Fear of the Lord

Hi all,

This week has been a BIG week! I found out that I'll be going to Indonesia for outreach!! How exciting!

I get to experience Indonesia with this amazing team and I can't wait to see how we all grow in unity together and in Christ. 

I also have made pretty amazing friends here. I'll introduce some of them...

First off is an amazing group of God loving, food loving and adventure taking women that I've grown to love to deeply...

I also get to laugh and enjoy life with these ladies....

Seriously....I've never loved life so much...

I also fell in love with a crab I found at the beach and I live by the motto it didn't happen unless you got a picture...so I thought I would share my enjoyment of finding a crab with all of you. Yes, its dead. I'm not that crazy! 

Now that you've seen what I've been up to and met a few of my friends I can start going into a serious mode. Okay, listos (ready)? This week during lecture we talked about the fear of the Lord. Before coming here I thought the fear of the Lord was that I actually had to be afraid of God and that I should be scared of Him. I was wrong. I shouldn't be afraid of God I should be running after Him wanting to know more and more about him. This weeks teaching was great, but I'm going to be honest...I still don't fully understand the fear of the Lord. Yes, I learned a deeper meaning of fearing the Lord, but it hasn't fully clicked with me yet. I've been praying that God reveals something to me that really speaks out to me about fearing the Lord. One thing I did learn about fearing the Lord is that when you do fear him you gain peace and comfort (Acts 9:31), wisdom (Proverbs 9:1), truth (Psalm 86:11) and protection (Psalm 115:11). Now all of that seems great to me. I want God to bring me peace, wisdom and protection. I'm just trying to figure out what fearing the Lord really means to me. Its a process. Another thing that happened in lecture this week was our speaker said she just felt from the Lord that there were a lot of people in our DTS who felt like they weren't good enough. She told us to stand up if we felt that way and we were all to pray and if staff felt like they needed to tell us something that they should. I stood up because I still struggle with my worth and thinking I'm not good enough. Even though I know God loves me and I'm His masterpiece I still struggle with it. But I stood up and my one-on-one came and prayed for me and she spoke words of encouragement and it was awesome. It was really an emotional yet amazing time. That is such a hard thing to do sometimes....To stand up and show people that you don't think you're worth it. I think if someone asked me in high school to stand up if I didn't think I was good enough I would've and I would have felt differently than I did when it happened this week. When I stood up this week and looked around at all the people there that loved me something changed inside of me. I was looking at my new family and I knew in my heart that to them and to God I was good enough. In high school I would not have felt that way. I'm so thankful that God has continually been speaking to me how much He loves me and how much he adores me. He's changing me and I'm loving this confident, God loving Lauren I'm learning to become. 

Thanks for reading,

Lauren