To be honest I do not even really know how to start this blog post. How about with an update of things going on in the past little while?
Lately I have been sitting around home most of the time, and other times I have been doing small jobs to earn a little money mostly around the house as well. As much as I am disappointed that I have no real full time job this summer, it seems to have come as a blessing in disguise for the most part. It has given me a lot of time to think about things from the past year and things about the future. To be honest up until recently I had not been using all this time wisely and truthfully have been failing to live up to the name that I left Kaleo with, the name of Reaching Torchbearer. I have not been reaching very far, and seem to have set down the torch for a while. I had become content to sit around my house and basically veg. After coming back from the wedding however, my thoughts seem to be more on the serious things in life, like the fact that I have been failing so miserably as of late and that I need to find something to do to change that. Today and for the next two weeks I will be house sitting for my youth pastor here at home and I am glad for the chance to be in a place where there will be a lot of real quiet time where I can listen for the Lord and dig into his Word with no other things around to distract me, yet I am sure that the enemy will search for ways to do just that, so prayer against those distractions would be awesome! Those have been my basic thoughts as of late in regards to how I have been doing post-kaleo, yet things have gone on (one of which you will read about shortly, forgive me for the length) which have moved my heart to again seek what it is that God wants me to be doing and in what way I am meant to do it. As for the future, I am glad to say that I am excited for what will be coming in just over one month from now, beginning school in California, I have decided to pursue an English major and a TESOL minor as well (forgive me Jim and Kristie for the papers which were less than top notch during the year). And perhaps someday use that in another place to interact with people while teaching them how to speak English. We will see, Lord willing. Other than that there is not much to report other than the fact that I have been staying up far too late at nights and sleeping in way to long in the mornings, but I guess that is not so much different than the way things were on the Island…but I hope to change that, as well as getting back into more rigorous and dedicated times of physical exercise. Anyways, to keep this as short as possible I’ll get on to what has got me up at 1:34 in the morning writing a blog to you all…
You know that things are bad when you try and go out to a movie with family and all around you people are making obscene remarks at every character and plot twist in the show, or when the three pre-teen girls sitting directly behind you think that somehow it is important to drop an F-bomb every two seconds in what they say…
To be fair let me give you the scoop on exactly what it is I am talking about and the circumstances that have got me so wound up tonight as I write this.
Tonight my Dad, sister and I went to see the new Transformers movie, obviously since it is the first night that it was put out there was bound to be more people there to try and get in than our little theater can even hold, so people’s tempers were not going to be in the most relaxed of states. We ended up sitting in the second to last row; in seats where even sitting directly straight up and down your knees (if you are anywhere over 5’5”) are hitting the seat in front of you and yet trying not to sit that high so that those behind you can still see the screen which by now looks merely like a home theater big screen. So put those circumstances and add a little (more like a tone) of profanity from kids who are only just starting secondary school and adults who should know better all around you in very tightly packed quarters and something is going to happen, at least if there is anyone within ear-shot who cares. There happened to be three young girls, about 13 years of age, sitting behind us who could not seem to make up their mind about where they wanted to sit, and when one of them decided to try the lower section, which by now is packed, the other two get all upset and choose to stay behind and proceed to bad-mouth their “friend” to no end. Suddenly she comes back up the steps and the two behind us decide to shut up…at least about the backstabbing things they had been saying seconds before. And now they move on to some other topic where all three of them see fit to continuously swear like crazy, pretty sure that more than 65% of every sentence was some profane word. Well, I had enough of it, I turn around and say something along the lines of “look, clearly you are upset about something but can you please keep the language to a minimum; there are other people here and it would be nice if you would respect that.” That’s it, they say ok, I turn around and wait for the show to begin (yes it was not even playing at this point yet). The lack of swearing lasts minutes before one girl decides to take it back up again, they again decide to try and find seats someplace else and as they are leaving one of them makes sure to lean a bit closer to me and cuss me out countless times before walking away…only to come back yet again moments later. I could go into detail but to get the point across they talked, texted and swore through the whole movie. There were others in the near vicinity also who saw fit to take on similar behavior; these people were at least 2.5-3 times the age of the young girls.
Sorry to have used you as my “venting place” but to be honest in a way I am glad that I went to the movie and saw again firsthand the state of things. It is again an incredible reminder of the way the world is and how we so desperately need to be different. What Deb posted earlier is so very fitting in that we truly need to MAKE the time in our days to read the Bible and be armed with the Sword of the Word of God. We need to read how it is exactly that we need to be different, we need to understand what that means for our own lives and make a choice about whether or not we are going to be part of the Lord’s Army in this world. But know this, all of us, that we cannot simply read the words and then go on with our day, we MUST apply each lesson to our situation and then PRACTICE what we learn, you all know the term “Practice Makes Perfect” well this is no different. We will not be examples of the things of Christ if we do not apply ourselves to learning just what those things are. Simply saying you are a Christian is not enough. How are we showing that to the world? How are we, you and I, proving that we are any different? To be armed with the Sword does not mean that we are to go and destroy things, in this case we are to be peacemakers, where the sword of the enemy brings chaos, destruction, violence, mayhem, and profanity; the one we are to wield, the Sword of the Word, is to bring peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, love, and all the fruits of the spirit. When we see the enemy in action our human instinct is to be outraged, to fight back with words or actions just as mean and hurtful and degrading, but we are called to be better than that. To “turn the other cheek”. Through Love the world will know we are different, not a love of our own but the Love that comes from the Father and that is never-ending, and UNCONDITIONAL. Yes the actions of those girls in that theater tonight made me angry, yet my anger was not directed at them, it’s at the one who has brought that mindlessness into the world; the one thing that I thought for those kids the whole time was that I truly hope the Lord sees fit to find them somewhere in their lives before it is too late and shows them the truth of their ways and that they would turn from those ways. It is easy to get caught thinking that it would be better for all the people who bring hurt to the world to die, not just teens who swear, but people who steal, who kill, who do all those other things that people see and immediately sentence them to death for. While in justice that may be what they deserve we are not the judge of them, how much better are we really? We have ALL sinned and fall short of the glory of the Lord, all of us you, me, as much as them. We cannot and should not condemn them to death, for as it is written, by what measure we judge them so we to will be judged likewise. And when justice is served and people pay with their lives, as much as it might seem right to celebrate we cannot allow ourselves to delight in it, for it is another soul lost to an eternity without hope. It’s devastating. It’s all so wrong. It is what we must rise above. That is how we need to be so radically different, not just showing people that we can accept the good times, but showing them how to act when things go wrong. And we need to do it now.
If that does not get you going then think of it in a different light. Every day people die, some you know and some you don’t, but they are gone none the less, today it might be a child in a third world country, tomorrow a soldier fighting in a war either distant or close to home, the next day someone you know and love dearly. The fact is we do not and cannot know when our time or that of anyone else is done. This has to give us a sense of urgency, and desire to be different, to be better, who knows what person you have some kind of impact on today might be lost or gained to eternity tomorrow.
I do not want this to be a downer to anyone, but it is the truth, and like we learned so many times over at Kaleo in countless classes or in books or some other way, what we do, how we live cannot simply be about feeling good or being “good people”, it has to be about the truth of God and the truth is that some day He will come, and we will all stand before Him on one side or the other, and who knows, maybe the way you interact with a person today will save them for that day and we will find them standing among the sheep. Yes God is about love and forgiveness but also justice and discipline. We cannot give people a message of God with one side and not the other, to do so is to betray who God is, people need to know that they have a choice, and they need to know what they are choosing between. That includes the good the bad and the ugly. We can’t make them choose one way or the other, we can’t choose how they will live, but we can choose how we live, and whether or not it is in accordance to what God wants His children to be. We can choose to be different. Though it might seem a daunting task, remember that we are not promised any time but the here and now, so that is the only time you need to worry about. Choose to live for God, to be Radical every day. It seems this message comes around all the time, but it is so very crucial, like Lech left us with the challenge of whether or not the fruit will rot or be consumed, whether or not we will take what we know into the world and apply it or let it go to waste, so I to want to remind all of us again, that there are things we have learned which we need to remember and need to put into practice each and every day. Don’t let the fruit in the basket turn sour and useless. Savor it’s sweet flavor and pass it on!
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