New Starts, Life, and a Funeral for me

Well.....

I don't even really know where to start. I was sitting in my bed, doing a short devotional tonight/this morning, and I started thinking about where I am with God. There are so many times when I feel totally disconnected from him and even start to wonder if he really is there. I've come to this point numerous times in my spiritual journey and can never figure out how I get out of this feeling alone or why I keep coming back to this point. Then I am reminded of the numerous times I have been told that I should be journaling my experiences and that by doing this I can look back on where I have been and this will help me move forward. So I pull out a notebook and a pen and look at the blank page. "I can't write all this stuff going on in my head" I say to myself, "there is too much to write and I don't want to spend the time physically writing all this stuff down." So then I realize that I should type it on my laptop, and off of that thought comes one that I should blog. Just to make it clear, (even though it's pretty evident seeing my number of blogs) that I am completely horrible at this blog thing. I'm pretty sure nobody will read them. I look at people who blog almost everyday and wonder where they find the time, but then I look at myself and the stuff that I do everyday and see that I totally have the time to do this. So all that being said, I'm going to ATTEMPT to be more consistent with this. No promises are being made, but I really feel that this is going to help me (and maybe some of you) move along this spiritual journey.


So to catch everybody up on what's been going on in my life over the past year (yeah it's been that long), I moved out of the dorms in May of 2007 into my first apartment. YEAH for me! Anyways, I lived in Denton over the summer and found out just how much fun life can be and suck at the same time when you don't live with your parents. I spent the first part of the summer working some summer camps and just basically living it up with my friends. Then in July, I got a job working in Arlington/Lewisville, making sandwiches at a place called Firehouse Subs. Not too bad a job, or so it seemed at the time, and it was paying the bills. I was working with my roommate at the time and things were going pretty good. Then before I knew it the summer was gone and I was back in school. I had started to work my way into a few of my major classes and thought that things were going pretty much the way that I had planned for them to go. This is the point where God steps in and changes things up completely. I didn't find anything I was learning enjoyable and dreaded every class that pertained to my major. I was doing horrible in school and the stress of it was killing me. I didn't understand. This is what I wanted, this is what God wanted, but it wasn't and I knew it. I was to the point of running from God. I had made up my mind that I wanted to finish school, become a basketball coach in a small town, have a house out in the country, raise a few kids, and enjoy life with my wife. I would follow through with God's plan by doing all this. The only problem was that these plans that I had made, they didn't at all involve God. They were what I wanted for my life to become. They were what I had envisioned as being the perfect life.
I've felt God calling me to a life of missions for some time now. I never really understood quite what that meant but I knew that this was definitely what God wanted from me. I ran from it, literally as far as I could. I tried to get away, but the funny thing about God is that you can't get away. He is always there. Waiting on you to come back. Knowing all along that you will be back, and in the weakness that brings you back, he will make you strong.
I told my parents before Christmas of 2007 that I felt that God wanted me in the mission field. I told them that I was considering changing school and looking for a college that would help prepare me for my journey with God in the mission field. I move into an apartment by myself, signed a short lease that would allow me to move out after the Spring semester, signed up for a few basic courses, and started the process of looking for that perfect school that would be exactly where God wanted me. I had just one thing that I did not want to see happen. I DID NOT....IN ANY WAY......NOT EVEN CLOSE.....want to attend Howard Payne University. It's too close to home and i'll get made fun of by my close friends if I go there. So I started looking at other colleges. I look far and wide. In state, out of state, Baptist, non-denominational, bible college, mission college, I looked everywhere. I visited a few, talked to a few on the phone, spent a ton of time on the internet looking. People would help me, by telling me of different ones that they had heard of or knew something about. I would look, maybe even become interested in a place, and then something would go wrong. They wouldn't believe the way I did, the school cost too much, the program had way too many hours, I didn't see eye-to-eye with the staff at the school, they didn't have the programs I was looking for......the list could go on forever. So after getting tired of my parents asking, I visited Howard Payne. We took a tour (I'd seen it before), we talked with Financial aid (they told us nothing new), I got a T-Shirt(wooo), and then right before we left, I got to meet some of the professors, specifically the one that would be dealing with me. I made my decisions based on two things she said: 1. That we want to not only invest in your life through your education, but also through where you go after you leave us, and 2. That we aren't always about the theology of it all, but are about loving people the way Jesus loves them. I was sold. If anybody could some up the way I view ministry, it's with that. Loving people the way Jesus loves them. I didn't want to go to Howard Payne, I'm still not sure I do, but God wants me to. I don't want to leave all my Denton friends, Overflow ministries, my girlfriend that I love with all my heart, but God wants me to. It's been tough. I don't like it sometimes. It would be so much easier to just do it the way I want to do it, but that's not what it's about. It's about obediance to Christ. And so i've come to this conclusion: It's Not About Me.

Ponder that statement. Does you life look like mine did (and still does sometimes)? Do you make it about you? Or something bigger than you?