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Yesterday was my one week anniversary of being in Kansas City. YAY! KC and I are pretty happy together and expect this to be a long-term relationship, so I’d say things are going well so far. 😉

I’ve been doing 6:00-9:00 a.m. prayer room every morning Monday-Thursday, and I have class at IHOPU at 10:00. That means I wake up at 5:00, get out the door by 5:50 to be early to the prayer room and get my favourite seat, then I’m in there for one full intercession set and half of a worship with the word set. Worship leaders this week have been Justin Rizzo, Jon Thurlow, and Tim Reimherr. I’ve listened to their cds but rarely heard them lead live, so that’s kind of fun. I also love that the ACTS missions school students are in there in the mornings with me, as well as many IHOPU students, so I’m surrounded by plenty of fiery young people to help me wake up and get my prayer on. 😀

Then I come home and get to spend about 45 minutes eating breakfast, talking with whichever of my flatmates is in the kitchen, and reorienting my brain for class. My class schedule this quarter looks like this:

Mon/Wed 10:00-12:00 – Biblical Hermeneutics with Daniel Lim
Tues/Thurs 10:00-12:00 – Basic Christian Beliefs with Jono Hall
Wed 1:00-3:00 – Sermon on the Mount Practicum with Wes Martin and Dana Candler

I’m also going to have discipleship group meetings once a week, most likely Tuesday afternoons, plus regular service/outreach activities together, but I haven’t been assigned my leader yet. I am definitely looking forward to that, though. I know I want to devote some time to going out with the evangelism teams again at some point, and maybe also ushering and CEC. We’ll see how much my schedule can hold.

These classes are SO much fun already. Bible classes were always one of my favourite parts of APU, and it feels good to be back in the swing of analysing worldviews, doing exegesis, comparing hermeneutics, etc. I did of course get really good Bible teaching during OTI, but it was much less academic. And as much as I love that, I enjoy a little scholarliness thrown in the mix as well. It’s good to approach the Bible in a variety of ways.

I’m also looking for a job. I picked up a stack of applications from all over town that I’m working on getting filled out and turned in, so continued prayer for that would be awesome.

I finally put my keyboard on my desk and started teaching myself some worship songs on it. It is of course veeeeery slow going, but I really want to be able to use music more in my secret place times with God. I know how to figure out the notes and chords even if it takes me a long time, so I am slowly but surely trying to build the habits into my fingers. Maybe one day I’ll be able to post a video of something… even one of my own songs, perhaps? We’ll see. Don’t hold your breath.

All in all, this week has been mostly me figuring out what the upcoming months are going to look like, and I can tell you right now that my future here looks very exciting. I’m at one of the most unique places on the earth for pursuing the knowledge of God and I’m surrounded by passionate, fun, godly people to run with. God has provided for me so graciously already in so many ways, and I know he will continue to provide everything I need. I can’t wait to see what he has for me as I give myself to this thing.

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I’ve been caught up in mercy
I’ve been caught up in grace
All my cares have fallen off now
And this joy I can’t explain…
-Zac Dinsmore, IHOPKC, “Caught Up In Mercy”
Listen on Soundcloud

This song was one of the big tools God used to encounter and change me during my time in OTI. A conversation with a friend brought it all to the surface again the other day, so I decided that now’s a good time to share this part of my story.

I’ve often had difficulty understanding the abundance of God’s grace toward me because since I got saved when I was three, I’ve often felt like I don’t have much of a testimony. There wasn’t much of a dramatic before-and-after; I was three, for heaven’s sake! I had a hard time with verses such as Luke 7:47, which says, “Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.” Of course, I know that because of Jesus, I’m not going to hell, and that in itself is huge, but… I still felt like I was missing something, like all of the ex-drug-addicts could somehow love Jesus better than I could.

One night, as Zac was singing this in the prayer room, I was thinking back again through my life and who I used to be. God really has brought me so far. I normally start telling my testimony at age three, then jump to high school when my spiritual renaissance began, but that night God started reminding me of all the childhood sins I’d like to forget… things that are seemingly small in retrospect, but I remember exactly how I felt during those times and I know that it came from genuine darkness within me. I remember trying to bury the guilt, but I couldn’t undo the damage. I was a hard-hearted selfish little 12-year-old who was bitter at nothing in particular, and I hated that about myself.

The great mercy is that even then, God wouldn’t let go of my heart. I still somehow loved him and kind of wanted him. I knew I was missing something about the whole God thing, and I wanted to be a mature Christian someday, but really didn’t want to be “weird.” And so I kept God at a safe distance. Even though I was a church kid, my heart mostly lived in darkness.

And God broke in and rescued me from that. I would sit in my room and pray for “breakthrough” even though I didn’t know what I meant. I wanted to just wake up with all my darkness gone, because I hated it but didn’t know how to grow without the growing pains. He was faithful, though, and gradually he brought me out of that and into genuine light and love.

Through all this time, I was “saved.” I was a “good church girl.” I wasn’t acting out or doing crazy things, but I was still living in a shadow of what my life was meant to be.

He could have left me there. I was on my way to heaven, the big job was done, God would have been completely within his rights to leave me floundering and move on to the next lost soul, knowing that he would get all of me in eternity eventually anyway.

But he didn’t.

He wasn’t content to just leave me technically saved but still in the dark in so many ways.

He wanted all of my love NOW, immature and broken though it is. He actually WANTED me, the in-the-process me of today. He knew it would be a messy, bumpy road, but he so desperately wanted to be with me that he refused to wait. He fought to bring me to this place I am today. He died to bring me to this place of love and intimacy NOW, not just in the age to come. It wasn’t just about eternity. It was about me being free and knowing him TODAY.

He wasn’t content to leave me. He fought for me because he wanted me.

I cried for twenty minutes when all of that hit me.

What if he didn’t? What would my life have been like if he had left me there at age 12, or if I hadn’t gotten saved at all? Although it’s impossible to predict that alternate timeline with any kind of accuracy, I know the tendencies and impulses I struggle to quash on a daily basis. If left unchecked, they would no doubt destroy me.

I know me too well. And he loves me too well to leave me to that.

In his mercy, he not only rescued me from what was but from what might have been.

He saved me in every way a person could be saved.

That’s the grace I’ve been caught up in.

Zac Dinsmore "Caught Up In Mercy" album artwork — Listen to “Caught Up in Mercy” on Soundcloud

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Caught Up In Mercy