Once again, I find myself in a place of having to reflect before tending to the “urgent” of my to-do list.  It seems as though God is establishing a pattern here…a new habit I need to incorporate into my daily life.

As I’ve written in the past days, I will be speaking to a group of women tonight.  The topic, Restoration, has been in place for months.  The notes and scribbles of thoughts have graced my brain for weeks.  Normally,  I would have every “t” crossed and every “i” dotted by now.

But I don’t.

For some strange reason, every time in the past week that I would sit down to fine tune my notes and perfect the rhythm, I would hit an almost literal wall.  No flow seemed to come naturally.  Something felt robotic and forced.

My prayer this entire time was that God would make His message of Restoration so impassioned in me that it would bleed out to the women that so need healing in their relationship with others or with Him.  That women who are carrying wounds of fear and abandonment and shame would hear with fresh ears of His deep, consuming love for them.

That was my prayer.  But up until a couple of days ago, I was striving on my own to create something that was failing to resonate with my own heart and I was coming up short every single time.

This would normally be a time when I would panic and let anxiety have its way with me.  Fear would tell me that I am going to let these women down if I don’t hurry up and get this all together in the perfect fashion.  The lie that if I don’t present a flawless speech, somehow the Holy Spirit and His work will be thwarted.

But I serve a God of the eleventh hour.  And once again, He has done a work in my heart at just the right time…

I woke up yesterday with no sense of panic and a new understanding of how He wants to work tonight.  It won’t be in your typical “speaker” fashion.  It will be in the way He has designed me and gifted me.  It will be a one-on-one encounter with 100 women.  Sound impossible?  Not with my God.

My hope is to be sitting on a stool, relaxed as if I had each of these women in my home, drinking a cup of coffee at my kitchen table.  Or even better, on my comfy couch.  Instead of talking at them, I will talk WITH them.  It will be interactive.  We will have a hands-on project that will be part of the evening.  A visual that they create with their own hands to illustrate the idea of restoration.  Something that they can take home with them as a reminder of God’s great love.

My passion will come from the place of another fresh encounter with God that has happened in the last 48 hours.  And alongside that passion is an ever-increasing COMpassion for hurting women.

Tonight’s conversation will be about the old becoming new.  The broken becoming healed.  The useless becoming useful.  We will talk about our own brokenness.  We will make beautiful flowers out of old and torn book pages.  And we will be reminded that Jesus came as a baby (Christmas!) to a broken world to experience our brokenness in every way. For thirty three years He experienced what it feels like to be broken.  And THEN….and then He took that brokenness to the cross and held it on His shoulders and died to eliminate its power over our lives.  His brokenness brought our healing.  He took on our old to give us new.  Restoration.  What Christmas is really all about.

Here is a picture of our illustration that we will create together tonight:

So, pray with me if you think of it.  There is no doubt in my mind that there will be hurting hearts in that room tonight.  Hearts in desperate need of God’s healing and restorative love.

(Huge side note – I met an incredible woman on the plane here, my new friend Yolanda, who shared with me the most amazing story of restoration in her own life.  Unbelievable!  And I just got off the phone with another friend who shared a miraculous story of restorative healing in her life that just happened.  I have goosebumps on my goosebumps!  So confirming of what God wants to do tonight!)

2 Corinthians 2:17 – Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!