Kingdom – Revival

Posted on FaceBook Feb 20, 2020

GOOD EVENING KINGDOM!

“Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone defiles the temple of God, God will destroy him. For the temple of God is holy, which temple you are.” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17)At the beginning of the year last month, I posted several comments stating this was a year of REVIVAL. That is my word for the year. Revival: not just my own personal revival, but my commitment to further the revival of the body of Christ, His Church, how and wherever I can.

Today is a continuation of that theme. Anyone reading those posts last month may have correctly concluded I was talking about a spiritual revival, and they would have been correct. But in truth there is more. I was also talking about a personal physical and mental health revival. We want to travel more, visit family more, enjoy each other’s company more (a sort of mental health revival.) So, we are committed to more camping trips, starting this weekend (hopefully) with the granddaughter Maggie. We will take Pat’s other 3 granddaughters, as well as Maggie, Pat’s daughters and one of her sons, to Enchanted Rock for the weekend next month at the beginning of Spring Break. We will be flying to North Carolina for the 4th of July weekend for a family gathering with my baby sister and family, and a slew of relatives on my mother’s side. Then in October, we go to Gatlinburg, TN, to attend the wedding of a dear friend from Somerset, KY. And next year will continue with another possible cruise and a trip to Boston. And closer to home, Pat and I have weekly Date Nights, for as long as we continue to find places neither one of us have been to, which is hard since she’s a native Corpus Christi woman.

The calendar is even more filled with the physical revival side of things. As the above Scripture states, our bodies are the temples of God. My body is the only one I will have on this earth, and since I sense that I will be in it for a long time still to come, I had best treat it like the temple it is, to give all glory and honor to God. So, I ended last year beginning the process of having a complete physical. I intended to follow that with getting all the little aches and pains and issues addressed, one at a time. The blood work added an issue to the list of venous reflux, bad knee, back cyst, poor hearing, diet tweaking, and maybe revisiting my umbilical hernia. My Medicare card is going to get a major workout this year. The blood work showed that I am no longer an on- and off again pre-diabetic. I am diabetic. I had already started working on losing weight after Thanksgiving, losing 10 pounds before my diagnosis several weeks ago. Add six more pounds to that post diagnosis. Glucose levels are dropping, and I expect them to drop even more when I get back into the gym, which was supposed to have been this week. That will have to wait a couple weeks, as I have surgery Friday to remove the golf ball sized cyst from my back.

My nurse practitioner is being thorough. She is scheduling me follow-up appointments with my cardiologist and nephrologist. I have already started the venous closure process with a consult; the ultrasound is scheduled in a couple weeks. And towards that end, I have started wearing compression socks in anticipation of surgery. After these series of appointments and checks are completed, I will then address my hearing (which is deteriorating,) and my knee (which is actually improving.)All of this to say: my personal physical and mental health revival is actually part of my spiritual revival. It’s a package deal. Just as you can’t be content in claiming to be a Christian by going to church on Sundays, and living in the world, without regard to giving glory to God, the rest of the week. It must be all in! Now some may say “too much information.” I say “hogwash.” These are the steps to my personal spiritual revival. In listing them here, I will be accountable to you to stay the course on this path. My doing so might encourage you to take up a similar journey. Had I done this years ago, I might have prevented my heart attack in 2015. It’s not too late to begin your own journey of revival. My desire is to light a fire and inspire a revival of the body of Christ, one body at a time, if necessary (starting with my own.) Are you with me?