Gifts and Return Policies

I've never looked at it this way, but as I sit here in the MVNU study room, fully aware that if I do not do my homework for my private Christian university , stop admiring how beautifully wonderful my girlfriend is, and writing melodic worship music in my head, that I will lose this school, my job where I get to tour around a small section of the midwest leading worship, this summer, this school year and the next.
So does God bless us, knowing full-well that we'll be overwhelmed all of the time? As I see it, God has given immense creativity when it comes to composing music, writing stories, performing humor, and everything in between. He has always blessed me with a wonderful job at a wonderful school. Lastly, I have an extravagantly stunning Christian girlfriend, plus great friends and tons of other people that I just know.
All I did was reiterate what I said in the beginning, but as I am sitting here, attempting to wittily write a little bit about how I feel, procrastinating further on already late, procrastinated papers, I wonder if God is testing me and wondering how far I can push to discipline myself, or maybe my intrinsic writing abilities are meant to be further developed and that's why all I can think about is music and not homework. Why is that schoolwork is the one failing aspect of all my priorities?

I love all that God has given me, but can I honestly handle all of it?

In My Mind Nowadays...

...circulating way too many times, are these new-found thoughts. Thoughts that I had thought in the past were so very relative and unrealistic and meant only for my future when I was an adult and on my own. Surprisingly enough, I woke up today realizing I'm now to that point. And now these thoughts that I had thought were so very far down the road for me, are, well, on the same patch of road I'm now upon.

And college has brought a fear I had yet to run in to.
When I arrived here, I realized that I underestimated the "a freshman again, starting over, at the bottom, etc, etc" that you hear oh so very often. I was alone, or at least attacked by the feeling of it. To come from a place where everyone knows everyone, and now to a place where I have to remake all my friends, more or less, feels adolescent and foreign and horrifying.
The cold fact that I was on my own in the sense of being an adult for the first time. Back home, I'm man enough to declare that I was a hardcore Momma's boy, and boy did I enjoy being waited on hand and foot.

Don't get me wrong. My sweet, sweet, angelic Mother was in no sense of the word my slave, but definitely took very care of me: an act I will have a hard time following, but intend completely to.
So coming to college on my own, living on my own, meant taking care of myself on my own. It meant being completely responsible for everything.
Lastly, who am I? What do I stand for? Am I womanizing, douche-hog prick with no morals or thought processes? Am I a bookworm who puts studies ahead and makes no friends for the sake of my education? Am I a suck-up, as I have been called so many times before? Am I Christian? Am I really a Christian? Was I ever?

Finding my identity has been so trivial for me, even back home, but especially in the last month. Which is why, I think for every boy and girl, the thought of having a significant other seems like it would help solve all problems.
I've definitely gone that road before. Date a person to fill a gap they were never made to fill, which explains the constant thought of a pretty lady friend to date on my mind.
There comes a point in every person's life, I think, where you decide what you're going to live for. For a while, and even now, I have struggled so much, living for the acceptance and expectations of other people. The idea that to please others will please me and all my aches and pains.

C.S. Lewis said it good to my heart...

"Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires
exists. A baby feels hunger; well there is such a thing as food; a duckling
wants to swim; well there is such a thing as water, etc. If I find myself a
desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable
explanation is that I was made for another world. Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well there is such a thing as food; a duckling wants to swim; well there is such a thing as water, etc. If I find myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world..."

I've found that when push comes to shove, you cannot solve a spiritual problem with physical remedies. And by that, I only mean that if your identity crisis goes down as far as your spirit, no person will ever fix that before they find God. Or more realistically...just stop looking for everything else.

Saturday night.

I think it's human nature to make things more complicated. To over think things. To try and make things more than what they are, even if they would be fine just the way they were. Kind of like the intro to this blog.

I've sat and sat and sat for hours, in anger, just going over and over about how mad and confused I am about my father. Why he left in the first place. Why he can't do this and why he does that. I've thought about how different we were and tried to take every possible measure to make sure it stayed that way. In a way I envy the children with the "cool" parents. The ones you wish were your parents. At least for my Dad I do. A lot. I don't wish he wasn't my dad, just that he wasn't the way he is. So...in a way, I do wish for a new dad.

To clarify why I am writing this, it's for one reason. So I remember the feeling I have this early Sunday morning. I'm not that different at all from my father. In the ways that he fell short though, I won't. I can take where he failed and I can prosper. And the man my father is...I'll live with.
He told me tonight that he sits at home alone, just thinking about how alone he is.
I sit at home, surrounded by people, just thinking about how alone I am.

I love my father so much, and he's a good person, and so am I. Just because my dad screwed the beginning of his story doesn't mean it has to a sad ending. And it won't.

For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

I don't always believe in the Lord, and I don't always believe in myself, but lately I've been telling myself something.
There are two kinds of people in this world. One who sees love as chemical reactions and neuron impulses exploding in the brain and nothing more. And then there's another person who sees love as something more. Something intangible. Something beyond comprehension. Something divine.
I'm the second person, and one who believe in a love like that can't deny a God.

I've found it.

Granted that it's not close to the end of the road, but neverless, I've found the path leading to the road; that road that will define the rest of my life. I can see it. I can feel it. I'm leaving behind everything I was.

In a way, I feel like me typing this out makes it real, makes it concrete. Makes a checkpoint in my life. The Missions Trip in '09 started this whole transformation and now it's coming to an end, more or less. I'm here. I've arrived.

This began as a blur, and I remember the day I woke up from it. A 2-year-plus blur. And I remember how the blurry life was. It was like watching my life on a screen and only every once in a while pushing a button to just gently influence a tiny bit of my life, but never enough to make any lasting impressions. No. The lasting impressions were done in the blur. And the days leading up to my "awakening", I remember thinking "there has to be more than just crawling along, barely being alive" and "how did this even begin?". Or even better "how long ago did this REALLY begin?". And I remember when I woke up from this blur thinking "what was I thinking?".
As I'm typing this, I've realized what put me in the blur. Solitude. I forced myself into something I wasn't, away from the people who made me who I really was: family.
Blurs are bad. End of story.

So then, once I was out of the blur, there was this bitterness. This anger. This resentment, towards myself and everyone around me. I felt like I had screwed up so bad, I'd never find my way back. Like I didn't deserve to be happy. That the family and friends coming to embrace shouldn't want to embrace me. So I pushed. As hard as I could, and I plummeted into a dark world, where hate was my threshold.
But then my threshold was forced to move. To cram into a van with people I hated for hours upon hours to a place I didn't choose to go. I loathed it. I loathed it all. I loathed myself. But then, something shifted in my heart. Deep, deep, deep inside my heart. As I saw others interact with people all around me less fortunate than I, something clicked. Something moved. Something shifted.
And then I heard these people speak of a moment. A moment I thought only existed in my dreams, and even there twas hard to find. A moment where God would meet them. A moment where they could speak with God. I wanted this more than I have ever wanted anything in my entire life. A way out. A way better than anything I could have ever thought up.

Now I'd be naive to say that my despair began with this horrible blur-stage, because that's not where it started. No. My despair flows through my childhood. My emotions towards my father. Towards my fears caused by that. My pressures to be something greater than myself. Everything starts there and flows into more chaos.

As we drove towards this place that all the other spoke of: the beach, I did something I rarely do. I stopped talking and focused on a single thought. Hope.

As we drew closer to the beach, I felt all my demons rising to the surface. Like I was collecting everything dark inside me and just holding it above my head, ready to let it drop into the ocean. And when that van finally stopped, I ran as fast as I could. And as soon as I settled, I separated myself from the group. I walked and walked until I was far away from everyone else and pleaded; screamed to God, cried to God, begging for Him to just speak to me. And I got nothing.

Then, after worship in the van, I heard a whisper in my head. Not an audible whisper, but something say, and it couldn't have been me, because what it said is what I never wanted to do. It said "People follow you. Lead them".



I've shortened this immensely, but, at this point in my life I find myself slipping slowly back to where I was just a year ago, and I type this to remind myself of something. There's hope.

This whole next part is just an excerpt from the paper we had to write the week after we got back from the Missions Trip, but I want to include this so I can always come back and read this whole thing together, so bear with me, as if anyone is actually reading this at all, ha.

________________________________________________________________

Right now, if I was asked about my shore, I’d say it’s pretty smooth, but lately there’s rocks and bits and pieces of things I thought had washed away forever have just washed right back, and started to once again get covered and stuck in the sand. Wow that sounds pretty lame and cheesy, but when I picture and think about my shore, that’s what I see. The sad thing though was that on the trip, once I had been on that shore, my shore was clean and smooth. I feel like things would be easier though with someone to keep me accountable. Proverbs 15:22 says:







“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed”






One moment I had with God was one day when we riding to our worksite and we were listening to Coldplay. We were passing all these houses and stores that looked rundown with homeless people here and there too, and the song “Fix You” came on. A calming sense came over me. I started to think of the reason why we had come to Texas. To fix what we could and let people know that someone cares and God is good, or at least that’s how I looked at it. But then it hit me that it’s so much more that. This isn’t just about us affecting them. It’s about them, and this whole trip, and all of that affecting all of us. Then, one night back at the church, we had our first devotion time, and I remember it clear as day.


Ben and I were shooting hoops in the gym when Candace and Steve told us we had to all get together and have a devotion time. We both immediately were kind of ticked. After a long day of work, now we would have to sit through this. So, we went, and for some reason, there was a chair in the back, separate from everyone else, and I sat there, of all places. I think I might have been having a bad night or something like that. Anyway, everything Steve and Candace said during their thing is sort of a blur, but whatever it was, I overwhelmed with this sadness and light all at once. This sudden realization that I had been living in a haze and all of a sudden the veil had been lifted and not only did I see where I was going wrong, but how to fix it, just like the song had said earlier. I broke down and began crying, and after the service, I saw Ben was crying too, which blew my mind. Semi-quiet, quite reticent, and very too himself about his feeling. But, for this one rare occasion, like a lunar eclipse, I saw it. That even the hardest shell cracked. And now that we’ve all come back to school, it’s like it never happened. But if there’s one thing about divine movements like that that I’ve learned, it’s that things like Ben uncontrollably sobbing and wanting nothing in this world but change, or the feeling I’m getting right now as I type these words, don’t happen just to be forgotten. There is always a reason behind it, always a plan, even though we don’t always see it.


The last moment, and I promise I’ll stop, is on the shore, ironically. I think it was the day after the whole devotion night we were finally going to the shore. It had been a delayed trip, but it was right on time. You see, when I talked to Candace the night before till pretty late, we talked about this. God’s timing was perfect. The Coldplay moment, then the devotion (and all kind of little things in between), building up to the one, pivotal moment: the shore. I kept hearing time and time again how Steve and Candace couldn’t wait to see the shore, where their Papa was going to speak to them. I wanted that so bad. I ached for that feeling. For what seemed like forever, I had waited for God’s voice. For God just to say one word to me, just one. Now that I look back, I think I just wasn’t listening. But this time, I told myself, would be different. I prayed the entire drive just about to the shore, praying for God to speak to me on that shore and change me. As soon as my feet touched the shore, I had my whole plan in mind. Spend some time with friends, and then go off on my own. Of course, Emma followed me and asked if it was okay if she came with me, but Emma, along with so many other things, was one of the main distractions keeping from listening. Nothing against Emma, but she’s a huge part of me, like music, another distraction. So, I just said politely I wanted to be alone for a bit. So as I walked alone down the beach, I prayed and prayed, and then stopped, and turned towards the open sea. I looked around to see if anyone was around, and there wasn’t. I said in a whisper “God, speak to me. Please, anything”. But, I got nothing. So I began to take a couple steps into the ocean. Again, I begged God for a anything: a word, even a letter would be better than silence. But I got nothing. So I took some more steps. The water began to get close to the bottom of my shorts, and it also began to pick up in intensity, it seemed, as I stepped out farther. I raised my voice a little louder. “God. Please. Something. Anything. I can’t do this anymore”. But once again, I got nothing. Tears came to my eyes and took a couple more steps in the ocean. It was getting harder to stand and I began to fear more and more what I might step on if I walked any further. And this time, my heart ached so bad, I couldn’t keep it in. I let go of holding my shorts up higher and held out my hands, and I screamed at the top of my voice “God! Tell me what to do! I’m lost! I need direction! Anything!” and for a reason I can’t explain, I grew calm. My heart stopped aching, and I walked away. I came back to the group, Ambrose spoke, told us to now go by ourselves, but I was already done. So, I joked around with Luke and everyone else I passed for a little bit while walking on the beach, and then caught up to Emma. Eventually, it got dark, and we all crawled into the van for one of my most nerve-wracking performances yet. Emma and I played some songs, and then came to this one song that had been stuck in my head for the weeks right before the trip. Never heard it before then. We played it, and the whole van grew quiet.


Whatever happened in that moment, when we played that song, changed my life forever. Steve said everyone sing along with the chorus, and everyone did. And they still were, even when we got home.






“I finally found where I belong. I finally found where I belong, in your presence. I finally found where I belong. It’s to be with you. To be with you”






It was like the words were written just for me, just for that moment. The van ride home was amazing too. Nothing but 45 minutes of just straight up worship music. No talking, or anything, and once again, Ben Sparks was breaking down, feeling the same thing I was. And then, it happened. God said “This is what you’re supposed to do: lead”. It’s simple, I feel guilty a bit saying I’ve always known it, but I have. For as long as I can remember people have said I’m a leader. Don McNally, our old youth pastor at Naz; the night he told everyone he was leaving and we were all crying, he told me something. He said “One day, God is going to do great things through me, and it would be my choice to let him or not”. Steve and I have had talks about it for a while sophomore year. About a week, if I remember correctly, before we left for the trip too, I ran into Brannon, and he didn’t say anything really but a couple sentences. He said “You’re the only one that’s gonna change things”, or something to that effect, referring to the school and chapel and whatnot. And, the night when Candace and I spoke, she talked about my undeniable leadership...

My eyes have been opened though to just the lack of openness to the Spirit among peers. Supposed Christians aren’t acting like Christians, and non-Christians teens have no one to go to it seems as if they are barely any teen Christians making any big impact. It makes me just that much more determined to do something big, and I will, but just not on my time. I have to have a lot of patience. I might want this now, but who really knows when this will happen. I know it will though. I just know it.

Humble

There's something very humbling about being human, simple and obvious. No matter how high we place ourselves, we will always come tumbling down and see that we were just fine way down here.

To wait.

It's strange how I fear order over chaos. I think in the quiet still night, I fear the likeliness of an erupting volcano greatens. Sometimes I feel like I deserve to suffer though, with how much I am blessed in everything else. That's not being conceided either. I am blessed beyond measure, much more than most people I know.  For this reason alone, I find my greatest despair. Maybe it's my dramatic nature or maybe it's my deep deep pessimisticness rising up, but I feel like with how screwed up my past is (my uncomfortably close past, that is), I should be suffering. But instead, God bestows to me this bountiful plate of just about everything I need or at least the tools to get there.

I fear so many things. Greatness. Power. Leadership. Love. I feel like so many of these things I've stumbled into, yet, I never was shown what to do with them; how to handle them. Isn't that the beauty of it though, in a way? If greatness and power and leadership and love were taught, strictly, then they really wouldn't have the same meaning they do. They are unique in their own ways, all with so many variables. Uncertainty.

I grew up in uncertainty. I still am. Uncertainty in a way is a synonym for fear in my life. Fear of love. Fear of responsibility. Fear of becoming what others have become.
If we were to get more specific: Fear of whether or not my family would have a home every month. Fear of what my brother will become, given our circumstances. Fear of what I'll become given my circumstance; given my mistakes.

You ever make a mistake so bad, you wonder if you'll always be haunted, influenced, and directed by that one bad decision? I know most things are a "jack-up. fix. jack-up. fix". But there's those select few that are just...digging at your mind. "Why, oh why, did I do that?" or "Why, oh why, did I not do that?"

Yes, it's true. I dwell too long on my mistakes and fears, etc, etc.
I just wish I knew how to fix them, my way. Waiting is so infuriating. But, I know it's the only way out of my mess.




To wait. The exasperating key. The bothersome truth. The...tantalizing answer.
It sucks.

I will though. Prayer and waiting seem to be the only hope I've got.

Change your view of something, and the things you view shall change.

I really hope that's true.