The Final Exam

Are you freaked yet?  I remember the feelings well.  It’s nerve-wracking.  One test is enough, but now you have to take a test for every class in just three days!!!  Anxiety!  Fear!!  Worry!!!

I'm not helping am I? J Fear reveals things about ourselves.  It lays plain where we find our center.  Our ‘center’ is where we look for confirmation: am I all right?  Am I good enough?  Do I belong?  John put it well in 1 John 5 “Fear has to do with judgment.”  The things that we are afraid of (outside of logical danger) are things that will expose us to judgment, evaluation. 

Many judgments come from how you fare on your exams.  Judgments from teachers, parents, relatives, siblings. 

But John says, “There is no fear in love.  Perfect love drives out fear.”  I encourage you to make that perfect love your center.  When that is your center you can face judgment differently.  Yes, you will be evaluated, hopefully fairly, in different situations, but your center, the full depth of who you are as a person will be safe.  I love Psalm 62.  I have held onto its words in many times of my life.  It says, “My soul finds rest in God alone.  My hope comes from Him.”  In another part, the writer seems to talk to his own soul and says, “Find rest, O my soul, in God alone.” 

When you begin to feel afraid as exams, or any tough things, approach, you will find yourself afraid of how you will be judged by the results.  Talk to your soul.  Say, “No.  Don’t go there.  Find rest, O my soul, in God alone.”  You are loved so perfectly, without reservation, by such a wonderful Abba Father.  Find your center there.

Oh, and study for the exams too.  That always helps J. 

Don’t “Get Your Head in the Game”…yet

Remember the High School Musical song “Get Your Head in the Game”?  That’s what I tried to do several times in the last week while trying to recover from some sort of flu.  I started feeling sick last Thursday, but figured I could just get my ‘head in the game,’ and so I went to school the next day. 

Bad idea.

I felt worse as the day went on, particularly as the bathroom became my closest friend.  I rested that night and Saturday morning big time.  I’m good!  So I started working around the house. 

Bad idea.

I got worse, but kinda felt better as the evening came.  I decided to go ahead and keep my assignment to teach Sunday school the following day. 

Bad idea.

By then I was just plain out of it.  I had to call off going to school the next day.  I rested like crazy the rest of Sunday and Monday.  I legitimately felt better by Monday night, but this time I listened to God’s voice (also known as my wife’s voice) and stayed home from school on Tuesday as well, just to make sure I had truly recovered.

Why share this?  For one, it explains a little of why I disappeared from my blog since mid-December, but also I saw a parallel to our lives here.

Psalm 1 talks about a person who loves the Lord and His teachings as being like a tree planted by a stream that “bears fruit in season.”  I think we all tend to think we are perpetual motion machines that should just keep on going at the same rate.  Instead, we are seasonal.  Our lives fluctuate.  We experience different seasons, and we would do well to embrace the seasons instead of just seeing them as random blips to move past. 

What season have you been in?  Maybe it has been a great one.  That’s good!  But maybe it has been a more challenging one.  Maybe you’ve experienced a loss lately.  Maybe you’ve been crushed by some disappointment in other people or even God.  It could be any challenge.  Don’t be took quick to ‘get back into the game’ like I was with the flu.  Sometimes that just makes it worse.  When you lose someone or a friendship, for example, people will sometimes say “just move on” or “forget about it.”  But grieving is a season.  And if you don’t grieve you just bury parts of yourself that will come back at some later time. 

So, yes, God can, and will, help us get our ‘heads back in the game,’ but this season is part of His plan too.  Be patient and listen to Him in this season.  It says later in 1 Peter “Humble yourself, therefore, under His mighty hand and He will lift you up in due time.”   

Someday you'll have an Anniversary

 Today is my wife and my 14^th anniversary.  I can’t believe it has been 14 years.  As I was on my way to school today I was talking to the Lord about how grateful I am for my wife and our marriage.  I thought of all the things I love about my life.  Next to being loved by my Savior, I am sooo thankful for my wife.  This is why I like to talk about relationships a lot in class, in my writing, my blog, in chapel, etc.  A good marriage is so crucial to life.  You can gain the whole world (i.e. have a great job, make lots of money, live in a nice house, be involved in church, make an impact on the world, touch the people around you, go on vacations, you name it), but if you have a bad marriage those other things seem so insignificant. 

Now, I have known people who have difficult marriages, but have been able to do meaningful things with their lives.  But, that being said, they would all say that healing that relationship with their spouse would change everything for the better.

So what does this have to do with you?  I know marriage seems far off, but building the relationship and personality skills that lead to a good one start now.  Be encouraged that you don’t have to end up in the unhappy relationships that so many TV shows and movies show us. 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Apostrophe

A little Christmas present for those of you who enjoy my weird videos.

Screwed Up Again

Just the other day I did something stupid.  I handled a situation in a way I thought would be good, but I just made the situation worse.  That screw up nagged my mind for nearly two days.  It’s so frustrating when we find ourselves in these situations isn’t it?  It’s like suddenly we realize just how “not together” we really are.

This, I think, is an important mentality to embrace as we try to figure out how to live a life differently because we love our Father.  We need to realize that we are easily swayed, easily led to poor decisions.  I’m not saying we should just throw up our hands and say, wo is me, a sinner…I might as well keep on sinning.  No, it’s about an attitude of humility. 

It’s a tough attitude to have at any age.  The challenge as a teen is that you’re at a stage in life where your independence is growing.  You are on the move toward individual adulthood (it’s not as far away as it seems!).  So, there is a tendency to fight for others to take you seriously.  You want people to know you’ve grown up and they can trust you.  It’s really hard when people still treat you like a kid. 

Those are all valid feelings, but let’s move toward not losing sight of reality, a reality that all people regardless of age need to see: we fall easily.  For me, it leads me this way: when that situation happened that I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I was angry.  Angry at the circumstances, but mostly angry at myself.  I took my anger to my Father.  I did some internal yelling (and some out loud ones in my car! J).  All in all, though, I was led back to the gracious arms of my Heavenly Dad. 

I had to go do some apologizing to someone, but I also learned not to beat myself up.  But, also, it reminded me how much I need the Holy Spirit.  As we address some issues in our lives, like the issues of sexuality, we need this humility.  It’s not easy.  We all have areas that we’re going to fail in. 

The encouragement, though, is that our Father, our Friend, walks with us.  Jesus said He doesn’t call us slaves, but friends. 

I Knew It Not

I have a quote calendar on my desk and I read one every morning.  A recent quote really struck me.  It's by an author who wrote a lot in the 50s and 60s named A.W. Tozer.

"Jacob saw a vision of God and cried in wonder, 'Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.'  Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that all-pervading Presence.  Be he knew it not.  That was his trouble, and it is ours.  Men do not know that God is here.  What a difference it would make if they knew."
 

Wow. It's a cool challenge to try to remember that God is with me all the time, not in a generic sense, but in a real, personal way. Consider that throughout your whole day God is with you, listening to you, talking to you, guiding you when you eat breakfast, when you interact with your family, in your classes, at lunch, when you're walking with your friends between classes. Amazing stuff.

The Three Letter Word-Part 6

When I was younger I had this complex about doing things exactly right all the time.  I suppose I got this from several places.  For one I used to get a little extra money by cutting lawns.  However, I had several customers who would watch me while I cut it.  It was so weird!  They seemed to be making sure I did everything just right.

 

I also came from a German family.  I felt a lot of pressure to do things correctly or face disappointment.  I remember how long it would take me to rake leaves because I thought I had to pick up every single leaf.  I didn’t know if I had to do it that specifically, but I always operated on the principle of “If you overdo it, then you can’t be criticized.” 

As a young person, trying to figure out the world, it’s tough when things aren’t explained well.  We don’t know what’s expected of us.  Sometimes we don’t even know what is okay to think about!  This is all the more true in sexuality, especially as a follower of Christ.  People just don’t want to talk about it, and if they do the main idea is: It’s bad.  

On the other hand, you may have grown up in an environment where there is nothing said about, or, even where it is in your face, because of the behaviors of some family members. 

All in all, I want to suggest that if you’re a person who wants to have a life that is different because of your Savior, then we need to talk specifics.  There is much greater freedom in discussion and reflection than there is in silence.  1 John encourages us to “walk in the light, as He is in the light.”  The light is honesty. 

One thing too often missing from dialogue among Christians is the specifics of managing sexuality.  Looking back on my teen years, I wish someone would have just talked openly about specifics and accompanied it with grace and freedom instead of hard and fast rules.  Unfortunately, I’m going to not be as specific as I’d like, not because I think it’s bad, but I don’t feel a blog is the place for it.  But I do want to open the door by mentioning the issues at hand.

Below are the main areas I mentioned in a previous post.  After each are some examples of specific issues that need some management.

Your personal sexual feelings and thoughts

1. Areas to manage: thinking about sex, fantasizing, masturbation, watching movies, shows, or online videos with sexual jokes, scenes, or clothing, surfing sexually-themed stuff online, drawing sexy characters, so-called sexting, music or video games with sexual overtones (or blatant ones).

Your sexual feelings about other people

2. Areas to manage: thinking about others, what to do with attractions, obsession, the sense that ‘I can’t get him/her off of my mind,’ reading into the way someone acts towards us.

Your interaction with the opposite sex (whether acquaintances, friends, or a boy/girlfriend)

3. Areas to manage: interacting with people you’re attracted to, flirting, the things you ‘talk’ about online, images of yourself that you post on facebook, hugging or touching the opposite sex, what you wear, what it means to ‘look’ good, how far is too far physically when you’re dating.

I hope to address some of the above in more specifics in some future posts.  However, I hope there’s some freedom in just hearing some of these things mentioned.  It’s easy to think you’re a weirdo.  No, sexuality is a huge part of who God made all of us and, like other things in life, it brings up all sorts of questions for everyone. Also, the above list is not a list of all bad things.  The key is, if you love God, your life will be affected by it.  We are Christ-followers so we don’t say, like so many others: who cares?  We say God cares.  He is raising me up to be a life fully lived.  He loves me and He loves my sexuality.  Let’s not assume “it’s all bad,” nor should we assume, “it’s all good.”  Instead, as always, I encourage you to “find out what pleases the Lord.”