Blue like Jazz

So I just got done watching the movie Blue like Jazz. For those of you haven’t seen it I’m not going to tell you much about it in an attempt to have you just go watch it. In the movie there is an overlying theme of hypocrisy and how to deal with it.

Now many of us have fallen victim to someone telling us to do something one way only to find out they are not even doing it themselves. What is our response? Anger? We get frustrated at all the hypocrisy in the world; Christians saying to love one another only to see them chanting at funerals that God hates them. Or maybe its Politician who promises us a better life and better country only to find out that he is embezzling money. Or the Catholic Father who is someone we are supposed to trust with everything even to the point of confessing our sins to him only to find out he has rapped children. What is wrong with the world? People should be better than this. Society should be better than this. Or maybe you even think that civilization has progressed to far for us to be dealing with such primitive problems.

We are let down when we find out someone isn’t really what we thought they were. We find out all the time people are worse than we thought and that can lead us to be lost and confused. Take me for instance. I am a normal guy who seems to have his stuff together. I seem to be doing pretty well, I am well traveled, a bit of a humanitarian helping people in need all over the world. I am a pretty nice guy who gets along with just about everyone and tries pretty hard to do things right. I have my stuff together… at least that is what I put off. If you get to know me more and more you find out I am a bit conceited and can also be a bit heartless. Oh also, I struggle with an addiction to pornography! I have since I was in middle school. Things like that can ruin reputations in certain circles of people. I have historically struggled sharing that last thing because I always thought I would let someone down or that people would realize my life isn’t all that together or maybe even worse… think I am a hypocrite!  I act one way despite that way only being a part of who I am (and we all know only telling part of the truth is just as good as a lie).

What is my point with all of this? Well I am here to have you ask the question “why do I pretend to have my life together?” I want you to ask yourself why you have secrets. Why not be open to sharing the deepest darkest thing in your life. The more you share, I promise, the more you will find that many people also have similar secrets. It may not be apparent at first and at first there may be some shock and some people pulling away from you but continue on. Don’t let yourself put those secrets back in a trunk for no one ever to see again. Allow yourself the freedom of living with who you are; all of who you are blemishes and all.

When I firs told someone I struggled with pornography they didn’t talk to me for several days. It was heartbreaking and I remember thinking “This is why I don’t tell people these things. They just hurt people and make them not want to talk to me.” I myself buried it back up for a while. After a while it got easier to tell more and more people but there was still a certain couple of people I was most afraid of telling and I ran away from it for a while. When I finally did tell them it was like a giant burden was lifted from my shoulders and I could really claim that struggle as part of who I was… am.

Confess a secret to someone today. Start to allow yourself to live in the freedom of the knowledge that your messed up. Know that even though you may feel alone and messed up, everyone is right there with you. We are all messed up, every single human is messed up. You may say that your the only one as messed up as you, or that your secrets are too deep to let up. I am here to tell you that quite honestly your not the most messed up human to ever walk the earth. Your not alone in your messed up-ness. Be free of that burden… let that secret be known.

Are you Missions focused or Jesus focused?

I haven’t posted in what seems like a very long time but I aim to amend that right now…

At my base here in switzerland another school has just recently started called Justice dts and they are doing an intro to missions course this week. They pretty much from what I have heard that they are learning about the 10/40 window, unreached people groups and a bunch of other missions things. I am very attracted to a class like this because it is so focused on going and doing. I like going to places and helping people and making their general life condition better which might mean sacrificing personal comfort for myself but isn’t it worth it to help another human being that is experiencing difficulty?

I was walking with one of my friends and he was telling me about what the course is about and some stories from his life. He talked about when last year he was staffing the Justice dts and there was a staff retreat were there was a guest speaker from Russia (I think…) who talked about ywam and missions. He said that the pastor of the church he grew up in encouraged all the youth to go to a ywam school and learn about God and missions and then listen to what God had for them to do in their life. After a while though the pastor stopped recommending the school and his reason was that when he first started the youth would go and come back all excited about Jesus but now they just come back excited about missions.

One might wonder, what is wrong with being excited with missions? There is nothing wrong with being excited about missions but the problem lies not in being excited in missions but the focus on missions as opposed to Jesus. It is really easy to get obsessed with missions and how to do them and were to go but loose sight of why you are doing missions. We forget the person we are doing the missions for and forsake Him for the task. It is challenging to stayed focused on God at times but it really is essencial to anything and everything you want to do in life. The reality of life is that God exists and he desires not for us to do all these tasks for Him but to have a relationship with Him and be obedient to what He tells you to do. I have found that sometimes despite having a huge desire to do, do, do God sometimes asks us to not do, but be still in Him and obey that command. The spread of God’s name is not dependent on you or your neighbor, it is dependent on the obedience to what He is saying.

I have been very challenged this year with this because I am very much guilty of being missions focused and not Jesus focused. I wish to be doing something for Jesus all the time as if people will go to hell if I don’t do something, but the thing I have learned is that God is bigger than me, He is just, and as it says in 1 Timothy 2:3-4 “This is good, and it pleases God our Savior, who wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Do you trust God enough to be obedient to Him know matter what He tells you to do? Do you trust God to stay true to His character? If not I would challenge you to really seek out God and wrestle with Him about why you don’t trust Him.

The main challenge of this is to really take time to sit with God and ask Him what you are to be doing. He might answer with missions, or school, or church planting, or pastoring or so many other things but the real task comes when you decide to be obedient to that or not. Do you want to do what you want to do more than you want to do what God wants you to do?

Cool happenings and art

Hey so I want to show you guys a couple of things today. So Ill just list them off with a brief explanation.

So the first is my friends’, Patrick Ray, blog. Every tuesday he is going to be a look into what it means to be a man. So today was his first post and he will be continuing as the weeks go on. So if your a man you should check this out every tuesday as he looks into what it means to be a man.

The next thing is a thing my roommate and I are working on. We started a tumblr called Social Sponsorship in which we are trying to, through social networking, help sponsor projects through world vision to help people that need it. Check it out if you want more details (or want to help be a partner) we posted a video and talked about it more in depth.

Something else that isn’t really that important but adds to the proof that C.S. Lewis was a very intelligent and bright individual.

And here is a pretty cool song by Moses Melkonian

Outreach experiance

This is my roommate and I talking about our outreach in Frankfurt:

 

Here is  also a tour of our base were I live just in case you were wondering where I live.

Also here is a little treat music wise!!

Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

I saw this email from my aunt from germany today.
“So I had to tell you what my little man (this is my awesome cousin Greyson) has been up to. He has been praying EVERY night that Andy gets enough money for his missions trip and then this morning he came down with 2 one dollar bills and a quarter wrapped up in notebook paper with this written on it. For Andys missions trip. He wants to mail to Andy for his graduation gift. I almost cried.”

I too almost cried when I read that. I thought why can’t I be that full of love for someone. He is such a nice little guy. A heart of pure gold.

When did I become so inwrapped in my life, that I forgot to love all the people in them. I feel this is what if everyone was like, this world would be so much better. Just a world full of people so selfless with the things they have just that they give it all so they can help one another. I want to be like that.

Matthew 18:2-4 “And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Greyson is that child Jesus calls.

I am very impressed and humbled by him, and that $2.25 is the greatest $2.25 because it has prayer and love behind in it and there is so much of it.

Maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but maybe I’m not. I think we can all learn from this example.

I love you Greyson.

Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things

Today, I feel, was a good day. Nothing super big happened, nothing groundbreaking or super fantastically fun. It was just a plain ordinary good day.

Today started off well by having an awesome time in band messing around with some awesome percussionists. The people in the percussion section are a lot of fun because they are so laid back and just kind of go with the flow and we are able to walk around and talk to each other with out too much chastising by Mr. DeYoung. They are lovely people, Lisbon percussionists.

As my day went on I went into my first of many art classes which is studio art and right now in that class we are doing a concentration of twelve pieces. For my concentration I am take twelve people and interviewing them about their life’s. I’ll have them tell me some random stories, some stories about things that have really shaped the way they are today, and random words that mean a lot to them. I will then take a photo of them and then take it into Photoshop and type out the stories and words and use them to create the image of the person. This technique is called micrography. The idea being that personal experiences, friends, and events shape and mold a person into who they are. Anyway I got re-energized to be working on it.

Third hour I finally made it to a band lesson! Which is exciting because it is the first one I have been to all year. Fourth hour I went bowling and didn’t especially bowl a super high score but I did learn how to put a spin on the ball which is really exciting for me. After bowling I was at lunch and the wonderful ladies that cook our lunch everyday made some of the most delicious bread I have had in a long time. I want to let you know lunch ladies that through good and bad you are very much appreciated and loved in my heart.

I talked to Caleb Morningstar about the idea of opening up my house every morning and having breakfast and a devotional and he (at least he seemed) pretty excited about it. Some other girls overheard me talking to Caleb and they like the idea as well so I’m really excited to start it. If anyone that goes to Lisbon or surrounding area is reading this you are cordially invited to come to my house on Monday through Friday mornings, starting next week,  to have some muffins, have a little devotion, and just talk and pray with each other before school starts. I will be opening my house from 7 to 8, you can come earlier but there is no guarantee I’ll be ready yet.

Sorry just have to make a little plug for that.

In other news I got this awesome mug from Kenyon that have dinosaurs and trees and when you put hot water in it the dinosaurs go away and what is left is their bones. It is soooo cool. I love it! I also got my script for the spring play which I am really exuberant about.

All these little things really add up and can come from behind and make for an enjoyable day. So today I thank the little pleasures in life. May they keep me from falling over the edge of insanity.

Dancing near the edge I rejoice

To fail is a natural consequence of trying

I know that I’m not the wordsey blogger like most people nor am I even good at putting words together to communicate my life very well, but I think I’m going to go on a particularly thin branch and try the fruit and see how it tastes.

I step out onto that thin branch and it shakes as I tell you last night I was talking with Patrick Ray who is a very good friend of mine and we were talking about many things in life and we got on the subject of winter depression. Winter depression is that feeling during the cold and brittle months of winter were you miss the nice feeling of the sun beating down on you and warming you up, miss having not a care in the world, and having the freedom to be able to hang out with your friends outside and go explore the woods. We talked about the things we hate about winter and what we miss about summer and nice weather, and I thought about all the fun I have when the weather is good and how I can’t do anything because winter sucks. Later today, though, I reevaluated the things I said and I believe this terrible weather is causing me to focus on negative things and loose focus on what good things have gone on recently in my life that I do like; I have been able to get closer to my family this winter than I have in a long time, I have developed some new friendships that I enjoy having exponentially, I’ve been able to focus on and produce some pretty decent art, I went out on a whim and tried out for the spring play at my school and got the part I wanted. I realize how often I focus on the bad and forget about all the good things God has given me in my life. I am very ungrateful for all the good things that go on in my life and overly mad about when I have a rough time. If anybody that might be reading this hears me complain please call me on it. I would deeply appreciate it. I want to be a happy and thankful person.

I move further out as the branch decreases in diameter and starts to shake violently as I remember I am apart of a bible study and we are reading a book called “When helping hurts” and it is about how to correctly help the poor (both poor in spirit and materially) without doing longterm damage. A well known illustration that discribes this well states if you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day, teach him how to fish feed him for a lifetime. This illustration points out that to trully help someone it is better to give them something that can sustain them throughout time by themselves than just give them something that fixes a problem one time and puts them in the same predicament the next day. Well anyway we were talking about different ministries and things that they do and how they go about doing it and different things like that and someone was sharing about a certain orphanage and she was just talking about it and describing it and she mentioned that every day they would start their day of with a devotion so that they would start the day with Jesus and have him at least in their mind as they went about their day. That really caught me. I thought to myself that is an excellent idea. So God has given me an idea of opening up my house from 7 to 8 in the morning during the week for people to come over and have some breakfast and read a devotional and just talk and pray with each other and have the day start off with a nice community gathering. I rather like this idea and am going to be pursuing it over the next few days to try and organize it.

The last thing that I want to say as I reach for that oh so alluring fruit is that I miss my best friend and I want her back.

Down I fall