The End

Thank you for enjoying this experience with me. The past few months have become a time that I will always look back ask how does God love me even when I am unworthy of his love. Because really during these months there has not been much in me worth loving. I The past few months I have had nothing by which to say "look what I have!" I now know anything I have is by His grace. So where to from here? Still pretty small a 500 square foot 1 bedroom apartment.

No one will start the fire for you

It is getting colder now. The nights are dropping into the mid to low 40s making the morning pretty cool as well. Yet during the day it is getting up to the high 60s and low 70s. So I am left with a question, do I turn on my heater or nor? With my heater on, I wake up my house (just an over glorified mountain dew can I know, but it is my house) is warm, if I don't, the waking up and getting out of bed process is brought to a whole new level of horrible. I just lay there using anything as an excuse to avoid the wrath of cold that is about to be wrought upon my body. Yet I know no one else is going to turn on my heater for me in the morning. No one else can, my doors are locked, and even if someone was to come in with the quote intent of "I'm just turning on your heater" they are most likely a liar and a thief.

The same is for those times when my affections towards God cool. No one is going to light a fire in my soul for me. I may feel encouraged to rekindle the fire, by a John Piper sermon or by a brother to pursue Christ more, but unless I start making choices to pursue Christ, I will not "make war on my flesh" as Piper says then my light will be dim.

It would be like me calling a friend and talking to them about how I don't want to get out of bed and they urge me to get up and get ready for work, I may feel motivated (especially if I were to call my Dad) but unless I get up, nothing changes. It would be absurd if I blamed my friend for my lack of initiative towards getting up. I would be lazy if I was always  dependent on someone to be pushing me to get out of bed. This is age appropriate for a child but not a man in his mid 20s.

Laundry Mat Love

I know the title of this post sounds a bit odd but stick it out and I know you will be blessed by it.

Let me paint the picture for you:
It is 9:30am on a Saturday, I am at the laundry mat because I am running out of clean clothes and in 140 square feet I just can't find the space for a washer and dryer. I am the only one here except for the young couple I am about to desribe. Now before I say anything else and make myself sound like a creeper the following observations anyone would be able to make, creeper or non creeper. With my disclaimer claimed I will procede. This couple followed me into the laundry mat and proceded to do their laundry, as they put their articles in the machines they talked as if if they were sitting at a candle light dinner and the hum of the dryers was a string quartet. Their love made even the most normal tasks special. As they waited they played rock, paper and item that cuts paper, yet they were not loud about their love and their friendship like so many are these days, their love was their own, no one else seemed to be needed to tell them their love was vaild, they just lived it out.

This is a great picture of the gospel, because marriage is a picture of the gospel, we can gain so much insight into both by looking at the other. Just like this couple's love gave laundry meaning, the gospel also gives meaning to everyday life. Now going to work is not just going to work it is a battle to be won each and everyday. My friendships are no longer for my own pleasure but, they are men to fight beside in our war againist our old nature. They are now my brothers to be praying for. The gospel has now caused the women in my life are not for my own pleasure, they are sister's to be defended and loved because of the gospel. Their love gave meaning to those things things that normally are mundane, just as the Gospel gives meaning to life.

The one thing I hate

The one thing I hate most is aparently prayer. I say this because as human beings we avoid that which we do not like. If I don't like black people then I don't go around black people, If spinach is displeasing to my pilate then I don't eat it, if tabacco makes me cough then I sit in the non smoking section (or pass a law that makes illegal to smoke in resturants). If I find a person who idolizes Glen Beck and never says anything good about life annoying then I find someway to make their idle words not near my then bleeding ears.

With advoidance being my bases of what a person finds displeasing then in my case (so please infer I am stating that not all of the above statements are of my personal
hates, I do like spinach ,mostly uncooked though, I do like people of other ethnic groups ,one black woman I like a lot) I really hate to pray. Not that I attend anti prayer rallies, or make signs protesting personal pray, but when I go to pray, I do everything to avoid it. Like write a blog post ... maybe I should go... bye...

1 thess 5:16-18

Be in prayer constantly because it is the will of God for us in Christ Jesus.

What is my motivation?

MMMM Bacon

We have all seen the scene; the over dramatic thespian is struggling to get their lines right and they inquire with zeal to their director "what is my motivation?"

There is one thing that all of us are motivated by; food. I work at a special needs school and to motivate some of our students food items are used as reinforces for targeted behaviors. When "Jimmy" does something right he gets a skittle and when he doesn't, he doesn't. Seeing that connection I understand why I show up at work everyday; because if did not, I would go hungry. It isn't that I do not like my work or find it somewhat fulfilling, but the basic motivation behind me getting up and being at work by 8 is because, without being there I will not get feed the following month. That hungry drives us to wake up, even when we don't feel like getting out of bed. That hungry moves us to deal with situations that we would normally not put ourselves in. That hungry moves us to keep showing up everyday until we retire or find a better feeding trough. That hungry will drive us to do some pretty crazy things.


Lets look at this spiritually:


What about when Jesus said that those who hungry and thirst for righteousness will be filled, (Matthew 5)? What does that hungry and thirst for righteousness cause us to do then? Do we hungry for righteousness so much that we fight for our time with God? Do we thirst so much for him, that we feel it when we haven't been praying? Just like hungry pains seem to disappear if we ignore them long enough, so does the hungry drive for righteousness if we ignore it long enough. And just as if we are in a routinely of eating healthy and our appetite for good food grows. Just as our desire for the word of God grows as we spend more time with him. So I would like to challenge all of us to seek out the Lord and ask him to grow our appetite for righteousness and to keep eating of his word because he is the only true satisfaction in this life.


So fight for your time with God, just a man works hard for his food, so should we work hard for our to be more righteous.

The way God has made for us to grow in righteousness is through prayer, reading of the bible and being in a biblical community. Yet none of this matters unless God has changed your heart, he puts the desire for righteousness in your heart when the Holy Spirit gives you a new nature, one that hungers and thirst for Him, not for sin like you once did. So if God hasn't changed your nature, repent of your sins and believe the gospel; the fact that Jesus died for evil men, that is my hope, that is my motivation.

I had a thought...

I had a something strange happen to me the other night... I got home at midnight and found all one hundred and forty square feet of my house smelling like my trash.  So I promptly took my lovely mix of gross and eww to the dumpster and then I saw my house. Now that's not so strange, actually that shows to be good thing seeing that no one had taken my home while I was taking out the trash (when your home is on wheels and has an engine you wonder if your house is going to be driven away by someone who thinks it is a tank with a couch in it), what was strange is I had the enlightening thought "holy crap I live in that?" Now I've been there for almost two months, you'd think I would have not have thought that like it was a new thing. You would think I would be think that pretty frequently. Yet that night I saw the real state of my home.

It is kinda like when we first see our sin; we have lived in it for years... yet we have never seen the absurdity of it all. We never saw it in a true light. Much like I had never looked at my house that I way, we never see our sin for what it really is until it is compared with the greatness of God, and how it really has made him mad. When we view of God's wrath, the beauty of Jesus dieing for you and me gets even prettier. It is a like a  snowflake on a black surface, the details of it are brought forth.When we forget about the wrath of God, we are taking away the background of a beautiful work of art.


Lord help us see the full picture of your love for us in Christ's life, death, and resurrection. Thank you for showing love to us when we deserved wrath, the hell of hells, yet you forgive us... and give us the love of love from you, who is the Lord of lords. Thank you Jesus for your awesome grace, your awesome power, and your awesomeness. You truly are the most beautiful, the most lovely savior of the world. Holy spirit teach us in the word how to see you everyday, help us glorify God in all that we say, think and do. In the name of Jesus Amen

Heart is where the Home is.

Most people have heard the proverb home is where the heart is. What if we reversed this thought? Heart is where the home is? What if our hearts change and are dependent on where we call home? Maybe they are mutually dependent on each other that where my affections are directed my home is there, and where my home is my affections are directed towards there. Because   I find a scary sense of security in my home whose foundation is 6 dry rotted tires. Why are my affections directed towards this temporal  home of mine? Maybe I see this aluminum box, and it is more of a reality to my earthly self than the God who created me? Maybe this is part of the earthly-ness that Paul calls for believers to put to death in  Colossians 3?

Colossians 3

Put On the New Self

 ¹If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. ² Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. ³For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

 ⁵ Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. ⁶ On account of these the wrath of God is coming. ⁷ In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. ⁸But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. ⁹ Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices ¹⁰and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator. ¹¹ Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.

 Apparently, as a follower of Christ I have died...How does my apparent death change the way I view this dead life? The things that my dead self once lived for, must die too. It makes no sense to feed a dead man, so why do we go on feeding our dead nature with the sins that it gains its strength from? My alive life is with Christ, therefore my home/heart is Him, not this dead world. My affections, my time, my strength, my being, is to be for Him... not for the frail Aluminum box.