THE COVERING
When somebody comes into the ministry, they first get to experience NEW LIFE! We’ve had people come in that are agnostic, meaning that they’re kind of seeking, or they might think there’s God, or something out there. We love Lyle Craig, the father and husband of our last family. When he came, he did not even believe in God. He was adamant that God did not exist. He was angry at God. To watch that transformation happen in his life was phenomenal! But if we try to teach somebody about who God is, and they don’t know God, it’s just like hitting a brick wall.
When drugs and alcohol are taken into the body, the dopamine releases at a rapid rate in our brains. So, when we stop doing that, we don’t know how to feel pleasure. We don’t know how to even enjoy a normal conversation with our spouse or our children in a relationship way because we don’t know how it feels at the normal phase. It is so uncomfortable when you’re trying to let go of things that have defined you your whole life.
So when spring happens, we have new life that happens. I have spent eight years putting perennials in the ground in front of my house, so that I don’t have to plant every single year. They just come up all by themselves and it’s God’s glory, I just have to weed around it. But we had a freeze a while back and the meteorologist said cover everything if you have anything growing. So we got tarps and sheets and blankets to try to save these new little flowers that were coming up. I had put seeds in the ground, thinking that that was the end of the freezing and we were good to go. If I would have just neglected covering the new growth from the freeze, then those little flowers that were already coming up and all their beautiful foliage, would have been destroyed by the freeze. So I’m telling you this to help you understand what happens when somebody first comes into the ministry. Every family that has come to us, has said that they felt like they wanted to do this for a long time, they just didn’t know how to get there. So we help put a cover over them when they come into the safety and structure of Finding the Family. We help give them a protective area and time period where they can feel safe.
THE ‘GREAT GUTTING’
The ‘great gutting’ is a phrase we use to describe the illustration of pulling out the stuff inside of us that we need to get rid of. If we harbor it, then we don’t have room to accept new ideas when they come from God. So in our minds, the way we think, in our feelings, the way we’ve covered them, and when we pull that out, then we’re able to allow God to deposit into us what He wants us to know and feel and act like and know Him like. But we can’t do that if we are filled up with all of our stuff because then we have no room for what He has.
If we allow our eyes to no longer be fixated on the things that used to hold us back but instead are fixated on Christ, then it’s a brand new life!