Auburn

Written June 24, 2007 on the way to Juarez, Mexico...

So my heart strings are being pulled again by that small town in Alabama. I have just realized once again how passionate I am about going there and how I can't help it. I can't help but think that a desire this strong is more than something I want but that perhaps it is a calling. I don't ever feel that I have had a calling to do something, per say, but this is very heavy on my heart. I talked a lot with Mrs. Pat and Mr. Dan on the way down to Mexico and they really gave me some good insight into living life and being happy with what you do and having no regrets. They talked a lot about doing what you want while you can and that really struck me. I don't want to live with regrets because i plan on college being the most exciting and adventurous time of my life. I want to be going and meeting new meeting new people and new places and experience things that I haven't before. I don't want to be afraid of going to a new place and not meeting people because that is my challenge and if God can make it to where I do go to new places, then I have faith he will take care of me there. I don't want to live in fear of having a good job that pays extremely well. I know the LORD will provide for me but I don't know it well enough to live it. All I want is to live a dynamic life honoring the King and helping others do that exact thing and in a passionate, contagious way. I don't want to be boxed in and if i feel that way at Harding then things must change.

So again, later today I have been thinking about my early motives for Auburn. I thought of how I wanted to do engineering, how Jonathan and I were gonna go together, of the friends I talked to that got me so excited about this place, about simply starting over and getting away to a new place, and of course the gut feeling that I developed about it. We stopped for lunch and I told my Dad about how I had been turning this over in my head all the way down to Abilene and his reaction surprised me. He asked me why I gave up on it earlier. That really got me going about what happened and why I pulled up on pursuing it. When things fells through with Jonathan and engineering, I really backed off. I really just gave up on it. But I look back at all of my reasons and I see that I let some pretty serious ones get away from me. My main desire to go there initially was to start over, to go to this new place that I have heard so much about. This place that would take me away from home and allow me to grow as an individual like never before. Then I visited and found out for myself how amazing it really was. But I let those go. The student center, tradition, town, campus, atmosphere..I let other things beat those down. I prayed earlier about it because I know that I am very lost about it. I prayed for patience, peace and understanding. I feel as if my will to actually do this is twice as much as it was and I cant help but think that God is saying something to me about this. There is nothing I can do physically for a while so I am giving this solely to God. I will simply wait and pray. Also, I know I have to take care of business at school to show my parents that it is worth it to send me, academically speaking, so that if the chance does come then I will be prepared to jump. I also think I can start being more responsible with my money because if this does happen then I will definitely need to do some maturing with my spending, along with me studying. Lastly, I need a plan for my major so that by Christmas when the time comes to seriously evaluate this plan I will have some idea of what will happen if I chose to move. It is going to take some growing up but maybe that is just the plan that God has. Maybe it is his underlying theme of all the madness this plan has in store.

They simply need to hear it.

I was listening to the radio tonight as I drove through the rain to get my sister at work. It was a Christian radio station. I don't normally think like this but tonight when I heard this commercial on the radio I immediately started thinking about what they said and after I put everything together in my mind, I was pissed. The commercial said something to the affect of this man was planning to start a Christian production studio that would like help produce Christian media. I know that sounds fine and dandy but here is the catch...it is going to cost $150 million dollars to do all that he has planned with this studio and production stuff. That didn't make sense to me. I do think that there have been some pretty powerful sources of Christian media and I could name many bands that have impacted me and I would have to say that the NOOMA videos are the best thing out in a while but $150 million!!! I have other examples of this same thing, one from a book by Shane Claiborne. He was interning at Willow Creek in Chicago and they decided to build a massive family life center and it was going to cost a lot of money. He really turned against the church because the fact that they would spend that much money on themselves. His book really got me thinking about how Christ came and lived as a servant.

It just kills me that a group or people can spend that much money on something when there are so many other causes that it could be put to, even right here in America. So many people simply don't know about Christ. It isn't about apathy or disassociation, it is about not knowing and if someone has that kind of money then they have the tools to reach out and send people to the places, be it here or another country, and share the gospel because our world is in need of a savior and I pray that people who feel like that is the best thing to do will have their hearts broken and realize what could be done on a much larger scale with that kind of money. I pray that I stay humble and constantly attempt to reach out to any person that doesn't have Jesus in their life because it is the only way. It is the only way.

Honey-Nut Cheerios and SFGKW Round 2

My mom never buys good cereal. She always buys like Total and crap like that..it sucks. She will mix it up like every 2 years or something so we are on Total right now, although she has made a somewhat progressive move to Honey-Nut Cheerios over the last year or so. Sugar cereal...I'm so spoiled. Anyway, I always eat them because that is the best thing to have for breakfast...its not Total, basically. The crazy thing is that I eat it so much but I never really get tired of it and that blows my mind because if you ate this cereal as long as I have, then you would be tired of it but I'm just not. I tell you this to relay a really strange epiphany that I had, a minor one really but none the less. As I was eating my cereal, I started thinking about all this not getting tired of the cereal business and actually like got spiritual on my cheerios. I thought to myself how I am kinda like a bowl of HNC's and God is the big guy with the spoon. Not saying God is a cannibal but more along the lines of how God doesn't get tired of me. He doesn't get tired of you or anyone else because he is so merciful. He has an incredible patience for us that we really don't and never will be able to understand and for that I am grateful. He shows us so many times how He is gonna stick it out with us not give up, not go buy a new box. Also, the Honey-Nut Cheerios describe humans so much..we aren't anything special but he keeps coming back. I mean, we are no Fruity Pebbles or Cinnamon Toast Crunch but he still takes us in day after day regardless. This was all very strange to me but honestly it was really cool to think about it in that small, goofy way. God has so much patience and mercy for us that we take for granted everyday and I count myself blessed to be able to see that in a bowl of cereal...

This same day, I decided that I was lazy and needed to get back to reading so I chose a book that I have already read but one that I didn't read that closely. It is also a good book to get me back in the joyous spirit because of the humor and the deep thoughts all together. In the first chapter of Searching For God Knows What, Donald Miller talks about the idea of Christianity as being pinned down by certain formulas. He visits this conference and the speaker there tells them that to be successful in writing a good Christian book, it must be structured off and Miller disagrees and I love it. He relates writing this book to how faith really is and he talks about how it shouldnt be do this do that, it is a free flowing relationship, not a set of laws. You have to find God not just obey him because without finding him you miss the beauty of what He is all about. The intro to his first book nails it...he talks about how your faith should be 'blue like jazz'. That is talking about how jazz music is so free and rythmic and good..there is no pattern, it is just the soul speaking put to music and that is just how one's faith should appear...not some strict, uptight do-gooder but a loose, smiling, laughing servant who does things for the glory of God and loves every minute of it. Why? Because the person who does this has truly surpassed a set of rules and stepped into the relationship that makes things click and makes things beautiful.