The “Aha” Moment! | Making Room for “Ah-ha” Moments with Jesus

“Ah-ha” moments with Jesus…. even typing that makes me smile. I don’t know that there’s anything better than an ah-ha moment with Jesus! Really, I don’t think there’s anything better. But even as I type that, I have to ask myself: “If I love ah-ha moments with Jesus more than anything, what gets in the way of having them?”

From experience, I know whenever I intentionally hang out with Jesus, I always have an ah-ha moment. And they come in different forms.

Often it’s a “DUH” ah-ha moment. Do you know what I mean? These are the times He says what might be the simplest thing, something that everyone already knows, but at that very time I need to hear it and it rocks my world!

Or when I am worried and as I just sit with Him and I get filled with peace, he reminds me that He is the Prince of Peace and that peace is always available. Ah-ha!

Or when I am reading through a story in the Gospels and He makes something become real. When I’m listening to a friend talk, or a sermon, or praying with someone and Jesus comes through and says something that opens us up to an entirely new way of looking at the situation. Ah-ha! So, if ah-ha moments with Jesus are the best, why don’t I experience more of them? I realize it’s not Him, it’s me! Every time I make time to hang with Him, I have an ah-ha moment. That is the key: making time!

Pondering this led me to think of one of the places I do consistently make room for meeting Jesus: when meeting with my Triad. Talk about a place where those ah-ha moments have happened. During Triad, I can honestly bank on having at least one, if not many, every time. (I am not exaggerating.)

If you are currently in a Triad, I’d guess you are nodding along with me, quite possibly with a big smile on your face, as you think of yours. Or, if you haven’t heard of this thing called “Triad”, you are wondering what in the world I am talking about? A “Triad” is a structured group of 3 people who meet up on a regular basis and practice listening prayer together. A specific time where we purposely practice both being heard and hearing others, while listening for ourselves and each other to what Jesus is saying.

And every single time, without exception, He has ah-ha things to say! He is so good that way. Let me tell you my Triad history: I have been in a Triad for several years. And as you can tell, I am a huge fan! At the beginning, though, I almost missed the boat. When I was asked to join one, I almost said no. I really didn’t think I had time for “yet another meeting” on my calendar. And even though the commitment was only once a month for 2 hours, I just didn’t know if I wanted to fit it in. Thankfully, though, wisdom kicked in and I decided to pray about it. I decided to commit and give it a try. And let me tell you: best decision ever!

And as I flip through my journal from the notes I’ve taken during our Triad sessions, the “ah-ha” moments fill the pages! There is a God, He loves us, He cares, and He talks to us! Having this scheduled time once a month to intentionally make room to listen to Him together, to practice hearing those ah-ha things He has to say, has been so life-giving and faith building.

Are Triads a magical format? Does He only show up when you Triad? Is Triad even a verb? Of course not. But I think the “magic” happens whenever we purposefully put time aside to actively listen. Jesus says “My sheep hear My voice” but for some reason this can be a struggle for many of us to believe. Or if you are like me, you may totally believe it but realize time flies by when you get busy and you just haven’t had time to listen. A Triad sets up a time and space for you and 2 friends to practice hearing Him and to see that He means it – we can hear His voice and He does have ah-ha things for us!

For me, joining a Triad has designated a time, once a month, in my schedule where I know I will have the time to talk to and listen to Jesus. It has become an easy rhythm to carve out this space. And it has become so precious to me. Also, the added beauty is I get to do this with my friends as well as with Jesus, thus having Him deposit “ah-ha” moments not only into my own life but into their lives too. Ain’t nothing better than watching my friend get encouraged, built up, receive breakthrough, and hear exactly what she needs to hear from Jesus. So good! And the relationship between my friends and I has become so deep in the process. When we get to hear Jesus’ thoughts about someone, when we get to feel His heart for someone, we just fall more in love with each other!

So is this an ad for Triads? Maybe! When you find a good thing you want to share it! But more importantly, I want to encourage us all to make room for those “ah-ha” moments with Jesus. However that looks in our lives today. He is a Person, He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and He wants to talk with us!

So let’s pray, “Thank You Jesus, that You love us so much and want to fill our lives with more ah-ha moments! Thank You that Your Word says we can hear Your voice, that You want to be our friend, and that nothing can stand between us and You. We say ‘YES’ right now to more ah-ha moments. We say ‘YES’ to making time to be known and to get to know You. We say ‘YES’ to asking for You to help us to create habits and rhythms in our schedules that make room for the ah-ha moments with You, Jesus!”

P.S. If you are interested in Triads and want more details: http://www.citysalt.org/triads

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About the Author

Pam is a fun and encouraging team-builder that brings the best to those around her. She loves people and is committed to serving and mentoring kids, women and families with opportunities to grow closer to God and each other.

Pam is currently serving as Children and Family Pastor at Valley Christian Center in Albany. Pam and her husband, Jared, have been married since 2005 and have three boys. Their family will always be a much loved part of our CitySalt family.

The “Aha” Moment! | What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

A few weeks ago I was faced with a dilemma. My 6-year-old daughter was finishing up the month-long introductory piano class I had given her for Christmas. I needed to decide if we should continue with piano lessons or not. The problem was, Marie had also recently started a dance class, and it seemed prohibitively expensive to continue both. I’d assumed she would naturally gravitate to one or the other and it’d be easy to choose, but it wasn’t. She loves music and her best friend had joined piano. On the other hand, she also loves dance and the hip-hop class was well-suited to her (very) high energy level and enthusiasm.

This may seem like it should be an easy, low-stakes decision, but I always overthink and analyze the angles when it comes to decision-making. Piano seems like a better long-term investment. I always wished for piano lessons as a kid and never had the opportunity. On the other hand, Marie had been asking for a dance class for months and months.

I prayed about it and Marie and I came to the consensus to keep on with dance and drop piano for now. There was no big ah-ha moment and I don’t know whether or not it was the best decision for her. In ten years will she still be dancing, playing an instrument, both, or neither? Time will tell. But for now this is the best decision for me. The dance class is an after-school program at her school. That means I don’t have to make extra trips in the car, coercing my 3-year-old son to get buckled in his car seat, and finding ways to keep him quietly entertained during a 45-minute piano lesson.

I’m always hoping for truth to be revealed to me in a big epiphanous moment. I wish that God would clearly tell me which choices to make when it comes to things like long-term career goals, friendships to pursue, and which extracurriculars to invest in for our kids. Even an ah-ha moment about where to find my son’s missing mitten would be appreciated. If I’m really honest, I may especially hope for epiphanies to come to politicians I disagree with or people I perceive to have wronged me in some way.

Still, I’ve found that it’s rare for us to learn much in isolated moments. Most of the time, growth happens slowly and gradually. We become the product of the small choices we have made day after day over the years.

A few years ago I went on an overnight silent retreat at the Benedectine Abbey in Mt. Angel. I thought that surely this would be the place that God would speak to me and reveal vital information about Big Life Choices. In the end, I felt that it was a worthwhile time of rest and reflection, and that God was with me in the silence. But I did not get any answers or detailed revelations.

Except, well maybe. I felt that God did have a message for me that weekend. And it was this: Be Present. I had been hoping that God would give me ideas for new life assignments to take on, and all I got was — Be Present.

That strikes me still today as the big reveal for me and perhaps all of us in the distracted and distracting world where we live, especially if we are parenting little ones. Put down your smartphone. Turn off Netflix. Be here, in this moment, where God has placed you.

I’ll leave you with some lines by Mary Oliver, my favorite contemporary poet, who passed away in January at age 83.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
— excerpted from The Summer Day, by Mary Oliver

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About the Author

Ursula and her husband Spencer have two young children, and their family enjoys playing hide-and-seek and dancing in the living room. She works as a communications and events coordinator with the University of Oregon. Ursula is also CitySalt’s Children’s Ministry Director. 

You can read more from Ursula at motherbearblog.com.

The “Aha” Moment! | Unexpected Blessing

Silent night, holy night. Christmas night alone. As a single person with no immediate family I reconciled myself to spending this past Christmas night at home, cozy and warm, ready to enjoy a good movie. But the sudden and loud ringing of my phone startled me to attention. It was my dear friend Merilee, from church. “What are you doing?”, she asked and then continued, “Do you want to come over for dinner…tonight?”

I paused and quickly thought to myself, ‘Oh how nice of her, but I shouldn’t impose on such a personal time!’ My unspoken thoughts were interrupted by a “loud” internal thought that said, ‘You say yes right now!’ I realized that Merilee’s kind invitation was also God’s gift to me, to experience something He knew I would especially enjoy: fellowship, community, and conversation over a shared meal. I swiftly replied “Yes thank you! I would love to, and I’ll be right over!”

When I arrived, her dining room table was beautifully set for four people. I introduced myself to her father and brother and realized we had all attended the same church thirty years ago and still had some friends in common! We shared a delicious dinner with vibrant and important conversation. We caught up on past events regarding friends living and those passed on. We shared our faith and talked about what God was teaching us now. I shared some of the lessons I had recently learned. Merilee’s Dad gave me scripture that supported these lessons. The metaphor of physical and spiritual food was strongly demonstrated to me around that table.

When dinner was over and the dishes were cleared, Merilee’s father asked for her Bible. He then handed it to me and asked me to read Matthew 6 aloud to them! I blinked in response and looked at their three faces, smiling with encouragement and anticipation. I swallowed and started in. The Bible was ‘The Message’ version and the words and their meanings jumped off the page to me, more vividly than I usually experience by myself. I thought of Matthew 18:20 “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.”

We paused and discussed passages. I was reminded that God’s word is alive! The experience made me realize that my true priority is embracing the privilege of hearing God’s Voice in scripture. And to recognize the importance of how we actively help each other hear God’s word, yes by the words we speak to each other, but also by the actions of our lives lived in community.

I remembered an analogy I heard during a sermon years ago. Our pastor encouraged us to focus on hearing God’s voice with the attentiveness of a waiter watching for and anticipating the needs of the diners in his or her care.

I was energized by the immediacy of The Message’s version of the Lord’s Prayer found in Matthew 6: “Our Father in Heaven, reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what’s best – as above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You’re in charge! You can do anything you want! You’re ablaze in beauty! Yes. Yes. Yes.”

Gathering together and sharing scripture that night strengthened my ability to experience and enjoy His presence that day and onward. Thank you Lord for one of the best Christmas gifts I have ever received!

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About the Author

Sara has attended CitySalt Church since 2004, the year it was founded. She studied Journalism, wrote for her college newspaper, and is a member of Oregon Christian Writers. Sara also enjoys singing hymns with friends: “there is a sermon in every hymn waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.”

The “Aha” Moment! | Revelation

Revelation. That’s one of those scary words that I usually leave to the theologians and my friends that went to seminary. What would I know about revelation? But as I reflected on it in recent weeks, many thoughts came to me. And I realized that revelation comes in many different ways, usually when we’re not expecting it. And sometimes we don’t even recognize it for what it is. When we do, we experience a blessing that can’t be explained.

Sometimes that “Aha!” moment will come to me through other people. Someone will interpret a truth of God in a fresh way that I’d never thought of before, in a lecture, book, song, sermon, or even a Facebook post. I’ll hear it and think, “Hey, that makes sense to me now!” or “I’d never thought of it that way before!” and I’m grateful for the fresh or deeper understanding of something I’d wrestled with or only scratched the surface of.

Usually for me, it comes from reading something again, but understanding it a new way due to my own more recent experiences. This has happened for me a lot when reading my Bible. Depending on what I had recently gone through or am experiencing at the time, a certain verse or passage will just mean so much more to me than it ever had before. The Psalms have had this effect on me many times. Once in our twenties, my stepsister and I had gotten sucked into a class action suit and were being countersued by a bank we had both previously worked for. We would call each other and cry on the phone because we were so scared. But then I would read the Psalms, where David wrestles with many different kinds of giants in his life, and remembers that God is on his side. These verses meant so much more to me because of what I was experiencing.

Occasionally, the “Aha” moment will just be remembering something simple but profound that I’d buried in my mind and not taken to heart for a while. I recently had this experience. Work itself had been fine that day, but the workplace environment had been discouraging. When I finally realized consciously that I was discouraged, suddenly I remembered that God exists. That was it. God exists. Immediately my heart lifted. I was surprised at the instant effect. I’ve always believed that God existed, so why did it strike me in such a way just then? Instant revelation from His heart to mine. He didn’t shame me for forgetting Him, but reminded me that since He exists, it also means He’s good, He’s in control, and everything else that I believe is true about Him. All of that came to me in an instant, and flooded me with relief.

Matthew 16:17
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in Heaven.”

Sometimes it feels like He’s silent. But I believe (based on my experiences) that if we are waiting patiently to hear from Him, spending time with Him in whatever way we know how to, then when our hearts are ready, we’ll hear what we need to know. We’ll understand truth in a fresh way. And we will be blessed by that moment, however dramatic or simple it is.

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About the Author

Jessie is an educator, currently in the role of academic advisor at a charter school after teaching there and overseas. She is also a novice writer, with several books in various stages and a (long-neglected) blog about the journeys of women. She is very excited to join the CitySalt blog team. She has been blessed by a few communities of Christian writers that have encouraged her dream. She lives with her trusty sidekick cat, Arwen in the foothills of South Eugene, where she can go hiking within minutes of the sun coming out from behind the clouds.

The “Aha” Moment! | Come Be a Fool as Well

1 Corinthians 1:25, 27-31
“For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength...God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’”

When I was sixteen, I had a mad crush on a college boy, who I met through a local summer camp. He was very invested in following Jesus, and I was very invested in following him. We started a postal correspondence, because even though Queen Elizabeth II sent her first email in 1976, I am not an early adopter of technology and didn’t get my first account until I was out of high school (and that was to correspond with an entirely different boy, because I didn’t make very forward-thinking choices between the ages of sixteen and twenty two).

Anyway, in one of those letters sent through the U.S. postal service, my camp friend included a piece of paper with the following song lyrics typed on them:

Seems I've imagined Him all of my life
As the wisest of all of mankind
But if God's Holy wisdom is foolish to men
He must have seemed out of His mind

For even His family said He was mad
And the priests said a demon's to blame
But God in the form of this angry young man
Could not have seemed perfectly sane

When we in our foolishness thought we were wise
He played the fool and He opened our eyes
When we in our weakness believed we were strong
He became helpless to show we were wrong

And so we follow God's own fool
For only the foolish can tell-
Believe the unbelievable
And come be a fool as well

So come lose your life for a carpenter's son
For a madman who died for a dream
And you'll have the faith His first followers had
And you'll feel the weight of the beam

So surrender the hunger to say you must know
Have the courage to say I believe
For the power of paradox opens your eyes
And blinds those who say they can see

So we follow God's own Fool
For only the foolish can tell
Believe the unbelievable,
And come be a fool as well

Here it is performed live:

Following Jesus doesn’t make sense, and I’m not sure it’s supposed to. It doesn’t make any more sense to break from our surrounding culture’s status quo now than it did for Jesus to go up against the occupying powers of Rome, or the religious elite of Israel. It doesn’t make sense to give everything we have to the poor, to turn the other cheek when we’re harmed, to pursue peace at the risk of our own lives. It doesn’t make sense to eat, spend, and live in ways that put ourselves last and others first. In a world of swords and guns and drones, it’s foolish to love our enemies and pray for our persecutors...downright dangerous, even.

And yet.

Come be a fool, as well.

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About the Author

Sarah is the author of Vegangelical: How Caring for Animals Can Shape Your Faith (Zondervan, 2016) and Animals Are Not Ours (No, Really, They’re Not): An Evangelical Animal Liberation Theology (Cascade Books, 2016). She spends her days working for CreatureKind, helping Christians put their faith into action. She lives in Eugene with her husband, son, and animal companions and enjoys action movies, black coffee, the daily crossword, and dreaming of her next international journey.