Return to Normalcy

Well, the much needed Thanksgiving Break has come, and is almost gone. It's amazing how easy it is NOT to blog, I don't know why more people don't do it. (See what I did there?) But yeah, November was a three-week extension of Hell Week, and I went into break in serious need of sleep and trans-fats. I slept 'till 130 today and yesterday was Thanksgiving, so I'm going to say that both of these were a complete and utter success.

On to the updates...

Spent a wonderful weekend-plus with the always dazzling and ever so lovely Jessica, so that was pretty great. Took a couple days to sit on my butt before Thanksgiving, in preparation for more butt-sitting the day of. In addition, I was introduced to College Humor, which yeah, has some raunchy bits, but if you have some self-control, it is completely worth it for the outright funny parts. On the note of College Humor, I've started the initial scripting for Production, an Office-like short film (aiming for 40 minutes) following the antics of a community theater company. I'll be meeting with a coalition of other writers in early December, and we hope to be filming sometime in the January-February window.

Jessica and I are still feeling strongly-called to Sweden, a country caught in the midst of religious-liberalism, hedonism, and a reemerging pagan culture. Pray that we would be attentive to the urgings of the Holy Spirit in the next few years as we prepare to cross the Atlantic. Also please pray that we would begin to experience life-change now that will prepare us for ministry, because, and I quote: 'There is nothing magical about a plane ride".

Thanks for listening to the ramblings of a sometimes-moron.

No Dark Corners

The past few weeks have been a mire of schoolwork! As I go through what could be the most difficult segment of my Undergraduate experience, I've been trying to hold on to my greatest commitment: Jesus. It's been rough, particularly now that business has allowed for parts of my sin nature to surface once more. Have you even encountered the same problem over and over again, not being able to make head nor tail of it? I'm right there this week. I'm so sick of myself, and the way that I approach life, but I feel like every time I throw down my life, I make it further away from my sins, but I just... can't... break free. So tonight, I came to a realization while looking up passages which concern prayer for my Herm class, and found something I'm not sure I've seen before: Luke 11:34-36. Part of this concerns the eyes, and what I allow myself to see, which in turn devastates my heart. What I choose to do with my eyes can wind up filling my entire body with darkness, and then I wonder why I am so distant from my Lord. I realize now that I can't possibly be the man that I'm meant to be if I don't first learn how to regulate what I observe with my eyes. Pray that I could soon be filled with light, and that my life would radiate the Light that lives in me.

Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love

I knew in August that this was going to be a life-changing semester. I just had a feeling that God was going to direct me into my calling. And here in the first days of October it seems as though that feeling has been relieved. Through prayer and faith, combined with a multitude of positive signs, Jessica and I are convinced that we are destined for the mission-field. We have no idea where, or when, or even how--- But we know that one day we will be in a different culture, sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ as our life's work. The two of us are very excited as we are awaiting the time when we find out where we are going. It is a struggle not just to drop out of school and go now, but I know that what I am learning at CIU will one day help me in the mission field, and so I remain. Pray for us as we seek the Lord's will in these matters.

A Rough Week Going, A Rough Week Coming

Just for starters, I'm in the perfect mood to watch Dead Man, with Johnny Depp. Grim, just the way movies should be. Without spoiling it: The deer scene really bothers me.

But on to the subject of the last two weeks... I've been holding on for dear life. Hermaneutics, ie. my second girlfriend, has really been taking up a lot of my time. It's just been obscene, not to mention all the homework for my other five classes. So...uh...yeah, it's been hard to find time to spend with God, which seems really stupid, as my entire second major in college has to do with studying His Word and experiencing life with Him... that bugs me. So no deep emotional woes tonight! Just a slow, quiet evening of wondering why the heck I even started a blog to begin with, because this is quite stupid. Who honestly cares about the mundane things that I do? Or the not-so-well thought out truths that I would convey otherwise. Oh well, I guess my mom will always read these, no matter how stupid they get.

The Wicked Self: Explaining Self-Loathing

Disgust is a strong word. Therefore, I do not use it lightly. Have you ever been disgusted by anything? A flaming bag of dog crap, perhaps? Or the actions of someone you trusted with your heart? Almost all of us have at one time or another been repulsed by the actions or thoughts of another. But have you ever been disgusted with yourself? I mean, really, really angry, to a point where you want nothing to do with yourself, unless it was to hit yourself with a car (think about it...). I reached that point on Thursday, when I was struck with a fact. I really don't deserve this salvation I've been so hopped up about for five years. For all natural purposes: I am a bad person. 

Guilt is a many-layered thing. If it were easy, or uniform, then it we would all be either hedonistic or depressed. What we feel when we are guilty is a product of psychology, and is influenced by experience--- Serial killers have a different sense of guilt than a child who has broken a window with a baseball. My own sense of guilt has changed a lot over the years: As a child, I didn't think twice about stealing from people I professed to be my friends, but now as an adult, I would never dream of stealing anything from someone who I would have to look in the eye every day. But the real change in my guilt-nature comes from within my head. I've always considered my mind a safe refuge, where nobody else could ever touch me. My darkest thoughts and desires can often be found breeding there, swirling around in some black ooze that whispers anger and desire to my heart. For the longest time, I thought that I could even keep my mind away from God. But recently, I've been changing: I've been fighting my mind. My guilt-nature is morphing. Whereas before I would have had no qualms thinking about sex or revenge or worse, now I find myself struggling against those ideas. It's been a slow process, over three or four years, with most of the change coming rapidly in the past fourteen months. The changes are coming even faster now, as I'm learning not only to struggle against my naturally wicked thoughts, but to be disgusted when I give in to them. Notice that I didn't say 'when I think them'. I can't avoid certain thoughts popping into my head, and if you think that you can, please tell me how. But what I can do is deny my mind from entertaining these thoughts, which is still in and of itself an ordeal. 

How does this tie in to Thursday, though? Let's just say I let my mind wander, both in boredom over our chapel speaker, and in lust trying to overpower that boredom. I realized it pretty quickly, and then my heart proceeded to layeth the smacketh down...eth on my mind. I was so repulsed by my stupid mind, and to a certain degree my heart, that I wanted to rip them out and stomp on them in the middle of chapel. And then the answer presented itself: What if I ran so far in the opposite direction of these thoughts that I actually flung myself closer to God? So I tried it, and wow: Worship in chapel was quite different than it had ever been before. I understand that Christianity isn't all about emotion, otherwise televangelists would have even more misguided success than they do already. But man, God flared up in me, refining bits of my heart and mind that hadn't been cleaned-up in a long time. For the first time in my walk with Christ, I have started to realize how undeserving I am of grace, and how I really do have to take up my Cross daily just to stay above the water that is my natural tendency to shave with the grain of the World.

The Ignorant Birth: Explaining Magnolias

My great-grandmother died recently. She had been living in a nursing home for just over a year, and had grown accustomed to living there. She had been in her house for longer than I have been alive, almost always living alone, even into her late eighties. In her old backyard, there is a magnolia tree. In July, I took a seed pod from the ground near the trunk. All of the seeds were missing from it, picked out by birds and squirrels, just as they had always been when I was a kid. I didn't realize at the time that the pod was seedless, and took it home anyway, not knowing that it could ever grow, no matter how much water, soil, and sunlight it was exposed to. Digging away the soil of our garden with a scrap of wood, I planted the seedless pod tonight. I know now that I had planted something dead, never useful for becoming a tree.

Rewind to Wednesday morning: I was walking to my car at school to grab some textbooks in order to work through lunch. I noticed two or three magnolia trees with seed pods ready to fall...

Back to the present: I have convinced myself that I should collect a seed-pod from school on Monday afternoon. Even though my own seed pod is dead, this second pod is filled with seeds, ready to burst forth in new life. Now what if I planted the new seed pod directly on top of the old, dead one? Could I not, in complete ignorance, assume that it was the old seed pod, and not the new one, that burst forth in life? I know this is an illogical and ignorant assumption, but will anyone on Earth correct me if I say that any resulting seedling is a product of the dead husk, and not the living pod?

I promised myself that I wouldn't start in on faith in my first post, lest I attract the harassment of people with nothing better to do, but I will anyway. The metaphor of these magnolia pods directly relates to my relationship with Christ! I was dead, completely devoid of the possibility that I might grow into a tree someday. But another, perfectly healthy seed pod was planted in my place, so that I would be considered to have life, and that I would grow skyward by the strength of someone else.

It's been a rough week, but the death of my one and only Nanny may have been just the thing to spur me on in my hopeless and never ending pursuit of holiness, trying to reach for a height beyond my means.