i repent...

.:forgive me:.

a few nights ago i went to a worship service at the base in Montana. it was so comforting to walk into a place filled with the presence of God and with people who were responding to it.

i miss community, a lot.

i was so comforted by God that night, i couldn't help staying as the service was dismissed but the worship team kept playing.

so there i was, half of the time singing and praying, half of the time just observing people responding to the Spirit in their own unique, oblivious-to-the-world ways. and then it hit me, this overwhelming knowledge that i had much to repent for.

this is what i realized and why it became important for me to share this with everyone.

i have neglected the gifts that God has given me.

i have failed to make holiness a priority in my life.

i have given the opinions and responses of my friends greater weight than God's opinions and responses to my thoughts, my words and my actions.

i know that God has given me a mandate to speak out prophetic words, to lead worship, to call out truth, to wage war on the enemy and to exercise discernment.

i also know that it requires my participation for these things to be made real in my life...and that is where i have failed.

that is why i want to apologize not only to God but to you, my closest friends, my community, my family.

by not allowing the Spirit to move through me in the way i know it does, and desires to always, i feel like i have cheated you.

i have failed to love you to the best of my ability because i haven't been letting God love you through me...i've been trying to do that part on my own.

forgive me.

challenge me.

hold me to my word.

be challenged.

i am left with this lingering sweetness of how gentle the conviction of God can be on a willing heart. even my ability to be willing i give him complete credit for. i am inexcusably and incurably selfish without the Spirit moving in me.

i am also left with many more questions than answers.

how can i stir up the gifts i've been given?

how can i encourage you in the gifts you've been given?

how do i allow for the supernatural to be a constant influence in the very natural and even sometimes mundane pattern of my existence?

holiness. gifts. willingness. awareness. repentance. love. Spirit. life. friends. family. strangers. worship. Jesus. me. you. ??????

thanks for listening.

keep me in your prayers.

i'm wary of the possibility that i could receive revelation and grace in a situation like this and that my response would not exceed the singularity of a response like this to actually become a change in lifestyle.

i never want to be in the presence of God and not leave irrevocably changed.

I realize...things, about myself, when I spend enough time in the in-between-things silence that comes in seasons like this one.

There is no real flow to my life these days, other than the fact that faithfully it is tomorrow every time I wake up, and then it becomes today. And today I get up and go to work, at least for the first several hours.

My feeling of displacement is likely attibuted, at least somewhat, to the increasingly fewer hours of daylight, and my exhaustingly regular habit of waking up and starting my day when those hours have yet to arrive.

Can't people wait till nine a.m. for coffee? I suppose not really.

It's an imbalance, like a string of non-moments attaching themselves to the justification of dollars per hour as I wait for the living part of my life to resume.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind working. In fact, I like my jobs. Both of them. All three of them (starting tomorow). It's just that the very nature of transition is to feel neither "here nor there", and that is an odd place to be. It leaves me doing niether "this nor that" and feeling oddly neutral. Like I'm in neutral, coasting downhill until I can engage the gears and start my climb into the mountains. This does though bring me to discovering things, about myself mostly.

When given to contemplation I usually go a little stir crazy and try to occupy myself, divert myself, entertain myself....and generally I'm busy enough not to have to try too hard.

However, lately it's been different. I feel alone even when I'm with people, like at work, and it lends to taking the time to actually think and feel what I'm thinking and feeling, instead of being busy enough to "process that eventually" and give my attention to taking care of whomever I might be with.

it's not what you think....

in fact, I've finally realized, it's NEVER what you think.

life, that is. it is neither now, nor will it be in the future what we think.

it's too changeable, too dynamic, too susceptible to the whims and ways of people and weather and the price of tea in China to ever really get your future figured out. we think we know, growing up, what kind of life we will have, what kind of job we will work, what kind of person we will marry, what we'll name our children and what continent we'll give birth to them on....but I believe that the only thing we ever really KNOW about our futures are that they will not be what we think.

I am more emotional, less punctual, more athletic, less driven, more intelligent, less educated, more generous, less wealthy, more adventurous, less mature, more changeable, fragile, compassionate, complex, complete, brave, childlike, and strong while at the same time less certain, worried, self-sufficient, organized and employed than I ever pictured I would be by this time in my life.

on Tuesday I'll be 24. my life today doesn't look anything like I thought it would and neither does my future, or what I can see of it from here.

surprisingly enough...I'm gaining affection for the suspense of it all.

confidence

as is common to my blogging habits I am currently in a coffee shop with a project to get done that i'm either uniterested in or uninspired to begin. today it's the starbucks in Keystone and my Winter newsletter. (in other news, my left pinky toe has fallen asleep, weird.)

there are muscles in my body that are sore today whose existance I had previously taken for granted. I have not, in the past, been a person inclined to trying new things which I'm not confident I'll succeed at. However, yesterday my determination to change that about myself took a good step forward. I stepped all the way out of my comfort zone and where did I find myself? Well, the bunny hill to start out.

After having lived all but a few months of my life in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains I am finally taking the time to enjoy them! I skiied for the first time in eight years over Christmas break, but I've been wanting to learn to snow board for a few years now and I've finally gotten around to it. Part of the reason it took me so long was my above mentioned aversion to failure and pain. Natural instinct, you might think, but not the type of things I want determining my experiences.

Choice is the core substance of any experience and this approach has changed, for me, just about everything. Confidence, in this case, was not something I felt, but something I chose and I believe it made all the difference. Rather than approaching the situation fearing failure, I no longer aknowledged failure as an option. The resulting determination created by this approach of success as the only is clear option in my mind as every sore muscle and bruised joint remind me today.

I am not any sort of snowboarding prodigy or even probably a case of 'natural talent', but I made it down that mountain and I was better at the bottom than I was at the top. I am on a path to learning and improving. Confidence made a huge difference, but it wasn't alone in the equasion of improvement. I made it through the day not without a lot of patience, good teaching and the lent confidence of good friends when my own was waning. This is step one.

Step two will be if I can again muster confidence and determination to again subject myself to the whiplash, whitewash, breath losing, butt bruising experience for a second time, believe again I'll be better at the bottom of the run than when I begin at the top. That can be determined tomorrow.

The significance of the experience, learning to ride, is not nearly as important as the process of actually participating in the process. There have been so many times in the past where fear of failure and pain have stopped me, or caused me to go around, find another way, etc. in my life...and that is not the way I want to spend my days living. While i'm excited about this new skill I'm aquiring, it's really not about snowboarding at all, it's about trying new things and not being afraid, even though it does hurt...it can be worth it.