change. Like I wrote about before I've really been praying for the gift of faith and Jim, one of the pastors, was praying over me and said that he heard God telling him that I would be a woman of faith and that God gave me faith. There were so many other things, one other was me surrendering feelings that have been harbored and disregarded for years; feelings of rejection and unworthiness that when surrendered to Him I truly felt leave me and experienced true freedom.

            I pray that no one gets caught up on any confusion or theological flaws that come from my inability to word this correctly or the whole spiritual aspect of it that tends to freak people out. I really just want to testify and proclaim Him in all of this. That He desires so much to be close with us and for us to open ourselves up to His Spirit that dwells in us. I was winding down, my feeble mind thought that when I was done, God was done. He wasn't, instead He was using everything I learned in the past three months, setting me up to experience a whole new side of Him. That's how our amazing God works. My prayer is that He reveals Himself to you when you least expect it. That maybe you're sitting on your couch watching American Idol and He speaks to you or you read something crazy spiritual in the magazine you keep next to your toilet :) I don't know. But pray that He shows up, pray that He sends the unexpected, because He will and that's basically the coolest thing ever. Peace to the nations!