Father Heart of God(First week of lectures)

This past week we had a speaker named Ray McConnell who is from Florida but now lives as a missionary in Thailand. He spoke the whole week on the "Father Heart of God". When i hear this i wasn't to sure what all there is to know about the Father Heart of God. When we started getting into the lectures we began to understand just how much God truly loves us and cares for us like a father. The first verse we looked at to delve into this subject was Ephesians 1:4 "Long before he laid down the earths foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy."

The whole week our group began to get a better grasp on Gods father heart and throughout the week words and visions came to many people. God has started speaking to some of us in crazy ways. The biggest thing for me this week was when i heard God speak to me. I was praying so hard and getting frustrated cause people were saying things about how God told them this and told them that, and I'm sitting there frustrated cause I'm not getting anything. Finally Ray gave us all versus to go for about thirty minutes and just pray about. When i got my verse i went to a corner and prayed over it. The verse i was given was Zephaniah 3:17 "The lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing." As soon as i read this i started praying and God began to speak to me. He began telling me how I'm trying so hard to worship and praise him and speak to him but I'm not letting him worship, praise, and speak to me. Sometimes we get so frustrated because we are trying so hard to experience God and we don't let him experience us. Sometimes its hard to believe that the King of the world can hear our voice much less that he wants to sing and dance over us in all of our sin and mess.

Another thing we were challenged to do this week was write down anything and everything that is our first love above our love for Christ. When he first said this i didn't think there was really anything above him in my life but when I started to pray a whole page of things came up and it convicted me so much, so afterward me and some guys prayed over all of our stuff and decided to put all of those things aside until God was our first love.

Outside of lectures my small group of 5 guys have begun going through the book "Wild at Heart", this book is exactly what i need in my life right now. It is really speaking to our whole group and is showing me so much.

God is moving here and our outreach team is finally starting to get our trip together, i ask that if possible i can receive some prayer for our outreach team, pray for our teamwork, visions, courage, strength, and planning skills for our upcoming trip to India/Nepal.

Thank you all so much for prayers and support. I swear there are times i can feel prayers over me from halfway around the world.

With Christs Love

Andrew Thetford

p.s.- if there are any questions or anything your curious about that's going on with me here feel free to email me anything at thetfordaw@mail.lipscomb.edu