BLOG REVAMP + PERSONAL UPDATE

There is one amazing thing about leading people that I have discovered. You see, if you do things right, lead people well, fruit will be displayed from your hard work. Every ounce of time that you have invested into someone will eventually show if you give your all to them. As a student leader on my hall, I get the privilege of leading the spiritual lives of everyone there. I also have a small group of community group leaders that I can invest even more into as I help them better lead their guys. But here is the real amazing part of leading them: I am given the opportunity to learn just as much from them as I hope they have learned from me. Recently, I got the chance to be challenged with a question. I was sitting down with one of my group leaders having a good conversation when this challenge came up that somebody gave him. “Am I loving God as much as I am telling myself I am?” Woah, that is a weighted question to ask yourself. This is a question that I think I have been dodging for a while now. I do really wish somebody had asked me this question earlier this semester. When my guy told me that he was challenged with this question, my mind really went deep into challenging myself with it. After that meeting and for days after, even up to this point, I have really been letting this question churn around and it has come around to my response to it.

First, however, a little back story to what’s been happening with me and why this question has added such a weight to my life. Back in November, I was spending some time reflecting on my life in the past year, where I have come from and where I believe God is leading me, and it also marked one year since I decided to leave my own desires behind, or at least those that I thought were mine, and walk fully in God’s will for my life in a career in youth ministry. This reflection time is the exact reason that I have not posted any blogs since my last one. I have been writing them like crazy as I continue to try my best to walk in faith in my new calling, which was the whole point to me starting this blog. Being as transparent in this one post as possible, I didn’t post any of the blogs I have been writing because I felt as though I was a hypocrite in doing so. I would sit down and write about a new experience God had led me through, do my normal routine of looking over it and seeing if there was anything I was missing, and get ready to post it, but there was this constant nagging in the back of my mind that something was not right. This nagging actually ended up being routed from the question above: Am I loving God as much as I am telling myself I am? I honestly thought I was, I really did. I mean, I accepted my call to ministry, didn’t i? That’s following God’s will isn’t it? That is partially true. But something that I have been failing to do recently is live it out constantly. In every action I do, every word I say, every show or movie I watch, and everything I listen to, I realized I was compromising on a lot. I was telling myself that following God’s will into full-time vocational ministry was enough, I was using it as an excuse. I was not, unfortunately, loving God as much as I was telling myself I was. I was following God’s will, but I was doing it with stipulations in place, and telling myself and God that I would do things if they worked out in specific ways. And if they didn’t, I wasn’t happy about them. This led me to a situation where I was literally torn to pieces by a decision because I knew that if I took a potential offer for an internship in Texas, I would have to let go of something I wanted so dearly for a while now. I remember calling my mom to talk about it, to tell her how great the option seemed, but that I couldn’t figure out why I was so torn up about it. She told me that she thought that both of us knew why I was torn up, but I just wasn’t willing to admit it. But then what she said next had me in tears. She told me that no matter what I did, which ever path I followed, she would always be proud of me so willingly following God and would support me in any decision I had to make. This is what caused me to question what I was doing, to come to a realization that I needed to love and follow God more than I have been lately. And this is why I have not posted all semester. I believed it better that I was not challenging others with certain things without first knowing that I was living them out myself.

So, now where I am currently. It has been quite the ride lately as I have been sorting through all of this. But now, I feel the time is right to go again. Through all of this, God has shown me His true will for my life and how I need to live in order to follow Him. It is not that one-time decision to go into ministry, but also everything I do after that. God has now shown me what I need to be doing. Now, as I come up on a year of this blog’s existence, I realize I started this blog to share with others what God has been doing with my life, but now that has changed. This will now be the place where I share one very important life goal that we all should be living for as believers: living our lives with heaven in mind. Everything we do, every conversation we have, and every decision we make should be understood to have eternal significance. After all, we are all planning living our lives until the day Christ comes back to take us to that glorious place. I will finish out this year tomorrow with one more post that I had written a while back. Once this is finished, I will move to the new mode: living for the eternal. Every month (maybe every other if school is hectic) I plan to have a new post up that can be circled back to how we can apply it to an eternal mindset.

Thank you to everyone that has jumped on this train with me and continued to read my blogs. It has been an encouragement to hear what it is doing for other people and their walk. I would now like to invite you to my revamped blog site and come along with me on this revised adventure as I share more life experiences and how God has shown me that we should be Living for The Eternal.