Shayna and Deanna here. We want to share with you some things, different than the usual blog.

Well, yesterday was quite dangerous.  If you tried to leave your home in the morning you would know.  While on my way to church I (Shayna)  made good friends with a telephone pole.  Or, well my car did.  I hit a sheet of ice and my car skid left, right, left, right and BAM! telephone pole.  Well, I’m soooo lucky because only my mirror was taken off instead of my head.  In fact, after hitting the pole, my car decided to keep on going for a bit in the middle of the field by the prison.  It could have been soooo much worse and I’m so thankful God took care of me yesterday.  The Hollobinkos took me to church and then I saw another white honda on top of a hill (along with several others)…
This is where i come in (deanna)… that white honda, yeahhh, me. i tried getting up the steep hill by the church and while getting half way up, proceeded to slide back down. there were about ten other cars traveling 4 miles/hr with flashers on, apparently the cold is not our friend. but the telephone pole is definitely shayna’s. until it backstabbed her and stole her mirror. bahahha. but anyways, i tried going up the gravel road to the church, hoping i’d get more traction. which was also a FAIL. i got stuck and had to walk the rest of the way to church.

ohhh what troubles we go through just for attending church..

buttttt. God took care of both shayna and i and we are both alive and well.

that is our story. so here is a verse to let you know just how much God loves you and will take care of you next time you hit a sheet of ice on a cold december morn.

k thats it.. right shayna?

YAAA!

okay, so go read the bible…

If the Creator of the universe cares enough about the humble birds to care for them, why would He care any less about us? God provides for the birds’ needs; as He loves us even more, we can count on Him to provide for us as well.

Matthew 6:26

Congrats to Sam, Eric, Ryan, Ben, Aaron, and Mason for moving on to District Fine Arts… You guys were amazing!!!!!

“God isn’t a statistic, he isn’t an argument to be won, and he isn’t a tangible entity that was meant to be figured out. STOP! trying to find God through the arguments and resources of the World. That’s like trying to find light in a black hole…” – Me

Proverbs 12:18 “Reckless words pierce like a sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.”

You cannot grasp God in this World… and this week in Sociology class I’ve realized it’s become an obsession with people, both Christians and non-Christians alike. There is always an argument and always a rebuttal to any statement someone may make about God or any topic. God is not an argument to be won… He is the one and only absolute. He is outside of time and space. No end and no beginning. And until you treat him as such, you will waste your life away trying to grasp Him and His ways.

You cant understand God in a “fallen world.” It is like trying to find light in a black hole. It can’t be done. The only truth of God that you can find on this Earth is by looking to the Word and realizing the only light in this World, now, are the true followers of Jesus Christ. We are a light. And if we truly know God, the truth we confess and the wisdom we profess to the World is of God and is the the only truth that proves the absolute Himself.

If you would have asked me five years ago, where you see yourself five years from now, I would have never said working for a church. I majored in landscape management at University of Maryland. It was a passion to work with plants and in the soil until God took a hold of my life and honestly changed my heart….

While pursuing God and trying to fill this void in my life, I knew I wanted to get involved in something that loved on people in the community. Even before I gave my life to him, he instilled in me how to serve and love….

So, I landed here, at CLA, as the admin assistant to the Youth Pastor b/c Pastor Tony Sebastian believed in me and wanted to see spiritual growth in my life. It has been life changing to say the least…

Have you ever had a passion to do something then a year or two passes and you realize that you are so far from it….Sure, I know we go through different seasons and sometimes passions and dreams can be put on hold…I remember saying to friends while taking care of Baba and managing a part-time business that I want to do more and help in the community….little did I know that I desired to do something in the name of Jesus not for myself.

I want to take advantage of this divine season and place….With the new vision of the church, Love God…Love People…Change the World…, it has brought back all the desires I have to impact our community…

Here are a few areas this month you can love people…and change the world. The first opportunity is working with Capital Area Pregnancy Center. They offer caring and professional medical services, abortion recovery counseling and support, clothing and furnishings for mothers and baby, among other programs. They are completely self funded. They hold six car washes a year to help fund these programs, this being the last one for the year. They need 6-8 volunteers. It will be held on Saturday, September 6th from 9:30am-2:00pm in Mechanicsburg off the Bowmansdale exit. Click here for more information about CAPC.

The second opportunity is helping the Center for Champions of PA. Center for Champions of PA is an outreach to inner-city, at-risk families using a holistic approach that addresses the mind, body and spiritual needs of the individuals we serve. They are committed to changing the city for Christ one family at a time….Once a month they have dinners for the parents. This month it will be held for the entire family at a Veteran’s Park Elmerton Avenue in Harrisburg. They are in need of 10-12 volunteers to serve and love on the kids. The date is Thursday, September 11 from 4:00-9:00pm. We are leaving from the Youth Center at 4:00p.  Click here to find out more information about CFC.

If you are interested in serving, please email frequenyouth@christian-life.com or call 717-635-7230.

i have been doing a lot of heart searching lately.

any good Christian knows that God searches the heart, but the Christian that searches his heart is rare.

unfortunately

i have a friend who was praying that i’d step into parts of my heart that i didn’t know and was afraid to. that prayer has been, is being, and will continue to be answered in me.

my heart is a scary place. do you identify?

God commands so much of us, and yet settles for so little. why???????

why do we make God suffer with so little of the so much that he so kindly asks of us?

i search my heart. and i question. i question my motives. are they pure? why did i bless that person? was it to genuinely bless them, or was it to gain some sort of sick, selfish pleasure beacause I blessed them? sick. why do i pray what i pray to God? do i pray for the benefit of others, or for my own convenience? why do i what i do? why????????!!???!!?!?

i have been praying that God’s reality would eventually become more real to me than this perverted physical reality. the demands on our easily perceiving senses are so easy to yield to without realizing it. but the requests God makes of us, perceivable only in a Spirit, practiced only in obedient love to King Christ, are hard to hear and understand.

but it’s possible. i have taken this saturday as a sort of sabbath. i have been searching my heart. i have been doing my best to yield to God my whole heart and let him search it. for we truly cannot control our hearts. no matter our best efforts, they do things that we have no control over.

which is why often times we distance ourselves from our true selves, because we’re scared of the control over us our hearts have. and thus the product is the very thing we hate to become. a viscious cycle. not broken by being merely saved, but only by King Christ’s power in a truly transforming way, met with glorious Scripture, changed by unchangeable words of God.

you youth are so real, so genuine. you don’t hide because you’re young. you hate fakeness and you can smell it in harrisburg. but unless you let God search your heart, and change it, you will eventually fade into what you don’t want to ever encounter.

God searching and changing our hearts is PAINFUL!!!!! it hurts! it stinks! i hate it! i honestly do not like it! it’s hard! it’s hard to yield! it’s hard to be honest, real, genuine to God! we want to say “i believe you wholeheartedly God!!!” and we want to impress God with our undying love and faith. but he’d rather we come to his feet, with no faith, no belief, no trust, but a heart willing to learn, and a genuine teachable spirit.

search your heart. guaranteed you’ll scare yourself. but it is worth it. with God, you can do it. you are deep, because God made you that way. and your depth will be either a great blessing to you, your family, your friends, and every person you ever meet, or it will be a wretched curse to all life.

you choose.

God loves you. and he will help you choose rightly. simply ask him for help. he will. and it’s okay to take time. i’ve been saved for 5 years….it will take time. and that’s okay.

I sit inside, at work. but i am not inside. my heart is free, and it roams around outside, enjoying the warm sunshine, the warm air, the refreshing breeze that will never be matched by canned air conditioning. how can God live in a building? why do humans always want to put God inside? God made the outdoors. we made the indoors. i just want to be outside, God made it for us. he made it for us to enjoy. when we sinned, he cursed it, but it’s still enjoyable. it’s beautiful, only because God is. the essence of true beauty is God. humans have perverted that, but if you look closely, you can see God’s depth in all that he’s created. look at a tree, why does it grow up? why do some twigs have leaves and some don’t? what person can tell you that, without years of study? and that came from a word of God’s mouth. what about bumblebees? ever seen them fly around? they make ridiculously high G-force changes in direction every few seconds. how do they do that? i bet few scientists could tell you that. God is so mysterious! and nature inspires me. here i am, sitting in four, straight, smooth, uni-colored, tame, lame walls of the same….boredom… God created man to be outdoors. and therefore, that’s where my heart is. but at least man had the sense to make windows. and so here i sit, staring out a window, jealous of my free heart, roaming around outdoors, longing to join it.

i guess i sound somewhat crazy. but then, free hearts usually do. not many people are used to free hearts, and i suppose few know how to handle them…but then that’s because they not handle-able.

beauty inspires me. as it does every man. it helps me to passionately chase after God. who can know his mysteries? and yet he longs to show us and reveal to us his mysteries. but we have to seek him.

and so i seek him. even from inside the rooms of nothing. i seek God.

So over the past couple of days I have been really thinking about May, here’s what I came up with….1. I thought that April showers brought May flowers..2.it would be soo nice that instead of the rain running into the sewers that it would be nice if they would run your car…3. I preached my first sermon and I was only 18 and God really used me. One good thing about rain is that the Lord refreshs us in the rain (not the actual wet stuff) but spiritually it refreshes us. When Maryssa and I preached last Wednesday we were praying for confurmation about what we were supposed to talk about and then Mike told us he was talking about passion and they just fit in soo perfectly. It just amazes me how God works even after all that I have witnessed…it just shows how God works differently everytime…just pray for refreshment and revival and just a fire to set our souls on fire for Him….

there’s more to prayer than it seems…

Recently there have been a lot of things going on in my life and sometimes it’s really hard to see God when I’m in those hard times but I know God is always walking me through them. I remember reading a poem called “Footprints In The Sand” and what it basically says is that even though we can only see one set of footprints that they weren’t ours!! It goes on to say that when we were in those hard times that it was God carrying us through and that’s why we only see one set! The past couple of days has been really hard for me with a lot of things just piling on one right after another and it was to the point yesterday when I just cried out for God and said “you know what I know that your here with me, but I’m tired of using my strentgh and I give it all to you!!” I was talking to someone last night and they gave me some good scritures one is James 1: 2-6 and it says this “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lasks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he mush believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.” To have doubts is not good for your spirit and it’s not of God!! I know it’s hard but you have to look at it like this you will be able to help someone who is going through the same situation as you and help them see what you saw!! Last thing is this: trust in the Lord no matter what life is throwing at you because you will over come this because God is carrying and watching your back!! Hebrews 12: 1-3 God bless!!!