43 Things, Hybles, and a whole lot of happy.

I stumbled across this rather obscure site, and was instantly hooked. I've signed up, and linked it to my blog, so expect to see some positive goal-achieving style posts in the not too distant future. It's really quite a novel idea...

Speaking of novel, I'm reading a book by Bill Hybles at the moment called Courageous Leadership. I'm reading it in conjunction with one of my pastors and we're having some discussions about it's content. So far, I've read the introduction, and the first chapter, which is our commonly agreed starting chunk. So far, he (Hybles) seems to have expressed a variety of "corperate synergy" style leadership ideals prefaced by "I believe that..." and not providing any real solid biblical evidence as to why. I hope it improves, because this guy is pretty highly respected at my church and a LOT of what we do is based on his writing.

Moving on from that, me and my wife are looking at buying a house. And I'm sorry people, but I'm going to get all hokey super-spiro Christian for a minute. I had this revelation one night which was rather morbid to begin with, and that is that when God speaks, stuff happens. No question, it just happens. This was true of when Jesus spoke - He said "Judas, you will betray me" and at that point, Judas was doomed to do exactly that. He said to Peter "You will deny me", and that's his fate, no questions asked. So taking the less morbid avenue, I'm thinking to myself, Jesus told his disciples that God would give them whatever they asked in his name (John 16:23-24), and again to Phillip in John 14:13-14. Does it apply to all of Christ's followers? Because I'm one. So couldn't I take the authority of Jesus, and say "This will happen!" and then see it happen? I honestly don't know if the Bible says that or not, but experience seems to be proving it's true. You see, I decided to try it. I was driving in my car about a month ago on the way to work, and I thought, "I'm going to try this." So I prayed first, and asked God that if this was the right thing to do, that it'd come to pass. So then I said nice and loud in my car with as much faith as I could muster: "In the name of Jesus, Rachel and I will be able to buy a house!" And then I decided I needed a time period, so I tacked on "... within 3 months!"
After I'd done this, I felt good for a moment, and then completely loopy for a couple of hours. However, here's the funny thing. I've mentioned this to no one, not even my wife, until a couple of days ago when we got unofficial pre-approval for a smallish homeloan with no deposit. It had come COMPLETELY out of the blue. We'd heard half an ad for HomeEasy on the radio, looked them up on the net, applied, and now we're off to make it official on Wednesday. Then we just need to find a house with a cooperative buyer (check out HomeEasy's site to find out why), and we'll have a house. We have about 2 months before my predefined time period expires, and assuming things continue to roll at the current rate, God is going to prove once again his goodness to us.
See, the interesting thing is that the conditions now aren't perfect: We have to find an EXTREMELY cheap property, with a cooperative buyer who is willing to forfeit a small percentage of their sale profits to help us (and others like us), and which meets the basic criteria of representing a better position for us then our current dwellings. But see, it wouldn't be God if we could do it on our own, at any point in the process. God likes the glory. He likes His children to be all "WOW!! How on EARTH did THAT happen!??! God is SO GOOD!!!" And let me tell you, 2 months from now, I reckon that'll be me. I'm not one for unrealistic expectations, but there's something about this that makes me feel confident... I didn't ask for a homeloan - I asked for a house. And I reckon I'll own one soon, because regardless of my situation, God is true to his word. Hokey super-spiro rant done.

I bet my wife would be impressed with THIS post... :D