One is the Loneliest Number


Have you ever come face to face with the vacuum of love that exist within your soul? Have you ever had an unexplainable sense of loneliness even while you're standing in the middle of a crowd?

At the same time you can be all by yourself and have a wonderful sense of connectedness with the world. You can enjoy being alone, but you can become lost in aloneness. Have you ever wondered whether you are the one person who simply could not be loved or was somehow born unworthy of love? Sometimes we'll go to unimaginable extremes to earn love, feel love, to be love. (Like spending $180 on 12 stalks of roses!?!?!) Loneliness can be lonely.

Claire Danes would be the last person you would expect to struggle with loneliness. Beautiful, talented successful. She starred next to Leonard Di Caprio in the 1996 version of romeo and Juliet. But in a recent interview she confessed "A part of me desire fame because I associated it with love...that was a mistake. Fame doesn't end loneliness."

Our need for love is intrinsic - it exist in all of us. Our soul craves intimacy.

We are created to know God and to know love. It is love that moves God towards us and love that pulls us towards him. Follow love and it will guide you to God

From the very beginning you were made for love.

It maybe hard to accept, but you are the object of God's love, and though you may not yet realise it, your soul longs to know this love. But it goes way beyond that. your search for intimacy explains our need for community, relationship, friendship and acceptance, it is expressed most deeply in our need for romantic love.

We all long to belong. We are created to know love and to give love. Our need to love is rooted in God, is not limited to him. love is not a limited commodity. love expands as we give it away. Love dies when we do not.

Without love there is no life. To love is to be fully human.


- Soul Cravings, E. R. McManus

Leo

Scars of Love


Here's a thought.

The intensity of which you feel love for another is no indication of its resilience. Feeling strongly for someone at any one point doesn't necessary mean its going to last the distance. If anything, through my own experience, it seems that the more you love someone, the more capacity you have to come to hate him or her.


So many times, it amazes me how two people who were so deeply in love a month ago can end up not only losing the relationship but become bitter enemies. It is true that the only people who can hurt you are those you allow to get deep into your soul. We are so vulnerable and defenseless against those whom we give our hearts to. But yet despite the dangerous nature of love, it remains the deepest pursuit of our lives. We just can't get enough of it.

"Even the scars of love can't make us stop risking at love." -Erwin Mcmanus

This makes me wonder. That when God created us as the objects of his love and gave us free choice as to whether we would Him back, wasn't He taking the ultimate Risk? But how can it be a risk when He knows all that is to come? Surely from the moment He created us, He already knew He would be rejected. Then why do it? Why love when you know you are going to be rejected, hurt and even scar-ed?


Could rejection, hurt and scars be a part of what love is? Is that why Jesus went to the cross? Is that why there is something ultimately moving when we see love expressing itself in suffering? Its like saying "I love you, and I have the scars to prove it."


Perhaps Shakespeare was right when he observed that 'The course of true love never did run smooth" If it was, somehow, it wouldn't be as worthy, would it?


I feel that strange as it seems, in the midst of our most painful memories, we find our most treasured ones. This is powerfully portrayed in Jim Carry and Kate Winslet's movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." It answered the question - Is a life erased of the pain of love filled with sunshine?


If you had the chance to wipe out all your painful memories of your greatest love to be freed of the pain of it, would you?

hmmmmm...I don't think I would. I'll gladly bear the scars of love knowing that I truly loved and truly lived.

Maybe that why Jesus went to the cross and surrendered to cruel nails -

Love suffered so that we would find love in our suffering. The kind that transcends even death. The Truest of Love.


Leo

YISS 2007 Theme



A theme is very important to the YISS. God always does something new every year in the lives of the participants and service team. We want the theme to prophectically capture what God is going to do. So after a time of prayer and group discernment, the Amplify Leadership team is happy to announce the theme for the Youth In the Spirit Seminar 2007:

"ALL THINGS NEW"

Taken from 2 Cor 5:17. Perhaps I'll just let the passage (in context) speak for itself.

Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins.

God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he's already a friend with you.

(2 Cor 5:17-21 Message Bible)

This year, we are believing for a fresh start for everyone who comes for YISS. Whatever you have been through, how you have lived, how your relationships may be like - God wants to make all things new. Leave the baggages of the past behind and allow God to love you into a new life - the abundant life He wants you to live!

I found the reason for me
To change who I used to be
A reason to start over New
And the reason is You.

Amen.

Leo