My husband thinks it is funny that I started a blog. Sometimes I think he still views me as the 18 year old young girl he fell madly in love with. The lovely, little, immature thing I used to be. He asked me why I chose the name “TheFarKingdomJourney” as my name for this blog. That was an easy question to answer. Not because I was ready to share all the things I knew to be true about the title, but because there was an excitement that filled me about its name.
When naming things we tend to make connections to things we know and love. When my husband and I named our first puppy, we made a connection to something that my husband loves very dear: Kentucky basketball. We concluded that the puppy we fell in love with should be named “Rupp” after Kentucky’s finest coach, Adolf Rupp. Now, we find that Rupp is just as prejudice of small dogs as Adolf Rupp was with African Americans. This is NOT something we are proud of as puppy parents.
The name of something can carry attachments to it that we never thought would be created. Specifically spiritual attachments. When we name children we want them to have positive names that bring about positive thoughts about who they are. This term could be coined as “self actualization”, and if you’re familiar with educational theory you would know that this is a psychological position that a person has reached once their basic needs are met. Abraham Maslow developed a systematic chart of these “needs” which are viewed as a hierarchy. Self Actualization has become the goal. While I think that a human’s basic needs should be met in order to climb to more pressing matters of heart, I believe self actualization has become the downfall of my Millennial generation. The idea that you can “be whoever, whatever” you want to be has allowed for rapid decline and devaluing of the society and culture as a whole. Unfortunately, the idea of self actualization has seeped into the church as well. But, I have drifted from my main point… a name.
TheFarKingdomJourney began as a song by The Gray Havens. It collided with my life while on the way home from our missions trip to Chicago this summer with our Beacon students. One of the members of our group shared the song with me. At that time in my Scripture reading, I had started reading verses about what TRUE and HONEST Biblical encouragement was. The Bible tells us that the way to minister to or encourage one’s heart is to speak with excitement and joy of the returning of the Lord!
“For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.”
My desire is to sweetly remind folks that the Lord is soon returning. Through the name of this song “The Far Kingdom”, and its sweet melodies, I decided to go on a journey that would rejuvenate my walk with the Lord, as well as encourage others in their walk as well. So take heart, brethren! For the Lord is soon returning! We will be caught up together in the clouds, where we shall remain with the Lord forever!
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