לצפות

I found this on someone's old facebook notes.  It's a passage from the book "A Fine Line" by Kary Oberbrunner.  It is fantastic



Expect pain.
Expect to be misunderstood.
Expect to be persecuted and expect it to come first from those who follow Jesus.
Expect to be maligned, attacked, and ridiculed from all sides.
Expect to grow tired and weary.
Expect to want to give up.
Expect to lose many old friends. Expect to lose all of your friends where the "church" is the central reason for your friendship. Only your deep and Christ-centered friendships will endure.
Expect to be labeled (a freak, a hippie, a cult leader, a quitter, a fraud, an idealist, a purist, a heretic, a divider, a communist, a jerk, an egomaniac, a devil worshiper). Yes, I've been called them all to my face.
Expect to weep...deeper and stronger than you ever have.
Expect to doubt your calling, your convictions, your path, your faith, and your life.
Expect to be lonely.
Expect to be seen as utterly unsuccessful.
Expect to die…nothing will be left of you. You will cease to exist. The last things in you to die will be your desire to be great for God and your desire to be happy.

And then you will finally...

Live. Expect life. Expect meaning. Expect to finally understand the prophets and apostles. Expect to know Jesus and his life...for that is all that you will have...and that is all that you need.

Creation & Nostalgia

When I was younger I had a xanga, and every once and a while I will go back on it and look to see what I wrote about a particular event in my life.  Quite amusing really.  But what really gets to me is that I used to share every detail about everything in life on there.  Where I ate, when I woke up, what tests I did, etc.... now it just seems so stupid.  Now I write sometimes and if I skip a week it isn't a huge deal.

I am in love with God.  I am head over heals in love.  It's actually making me tear up.  I honestly don't know what I would do without him.  He is probably the only reason I have survived a lot of the stuff I have gone through and have many of the friendships I have today, even if I don't really understand the meaning of them.  God has formed me the way he wants me and loves me more than I could fathom.  In return God wants me, and all of me.  I have trouble focusing on him with distractions such as friends and boys and music and school, but really all God calls me to do is love him and love others.  Love until I can love no more, and then fight through that.  I mean, yes, God calls us to do our best in everything and to strive for the best, but he also calls for us to spend time with him and getting to know him better.  God wants to know us intimately, and that is a beyond amazing thought.  The King of Kings, maker of the universe and the heavers and earth wants to know you, small little you.

Something I struggle with are feelings of loneliness.  Whether it's feeling like a 3rd wheel or sometimes just feeling like I don't have close friends (even thought that is completely stupid), I feel lonely.  And lately I've been thinking a lot about this.... why is that?  Why is it that I feel lonely?  Is it because I am not satisfied with God alone?  Is it because I long for someone to share the little things with?

I think it is honestly a mix of the two.  I think that if we don't spend enough time with God and focus on how we are not exactly fitting in we will feel like we are inadequate and unimportant, but really God is telling us otherwise.  God wants to develop a one-on-one relationship with us.  He wants to know our ins and outs and in betweens.  He longs to see us at our worst, our most vulnerable and what we think is our ugliest.  Maybe because then we are being the most real?

At the camp I work at we are encouraged to have "one-on-one"'s with our campers.  We are encouraged to get to know them for who they are.  We try to learn their stories and learn where they have been.  One of my good friends talks about how he has these with his boss every couple of weeks, and I think that is really cool.

So what I think is cool is this..... my xanga..... all that useless day to day crap: God already knows it and he cherishes it.  He knows "my going out and my lying down".  He is "familiar with all my ways".  And that is so amazing! God wants to know that.  God desires to know that.  God wants to know every little detail that I now don't often tell people because I don't think they care.  People don't care, but God does.

and that is the God I worship.  A God who loves me.  A God who cherishes and adores the very ground I walk on, which he himself made.  I am in love with God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost.  My life would be nothing without him.

I am posting Psalm 139 on here.  I love this psalm so much.  It shows that God loves us and every little thing we do.  That is beyond amazing.  God knows the hairs on our heads and the thorns in our hearts, yet he loves us and created us imperfectly so that we would want to get to know a perfect being.

I want to get a tattoo.  I want this tattoo to say "Loved" and under it have "Psalm 139:14" written.  I want to get this placed on my left wrist.  There's several reasons I want to get it, and get it there, but one of them is that I just want to remember and know that I am fearfully and wonderfully made the incredible image of God the Father All Mighty.  I am perfect the way I am, whether I need to loose or gain a few pounds doesn't matter.  Whether my hair is a mess and my face is covered in pimples, it doesn't matter.  God loves me regardless of that.  and because God loves me, I am going to find others who love me.
Just. the. way. I. am.

Psalm 139

 ¹ O LORD, you have searched me 

       and you know me.

 ² You know when I sit and when I rise; 

       you perceive my thoughts from afar.

 ³ You discern my going out and my lying down; 

       you are familiar with all my ways.

 ⁴ Before a word is on my tongue 

       you know it completely, O LORD.

 ⁵ You hem me in—behind and before; 

       you have laid your hand upon me.

 ⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, 

       too lofty for me to attain.

 ⁷ Where can I go from your Spirit? 

       Where can I flee from your presence?

 ⁸ If I go up to the heavens, you are there; 

       if I make my bed in the depths, ^[a] you are there.

 ⁹ If I rise on the wings of the dawn, 

       if I settle on the far side of the sea,

 ¹⁰ even there your hand will guide me, 

       your right hand will hold me fast.

 ¹¹ If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me 

       and the light become night around me,"

 ¹² even the darkness will not be dark to you; 

       the night will shine like the day, 

       for darkness is as light to you.

 ¹³ For you created my inmost being; 

       you knit me together in my mother's womb.

 ¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; 

       your works are wonderful, 

       I know that full well.

 ¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you 

       when I was made in the secret place. 

       When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

 ¹⁶ your eyes saw my unformed body. 

       All the days ordained for me 

       were written in your book 

       before one of them came to be.

 ¹⁷ How precious to ^[b] me are your thoughts, O God! 

       How vast is the sum of them!

 ¹⁸ Were I to count them, 

       they would outnumber the grains of sand. 

       When I awake, 

       I am still with you.

 ¹⁹ If only you would slay the wicked, O God! 

       Away from me, you bloodthirsty men!

 ²⁰ They speak of you with evil intent; 

       your adversaries misuse your name.

 ²¹ Do I not hate those who hate you, O LORD, 

       and abhor those who rise up against you?

 ²² I have nothing but hatred for them; 

       I count them my enemies.

 ²³ Search me, O God, and know my heart; 

       test me and know my anxious thoughts.

 ²⁴ See if there is any offensive way in me, 

       and lead me in the way everlasting.

Think of a car driving through the night. The headlights only go a hundred or two hundred feet forward, and you can make it all the way from California to New York driving through the dark, because all you have to see is the next two hundred feet. And that's how life tends to unfold before us. If we just trust that the next two hundred feet will unfold after that, and the next two hundred feet will unfold after that, your life will keep unfolding. And it will eventually get you to the destination of whatever it is you truly want, because you want it. 

-The Secret

I'm Taking You With Me

This summer some of my campers would ask me where my home was.  Where was it I lived?
That question opened the gate to something I'd been thinking about for a while.

It's funny if you think about it.  The average person grows up living with their parents in a place called "home" for 18 years, and then they go to college, and at least in my case, the idea of home becomes distorted.

They say home is where the heart is.  Well what if your heart is in a complex of three different places?

First of all, there is Plano.  It is where I grew up for 13 years of my life.  It is where some of my friends, my parents and brother are, but it's not where my life is.  It's not where I wake up and go to class and eat and study and grow.  I kinda feel like it is the in between place.  Not that it hasn't meant a lot to me, because it has, but I just feel like God is calling me on in my life.  My home church is in Plano and that is the place where a big part of my heart will stay forever.

Then there's Waco.  Where I go to school.  I feel like this is where God wants me right now.  I have formed and am continuing to form relationships that are molding me into who God wants me to be.  I have been developing mentally and emotionally and maturing as a person.  I have been deepening my faith and have been and am continuing to be challenged in it.  I have learned how to proudly say that I am a religion major and that I want to go into ministry, instead of saying it and shying away thinking that others will look down on me.

Livingston.  This was my home this summer for about 2 months.  In this place I endured hard times, learned about trusting in God completely, giving everything up, being vulnerable, having patience, having forgiveness and many other things.  God put me in this place for a huge reason and I can not even begin to try to comprehend the whole thing.  I have been transformed this summer.  A big chunk of my heart can be found somewhere between the Cho-dome and the Lease at Camp Cho-Yeh.  It is where God wanted me to be and where I needed to go.

So maybe home is where the heart is, but if it is then I have three homes.  Somewhere in the triangle between Plano, Waco and Livingston I left my heart.  The people in all of these places have impacted me in ways that I can say that I have called each of these home at some point.  and I have no doubt in my mind that God brought me to all three for a reason.

Usually I would tell my campers that I was from Plano (or I would just say Dallas cause they're all from H-town) but I live in Waco most of the year and camp during the summer.

College is a weird time of transitions.

Flower

"God opens millions of flowers without forcing the buds. It reminds us not to force anything for things happen in the right time."

Ecclesiastes 3:1- 8,11

 There is a time for everything, 
and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die, 
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, 
a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up, 
a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend, 
a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate, 
a time for war and a time for peace.

 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.