An Army Rising Up

Today was pretty much a total bust.  It was raining, there's drama in the club, and basically no one came up to our tent.  I'm tired and going to bed, so this song is pretty much all I want to remember about today.  I've been listening to it over and over and over again this week.



Every single time I sing this song and I get to the line "There's an army rising up," I think about Sanctuary and my baptism.  Every person that was there that night played a part in how special it was for me.  I've said it many times before, but I've never felt love from a group of people like I did that night.  It was the first time I'd ever felt a Christian community banning together to lift me up, and they didn't even know me.  Every person that told me congratulations and hugged me or patted me on the shoulder or simply just cheered for me when Brennan lifted my arm in the air on stage was welcoming me into a family I'd been missing out on my entire life.  I'd been terrified of going to and trusting in a church until that night.

It wasn't just me, though.  I remember so clearly standing in the lobby talking to Taylor and Bruno, and I looked around and saw people on their knees with others just laying hands on them.  People who are just as broken as anyone else got together to bring some of us back to Christ, and most of the people probably didn't even know the ones they were helping.  Brennan and Joe and the other two guys who prayed for me certainly didn't know me.  They saw me at my weakest and held no judgment, just love and patience and sincere prayers to God on my behalf and my family's behalf.

At least thirty people got to experience the same overwhelming sense of love that I did that night, and as Kyla told me one day, that's a bond that we share that no one can ever change or take away.  Thirty people got baptized in a single night; several of my Nashville friends who attend Sanctuary regularly and go to churches where public baptisms are normal told me they've never seen anything like what happened on April 5th.  I remember getting on Twitter the next day and seeing a tweet from a girl through the Sanctuary twitter who said "There's a revival in Nashville."  And if those thirty+ other people have been feeling the same enormous, intense, overwhelming changes I've been feeling over the past almost six months, that revival is still going.

I am not the same person I was on April 5th, and I am so glad that's the case.  For the first time in my life, I am 100% sure of myself.  I've accepted my weakness.  I'm learning how to let go of the people who hurt me and the things I can't control.  April 5th was the first night I ever definitely heard God speak, and He's been speaking straight into my heart so often since then that I've been able to use His words to minister to others.  I have felt God breaking all of the chains that were holding me back, chains of fear, doubt, anger, pain, depression.  He's freeing me a little more every day.

And it all started in Woodmont Hills Church.  I have to get back to Nashville.  I have to get back there so I can go back to Sanctuary and be with the first Christian church community that ever made me feel like family.  I have to get back to the place that started the chain of events that changed my life and started turning me into the woman God's seen hiding in me all along.  I don't know when or how it's going to happen, but I pray that God will give me a way.