2010

We made it.

I believe I've spent the last year heralding how wonderful 2010 is going to be. I haven't the faintest idea why exactly that I have been so confident about 2010, but I'm marching into 2010 expecting a great many things.

I thought about using this post to look back at 2009, but I want to wait and maybe do that later, though I will look back a little just to reminisce about how amazing 2009 has been. It's been anything but easy, filled with fear and doubt over a move 300 miles from everything familiar, to worry it was a bad decision when 4 months later I still had no job. But I'm ending 2009 annoying all my friends and family by telling them how very happy I am.

I'm not fraught with worry, in fact it's just the opposite, I trust God more than I ever have. My faith was challenged severely this year and somehow God brought me through. And He didn't just bring me through a survivor, but a Victor. A true victor.

But I'm looking at 2010, and I see more challenges ahead that I simply don't know what to do with, so I'm simply letting those worries go and trusting that God will handle those challenges when I reach them. He will be faithful in leading me and guiding me in 2010 just as He was in 2009.

Tonight the church that I've been attending offered a come and go communion service. From 8pm-1am the pastors were there and whatever time you wanted all you had to do was just show up and take communion. So at 10:30pm I found myself standing there holding the bread and wine and feeling as though I was a soldier being sent off. (Yeah, soldiers, I know, there's a big difference, but you get the idea.) I feel as though 2010 is going to be so very important for me that being there tonight; giving myself back to God through communion and remembering His sacrifice and honoring it seemed vital.

My heart has been slowly turning towards ministry in the last month. I suppose in a way I've always been in ministry, whether playing the piano for my church or teaching a Sunday school class or whatnot. But in the last month, and especially tonight, my heart seemed to be veering towards evangelism more than ever before. That God would use my life as a witness for His glory. That He would make me a light that is not hid under a bushel by my fears or doubts concerning what to say or do. I began to pray that He would teach me how to witness to others of His glory. Because I haven't the faintest idea how to actually begin those discussions.

The pastors at church ended the small communion with a special "into the new year blessing for me" and as they prayed over me, and even in their talking to me before and after they just kept mentioning how God was going to bless me, and that God saw what I was doing (like attending communion services when I should be in bed asleep) and that He honors things like that and would see my heart and bless it.

It's lovely words, and I don't doubt for a moment that God loves me so much and will continue to bless me as He has this 2009 even if no one asked Him toon my behalf. But something about 2010 has arrested my thoughts concerning my own blessing. And I believe that He's outlining a plan in 2010 where I will become a blessing. I don't know how, or where, or what, but I truly believe I God is leading me into a year of being a blessing to HIM.

That's why tonights communion felt so vital. I needed to give my life back to Him tonight for His use in 2010.

Like I said, I don't have any explanation as to why I feel so strongly about 2010, but I'm very sober concerning the challenges and the growing that I believe will be taking place this coming year. I love Him so much now, He's so worthy of so much more than someone like me has to offer. But He still has plans for me, and I am ready to walk in them.

May your 2010 be blessed beyond abundance, and may you find hope, peace, and joy you have never imagined. May the love of God reign in you and multiply to scatter across your communities, your city, your county, your street. And may you find rest in releasing your hesitation and embracing His resolve.

God bless you. And happy New Year.

Continuing the dream discussion

Wow.. I wish I had more time to comment on my OWN blog during the day!
I've really enjoyed reading this discussion between you two.

ED, I liked your statement "lately i see myself driven not by goals or ambitions but an understanding that God can do extraordinary things with ordinary people if we only turn ourselves over to him."

Then I went to SLW's comment "it's not wrong to have desires or goals per se, often what are promoted as such are ego driven, greed driven, or driven by some other orientation that smacks of a love for this world and the things that are in it."

And again, I'm drawn to the idea that there are some goals that are NOT driven by greed, ego, or love for the world. I truly believe that there are some ideas that are passionately driven by a love for the people in the world.

Could... maybe.. the problem be that we are calling our calling - a dream? God calls us to accomplish certain works on this earth, do certain things, and we're too afraid to do it so it then becomes classified as a 'dream'?

What do you think of that possibility?

Conversation about dreams

SLW brought up a point that dreams can end up frustrating people. I can see how that's exactly true. He mentioned that it's the famous few that actually chase, and unveil those.

How do you know if you're going to be the famous few or not though?
Are those famous few dreams realized, worth the cost of all those yahoo's chasing their dreams?

How many lives are ruined each year as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, friends, and people of trust, throw caution to the wind and chase those foolish dreams leaving shattered people to pick up the pieces, pay the bills, and keep the real world running.

I get that.

I don't know of any foolproof way to figure out if yours is the whimsical dream of fancy, or if it's the direct vision from God planted into your heart.
And at the same time, it's easy to chase after Gods dreams in your own ways and timing, rather than Gods.

Or maybe I just hit a key word a minute ago? Vision, vs dreams. Is it an important difference?
Do visions tell you of what God is seeing. And dreams focus on the imaginary?

There was an interesting post by Steven Furtick called "Look Within" this afternoon and it resonated with what I've been thinking about in dreams today. Take a look at it, even if you don't connect it to the dream discussion, it's still a good post to remind you to have faith in what God is leading you into.

Dream big

I keep reading about asking God and dreaming big, bigger than your regular sized dreams.
I found it ironic that I have a dream I assume to be wildly too big and out of reach so, I think God needs to give me a more reachable bigger than imaginable dream.

It's amazing how we rationalize things in our heads sometimes.

Do you have a larger than life dream?

I have a dream.

I say have, not had, because I'm waiting for it to come to fruition.

But, this week I had a dream. I cannot post about it, because the person involved reads my blog and I don't want to do anything that would seem like "helping" God in this instance. But I did want to document it as much as I can.

In the year 2008 I expect to see it happen.

The best part of the whole thing is my beginning confidence in these things. In the last two weeks, a lot of things have happened. Life changing things that really have just come out of the blue. But they came out of the blue after I asked God specifically about them. It's really just opening me up to expect God in more and more as I experience new things. And when those nudges come, I'm beginning to give them more credit than I normally would have before. And now I wonder how far off base I have been as I sought so much of Gods power - and not enough of God.

It's not about seeing God do something, it's about seeing God, while He does something.

Enjoy not being there yet.

Three hundred forty-six payments left to go. 346. I've made 14 payments on my house. The goal, of course, is to get it paid off one day. But just like anything else, you get so wrapped up in the goal that you miss the journey.

I forget sometimes, until last minute or sometimes I do it obscenely early. But whenever I hit that "submit payment" at my mortgage companies website. I have to tell you, I smile. I know the money is in the bank, the job is done, one more month is taken care of and another lies ahead. And I'm pleased with each step.

It's not done yet, it's not paid for, I'm not there yet. But I'm going to enjoy getting there.

With that in mind, I'm working hard to apply that to other things as well.

I'm not posting much anymore, because my writing has changed. It was one thing to fill post after post with pain and questions. But this is different now. I've entered into this strange world where I'm not really sure what I believe in anymore. Not sure what to hope for. Not sure what to pray for. And some of the changes I'm wondering about making, are ones that I can't go blabbing around about. Like, you don't tell your boss you're thinking of quitting just as a conversation piece. - At least I hope you don't.

Nothing is off limits where these changes are concerned and I'm wondering what I might end up losing. Or worse yet, I'm wondering if I'll miss my cue and hold onto the wrong things or let go of things I should have kept. I'm having strange dreams at night again that seem to tell me things that I just can't understand. And I wonder what they mean.

In the midst of all this unsettledness, I feel more settled. There's a different type of fulfillment coming from inside myself than there was before. There was a neediness to me before, that was so desperate and also desperately hidden. Some relationships I clutched at, trying to suck as much happiness from the relationship as I could before I lost it. I did that, certain that I would one day lose the relationship, because... well, that's just what happens. People don't stay. Affections don't stay. People that liked you before, get distracted and move on to newer, different things.

But, even seeing it in myself, I just couldn't help but be that way. Now though, it's as though that part of me has simply been stripped away. There's contentment in that, that I always imagined would be sadness.

I stopped pushing.

I let go.

I just don't know what's going to happen next though.

But here's what I do know. If God wants to revamp my life, right now, I know that there is literally nothing I wouldn't give up. Five months ago I know I couldn't have said that. So now, looking at the things that I have, and the things that I don't have. I'm wondering what God is going to do with me.

Bad news

I killed a baby last night. It lay in a basin while I filled the basin with water and I just wasn't paying attention. I can close my eyes and I still vividly remember turning around and the shock setting in as I looked at the baby, entirely submersed in the water, lying so still. Actually, I don't even have to close my eyes to see it.
It was a dream, it was only a dream.
The night before that there was a huge gang of bad guys with knives.
Only a dream, I remind myself.

It's just one more aspect of the bad news that surrounds everyone, it just happens to follow me into my dreams. And I wonder how many others out there are tired of it as well? Surely, someone is.
Even trying not to hear it, I'm still swamped with it. This one died, this one has cancer, some guy I'll never know just died because he was at wal-mart when some other guy decided to shoot someone, and don't forget the old man, literally sick with grief, who doesn't want to live now that he's lost his wife who, by the way, didn't get appropriate treatment because they couldn't afford healthcare. At lunch a couple of weeks back, I actually had to leave the table at lunch as my dad began describing in vivid detail a 6 yr old that ultimately, and mercifully died - I ultimately ended up watching cartoons with my 7 yr old nephew. He had the best ideas of all of us.
I go home and check my mail and there's a child looking at me from the envelope with cystic fibrosis. Will I give even $5.00 to help find a cure?
The jokes give laughs about someone being hurt, or being unfaithful to their significant other. The games make sport of killing other people. The movies make light of the gut wrenching, life changing events that destroy the lives of the "audience" that is the victims.

But then I imagine that no ones gut has been wrenched. We're too immune for it. We have to be. If we truly felt for each and every sorrow that we saw, or heard about, and we grieved over it... we would never stop grieving. Literally. There's just too many.

There's just too many.

I realize I'm not alone in feeling afraid and hurt, there are people everywhere just like me. And I'd like to think I speak for all of us when I say:

God, I just want to see you do something.

I want Him to be louder, and more newsworthy than all the other stuff that's out there. Maybe I don't see Him doing major things just because I'm not open enough to see it. But I feel short-changed sitting on the Christian side of things celebrating the miracle that is another day, while the enemy celebrates 4,000 abortions every day.

If I stand back up into Christianity again, start walking and following, once again, it has to be different this time. Everything else is just mediocre, and I'm sick of mediocre. The biggest problem is that I don't yet know how it would be different. I have no direction. And I guess that's what makes the whole Psalms 18:32 all the more frustrating. "It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect".

I don't even have a "way".

Sometimes it just is what it is.

Wish me luck conveying this.

For the last several weeks I've had a pain under my rib cage. It makes it hurt to get a deep breath, cough, or move. It's nothing severe, or even important, just annoying. But I learned a lesson in it.

I had a dream. And in this dream I dreamed I was standing in a field, and eleven sheaves of wheat bowed down to me... wait... wrong dream.

I dreamed a doctor told me my pain was being caused by a tumor. It might be cancerous, or benign they wouldn't know until they got it out. They weren't going to biopsy it, because he said either way it had to come out because it was growing too large and it was restricting my blood flow so I could have a heart attack if it wasn't removed quickly.
I remember taking the gamble that nothing would happen, and decided to hold off on treatment until my insurance kicked in at my new job.

Some more things happened, and I'm sorry to say it wasn't a good gamble I took. So many things happened that I don't have time or desire to tell you about, but ultimately I woke up stressed out and more tired than when I went to bed (but not on the brink of death anymore, so that was a good thing). A seemingly innocent pain, had suddenly become life-threatening, finance-wrecking, family-destroying disaster. It took a moment for reality to return, but as it did the words came to me: "Sometimes a pain is just a pain."

I get caught up in fixing things. When something breaks, lifes central focus becomes "fix it" and until it's fixed, not much else gets done. It's not a good method for life, because with a little attention a lot of breaks could be prevented, if only I wasn't so focused on fixing one little break to stop the 50 others.
In the same way, when I'm hurting over something, I stop trying to grow, stop trying to learn, and I almost stopped going to church, just waiting for the pain to pass.
I'm not suggesting God told me to accept a mediocre life, accepting pain and hardship as though He had no power over it. But, hearing those words brought me a measure of peace.
He didn't say "Sometimes pain is just a test" or "...a punishment" or even "...what you reap from sowing as badly as you've sowed."

Sometimes a pain is just a pain.

I drive a 97 Nissan Sentra, with a salvage title, and a busted door that lets in a lot of road noise and rain, no tail lights, and an alignment problem that perpetually has me curving to the right. At the moment it's in the shop because it finally gained a problem that stopped it from running. But all those other problems? Didn't stop it a bit. It didn't even slow it down. It's gone, and it's gone, and it's gone.
I've spent a week now driving a sleek, sweet rental car. And as smooth as the ride is, I find myself thinking more and more about my car and how much better it fits me. I've been broken, refixed, and certainly let in a lot of road noise, and without a constant firm hand, I veer off the road even faster than my car does. But I'm still drivable. Just keep me on the road, turn up the radio volume to drown out the road noise (metaphor... just think about it), and point me in the right direction.

Sometimes pain is just pain. It's not there to be controlled, blamed, whined about, fixed, or avoided. It's just there to be felt. And then drive on anyway.