God restores those who return to him

The Y on the 4th of July. Awesome day.

<sup>Since my last blog post, I've learned first hand how awesome and faithful God is when you come to him desperately.

After figuring out what was distressing me over the few weeks preceding my last post, I heard God calling me to rest in him and allow him to fill me up and restore me. Through that, He put this verse on my heart:
 
Psalm 23:1-3

1</sup> The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.
²     He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
³     he refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths
    for his name’s sake. 

This verse has spoken so much to me in the past week. I didn't even remember the reference when I was thinking about it, I just knew the part about leading me beside quiet waters and refreshing my soul. That's exactly what God did for me over the past week.

Since I felt God calling me to rest in Him, I basically took four days to spend a lot of time alone with God, reading, praying and waiting expectantly to be filled up by him again. I'm not one to usually do a thing like this, but I certainly did learn the value of it when God showed some of his basic truths to me again. 

It's amazing to me how dumb we as humans can be. How can I forget that all I need is God's love to be sustained? That is something I have known for years, but in a moment of a trial, it is easy to forget in your heart for some reason. That's what happened to me this week. Through reading and being still to listen to God, he revealed those truths to me and really showed me how he loves me individually.

I'm learning how it's tougher than most people think to be in a leadership position in a church. There are a lot of outside pressures. The pressure to serve everyone in your group effectively is quite draining, but there is no doubt that I'm learning on the job and enjoying what God has taught me this summer. 

Continue to pray for all of us out here as we are all feeling some cabin fever and anxiousness to return home and back to our campuses. We just want to make sure that everyone makes the most of this awesome opportunity and grows as closely to God as possible so we can be as effective as possible when we get back on campus.

Thanks for all your support, everyone!

Rejoicing in the Lord's majesty

So one of my goals for the summer was to experience God more fully and realize how awesome he is and how worthy of my praise he really is. The first thing I can say about that is that God really satisfies our desires. Wow.

God has really been revealing a lot of his great love and power recently to me. If I said this to myself before the summer, I wouldn't have been surprised seeing as how I am LT and awesome life change happens out here on a yearly basis. But God has really shown his great power to me in so many awesome and different ways.

The big change is that those words (love and power) used to be just that to me, words. Now I can say I am truly experiencing God's love on a consistent basis throughout the day and it has been powering my faith more awesomely than I could have imagined. I can think of three recent things that I've realized/experienced that really illustrate this point pretty well!

Firstly, through the book we are reading through at LT, Walking as Jesus Walked, I have been able to come to the realization that Jesus was actually fully human.

That statement is something I'd heard a lot before the last couple of weeks, but I had never really grasped the meaning of it. I always picture Jesus as a human with God's powers inside of him, even though the Scripture makes it clear that he was only empowered by praying to God and having faith that his Father would provide for him.

Think about that. Jesus was exactly like any other normal human. The way he became the perfect sacrificial lamb for the sins of every other human was his incredible faith in God and the amount of time he spent in prayer. So the next logical question for me is why can't I be like that from now to the end of my life? I'm a sinful human, but Jesus was also a human and he was able to do it.

Through the talk from John Werst on Tuesday, I realized that when we suffer, we get immensely closer to Christ because he suffered in the exact way we suffer on a daily basis. He REALLY knows what we go through.

I want to walk like Jesus did.

Another way God showed me his awesome power is through a incredible miracle I saw last night. Our friend, Logan, got a pretty bad thigh bruise while playing basketball earlier in the afternoon and was having a pretty hard time walking around for the rest of the night.

Around 10 p.m., his project leader Dustin asked if he could lay hands on him and pray for healing for him. After they got done praying, what do you know? Logan could walk around with no limp and no real pain. God #doeswork if you really believe he will! It's amazing that stuff like that can still happen!

Finally, God has also been super faithful in answering prayers for me and a lot of the LT participants in recent weeks. I feel like everything I have been praying for has been answered rapidly by God and things are being made very clear to me by the Lord. I'm somehow getting more in touch with his Spirit (possibly through reading and studying his Word more consistently) and I feel really confident in what and where he wants me to be next year.

God is really doing work on me more than I thought was possible in my second go-round at LT and I can't wait for the next 7 1/2 weeks to see what else he can do!

Three Words

3 Words

As the first month in Colorado has come and gone, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want this summer to be defined when I reach the end of it. A couple of friends have suggested that I try and think of three words that I could use to guide my actions during the summer and establish my goals going into next school year. Here’s what I came up with.

Brother

A big goal and passion I have for next year’s canvas group is to be one of the top male leaders while also being a guy that younger students can come to if they need someone to talk with about spiritual things. Over the past year (and especially this summer), I’ve learned how important that kind of relationship is and how helpful it can be in a young person’s walk with the Lord.

I want to be a great big brother to all my brothers in Christ, so I need to learn how that is done successfully. This summer has given me a number of great guys that I can go to if I need to talk about anything. Now I know how to show others that I care enough about them to help them with whatever they are going through and always point them towards the Lord.

Personal

This is the main spiritual goal and word I have established for the summer. For the first 20 years of my life, I didn’t really grasp the concept that our God is THE personal God, the one that you can go to with any feeling: joy, sadness, anger, etc. He can handle anything you throw at him, but I never really took advantage of that before this summer.

I am now reading my Bible mostly every day (reading the whole New Testament this summer) and giving myself daily time to talk with God on a personal level. This has helped strengthen my faith, exposed me to more intimate moments with God and has overall given me more joy in situations that probably wouldn’t be joyful without Him.

Purpose

Finally, I want to figure out my purpose in life. Who doesn't want to figure that out? We are going through a book called “Chazown” through the LT program out here, which means “vision” or “purpose” in Hebrew. I can say that I saw God working in my life personally when I heard that we were going to be reading this book.

I’m going to be entering my senior year of college and I don’t really have any idea of what spiritual gifts I have or how I can use my talents to serve the kingdom of God. I love sports journalism, but am I using my gifts to glorify God through that? I don’t really think so.

So this summer has been a time of exploration and learning about what things I am good at (on a spiritual level). I still haven’t figured out a master plan or anything (what things go according to plan anyways?), but I’m getting a clearer picture of what gifts God has given me and what I am passionate about doing.

Going into LT, I really had no expectations on what God was going to do in my life or what I wanted out of the experience, but now that a month has passed by, I see exactly why I am here and these three words help show those reasons in the best way I know how. I am so grateful for this opportunity and I'm doing the best I can to take advantage of it every single day.