save this for a rainy day, pt 2

this is what i learned today: i want to be honest, but i also want to be accurate. i want to honestly seek God, but to some degree, i also wanted to be right. i didn't want to have to be corrected when it came to God or my faith or my walk. and...being accurate will get me no more. i'll go as far as to call it irrelevant - it doesn't make a difference. what makes a difference is being honest with God. being right before God - not the same as being right with God - is like wanting to impress God rather than actually sit down and know Him and be close to Him. we're still learning. we're never really gonna have everything down, not here, anyways. honesty admits that. we're gonna screw up. honesty also admits desire. i want to stop pretending i'm someone i'm not. and though i know i want God with all of my heart, i fail to trust the depths of my heart and know that if God were not helping me get to Him, i would fall away from Him faster than i could express.

---the rest of that first chapter, continued from part 1 of this rainy day series (and today actually ended up to be a pretty rainy day, complete with lightning and an onslaught of hail)---

Today was student council elections, and it was kind of strange because I felt absolutely no urge to vote at all. I told my friend and he said, “Really?” like that was something unheard of and then he asked if he could have my ballot. It’s strange because, I mean, everybody has a voice, and I hear that it’s supposed to be an obligation to let people hear it. But some guy from MIT disproved the thought that your vote actually counted, and I think I was probably hesitant to elect someone that would do a horrible job and it would be my fault – which is ironic because I agree with the guy from MIT who says your vote doesn’t matter. Anyway, I ended up only voting for two of the five positions, and even then, it was pretty obvious who would win. Later today, I got a questionnaire about a school issue and I was going to fill it out, but then I realized that all that I was going to say would only be matched or beaten by everybody else in my grade, so I kind of stopped. I think I like my voice, but I can’t figure out why I don’t insist on people hearing it.

I read this book from Donald Miller about how it’s somewhat important to grow up being at least told that the world was hinging on your performance and your capability to contribute to the world – that you were essentially a large part of the society and that you actually did matter, maybe even that lives were riding on you. This was the distinction that President Eisenhower had, I think, and it was the basis to his being a leader – that he had a strong voice he had no problem in letting people hear. I don’t think that it’s a lack of confidence on my part, though that could very well be it – I just don’t feel a need to participate that much.

Our last DFC meeting was how it was important to put yourself third, letting God be first and others second. Afterwards, I noted that yourself should be a close third, because placing myself at a value is actually something I struggle with. That whole self-esteem issue, I fight with that. It’s weird – God requires that we lower ourselves and be nobodies. And then God makes us “somebodies” and, I guess that is when we have matured enough to rise to somebody status in the world and start showing people new things. That must be it. Since God has fixed us, it really does make sense that we should rise in the world (to some level) and assume leadership roles – we might as well believe that what we know really is that strong voice that we really do need people to hear. In fact, you could go as far as say that the world is hinging on our every move and whether or not we allow our voices to be heard, or should I say God’s voice?

I think it’s really important to be no one at least for a little bit. When you’re no one, you don’t have to meet a standard and you have enough time to figure things out for yourself, without the stress of expectations and demands from everybody else requiring things from you. Though I’m not sure that it’s even possible for some people to be no one for a little bit. I think if you’re no one, you get to see life in a completely different light – as someone who can go anywhere they want in life, like an open field. Being someone means you have responsibilities and commonly, you can’t show emotion or meet the status quo or crack under pressure. The difference between being someone by the world and being someone by God is that when you are someone by the world, everything comes from you and what you can do. If God makes you someone, it’s God’s work and that’s everything. The end…it’s just God working in your life, and all you have to do is show respect and obedience to Him. You don’t have to be good enough for Him, because I don’t think we can do that, since the standard is, well, perfect, and the idea of perfection usually eludes me. You just have to be real…I think that’s what God wants. An open heart, looking to Him for life. Then He makes you someone. Somewhere in Matthew, it says God shows the blind what it means to see and he shows those who think they see that they are really blind.

More and more, I think God really intended for us to be perfect, because sin, the one thing standing in our way between God is simply imperfection. If we didn’t have sin, we could just go with God and God would let us be perfect. Since we are not perfect, we have this need to find a solution that will make us perfect, and that is how sin came to be. Sin isn’t having money, but loving money – starting to believe money is a worthy solution that can justify and make one perfect, because we are in a search for perfection – sin is not being perfect because that love for something besides God cannot make you perfect. It is investing ourselves in something that is not satisfactory, something that can’t complete us – I think that might be the entire essence of sin, whether trying to satisfy yourself with riches or pride or fame. The essence is that those things can’t be perfect or be good enough for us, no matter how much we believe in them and invest in them. These pursuits can’t be good enough for us, because these pursuits aren’t perfect or perfecting. We were created for perfection – we were created for God.

That means it makes sense that all the songs we sing in church say that God is ‘worthy of being praised.” It also makes sense why Heaven is called our home, and Heaven is perfect. When I first heard about Heaven in elementary school, they told us that we wouldn’t have to sleep there. That would be great. I don’t think I like sleeping – it takes too much time. Though what is time in the face of eternity?

DFC is fasting, so we met at Kafe Bona and had a good discussion. I think fasting is like saying “I’m just not gonna live off food, I think I’m gonna live off God.” And not so much food all the time, but a lot of different temptations that we have grown to maybe not indulge in, but at least accept. It’s a strange concept to keep yourself from doing something, like eating or looking at people a certain way, because it’s like second nature – how much strength it really does take to keep from satisfying yourself. It really hasn’t been that much with food for me, but a lot with other things like lust, and it’s just strange to say “no, I think I’d rather follow God,” because it makes things a lot more obvious that you are investing in God and not investing in keeping yourself comfortable and satisfied. We spend most of the entirety of life trying to satisfy ourselves, so we buy clothes and tell crude jokes and watch TV – it’s really a strange concept that we would just stop and go for something that is uncomfortable and even a lot more challenging.

Another thing is that if you suddenly just decide to stop eating, you suddenly don’t have anything to spend your time or money on (exclusive of Taco Bueno’s dollar menu). It’s weird – you really learn how dependent you are on food and how important it seems to keep yourself happy. But you also learn how to overcome, and how it really is true that “man does not live on food alone.” Some people give up eating to play World of Warcraft, but I think it’d be more amazing to give up eating to find God, specifically with everything you have. It’s like dropping everything, absolutely everything, to focus on one thing with as much as you as you can (at least for a moment). I think that is really being no one – like when Jesus was calling the apostles and it says that they dropped everything and simply followed. To just drop everything – not exactly food, which is necessary to some extent, but other things like temptations and concerns and inconveniences – and follow.