Sometimes a soul is placed in our hands for but a moment in time. More often than not, we spit on that opportunity instead of revealing the heart of Christ.

I used to have a joke before tossing myself casually from terrifyingly-high cliffs around the world, "Dying is easy; it beats paying rent." We're called to a much greater death.

You're worth dying for.  God looks at us and sees someone He loves. Real love will cost you everything you are.  Love doesn't put a price on its own life, but on yours.  "In matters of laying down our life for others, we can't afford to ask, 'What will this cost me?' But instead what will it cost them if I don't?"

I've recently moved back to Hawaii, and last night I was invited to a documentary viewing about modern day slavery in the fishing industry overseas.  It was fiery afterward, opinionated, political, and as someone not personally involved in the industry, it was a little boring.  I didn't give my opinion about it as we drove away, but my heart was burning and I was more than ready for battle and to respond to the issue, just not in the way my friend would have thought.  As I sat there in the discussion after the documentary was played, my heart actually went out more to the ones hosting the event. They were so passionate... passionately wasting their lives fighting the wrong war and they didn't even know it.  If I had said it out loud, I would have been surely beaten off the stage and flogged. It is a truth people don't want to hear.  The truth is. THIS WORLD NEEDS MORE SLAVES. 

God in His infinite love will often bring us to a place where He knows we'll almost be miserable, but it's in those places of great and even painful challenge where He knows we'll grow faster in a short period of time of struggle than we would after many years in a place where we're comfortable.

One of my silly pet birds one day taught me a powerful lesson about the way satan sometimes operates.

While visiting a small country church for the first time, the Cry of my soul was to know the heart of God. He showed me my first prophetic vision and one-third of it came true moments later. And then the pastor called me out of the congregation to tell me what he saw and it was the exact copy of what I'd seen of me in the park holding out my hands. Then an hour later another pastor said the same thing, thrice confirming it to me in the same day.

Without staring directly at the Glory of God, this side of eternity, none of us can ever truly understand how much Jesus paid for our sins, and even then it is through very dirty glass. But as those born again, we have the Holy Spirit of God living in us Who is willing to teach us as much as we can finally fathom so we can stop living with a worldly mindset and with an eternal one instead.

I went to China to meet one of my friends. In such an intimate setting, our personalities didn't work well together. And instead of using my unbearable loneliness to seek Holy Spirit, I used it on myself and ended up permanently damaging a friendship that took three years to build. I had failed them all.

Part 1 of 2: Sometimes we only get one chance to be the love of Christ in someone's life before they're gone, and to love people for who they are without any expectations. If we truly understand we have the Hope of the world living inside of us, we have to love people enough to tell them about Him everywhere we go.