A Day in Rest

We are already more than a month into school and yet it feels like we have been here for a year!  Our home is full, with two Dutch (Ton and Rianne), two cats, our selves and Holy Spirit.

Tuesdays:  We wake up to our cats...breaking down our bedroom door, pleading for their morning meal-pitifully I must say.  Next is breakfast: french press coffee, fresh bread from the bread machine and maybe an egg and O.J.  Cierra is on call for massage at the day spa she works at, so any given morning she may have a massage or two and sometimes nothing at all.  The rest of the morning we find our selves either on the couch with a book, on our patio with a book, or in the armchair with our computer, often times working on different assignments or filling ourselves with inspiration from music and visual art.  School starts at 12:30, which usually finds us rollin down the road with our car packed with housemates and others on our way to school, sometime after 12:00.  We then get to experience the presence of God in worship for about an hour followed by teaching from 1 or 2 people and then we all split off to different Bible classes for the last part of the day.  One of the best part of any given day is the evening meal, which we usually all eat together, enjoying some sort of fusion dutch/americana recipe contrived by our head chef Rianne.  Confession...we are such homebodies!  Evenings are a time to talk over a glass of wine and process the day or perhaps worship more, or pray, or just lay on the floor and enjoy whatever Holy Spirit wants to do.  Then, slob lecher (spelling??).  Goodnight in Dutch.

A somewhat deep thought: What saves us? Faith in Jesus? I used to think so.  Don't get me wrong, Jesus is the ONLY way to the Father and salvation is only through what He has done on the cross, however, there is something interesting to look at here.

Faith in Jesus does not save us.  It is the grace of God that saves us.

Eph 2:8

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,

Now, once you get past the anxiety of the statement I just made, let Holy Spirit draw you into the freedom that this will produce in your heart.  You don't have to work for your salvation.  Faith is simply the turning of our will in the vivid realization of what Christ has done for us on the cross.  We don't have to "work up" enough faith to get saved.  We simply let ourselves agree with what has been done for us.  Just know that you don't have to work to attain your salvation, and you certainly don't have to work to retain you.  Walking with Jesus should be characterized by rest.  Are you at rest?

We love you.

Jason and Cierra.