Hey bloggers,

While I’m taking some time off, I’ve decided to let you continue the conversation without me. I’ve changed the blog settings so that your comments don’t have to be moderated, they’ll just go straight through to the site. I know it’s a little risky to make something with my name on it so vulnerable to cyberspace, but I’m just going to trust that you will respect my site in my absence in the same way that you would respect my house if I weren’t home. Anyway, the just shall live by faith.

When I check in I will still reserve the right to remove a comment if I deem it inappropriate. But now you insomniacs can talk all night long…

I’ll be back when I’m back…

I love you all very, very much!

Bish

20/20 Vision: Affirmations I & II

Hey bloggers,

I kept posting GPF pictures that people were sending me under 8/11 (now titled: GPF Highlights) until it became necessary that I just re-arrange all of them in sequential order (which sort of turned out to be a huge hassle, but they're there now, so please scroll down and check them out).

I also added the Event Video, including Erik and Pastor Debye. If you have additional comments about them you can put them there or on today's article.


Thanks again for the great feedback from yesterday...here's some more from the book...

Affirmation I.

All the creativity that I need to have a productive and successful day today is already resident within me.

Conventional wisdom says that seeing is believing, but, in fact, believing is seeing. When you begin to see what you already have inside you, you can really start to believe in yourself from the depths of your being. You were designed for success, so you have been equipped with the skills to live your life successfully. Instead of allowing yourself to give in to artificial thoughts of inadequacy that can cause you to feel overwhelmed by your problems, begin to see yourself as a capable individual who is inventive enough to create imaginative solutions to those problems. Dig down deep until you discover that vision, then doggedly hold to it.

Without a doubt, success is always a team effort and everybody needs help, supportive input, and advice from qualified people on occasion. But, when all is said and done, nobody knows how to handle your personal situations better than you. You have the innate ability to deal with anything that can arise in the course of a day, good or bad, in your own original and artful way. Trust your instincts and don’t be afraid to face your life and the unique challenges it brings with it. You are ingenious and resourceful on your own terms, and you can produce positive results by simply recognizing your own capacity for creative effectiveness.


The Creator brilliantly designed you with both the desire and the ability to unveil and reveal His nature within yourself through a continual process of self-discovery, and every new day is filled with fresh opportunities for you to do just that. You can’t afford to allow yourself to be so blinded by your own perceived fear of the potential for incompetence that you begin to doubt your credentials as a creator in your own right. That blindness so colors your perception of believability that it renders you unable to recognize God within yourself, and so you miss the beauty of the process because you don’t trust your own God-given creativity.

You have been authorized to make every single day of your life a good one by using your extraordinary powers of sight to recognize each day for the miracle that it is –and you don’t need externals to give you the necessary confidence to pull it off! You already have genuine confidence in you that has been tested and tried, so you don’t have to keep pretending to be an amateur at running your own life. You know what to do, so do it! And do it with a self-assurance that requires no apology or defense. It’s time for you to start seeing yourself for who you really are by recognizing what you already have. You can change your life by changing the way you see things.

Affirmation II.

I am empowered to rise above any and all small thinking today.

A small, insignificant life is the product of small, unimportant thoughts that are the product of small, unexceptional inner pictures. By fearlessly embracing the largest vision that you can for your true self and for your best possible life, you liberate yourself from being stuck in a third-rate mindset of prolonged toleration for the average and the ordinary. Someone you know who can’t see a bigger picture may tell you that something can’t be done simply because, in their sight, it’s a small world after all. Love and appreciate them for whom they are, but ignore their little words and little ideas, because you are being enlarged by what you are able to see.

Claustrophobia is the abnormal fear of confined spaces, and it is a very negative and debilitating thing that can greatly disrupt the lives of people who suffer from it. But there is a type of this phobia that is actually quite positive and useful – a mental claustrophobia, if you will – that manifests itself as the absolute aversion and revulsion to small, confined ways of thinking. To break out of the restrictions of a mindset that continues to put limitations on your life, you actually have to develop a phobic repugnance for any line of thought that doesn’t allow your brain to breathe. Mental claustrophobia will cause you to avoid such thinking.

The continual allowance of petty thoughts of cowardice, self-doubt and paranoia eventually shrink your mind down to a state of feeble barrenness. A great mind cannot afford to permit itself to dwell on these kinds of thoughts. Neither can a great mind consent to agreeing with negative, outside influences that addict themselves to the exaltation of the impossible. It’s actually quite easy to fall into the nasty habit of always seeing how a thing can’t be done, and then pointing it out to others. This way of thinking and speaking causes faith to dwindle and shrivels up the capacity for vision until it becomes virtually useless. Don’t let yourself be diminished in this way.

It’s been said that you can never expect a 16x20 idea to fit into a 3x5 mind. If you are a seer or visionary, there will always be the small-minded ones around you who will oppose you, simply because people generally fight what they don’t understand. See past them. Do not allow yourself to be infected by their stunted mindset. You are not obligated to go along with the thinking of everyone else. You can rise above the mental limitations of others and distance yourself from them. You may have to be willing to enter a season of loneliness because of it, but you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. You can change your life by changing the way you see things.

20/20 Vision

Hey bloggers,

I was making some plans yesterday for Debye’s and my 20th wedding anniversary, which is a week from today (on August 20th), and the idea of celebrating 20 on the 20th got me thinking about re-visiting my book 20/20 Vision: Changing Your Life by Changing the Way You See Things.

Suffice it to say that I personally need to take a little look at some of these basic principles about perception right now…sort of need a refresher course in "perception 101"…and I have the feeling that maybe some of you do, too. So from now until the 20th I want to share some excerpts from the book with you…

This is from the introduction…

You can, in fact, change your life by changing the way that you see things. It has been theorized that there is no such thing as reality, there is only perception – a premise that can be argued, ad infinitum, by philosophers and physicists, alike. Whether or not it is actually and completely true, the fact remains that your perception of things really does determine how you think, feel and function every single day of your life. It is a fact that God is, but it is also a fact that God is to you how you see that He is. The world around you is, but that world is to you how you see that it is. Life is what it is, but for you, your life is how you really see that it is.

The earth is round, but to the people of the ancient world it was flat, even after Christopher Columbus returned from the Americas on the other side of the globe. The false perception of the earth’s flatness did not change the fact that the earth is and always has been round, but the fact of its roundness did not change the world’s collective perception that it was flat. The reality and the perceived reality continued to coexist for another generation after Columbus. In the same way, there are things you believe about your world that are undeniably and universally true, and there are things you believe that are only true in your own mind.

You can determine your own happiness by learning how to properly view and discern the circumstances of your past and present. By learning how to see yourself correctly, you can become the person you’ve always really wanted to be or, better yet, you can reveal the best “you” that you already are. You have the ability to choose an attitude and vision for each day with the same confidence and ease that you have when choosing what to have for breakfast in the morning or what clothes to wear for the day. The more you are able to see how inner sight creates daily realities, the better skilled you will become in using it to your advantage.

Free your mind, open the eyes of your heart, and prepare to change your life for the better. You can be happy. You can succeed. You can stop second guessing your life-choices, living in regret, or blaming others. You can break all the limitations of your own mind and tap into an inner power that will enable you to do things that you never thought you could do before. And you can do it all by simply choosing to change your viewpoint and perception of the things pertaining to your life. As you begin to realize personal transformation, let these words take on new meaning for you: I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see!


SECTION ONE
FIRST SIGHT: HOW I SEE MYSELF

There we saw the giants . . . and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.
Numbers 13:33

Consider these two statements: (1) You are what you see; and (2) Every person eventually becomes what he or she really believes himself or herself to be. Now, consider how these indisputable truths are interrelated. The concepts of seeing and believing are so completely connected to one another that no one can separate any part of his or her life from them. The constant cooperation of both of these actions continues to affect your entire world view, as well as your conscious and subconscious self-image. Your perception of the immediate world shapes your attitude toward it and ultimately creates the environment in which you live.

The way that you see yourself determines what you deeply believe about yourself and how you relate to others. You constantly communicate your vision and belief about yourself to those around you in innumerable ways. Every day, without knowing or understanding how they do it, the people who come into contact with you actually learn how to see you by perceiving, on a very profound level, how you see yourself. People respect you because you respect yourself. People love you because you love yourself. People follow leaders because they believe in them, and they believe in them because those leaders believe in themselves.


Picture This

Whether you are aware of it or not, the quality of your life is being determined on a daily basis by your own core beliefs – the things that you really believe, foundationally. Your most basic existence is produced and manifested right out of your own unique belief system, as is the “you” that you project to the general public. The lifestyle you enjoy, the things you accomplish, the things you attract to yourself, as well as the people who enter and exit your life, are all being moved, motivated and managed on some level by what you honestly believe about yourself and by how you perceive your relationship to your world.

That powerful and dominant belief system (mindset, philosophy of life, world view) is basically just a collage of internal pictures that you have collected throughout your personal history. Some of these internal pictures are facsimiles of real things that you have seen externally, and others are images that have been painted on the canvas of your mind through thoughts, words and suggestions. There are pictures in this collage of yourself, and of the components of the world around you, some of which are actual and authentic, others of which are more smoke and mirrors than real images of a viable reality.


Optical Illusions

The fundamental convictions that you hold about your own identity, value, or worth as an individual, which are realistic but positive, are generally valid. But the beliefs that you maintain which produce negative inner pictures very probably result from your own self-imposed, internal optical illusions. Very few people in life ever really hold a completely accurate picture of themselves in their own minds. We tend to believe what others tell us about ourselves, either verbally or subliminally, and, therefore, live out a good part of our time using information that has been obtained by the observance of a wrong, mental self-portrait.

The shockingly emaciated young girl suffering from anorexia nervosa continues to starve herself because she is fixated on a completely fallacious picture of an overweight girl that she sees as being herself. No matter how many people tell her how thin she is, and despite her doctor’s stern admonition to gain some weight, she still refuses to eat because she can’t really see a reflection of her actual self when she looks in the mirror. She doesn’t see what everybody else sees because she is held emotionally captive by an internal vision of an incorrect picture. In many cases, the results of such dangerous illusions can prove to be fatal.


Perception is Everything

Two people observe the same glass of water. One sees the glass as half full, the other sees the glass as being half empty. Of course, this illustration has been overused to the point of becoming cliché, but if you think about it, it really is the perfect way to explain the concept of perception. The glass is half full, and it is half empty. Both realities exist simultaneously, but two different people see two completely different pictures of the exact same thing. They hold to opposing concepts because they have conflicting paradigms and, therefore, have different perceptions of the truth. The most remarkable thing is that neither person is wrong!

Moses sends twelve spies into Canaan with a mission to bring back a report about the conditions existing there. Ten of the spies see a picture of overwhelming impossibilities and bring back a negative report of a hopeless situation. But two of them, Joshua and Caleb, see something entirely different and bring back a completely alternative report, never refuting the validity of the report of the other ten. All twelve spies inspect the very same geographical area, and all twelve tell the truth about what they observe, but they have conflicting perceptions of the same reality. A simple matter of perception cost Israel forty years in the wilderness.


See and Say

Moses’ twelve spies were commissioned to see something and to say something – to translate the visual into the verbal, so that the others waiting back at the camp could unify themselves around a collective vision. This principle of seeing and saying is something that you practice on a regular basis, either intentionally or unintentionally, and it can be your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on how you use it. The combination of positive visualization and verbalization in your life can be a powerfully transformative force, if you are consistent in your practical application of it. You are what you see that you are. You are what you say that you are.

This book is called 20/20 VISION because it is based on 20 daily affirmations that you can make concerning how you see yourself, and another 20 daily affirmations concerning how you see everything else. Each affirmation has commentary that expounds on its meaning for your life, with a plan to help you observe things in a better light and to encourage you to say something good about what you see every day. Remember that you are creating vision (visualization), changing vision (paradigm shift) and discovering vision (perceptive insight) all at the same time. You can change your life by changing the way you see things.

God Uses...

...ORDINARY PEOPLE!

"Remember, our Message is not about ourselves; we're proclaiming Jesus Christ, the Master. All we are is messengers, errand runners from Jesus for you. It started when God said, ‘Light up the darkness!' and our lives filled up with light as we saw and understood God in the face of Christ, all bright and beautiful. If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That's to prevent anyone from confusing God's incomparable power with us."
(2 Corinthians 4:5-7 – The Message)

Today I will live in the now! I will live in the now because I know that God uses ordinary people like me to do extraordinary things!

Today I will remember that the Kingdom is "at hand" — it is within my reach, in my everyday experiences. It is here, where I am, and God wants to take what I already have in my hand, and turn it into a key of the Kingdom!

Today I will look for the significant and profound things to be revealed within the context of the familiar and recognizable ("And He took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘THIS is My body . . . likewise He also took the cup after supper, saying, ‘THIS cup is . . . My blood . . ." Luke 22:19, 20). I will seek a revelation today of the power of understanding what "THIS" is for me in the now.
















Today I will lay my little limited lunch of loaves and fish at the feet of Jesus so that He can feed thousands by multiplying my finite resources! He uses the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and, as I follow Him closely, He will turn the water in my life into the finest wine! And if it seems that He is taking too long in the manifestation of the miracle, it is simply because he is saving the best for last!

Today I will be myself because God wants to use me just as I am!

Today I will not complain about what I don't have, but I will plant seeds of faith, with a vision for the future, expecting a great harvest in my life. God is increasing me as I enter my season of maturity and manifestation.
















Today I will allow God to supernaturally make something special out of my simple life. I will do great things today, and today I will live in the now!


Father, use what I have in my hand today for Your Kingdom. In Jesus’ name, amen.

GPF Highlights

Click on images to enlarge...


Promo Flyer

















Judah and Pastor Scott rapping...




















Event Video
Scroll down (or up) to pause the playlist first...

Monday Blast

Later...
______

OK, it's later. Thanks for getting started (currently 9 comments)...

BLOGINTHENOW is 6 months old today! Thanks for helping to make this cyber-community so vibrant and cutting-edge for half a year!

And thanks for the comments here and on e-mail about the service yesterday...here's the passage we discussed from John In The Now:

Chapter 3

1. Now there was a man named Nicodemus who was a Pharisee, a member of the Jewish ruling council.
2. He secretly approached Jesus under the cover of night and said to Him, “Rabbi, it is obvious to all of us that you are a God-sent, God-ordained teacher, for no one could perform the amazing signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
3. Jesus replied, “This is what is important – even more important than the signs – this truth is absolute: No one can perceive the concept of the kingdom of God without experiencing a rebirth of sorts…without having actually revisited the human birth process.”
4. “What are you talking about?” Nicodemus asked. “How could any adult be born again? They obviously couldn’t return to the womb, so how could rebirth possibly happen?
5. Jesus answered, “I’m telling you, unreservedly, that no one can access the kingdom of God unless they are first physically born of water (the natural birth that begins when a pregnant woman’s water breaks) and then have their thought processes reborn by having them washed with the water of the Word, which is the result of the birth of the Spirit.
6. “Every living thing in the physical realm gives birth to, or recreates, a physical manifestation, and everything spiritual gives birth to a spiritual reality. Whatever is birthed from the Spirit is the essence of spirit.
7. “Look, you shouldn’t be so surprised to hear Me say ‘You must be born again.’
8. “Think of it this way…the wind blows wherever it wants to blow. It has a mind of its own. You can hear it, but you can’t locate its place of origin and you can’t predict its destination. This is how it is with everyone who is birthed out of the Spirit-wind.”

I didn't emphasize the word "blast" in JITN as I did in my sermon yesterday, so here's the same passage in the Concordant Literal New Testament (the translation I used)...

1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees, Nicodemus his name, a chief of the Jews.
2 This one came to Him by night and said to Him, "Rabbi, we are aware that Thou art a Teacher come from God, for no one can be doing these signs which Thou art doing, if God should not be with Him."
3 Jesus answered and said to him, "Verily, verily, I am saying to you, If anyone should not be begotten anew, he can not perceive the kingdom of God."
4 Nicodemus is saying to him, "How can a man, being a veteran, be begotten? He can not be entering into the womb of his mother a second time and be begotten!"
5 Jesus answered, "Verily, verily, I am saying to you, If anyone should not be begotten of water and of spirit, he can not be entering into the kingdom of God.
6 That which is begotten by the flesh is flesh, and that which is begotten by the spirit is spirit.
7 You should not be marveling that I said to you, 'You must be begotten anew.'
8 THE BLAST IS BLOWING WHERE IT WILLS, and the sound of it you are hearing, but you are not aware whence it is coming and where it is going. Thus is everyone who is begotten by the water and the spirit."

The Blast is blowing where it wills...

Please spend some time today praying for peace in Russia and Georgia...

No Place Like Home

Hey bloggers,

Everything was great...too bad about the air time running out, but it's all good...it's a little after midnight at this writing, and we have to leave for the airport at 5:30 (up @ 4:30), so I'm going to end it here for now...but I'll see you ITB in a few and tell you all about it...Washington was off the chain, but I'm really looking forward to being home at wonderful CITN...

Peace...

Happy Birthday to my mother-in-law, Shirley Flanders...

____________


Later...

Hey bloggers,

The atmosphere at church this morning was wonderful, especially the worship experience...the liberty in the house was obvious...I felt very connected to everyone ITB (and even to the cyber-congregation)...the unity seemed exceptionally authentic...

The "Let It Rain" video had the same effect on the congregation today that it had the first time they played it...

It was good to see even more faces that I haven't seen in a while...

Stood at the West Entrance in the Narthex and greeted people afterwards...got to speak to, and pray with, several of our college students who are returning to school this week (and meet many first-timers)...

That's all for now...I'll let you know about video from the GPF when I get the 411, and will also let you know if Judah and P. Scott will for sure be performing at the U.N. this week...

Feedback from the service today is welcome...

Anyway, let me reiterate how happy I am to be home...


(The music's back on...)