There's a garden in the middle of a desert

I've been getting better about writing stuff down lately. A couple friends of mine at small group exhorted me to do so, especially after having seen visions of eyes looking right at me. Yesterday I was in the process of cleaning up my desk a little, and I came across a ripped piece of paper that had some notes from a small group a couple months ago. I kinda wanted to throw the piece of paper away (because it was ripped and jagged and had some other junk on the other side), but I didn't want to lose what I had written -- I therefore copied it into my notebook. Last night at small group those very same things happened to come up in conversation, and later one of my friends had reminded me that on the same night that I saw a pair of predominantly-bright-green eyes while being prayed for, I had also smelled honey during that same span. It was funny; I never wrote it down, and part of me can't believe that I forgot to do so. To be fair, I had a bunch of other things on my mind that I needed advice on, and therefore reserved the rest of the space on that ripped piece of paper for taking notes on those. But still, this same friend then asked me (last night) if I could be a seer. I replied it was possible; I explained I don't often have visions (or other arousals of the senses), but I also wondered if, because of my hearing loss, God could have told or showed me things and I completely missed them. [But then again, if God really needed to get something across to me, I have a hard time believing that he would choose a method of message-sending that would result in message-not-received. Then again, maybe I'm off on that.]

A couple Sundays ago I decided to go receive prayer again after the morning service. This time I was explaining that I was at a bit of a crossroads in determining how to grow both inwardly and outwardly at Vineyard. A couple nights prior, I received a thought (I do honestly believe this was God telling me): Branch out. Get to know more people. You've been at Vineyard for three months now, and you know maybe fifteen people really well. But there are many more people that you barely know at all. Go find more small groups, connect with people in those groups. You have done well, and your current group fits you well; but if you do nothing, you will fall into a rut.

That's the basic idea behind it. Since then I've begun to reach out to more people. Last Tuesday I went to a small group in Skokie, made up of many musically-inclined individuals. On Sunday, I went out to brunch with a bunch of friends who either live in the South Loop, will soon live in the South Loop, or are good friends with folks from the first two categories (during brunch I also happened to be asked: "so Nathan, when are you moving to the South Loop?"). I then went to the South Loop for some coffee and an unfinished game of Settlers of Catan. Then that evening I hiked it back up to northside Evanston for a dinner and some hanging-out with some folks while playing piano and ping-pong. Tonight I had a couple small group options to go check out, one in (where else?) the South Loop, and another in westside Evanston. [I passed on both mostly because I was so tired after this afternoon's interview that I took a nap for a few hours.] So I guess I'll be pretty busy next week, with the once-every-two-week small group meeting in Skokie on Tuesday, my regular Wednesday group, and then Thursday once again getting to choose which place I want to go (for now, I foresee alternating).

Enough with the tangents from the last week. On Sunday April 25, I received prayer for guidance on all this, searching and choosing groups, reaching out to various people, and ultimately if God plans for me to start my own small group (the reason for branching out in the first place), possibly as soon as this fall. The guy that prayed for me explained a vision that came to him:

There's a garden in the middle of a desert. It is mostly a green garden (with a tiny bit of yellow, red, and possibly purple), but there is an abundance of plants, and it seems to continually grow at the edges. I'm standing in the middle, not really doing anything, just... standing there. And the garden still continues to grow.

And then he told me the following words that came to him during the vision:

You're in the right place.

You bet I wrote it down.