.you can have all this world, but give me Jesus.

i have this small group of girls - 8 of them in all, they are amazing. they come from lives completely alternative to my own. according to the world i know and love, they have it rough. they live in rough neighborhoods where my blood pressure rises out of fear when i drive them home. they live in homes where peace is not commonly felt or known. many of them are raised by only one parent or the other, rarely both. they live the antithesis of what my life was at 16 years old - and they live it with courage and strength. they made a choice to love and follow Jesus this past summer and are truly learning what that means on tuesday afternoons at our house - and they do this alone, most often with parents who are ridiculously non-supportive. they are my heroes.

this is who they are - this is all they know and they'll say, "i don't really have that many bad days, i have a great life." but about 30 minutes into digging into the word and inevitably digging into our lives, because that's what Jesus is good at - they break. it's typical to have tears and we embrace them, we walk through them, we grieve their lives and we try to let Healing offer hope for tomorrow. these days, tuesdays are my favorite days - they are the days where i most see Jesus at work.

today, one of my girls asked me a really raw question - she said, "Bree, do you ever get sick of parents telling you they don't want their kids over at your house or getting kicked off high school campuses because they don't want you to talk to us about Jesus?" and i said no. i said no because when you live a life of ministry, this is what you can expect - that the world will neither appreciate nor be excited about what you're doing because they won't understand. and i said no because this is what i was created for - because if myself and my co-leader, katie weren't pursuing this, these girls would not be sitting in my living room talking about Jesus on tuesday afternoons. and i deserve none of the credit for my lack of consistency and lack of preparedness - none. He is just stinkin' faithful, day after day.

a friend of mine articulates it well in saying, "Who would enter heaven clean, manicured and adorned with the world's riches? The notion is complete insanity. We were made to enter heaven bloody and broken. Like we just got down off a cross."

i want that - i want the blood and brokenness, the highest highs and the lowest lows - bring it and let me settle for nothing less in this life.