"Transformation happens experientially, not intellectually."

Can I just begin by telling you how validating it was to read the quote that is the title to this blog. "Transformation happens experientially, not intellectually." That's pretty much been my hearts cry for the past several years. I have cried out, God I want to know your love, experientially. I know it intellectually...but I want to know your manifest love in my life.

So as I have asked God for that, I have made some progress, but probably not as much as I would like. This weekend at the Pursue Conference, I went up for prayer. The couple that prayed for me, knew bits and pieces of me, mostly thru different prayer times together. They proceeded to pray that God would reveal his love to me and that I would know that I know that I know how much God loves me. Awesome! Great prayer. Wait a minute....how did you know that was an issue...is what I thought to myself. Am I walking around like Pigpen on Charlie Brown? Is there a cloud of dust that follows me around? Was it discernment? Was it a Word of Knowledge? Had my friend who works with them been blabbing about me and my issues? No matter, it bothered me. I asked God how do we fix this, and I was reminded of a statement I had made a few days earlier. In reference to my work ethic, I told my boss..."I'm not hungry." (My boss is a friend, so I can have honest conversations like that and it not be weird.) I'll work, do my job, but there is not an internal drive to "be all I can be." I'm comfortable, satiated, complacent. Yuck! Which is why I tend to move to a new city. I need a jolt in my system. Somehow I've quit focusing on the beauty and majesty of Jesus, started focusing on my pain, and decided to become comfortable and even lazy when it comes to life. Be it a job, weight loss, dating, education...I've lost my drivenness. I want it back. But I want it refined, so that I can be driven relying on God's strength and not my own. Here are some more good quotes.

The following are quotes taken from the Monday Morning Memo by The Wizard.

“The brain has three natural roadblocks that stand in the way of truly innovative thinking:
1. flawed perception
2. fear of failure
3. the inability to persuade others.”
– Dr. Gregory Berns, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University.

“It typically takes a novel stimulus – either a new piece of information or getting out of the environment in which an individual has become comfortable – to jolt attentional systems awake and reconfigure both perception and imagination. The more radical and novel the change, the greater the likelihood of new insights being generated.” – p.58, Iconoclast, by Gregory Berns.

Get out and smell the roses.

This is something I'm pondering. I'll write more later.