"We could be flight attendants!"

Slowly but surely, the house is going up! Now that there is some framing with walls we can visualize what this home is going to look like. I realize we're still far away from completion, but I love that I pass this spot every single day and see progress. 

This past weekend Mel, Mary, Maddie and Smelko all helped with some flower practice. We're going to assemble all of the centerpieces and bouquets the day before the wedding so we had to figure out how many we'd need of each kind. Some of the flowers are substitutions right now because of what's in season, but we're pretty pumped about our new skills as florists.

Tonight at Campaigners Chloe shared with everyone. She created a new illustration to teach about the Holy Spirit's role in our lives as believers. The jar represents us, and once we've committed our lives to Christ our jar is filled up with the Holy Spirit (aka water) because he lives in us.

As Christians filled with the Holy Spirit (aka water) we still make mistakes and have sin in our lives (aka jars) that gets put right in with the Holy Spirit...

Lemon juice-- bitterness, towards life and our situation and our circumstances
Vinegar-- ego, it looks perfect and might fool some people into thinking it's water, but if you get a whiff of it you know it's not the real thing at all
Beer-- temptations, drinking and sex and pornography and other choices that we make that pull us farther from who God designed us to be
Lime juice-- jealousy, always wanting more and what the next person has and never being satisfied
Hot sauce-- anger, an attitude of hate and rage that impacts the way we treat people and treat ourselves

As Christians, people see our jar and they can see all of the junk-- it's disgusting. We often don't make being a Christian look like something desirable to the rest of the world because the sin is so obvious. The Holy Spirit is still in there the whole time, but the rest of the junk is impossible to hide.

So what do we do?

Next Chloe talked to us about coming before God every single day and asking the Holy Spirit to fill us up-- it looks like praying, reading, going to church, memorizing Scripture, loving selflessly, giving money to the church, growing with other believers. When they Holy Spirit fills us up water just keeps pouring into our jar and slowly the other stuff is displaced. The only way to get back to how God intended is to continuously be filled by the Holy Spirit.

When we broke up into small groups there was so much to talk about-- from the scripture Chloe shared to the visual and how it all relates to our lives. I can't wait to use her demonstration again-- it's going to stick with me.