what's with all the voices?

March 2-5 I had the awesome opportunity to go to Louisville, KY for the Simply Youth Ministry Conference. Or if you followed me on twitter at that time (@kacoustic89) then you saw a lot of #symc going across your feed. And probably decided at that moment it would be a good life choice for you to stop following me. However I did give the disclaimer that I would be over-tweeting. So if you did unfollow me, shame on you.

Now that I have that out of my system...

SYMC was incredible. 

(for the youth worker reading this, go to http://conference.youthministry.com/ and look in to next years conference. We could carpool. It would be a grand time.)

I met some amazing people, formed great friendships, and was poured in to by some of the most passionate people I've been around in the field of youth ministry. The conference is "by youth workers, for youth workers" and this year they wanted us to breathe. Only being in vocational youth ministry for a short while, I initially went in to the conference thinking I was going to get a lot of to-do lists, or 7-steps-to-grow-your-ministry talks.

But I didn't. 

I was told to slow down and listen to Jesus. And only Jesus.

Saturday night's keynote speaker was Jon Acuff. If you don't know who he is and you have me as a friend on Facebook, I now know that you pay no attention to the links I post. Shame on you again. So go check him out at www.stuffchristianslike.net. You can thank me later.

Jon spoke about voices that we all hear. We all have internal and external voices that tell us who we are. At least we let them speak to who we are. 

Here are some of the tweets that people sent in toward the end of Jon's talk. Many that made it to the screen that night were lost in twitter land by the time I was able to get a screen shot...

As you can see, insecurity is a common thread. And this isn't just in youth ministry. This is in life. 

"I'm not making a difference"......"Your work isn't worthy".....You. Aren't. Good. Enough.

The interesting thing in all of this is that these are lies. These voices that we allow to speak to who we are, internally and externally, do not mirror the Truth that God has and does speak in to and over our lives. 

Zephaniah 3:17-"The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing."

His voice alone has the right to speak to who we are.

His voice alone gets to tell us we are worthy.

His voice alone gets to remind us that we are loved.

His voice causes us to be quiet and rest in His love.

That blows me away.

Of all the voices we can hear, may we learn to block out the lies of the enemy and rest in the Truth of our Creator, Sustainer, and Lover. 

He is the only one that has the right to tell us who we are. So let Him.