Old posts up again

So I've got most of my old posts up again. If there are spots that seem to flow like mud it's because I had to take a bunch of stuff out of several of them. A couple of posts didn't make the cut so they're gone completely. I'll probably start posting more again pretty soon. There will be at least an update on life up here in the not so distant future.

Blog on Hiatus

Due to a bunch of things going on in my personal life I've put the blog on hiatus and pulled everything down while I edit some old posts. Pretty much every one of them contains a reference to something I don't really want to remember. I'll get them back up after some editing. It will probably be a while.

7,000 Miles Later

“God wills our good, and our good is to love Him and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God – though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain…whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” – C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

In the past four years I have lived in six different cities, one of them twice. In those six cities I regularly attended seven different churches. In those four years I have struggled to find a job that I truly enjoyed and felt like I belonged at. My journey began because I no longer felt like I belonged, nor was called to be, at a place I thought I would never leave. I feel like I am supposed to be working in my now chosen field but I can’t find a sustaining job within that field. I have bounced around from community to community looking for something that I haven’t been able to find.

And through all of that insanity I have pushed away and hurt those I love most. I am starting to grasp what caused all of that. My ‘love’ for God was something that Lewis was trying to get at. I was loving something that was not yet God but my fantasy. I can’t even really put it into words exactly and from what I can tell when reading Lewis’ paragraphs trying to explain this concept, he had a difficult time as well, so I don’t feel quite as bad. But never the less, because of my shortfalls I messed up a lot of things. I wasn't prepared to take on the things that I had because I wasn't able to love God the way He wants us to. I'm not saying that God is punishing me. I know I am very blessed and by comparison "happy" (though it is relative) but He requires more.

What I am realizing is that though I thought I loved God I didn’t, not in the capacity that we were created to anyway. Instead I had this idea that community was the key to feeling God’s love and being able to love God. I did this because at one point I had what I thought to be a great relationship with God because of an incredible community. So I searched and searched and moved around and tired different churches looking for it…but I never found it. I figured that kind of community was never to be found again and went through periods of sadness because of it and that put incredible strain on my relationships.

I still wasn’t loving God and now I was loving something else more than God. Because of that God has taken what got in the way, what I placed before Him, and He has removed that from my life. I couldn’t truly love Him the way I am supposed to with this "obstacle". Not that it was in itself bad, because it wasn't, it was that I made it into a distraction and that was my fault. As good as that distraction/obstacle was, it was taking away from God and He is not exactly cool with that. We know He is a selfish God and by selfish I don't really mean by our definition of the word but it fits best. His idea of the order that things need to be should not be understood as selfish but as good. Those things God puts in our life are supposed to be good we are supposed to glorify God through them and I had done the opposite. I know that doesn't make much sense but it does in my mind. Read “The Problem of Pain” and you will understand where I am coming from, Lewis puts it much better than I ever could here.

I spent the last four years or so searching for God and I believe I was doing it earnestly. If I just live in this town I’ll be able to love God better. If I move to that town to be living with those Christians in that community I’ll be able to love God the way I’m supposed to. If I move to that town to be at that school I will be able to love God correctly. If I move to that city to be closer to family and the mountains I will be able to love God in that setting. If I move to that city to work those jobs that I have always wanted I will love God best. I did this because of the manner in which I felt the most love from God and thought I was loving him most was because of two separate times and places that no longer existed. How wrong I was. Moving all over the place in search of loving God through the vehicles of community and location was incredibly foolish.

So I find myself back in Arizona. I find myself at the church that I know God wants me at with the people He wants me with in the community that I’m supposed to be in. But I’m not going to find love for God because of those things either. I’m going to have to figure that one out on my own. This is something between me and God. The great thing is, I’m starting to figure it out. I’m not saying I know the way to understanding God, I’m learning to understand God and only in the very limited capacity that we as humans can. In the place God has me, physically, mentally and spiritually, He has begun to show me how to love Him the way that I’m supposed to. And it comes with accepting God’s love first. It comes from accepting and being truly thankful for what God’s “good for me” is not what my "good for me" is.

So after four years and literally 7,000 miles of sitting behind the wheel of a U-Haul moving around the country and hundreds of people that have come and gone, I’m going to hunker down. This is where God wants me, this is where I’m supposed to be. For the first time in a long time I know something about God’s ultimate plan for me and that is a location (oddly enough). I don’t fully understand why I’m here but I know in time I will and I'm thankful for that. None of this is to say that I didn't "love" God or that I didn't have a relationship with Him or that I question my salvation. But I clearly wasn't doing it right.

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Mostly because of all my moving and transferring schools I have taken far too long to get my degree. I’m going to buckle down and finish. Because of moving all over the country I have the longest and quite possibly most random resume ever. But now, I’m going to be stationary and find a good job that is stable and sustaining. I am going to find a ministry that I can actually pour myself into again and commit to it long term.

What must happen first is that I have to allow God to love me in His way and show me what is good for me in His view, not mine, so that I may love Him the way I was created to. What is amazing is that it has started to happen already. Because God loves me I can love Him and through my love of Him I will be able to be the man that He created and calls me to be. I have literally been to both coasts and everywhere in-between searching for something that was right in my backyard all along. I just thank God that He finally hit me hard enough, as painful as it has been, to realize it.