Even though tons of people couldn’t be there, and we all rushed to get there, and we almost got poured on, it held off and we managed to have super fun time of reflection on God and what He wants to do with our lives, swimming in the ocean, floating on the green dragon, watching Olivia fall flat on her face and eat some serious sand, and laughed at Rachel falling off the dune and busting her behind, and a super fun game of beach soccer. We’ll all be too sore to get out of bed tomorrow, but it was worth every second!

By popular demand we will be scheduling another one before the summer is over! And next time folks we’ll plan it for 1 instead of 5. Three hours of fun in the sun just isn’t enough for this crazy crowd. We will also grill hotdogs and have drinks for everyone!

We’ve had some crazy fun, now let’s go serve. Stay tuned for details on our next AXIS excursion to feed and minister to the homeless locally. More info. to come in a week or two!

View invitation here!

Host: Anthony & Rachel Rowell
Location: Wrightsville Beach South End
S. Lumina Avenue, Wrightsville Beach, NC US

When: Sat. August 9th from 5 p.m. until sun set!

Phone: 470-0948 or 470-0947
Come join us for a fun-filled, afternoon hangout at the beach!

Bring your own chairs, coolers with drinks and food!

It’s gonna be a blast!

* Women, bathing suits are just fine to wear. Just please be mindful that we will all be in mixed company and dress appropriately. Thanks!

** Don’t forget change for parking! However, you only have to pay for parking until 6 p.m. After that time the meters are no longer enforced. Parking is $1.50 an hour.**

DIRECTIONS:

After you cross the Wrightsville Beach bridge, stay straight. When you come the the fork, do not veer to the left. Stay straight.

Go all the way to the end and you will arrive at the stop-light.

Turn Rt. onto Waynick Blvd. Stay on it and it will sharp curve to the right.

Turn right onto S. Lumina Avenue and follow it all the way to the end. That’s where we’ll be. You should see a long street of parking meters. Park there. We will be at the access with the gazebo.

James 1:27 N.L.T. - Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.

THIS is our heart. This is the calling. To let them know, HE is on their side.

The orphan clings to Your hand
Singing the song of how he was found
The widow rejoices
For her oppressors are silenced now

You sit at the table with the wounded and the poor
You laugh and share stories with the thief and the whore
When You could just be silent and leave us here to die
Still, You sent Your Son for us
You are on our side

The runaway falls at Your feet
You are what he has searched for
The rich man is broken
When he stands beneath a sky full of stars

You sit at the table with the wounded and the poor
You laugh and share stories with the thief and the whore
When You could just be silent and leave us here to die
Still, You sent Your Son for us
You are on our side

You sit at the table with the wounded and the poor
You laugh and share stories with the thief and the whore
When You could just be silent and leave us here to die
Still, You sent Your Son for us
You are on our side

Still, You sent Your Son for us
You are on our side

The story of Josh continues on….. Today, once again because God loves him so much, He had sent people into his life weeks ago that loved Him all the way into His arms; Josh accepted Christ into His life. There are no fancy words that can rightly put into perspective the amazingness of what has happened, and none are needed.

I can say that I am so proud of the people in AXIS that have devoted themselves to looking past a person’s faults and simply loving them for who they are because that’s what Christ taught us to do.

Living for self is a worthless life. If you are a true follower of Christ, inside you there are “others”. And then others inside your others…and so on. Everyone you impact for Christ is your “others”, and everyone they impact are also your “others”.

I can’t help but have overwhelming joy in knowing that Josh is one of our others. And there will be others.

Meet Josh. Josh is a new guy at AXIS, our small group ministry. This is just another story telling of an amazing God and how he loves us so much that He goes to the ends of the earth to find ways to reach us when we’re sinking and going down.

Josh came to AXIS thinking it was just something fun to do on a Saturday night, and to hang out with some people he didn’t even know. What he really didn’t know, was that there was a God so in love with him, He had set up, unknowingly to Josh, a divine appointment with His love through the people who follow Him.

I personally had never met Josh before in my life. But the moment he walked through the door of our home I knew that this was a young man with a life filled with pain, disappointment, anger, and hurt. Through his laughter, magnetic personality, and kind nature; in his eyes I could see these things staring back at me.

We had watched the video on baggage, and as the group discussion was hitting it’s peak, I wondered how he was taking it all in, ….if he was even taking it in at all. As soon as I opened the topic up for group discussion for everyone to share their hearts, he was among the first to pour out his soul. And I mean, literally pour out his soul he did. He explained the horrifying set of circumstances that this young man of 24 years old had already lived through. Just to name a few, at 16 he saw his older brother murdered right in front of him, he’s been emprisoned, he cleaned up the scene where his father committed suicide just last year, and was raised in literal poverty with 11 other siblings in a two bedroom house with a space-heater for heat, and is currently the main supporter of his mother and other siblings in his father’s absence.

The first thing out of his mouth was. “I believe there is a God, but I know one thing. He’s not in control of my life. Why would a God that’s in control let me endure such horrible things? There’s no way He cares about me. You don’t understand what I’ve lived through. You have no idea of the hurt and baggage I carry around with me everyday of my life! I will never understand how God could let this happen to anyone, let alone me.”

As he spoke, my heart broke. Literally. For a moment, I could almost feel his pain. As he spoke, my eyes filled with tears and this thought was running through my head like a CD that was skipping on repeat. “What do I tell him? What do I tell Him? What do I tell Him”? And then this. “Tell Him that I Love Him. Tell Him that I Love Him. Tell Him that I’m deperately in love with Him.”

I said, “Josh, I’m not even going to pretend to know the hurt you live with. And I completely understand how and why you would feel the way you do about it all. That is logical thinking. But I need to tell you that no matter what you feel, it doesn’t void out the truth. And the truth is, God loves you more than you can imagine, and HE IS in control of your life whether you believe it or not. You know, the Bible says that God will not put more on us than we can bear, and He must think you’re a pretty amazing person that could handle all that you’ve been through. He wants to take your pain, and make it beautiful. He wants to take your hurt and use it to bring you to Himself. He wants to take your brokenness and make you whole. He wants to take your life because of what you’ve been through, and make it a reflection of what He can do through a shattered life. You can reach so many more people than I can because you can look at them and say, I’ve been there. I know what you’re going through, and I am a living testimony to God’s grace and love.”

I told Him that I wasn’t asking Him to understand it all that night. God is much more complex than our human minds can wrap around. And when we try, we will fail. I said, “Josh, I’m asking you to do three things right now. First, to try to realize how much God loves you. -(That’s the toughest one) Secondly, to realize that we’ve all screwed up big time and are in need of His mercy. Last, to just open up yourself to a God that you cannot understand and just watch and see what He can and will do with your life.” He shook his head and said, “I can do that….yeah, I’ll do that.”

Huge seeds were planted in his soul that night. And somehow I don’t think God is finished with Josh. I think he has an unbelievably bright future to look forward to.  He left that night with a huge smile on his face, a hug, and said that he was so glad he came, and would definitely be back from now on, that this definitely had to be of God because it was like we knew his life and what he desperately needed to hear, and that he knew it was just time for a change. I still haven’t gotten over the awesomeness of that first night with Josh. He already feels so endeared to us.

Ya know. What we do doesn’t have to be fireworks. It just needs to be real. After all, what happened to Josh is what it’s all about.

TO BE CONTINUED………

So many people are burdened with a load of emotional “Baggage.” You know what “Baggage” is–it’s the stuff from your past that you carry around in your soul. It’s the words people said and the things people did that still haunt your mind and seem to limit your potential. It weighs you down. It crowds your relationships. It causes you to stumble through life.

God wants to take the “Baggage” off your shoulders so you can be free from its bondage forever. Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matt. 11:2 The Lord invites you to come to Him and “check” your baggage once and for all.

In this series you will learn how to rid your life of the emotional pain, generational curses, and addictive habits that come with “Baggage.” God is going to take the load of guilt, fear, and regret off your back. You will never be the same.

This is a three part series at AXIS beginning Saturday, May 24th at 6 p.m. Come and join us. And ”check” your baggage forever. 

 

At AXIS this past weekend, we as a group learned and discussed an incredibly life-changing truth.  We learned that the point at which a piece of glass breaks in called the mirror. So we discovered that in our brokenness, Christ is mirrored in every break. There are so many people walking around broken, or with broken pasts that hold them back from being all that Christ intended for them to be simply because they feel that their brokenness somehow makes them unusable to God. In fact, the opposite is true. Each broken area is another opportunity for Christ to be reflected or mirrored in our lives. Is this not amazing?

 In the light of this study, we all stopped and examine our lives. Has the brokenness in us been an opportunity for Christ to be reflected? Have we allowed Him to fill in the cracks and bring about wholeness with the image of Him? The purpose of a mirror is not to become the image, but simply to reflect it. After all, we were created in His image. Which means that our lives should be a pure reflection of the image of the Father. I believe God loves to show Himself through broken things. He is glorified when what was broken is made whole and complete, and then is a relection of Him.

At last night’s AXIS meeting we began a study on knowing and having a heart after Gods. We learned that one of the major things at the heart of God is service. John 13 & Luke 7. Christ demonstrated this himself by washing the disciple’s feet. So last night, Anthony demonstrated this by washing others feet. This was intended to be an example to us on what kind of attitude and heart we should have towards others. We learned that it’s not about the actual act of washing another’s feet that is significant, but rather the attitude of service that one must have to kneel down in front of someone and wash their feet.

We also watched and discussed the video below. This embodies a Father’s amazing love for his son and his attitude of service that is at the very forefront of their relationship. We noted how obvious it is in this video that this father basically laid aside himself and his comfort just to serve his son and give him a life he could never have had otherwise. And how it came naturally, out of his immense love for him. It wasn’t really even something he had to think about, it simply flowed out of pure love.  Just like our Father has for us, and then commands us to have for one another as His disciples. This video is to us, such a representation of God’s love for us and how He loved us so much that He laid His life down so that we, in our frail state, could be free. And we could WIN, depite our weakness.

It left us all challenged to begin to implement this character of Christ’s heart into our own daily lives so that we can be more worthy of the title “followers of Christ.”

” We have not truly learned what it means to love like Jesus until we can lay aside ourselves simply to serve others. There is no greater demonstration than this.”

We are excited to announce that we are beginning a new study together as a group at our next AXIS on Sat. April 19th 6-8 p.m!

 It’s Max Lucado’s: Experiencing The Heart Of Jesus. Knowing His Heart, Feeling His Love. We have throroughly studied the workbook and believe that the in-depth group studies on topics such as: Experiencing the Care of Jesus,  Experiencing the Grace of Jesus, Experiencing the Freedom of Jesus, Experiencing the Power of Jesus, Experiencing the Hope of Jesus and many more will equip us a group of people desiring to more fully understand and know what is the heart of Jesus.

What is it that He carries within his heart that we as His children should know and understand and also carry within our own? If He uses us to minister to those He desires to reach, we believe that it is essential that we contain the same attributes and burdens that our Father does so that we can in turn use it to help us most effectively minister to a dying world so badly in need of the Love of Jesus being taken to where they are.

 Come ready to experience the heart of our Father together and share what’s within your own.

 Please read the previous blog posting before viewing this video so you will understand it better. Be sure your computer’s speakers are on.

Anthony and I made this video to represent what happened to the sins and struggles that the people nailed to the cross in the previous blog posting. We showed this at our second AXIS meeting. It’s impact was and is HUGE!

 Special thanks to The Rock Of Wilmington  for the inspiration!