Moving to Wordpress

Well, I have avoided it for a years, but I finally gave in to the superior blog options Wordpress offers... You can now find me at my new and continuing to be developed Wordpress home.

www.jasonclarkis.com

I wont be closing this blog and will probably continue to post here for a little longer. But eventually I plan on permanently residing on my new blog. Hope to see ya there!

- Jason

Surrendered and Untamed Free Album Download

About a week ago I decided it was time to make some new friends. So I did something that I learned when I was in kindergarten - I shared. I have given the album away to nearly 1000 new friends!! Very soon I will be emailing them to see if can I come over for dinner.

If you haven't got the album yet...

NO LONGER AVAILABLE

Enjoy!

And Before the Coffee is Fully Brewed...

Anthony & Mary Keith Skinner recently visited the Clark's. It was like streams in the desert. I hadn't realize how lonely I’ve felt for the past several years until I was sitting across the table with a new friend. I have some amazing friends… some of them are in Dallas and Jackson and Seattle… Eye contact and shared coffee is priceless...

You know what was really refreshing about the Skinners visit? They didn’t visit us for them. That's not to say we weren't good company, or that we didn’t bless the Skinners, I mean, we are pretty amazing. But my point is, they didn’t come for them; they came for us. They walked through the door and started loving us before the coffee was fully brewed. People who have lived immersed in the Fathers love, well, they love. They can’t help it. You see; they’ve become love.

Karen and I have begun to live this way as well. We are daily becoming convinced in our Fathers always-good love. And so, we too are becoming love. You know what the best thing is about becoming love? It's not hard to love, you don’t have to try. All you have to do is walk through the door and before the coffee is fully brewed… well...

Jesus was love. It wasn’t hard for Him either. He didn’t have to try. All He had to do was keep His eyes on His Dad. His Dad was Love too.

We went to hear the Skinners sing at The Queen City Church the Sunday night before they headed home. It was beautiful, sweet, and powerful. It was all those things for several reasons. First, as my friend Andy Squyres says, Anthony's voice is a million bucks. So there was that. But it was also beautiful, sweet, and powerful for a profoundly simpler reason; the Skinners weren’t there for themselves, they were there for all of us.

Mid-strum, Anthony muted his strings and paused for a moment, “I used to try and love God...” my new friend said from the stage. He was sitting on a stool, Mary Keith next to him. “...but now I just let Him love me.”

And before the coffee was fully brewed…

You want to know how a person becomes love; you want to know how a person can live for another? It has nothing to do with trying…

The Oscillating God

The Philippines is the hottest most humid place I have ever been in my life. New Orleans in July doesn’t hold a candle to its suffocating heat…

I lay in my homemade sleeping bag, a queen size sheet that Karen had halved and sown shut at the bottom before the trip. My head was on a rolled t-shirt; one of my last clean ones. The mosquito netting hung from an exposed beam above my head, cocooning me. It kinda worked; at least, it kept more mosquitoes from getting in. And the ones that slept with me were well gorged.

I doubted the net would stop the rats that ran across the beams over our heads but they seemed to have some place to go and were thankfully uninterested in the sweaty sleeping men beneath them. Strike that, the sweaty horizontal men. No one was sleeping. And our minds weren’t on the disagreeable plywood floor, the hungry mosquitoes, or the busy indisposed rats. The only thing that existed in our universe at that moment was the oscillating fan.

I wanted to find the fella that had invented the damned beautiful thing and hug, and then strangle him. My emotions where as fickle as the wind. The fan was my delight and my torture. There were five of us attempting to sleep on the second floor of the two story tin shack located on the side of a Filipino volcano. For the brief seconds the moving air brushed my clammy skin I knew to the core of my being that God was good and he loved me. “Oh God.” I sighed. And then the stupid fan moved on and I would begin to doubt, “Oh God!” I cried out again, this time in desperation.

Much of my life I have served an oscillating God. You know, the fella with the fickle nature. The guy that has sunshine and ponies in one hand and the Skill saw in the other. I have determined His nature through the lens of my needs. When life was sweet, with demands met, health great, and friendships deep and true, I’d sigh blissfully “Oh God.”

But life isn’t always sweet. Skill saws happen. And when the valley of the shadow of death is upon us, that’s when we must know to our core that our Fathers nature doesn’t change. He isn’t fickle. He hasn’t gotten tired of us, or changed His mind about us. He hasn’t turned His heart from us; He’s not judging us, or condemning us. He is still the same always-good Love He has always been.

I am growing in my revelation regarding my Fathers heart toward me, “Only goodness and love all the days of my life,” that’s what I say. I say it when life is a “mountaintop” and I am learning to say it when life is a “valley.”

My Father doesn't Oscillate! His love is steadfast and relentless. His love is pure and beautiful. His love pursues me, enraptures me, consumes me. His love is the beginning, the end, the before, the after, and everything in between. His love is good - always!