weekend coming

I just feel so good today. Im in a very good mood. thanks Jesus.
we had a grouping day in school today. (yep, I guess there is not such a word in english.
I mean that we had a group of small kids coming here, we had a route with different kind of assignements for them to do together, and the result should be they end up feeling more like a group) I was helping out with the 7-years old group. whatI basically just did, was helding a string. in the end a small boy came up to me, hugged me, and said: thank you for everything.
I think I melted just there. such an innocent, lovely feedback.

Im going to my mums place this weekend. and also will spend a day with some people,
hanging out as a family of God and talking about our processes. dont actually know much about that yet, we´ll see what the weekend will bring.

then on sunday I go with mum to my sisters home. yei! my sis is pregnant with twins and I havent seen her in a while. I guess she is starting to be huge already :)

dresden briefly.

germany was good.

best thing was the people.
seeing old friends and getting new ones.

had a really blessed moment with marc and heidi
just being able to pour out stuff that heavied my heart,
and then the blessing continued with sitting in a cafe for
a moment with them, and alec and alpin from macedonia.
was encouraging to hear from the macedonian guys about their
processes and the situation on macedonia.
I defenitely sense some kind of growing interest in visiting there someday.

dresden as a city was really cool.
I think it would be one of the cities I want to go with somekind of a team.
like ljubljana as well.
maybe it could be a good route, dresden, then maybe prague, ljubljana, then going to macedonia.
serving, praying, living,learning,travelling.
some day some day. maybe some day next summer :)

I met many new lovely sisters.
great connections with english, german and swedish. and spanish as well. thanks Jesus!

maybe more later, now I really need to go and have some rest, maybe even sleep. weekend was so intensive, not much sleep and then today in school quite intensive as well.

thoughts on a bus

sat on the bus listening to a good worship cd
as the sense of being a bit of a hypocrite grew in me.

could I live the Kingdom out here, on the bus.
with these people?
would I even want to?
would I actually want to get started on thinking these souls?
where they are heding.
bother myself with it.

w h y w h y am I so afraid to love?
maybe cause like CS Lewis says
to love is to be vulnerable,
cause love cost Jesus his life,
cause it can break my heart, demand a sacrifice, make me cry
cause it would actually be caring for these people I dont even know.
being willing to lay down my own
-so called- reputation
comfort
and will
for them.

Father, change my heart of stone to a heart that is broken by the same things as yours.

loving someone without being loved back. now thats a scary thought.
sometimes I just really wonder how Jesus does it. amazing.
if even I can go through a little glimpses of love, sorrow and pain
and have a hard time bearing them,
what then can be on Fathers heart when he desperately longs for his creation to come to him.

blessings from the fullness of His grace

Im going to germany on friday. there is this 24-7 gathering.
quite nice, though I have no idea what I am actually going to do there.
but maybe it can give some clarity to this whole 24-7 in finland.
and Im eager to meet all the new people.
(I just got some email consernig the meeting.
and have to say now I am even more eager.
its quite amazing, travelling and meeting people from different nations has always been this distant dream, and all of a sudden Jesus is making things happen. what can I say. who am I and yet He calls my name and knows my heart. Jesus, you are more than I can fathom. grace grace and grace.)

I run in to liban at the weekend. (muslimfriend from somalia)
we had a very short conversation, it went like this:

liban asks: have you been to the church lately?
Hey, I am the church I answer smiling.
yeah, and Im the mosque says liban.

opened my eyes again a bit for the reality
of what people think that the church is.

dreams

Father I wait.
I wait for the calebs.
faithful and brave.
I wait for the samuels.
Whispers:
speak, your servant is listening.

Daddy, I wait
When
davids go against goliaths in your name
and elijahs mock the prophets of baal.

I wait
longing for a generation
consencrating for the amazing things
you are gonna do.

my Father I wait
when will the world go after you
when faith can heal
when the demons fear even our clothes
and a shadow can heal in your name.

Father I wait
when your kingdom
wouldnt be a matter of talk
when our love would be
in actions and truth

when the praise that belongs to you
makes the foundations shake,
doors of prisons open and
chains come loose.

And Daddy, I wait
when can I see face to face
lay my crown and cry
Holy, Worthy
Lover, Saviour and Friend
See the flames of love burning in your eyes.

May it all be for that.
May it all be for you, my King.

whats up.

yesterday night I thought that I would need a table.

and today we went to take out the trash with tytti, and there besides the trashbins was a great table for me. thank you Jesus! just hoping its still there when I go and get it after school.

we moved some of my stuff on friday with johanna. it was quite crazy. dragging the heavy parts of my bed in to an elevator around eleven pm quietly is a challenge. hope we didnt wake up the whole building. but hooray! maybe I can start getting the room in order and look like my room. allthough I dont know if I am able to put the bed together..

after one month I will be doing a practical training for school. I am going to work for a lutheran church for eight weeks. it will be i n t e r e s t i n g. I just met the people I am going to work with yesterday. and I think that the time there will take my process about what the body of Christ is about even deeper.. felt kind of sad while I listened all the programs. a lot of talking about playing, cooking, watching films, bible studies even, making candles and so on. (all good, I dont mean that) but no one mentioned the groom.. Shouldnt the activity of the bride pretty much be about Jesus?

But well, there are many good things in it as well. I get to go to high schools and so on, and have a chance to talk about Fathers passionate love towards His children. and it will fuel up my process. and maybe hopefully humble me in a way I learn not to be arrogant. and I can learn learn learn to live the Kingdom out wherever with whoever.

number four

I think there would be enough thoughts conserning prague, that I could go on and on until the number 300 or something. and that would only be the thoughts. I even havent told any of the actions (so about what we actually did there. but for example jan has something in his blog, and marc also. so go and check their reports)

one thing I still wanted to share is about being.
a process that started already before prague continued there.
God has in some way being doing some kind of an inner healing in me lately.
Im the kind of a person who can take pressures real easy about hearing Gods voice,
being prophetic, to be able to measure up.. and so on.
but lately Jesus has freed me to just be. (so simple, yet so profound:))

so, for example being prophetic isnt something that comes outside of me,
something I really need to struggle to get a hold of. it actually flows within me,
as I understand who I am in Christ, and as I let Him live through me.
it comes through my personality and the gifts God has given me.
what a revelation! (yeah, maybe the thing actually is, that eventhough you might
know something and think that it makes sense, its still easier to understand it and live it when God really reveals it to you. so thanks Jesus for starting to reveal to me who I am in you.)

so in Gods kingdom being proceeds doing, and doing flows from being.

and so this would be part three

then there was talking about intimacy.
the main thing is to follow Jesus.
in everything to follow Jesus.

one of the many good sentences I heard during the weekend was : religion is when you define intimacy with prayer, Bible etc. nowadays there is a danger for this "worship-culture", do you know what I mean? many people might think worshipping Jesus is when you go to a meeting, lift your hands up and sing. (I am not saying here that its a bad thing to do so, but if you limit worship to that, then something might be wrong..) it says in the ephesians: in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.
thats a thought, just to BE for the praise of His glory.

so I can actually be intimate with Jesus holistically.
Jesus said that he only does what he sees the Father doing,
so could I maybe learn to do the things I see Jesus doing?
being intimate with him in action as well.

during the time in prague my eyes were a bit opened to see how much
legalism and religion really do affect my life and thinking. how easily I slip
into doing things for God, rather than really concentrate on Him.
its not about" doing christianity", its about being in Christ at all times.
like Paul writes in phil 3 that everything that would be for his profit he
counts as loss for the sake of Christ.
I would really welcome a fresh revelation of the cross every day. .

and maybe the sucject of dying to self walks hand in hand with intimacy.
at some point in prague Joy shared a good Bible passage concerning this,
its from exodus 33, where Moses asks God to reveal His glory to him.
and God says that no one can see him and live.
also Ive heard a teaching of the passage from numbers 12:3 where it says:
Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth.
I heard that the word humble which is used here in hebrew is the kind, that if you read it backwords it means dead. so moses was the most dead person. maybe it had something to do with the fact that really did see God. (by the way, in the same teaching I heard a good thought about humility. humility isnt a gift or a quality, its a constant choice. something to learn again..)

not so finished thoughts about prague part two

so besides people one of the best things was to hear good teachings and conversations.
Simon from england shared many things about the Kingdom of God and threw the question in air about how would church look like if it would be based on the kingdom of God.
its actually quite an interesting thing, that Jesus speaks about church three times in the gospels.

there was some critisism for the word "churchplanter" as well, cause no where does Jesus say to us that we should plant churches. I think its a good thought, that our job is to make disciples. we can introduce people with the King, they can see the Kingdom, hear and understand and receive the Gospel, and then church happens.
and it happens wherever. where two or three are gathered in His name.
also if church is Jesus´ body its a thing you cant actually go to and be there or not to be there. you either are in the body or arent.
Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in us. and that should work in every area of my life, shouldn it? whoever I am with, wherever I am, I am carrying the Kingdom of God inside me. living, moving and having my being in Him. and if the kingdom of God is for example joy, peace and righteousness in the Holy Spirit, then I can own peace, joy and righteousness in the Holy Spirit in my life through every circumstance, feeling or situation. its actually kind mind-blowing, and I would really want it to be true in my everyday life.
learning in the grace of God.

not so finished thoughts about prague part one

great time. Almost feels quite stupid to even write about it, cause I think I wont be able to communicate all the stuff I would like to, but well, if I am learning to communicate then I need to learn to communicate.

I arrived in Prague on Thursday evening and settled down.Friday we heard about a Czech reformer called Jan Hus and visited a city called Tabor. we went through some of the history of the hussite-movement and the moravian-movement. Hussites at some point started to go a bit too much with the sword, when again the moravians used pens as their swords. One thing that stayed on my mind of it, was the pro- and anti-thinking.For example the Moravians liked to be more pro-Christ than anti-something. One of the things we talked about during the weekend was getting out of the “church-organisation-mindset-kind-of-a-thing” (am I communicating clearly enough :)) so in that as well its good to bear in mind that its better to be pro-Kingdom of God than anti-church as an organisation. Maybe its always a bit more edifying to concentrate on that which is good.

Friday evening the meeting started “officially” or whatever, and we met all together. Sat in a small room all 50 of us and shared three keywords about ourselves. Absolutely one of the best things during the weekend were new friends. So blessed to meet people from different nations, share dreams, visions, processes and thoughts. There were people for example from UK, Holland, Portugal, Norway, Hungary, Bulgaria, Macedonia and so on.One good thing relationship-wise was that there were quite a few “older” people there. (don’t know how I should say it so it wouldnt sound that I think they were o l d .)Cause the thing here in finland is, that we cant quite find too many spiritual mothers or fathers who would be releasing the postmodern generation (or whatever I could call it) do things their way. So it was good to hear from them, and just to have them around.

(in the picture rachi and me)

this might be quite long.

This weekend I attended a leader-training. It is based on john maxwells material. The thing is supposed to last for three years, meeting every half a year. I did have some good ideas and encouragement, but there were also stuff I couldn’t quite say resonated in me.
But anyways, it’s a good process to be in. this search of a biblical leadership.
Don’t quite know if I will be attending the training next time, but we´ll see.
Anyways with all may I have the grace to test everything and hold on to the good.
Also it was great that through niinas blog I came across an article about “kingdom leadership in the postmodern era.” (http://christianity.ca/church/leadership/2005/05.000.html)
Good stuff. I thought about passing some lines from it here.

The leadership style that once dominated our culture is becoming passé. Instead of the Lone Ranger, we have Frodo: the Clint Eastwoods and Sylvester Stallones are replaced by ordinary men. Frodo, Aragorn and Neo (the Matrix) are self-questioning types who rely on those around them for strength, clarity and purpose. Indeed, while they have a sense of the need and a willingness to sacrifice themselves, they may not even know the first step on the journey.

Postmodern people are not looking for a CEO, CFO, COO CIO, or any other three-letter combinations you can think of that starting with the big "C." Today, we are looking for the poet, the prophet, and the storyteller—the narrator. We don't "lead" people as much as listen to the needs of people and guide them along the path of faith. (The community direction is not based on the desires of one person, but grows from the leader's understanding of the collective vision.)

I think primarily, you don't lead, you example. Notice I did not say, "you lead by example"—because that is somewhat impossible, and all the time doubtful. To "example" you simply are you.

At a deeper level there exists the unspoken assumption that leaders have more to give than others, and that those who "follow" need us more than we need them. In reality, the strong offer one gift, and the weak another. Until we die to the idea that we are somehow "ahead of" or "above" the community of faith around us, we will continue to be frustrated in our attempts to have an authentic community that combines real relationships with real discipleship. Jean Vanier writes,
"We do not want two communities—the helpers and the helped; we want one. That is the theory, but in practice there is a tendency for the assistants to make their own community and be satisfied with that. Truly to make community with the poorest and identify with them is harder and demands a death to self." 6

Modernism (and much of what was called "discipleship") stressed "getting the right answer" (as if knowing something automatically transfers to lifestyle); post-modernism stresses "does it work"? It is important to give people space and time, within the context of a community of faith, to journey with us. Thus, a teacher of great worth in postmodern society isn't the one with the right answers, but the one who can ask the right questions, and then walk the road of discovery with others.
Where moderns trust the expert, postmoderns tend to respond or react to a person's energy or person more than to what he or she actually says or does. If postmoderns trust the who of someone, the what is negotiable and open to maturation. Postmoderns will go along for the ride and enjoy the process even when the goals are not clear so long as the who is trustworthy.
The open-ended question of how we follow Jesus in a post-modern society can best be dealt with in the Hebraic learning tradition, which views the teacher (leader, pastor, narrator or whatever) as a co-traveler with the learner on a shared journey towards truth. For the post-modern person, there is as much value in the question as there is in the answer, so reaching the goal becomes less of an obsession
First, we have to trust that what appears to be chaos may hide an incipient new order. We may not see the new order as it is emerging.
"Our God is a God of beginnings. There is in him no redundancy or circularity. Thus, if his church wants to be faithful to his revelation, it will be completely mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative." 12

Second, quantum physics is teaching us that we don't need to understand and control the variables before order emerges, and leadership often arises spontaneously where it isn't expected.

Third, we have envisioned leadership as an individual and lonely pursuit. This worked in the modern world of commerce, and it works for an audience, but the practice is damaging to organic and communal life.
Unfortunately, we have built congregations rather than communities, buildings rather than temples of living stones, and audiences rather than families of faith. Building communities requires completely different skills than building an audience.

Its a good thought that leadership isnt about about power, confidence, knowledge, and position. makes it a bit easier.
I think that I will still post something from the leadership training as well, but this post is beginning to be so long already, and its getting late, so maybe I can do that later. and the stuff about prague is still coming :)

few lines

been in finland after prague almost one week already.
havent got the time to write down thoughts.
been in school.
seen friends.
planned my next trip.
been desperate for the Kingdom.
enjoyed life.

at the moment I am at my mums place. tonight we are having a small gathering for planning the next connect finland-thing. I´ll write down thoughts about prague as soon as I gather them somehow.