Second Time Around

So I think I can say that my very first dive into blogging was not a colossal failure. I do reserve the right to mess things up at any time. I hope that if I start making consistent commentary on growing fruits and vegetables or start talking about politics everyday that everyone (4 people) will stop reading my blog immediately. Thank you to everyone who has checked out this blog so far. If you can think of anyone who would be interested in the ramblings of a 25.83 year old church volunteer then pass this along.

I was inspired by a conversation I had the other day and it really got me thinking. Here are the questions that I have been wrestling with. Are some of us OK with ordinary? Do some of us settle for less? Before we get too carried away let me clarify. I know that we are all ordinary people, and we all have different gifts and abilities. What I mean by ordinary is the picture of the american dream, the ordinary life. The 9-5 job, the nice neighborhood and so on you can fill in the other details. Do we strive for the wrong ordinary? Is there something more for us? I think deep in all of us there is an attraction to the adventure or the journey. We are always pushing to get somewhere, a better job, a bigger house, to be smarter and better looking. We strive to become better people and some of us try to become "better" at our walks with God. Some of these things will be accomplished in this lifetime and some will not. But that doesn't stop us from continuing the pursuit. But sometimes when we achieve our goals we get stuck. The pursuit of ordinary we will call it, is working towards and achieving our "dreams" and then becoming totally OK with that being it. What if that's not all? What if God is calling us to something more or something different? What if his ordinary looks way different than ours? What if his plan really isn't ordinary at all? Are we willing to accept that this is possible? In the christian faith we always talk about our desire to not be "comfortable" that we want God to push us outside our comfort zones. My question is why do we continue the pursuit of ordinary? It's one of the biggest lip services we give, that we don't want to "settle" or be "comfortable". But if you stop and search your heart, isn't that at times exactly what we want? We want by the world's standards to look successful, in essence we want to be safe. If we were truly willing to step outside of that, what would happen? What if that meant moving to the middle of a jungle and living in a hut? What if that meant quitting your job? Quitting the pursuit of ordinary and pursuing what God has for us requires us to believe God at his word, that he really does have a plan for us. I am not saying we need to become extremists and all sell everything and live on that small island. But I think that we should be willing to. I think some of us need to accept that he has called us to minster locally. God has a plan for all of us and it may not meet our standards of ordinary. I think we don't have to worry about arriving, we just need to keep moving. One step at a time. We don't even need to see where we are going, we just need to trust that he will get us there, where ever that is. The beauty and the curse of blogging is that I can raise interesting questions but not always know or have a clue what the answers are. I am still, like I said wrestling with these thoughts and ideas and I am excited that it might take quite awhile to come to any sort of answers.

The start or the end of something

I have been having a internal debate for some time now. The question I continue to ask myself is, "Do I really want to be one of those people?" By those people, I mean those of you across the great expanse of the Internet with a blog. The answer to that question was and still is a resounding NO, but here I am writing my first blog post. It feels like a nice leap off a 1o foot cliff. Its not going to ruin me but it will probably feel really crappy. Anyways hopefully this will keep all those crazy voices in my head quiet for a bit.....just kidding. I decided to label this site slightly deep thoughts and observations because I wanted to be able to spread my humor to everyone that reads this. If you think about it if I were to take off the word slightly from the title, people would be expecting C.S Lewis, Billy Graham or Socrates. Now with one word I have completely lowered everyone's expectations and put myself right where I want to be. This now allows me to spread my wonderful cheer and try to touch on a serious topic here or there.

So onto the things that I want to testify about. Here's an idea, what if we were authentic in every single thing that we did each day. What if we let other people know we were broken? Why do we first try to fake it? For example I have been going to church all my life, (approx 25.83 years) and there is no other place I have ever been where people fake it more. You may be asking what is "Faking it" Faking it hides the truth, it comes from those times, where we lie and mask the things in our lives that we don't want people to see. It's almost arrogant, we want to seem like we have it all together, that we are better than other people. Like the Saviour that we say we follow hasn't put together all of our broken pieces. Shouldn't the church be the place where the most humble people reside? Aren't we by asking our king to save us, admitting our failure? We needed someone to save us and he did and we know it. So why is it that when people talk about the church they use words like "Arrogant" and "Judgemental?" Do people want to hear that they are failures? Do you want to hear that? I don't, how would people respond to the phrase "We are failures," cause we all are. I am no longer just willing to accept masking my life to avoid having other people look at it. I can't say that I won't fake it anymore or that I am going to lose the desire to fake it. But if we are supposed to show others his light, then I guess we need to be see through.