It’s been a while since I’ve seen bare breasts in church. Oh, there was that time when the voluptuous singer did the special music—right before the sermon—with her blouse unbuttoned below the nipple line. We were all too stunned to say anything about it. I think everybody thought she’d surely hitch ’em up a bit, but apparently she believed in celebrating all of God’s gifts and on that day she put them on display.

I hadn’t seen any uncovered breasts in church since then, until a few nights ago in a Nicaraguan village. I was midstream in a passionate sermon about sin, righteousness, and the love of God when a young lady I’m guessing to be less than 20 years old lifted her shirt, fully exposing both breasts to whomever, and beckoned her toddler to come and nurse.

It caught me a little by surprise. No big deal. Exposing breasts to feed a baby is a culture-by-culture thing; we American’s need to “get over it.” Yet it did catch me off-guard. It just wasn’t very American-evangelical-normal. I mean, we have nursing mother’s rooms with the service video fed into the room so Momma can feed the baby discretely and still be at church with the rest of the family.  But in Nicaragua, sitting on row two, you just whip ’em out all the while nodding, smiling, and amening the preacher even as you switch breasts half-way through just so things stay in balance.

So there I am, fervently working my audience, all the while there’s this whole other narrative running in my chuckling brain. “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

So when you are in church next Sunday—particularly if you are a pastor facing the congregation—beware, you just never know what the lady on the second row is going to do.

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Update: Christianity Today had a blog article on this topic that you might find interesting.

Best days are relative, but I guess everybody’s got one.

As I was leaving the village after speaking for the final time a 40 year old pastor who’d been in our conference in Managua stopped the car and then knocked on the window. He was gracious, told me how much he’d been helped by the teaching, then he said something that set me back on my heels: “Today has been the best day of my life!”

Wow! The BEST? Not a great day. Not one of the best? But THE best?

I often open my presentations by talking about experiencing “An internal, pervasive sense of YES!” Apparently that’s what happened to him; he moved from OK to YES!!

How ‘bout you? Are you experiencing an internal pervasive sense of YES!!? If so, I’d like to hear about it. And, I’d like to hear about your life’s best day. Send me an email and tell me about it

The Nicaraguan people are a beautiful and grateful lot, and while I showered this morning I reflected on my engagement with them. What came to mind was what a fool I had been in my earlier adulthood, because I didn’t understand the profound power of words.

In my former life I used to speak to groups of several hundred people weekly. But I was careless and imprecise with what I said, perhaps because I didn’t believe anyone was really listening or paying attention. This week I was reminded of how much some people do pay attention and of the profound impact of your words.

I’d met some of this week’s conferees during my previous two visits to Nicaragua, so we share some familiarity. On multiple occasions during the week, my words from previous visits came back to me.

Emotional distress from life’s battles is apparently a big issue to Nicas; at least it was to some of the people who came to speak with me this week. My guess is that all humans—in the modern world, at least—carry emotional baggage that they may or may not be aware of.

One man came to me with a notebook in hand, and he turned to the page of notes he had taken when I was here on my last speaking engagement eight months ago. He told me of how as a young teen he’d gone to a Christian youth camp, and at nighttime after the organized activities some of his fellow campers had sneaked away to go drinking while he remained back at the camp praying.

In the midst of the night there came a knock at the door. It was the police. They wanted him to identify the corpse of one of his fellow teenaged campers. Somehow in the dark, on a night already clouded by alcohol, there had been a melee and in the confusion the police had shot and killed one of his fellow campers.

He told me of how the image had burned into his mind and how it had haunted him in adulthood. He’d had years of nightmare and terror which he attributed to the image of his dead peer seared into his conscious so many years ago. Then he began to read from his notes from the last time I’d spoken in Nicaragua. He told me all about how a particular concept I’d taught and a couple of phrases I’d said—which he had captured—released him from his terror, and of how he’d been freed from the haunting that had plagued his life.

Wow! Words are powerful.

A lady came with a similar story. She told me of how she had participated in our last conference and of how God’s promise in Jeremiah 29:11 had stuck with her. It says “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘Plans to prosper you and not to harm you. Plans for hope and a future.’” She told me of how hearing those words had helped her to understand for the first time that God had a plan for her life, and that the plan was good and provided a future she could look forward to. She’d been given hope and wanted to say “thank you” for unlocking the door to her despair and helping her to see her value to God and the seeds of blessing that he had planted into her life which she could cultivate into a great harvest of abundant living.

Over and over people kept quoting phrases and concepts about abundant living.

Wow! Words are powerful.

I hate to think about the opportunities I likely missed as a younger man when I could have been giving life giving words to people desperate for hope, and how an undisciplined mind and a careless tongue might have squandered the chance to change the future for someone.

I’m always trying to learn, and I was already aware of the principle of the power of your words. But it was pressed into me in a more profound way this week as I heard the “you said” stories from my Nica friends. I’ve always heard those kinds of things from people who’ve heard me speak, but for whatever reason I have really never believed it or put much stock in it. I always assumed they were saying those things because they felt they were supposed to. But no more.

There’s something amazingly powerful about having people in tears standing before you, speaking in a tongue you can’t understand,  telling you of the emotional chains in which they’d lived, and how the word that God spoke to them through you released them from their mental prison.

Wow!

Now, I get it. Words are the key that unlocks the door that leads to abundant life!

I pledge to reign my tongue even more; to sharpen my words for surgical precision and to use them judiciously to break chains and free prisoners. There’s something magical about participating in setting captives free. It’s life in the Kingdom of God, and THAT is where the living is abundant!

Nica’s seem to need to confess. That’s certainly good for the soul and very Biblical. The scripture says “Confess your sins one to another and pray for one another that you may be healed.” (James 5:16) But it may also be the strong Catholic tradition in the country that causes them to confess so easily. Who knows?

One lady is telling me of how she has become proud and arrogant. Its almost inconceivable to me. Her shelter is a tin shack inferior to anything my farm animals live in. She makes $100 a month. She has maybe two changes of clothes, and yet she struggles with pride.

“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it.” Jeremiah 17:9

Its interesting, incomprehensible, and instructive to me, that someone who lives so humbly could struggle with the sin of pride.

Hmmm.

There are so many stories and little incidentals that happen on a trip like this one. I wish I could share them all with you. I wish I had the energy to share them all. But my daily schedule looks like this. I begin teaching at 9:00 a.m. and go straight to 12:00 with a ten minute coffee break in between. We stop at 12:00 and eat, and then resume at 12:30 and go hard to 3:00 p.m. We then break for the day and get on the bus at 4:30 to head out to the village for a service that begins at 5:00 where I speak for about 45 minutes. That’s a little over six hours of speaking. That’s alot of talk. When combined with the fan blowing on me at night and drying out my throat, I’m sounding a little croaky. Thankfully tomorrow will be the last day and I can rest my voice until Rogersville takes on Cassville in the playoffs on Saturday.

I want to tell you what happened during the break between 3:00 p.m. and the 4:30 p.m. bus today.

As I rested in my room—stripped down to my shorts because my shirt was long-ago soaked through—there came a knock at my door. There stood a woman I recognized from the conference. She just had to talk to me. She’d planned it well. She even brought the interpreter with her. But first, she insisted that I put on my shirt. Apparently in Nicaragua  you can’t do spiritual work shirtless.

I shirted up.

She comes in with the interpreter and begins to pour out her story. She is far from God. Her family needs God. Her neighbors need God. She recognizes the situation.

She formerly walked closely with God but has strayed. She had prayed that God would allow her to participate in this conference, and He did. Then in the conference she had begun to hear about how there is a right way to think and a wrong way to think, and saw unfolded from the scriptures a path toward right thinking that begins with setting God at the very center of your foundation. She confessed that her foundation had shifted and she knew it. She was taking a course in psychology trying to learn what motivated people and how their minds work, but nothing she’d experienced in her psychology classes had provided her the clarity that the Wheel Of Right THinking (W.O.R.T.H.) did. She’d gained understanding about how building life around a system of thinking that placed God at the foundation, then allowed her to think about her self, her purpose, her bigger future, her relationships (Teammates), and her behaviors (Teamwork) could lead to the life she wanted. So she was coming to see me because she wanted to confess that she had strayed and she wanted to come back to God.

That’s all good and well, but it’s what triggered her response that was most interesting.

Apparently she and God had been wrestling for a while and she’d asked him to show His hand. She’d asked him to reveal Himself to her in some provocative way. Along comes Barry stumbling down the path, teaching his heart out and casually looking for a “victim” to use in his illustration about who is in charge of your life. There’s a less than 3% chance she’ll be chosen. But guess what? I surveyed the room, selected her, and unknowingly began speaking into her life in what I thought was a hypothetical manner, the exact words she needed to hear. I talked of how she had to make a choice and no one could make it for her, about how her life was her domain and only she could choose and control what happened in her life, what she believed, and what choices she made. That God had provided a way but the outcome was up to her. I can’t remember the exact quote, but translated back to me from her teary Spanish it came something like “You said I was the one who had to make the choice to think rightly and deliberately put God in the foundation of my life and I am making that decision today.”

Very well.

I took her face in my hands and lifted it so that she was looking in my eyes and said “I have a message for you from God: Welcome home. He’s missed you. He’s glad you have decided to return to walking with Him.”

Through tears she continued to tell me how she wanted to make a difference, about how she used to be a leader in her church and “spoke to the people” but how she had drifted. She told me of her desire that God use her life and how she could see it all coming together through the principles of right thinking so that she could really experience the abundant life that Jesus talked about.

I prayed for her, wished her well, and invited her to share her story when we gather in the conference tomorrow morning.

Somehow as I write this out, telling the story doesn’t have the same punch as experiencing it. But I want you to understand it was a big deal. She came to the conference feeling estranged from God. She heard a message of hope regarding how God wanted to empower her life and fill it with abundance if she was only willing to be “transformed by the renewing of her mind.” She negotiated with God and he took her up on the deal—she got called out of the crowd at random. She knew that her number was up. And in that instant as I unknowingly  spoke into her life exactly what God wanted her to hear she chose to act on what God said to her.

That’s kinda why I came to Nicaragua. It thrills me to help people move closer to God, and even more so to begin to experience the abundant and victorious life because they have learned how to be transformed in the renewing of their minds. It thrills me to watch them grow strong;  to see them begin to rise up and take their place, standing in strength on God’s promises, full of faith and hope, passionately living empowered lives of purpose. Its what I yearn to share with my friends back in America. Yet whether it is Managua or Rogersville I’m profoundly grateful—beyond my ability to express it—for the opportunity to help people find The Path.

Oh yeah, I went on to the village this evening and spoke about the spiritual laws which govern the universe. Two teenaged boys and a middle-aged woman responded to the invitation to follow Jesus. After the service one of the boys came and searched me out. He spoke no English and I no Spanish. He merely grabbed my hand, locked onto my eyes and said “Muchas Gracias.” He didn’t have to say any more. I know exactly what he meant. It was there in the eyes.

When the service was ending they were singing and clapping with wild Latin abandon. I generally stand around and listen since I don’t know the language or the song, but for some reason I decided that the tune and the rhythm were worthy, so right there in the middle of the crowd I cut loose with a jig that I am thoroughly confident would embarrass my daughters and cause them to disown me, but would make my Pentecostal friends happy that I was dancing in the spirit. It brought the house down. Yeah, in  Nicaragua I’m Dancing WIth The Stars.

I still think the kids think I’m Santa Claus. They come around by the dozens shouting “Hey Gringo” and poking me in the belly. Then they want hugs.

I’m so thankful to God for the opportunity to share what He’s given to me. I feel like it is a precious treasure. Tonight on the drive back from the village one of the pastors was telling me about how I had talked with him about “Identity in Christ” when I was here two years ago, and how he’d incorporated that into every sermon he’d preached since then. Understanding who you are—your endowments and capabilities—when Jesus comes into your life IS the whole thing. I can’t tell you how it moves me to know that it helped him, and that he’s using it to help countless others.

THIS is abundant living!