The Last Two Years

Sometimes, I think that God tells me too much. He's pretty talkative when you ask what's going on, and you shut up long enough for him to answer.

I used to be SO jealous of my friends who seemed to hear from God so easily. I thought of them as little unthankful brats, spoiled and casually talking to God as they licked a lollipop. I used to want God to talk to me SO badly. Day after day, I'd ask Him to speak to me.
I was always jealous that my friends felt what God was doing. They described things with feelings, and then I'd be stuck thinking to myself, "Well, I don't feel anything." I used to pray for God to give me discernment, so I could feel and/or see demonic and angelic things.

Then there was my frustration as a freshman here in college. I was so full of God, with Him giving me sermons and teaching me lessons constantly. But I couldn't find any outlet, no way to release any of what I had in me. That first fall was so frustrating, with not being involved with ministry, that I went home devastated. I told my pastor about it, and he didn't have much in the way of answers. God only answered me with the word "knowledge", just saying that it was time for me to focus on learning. And it frustrated me no end. The year previous at New Years, God had laid out an entire semester's worth of things He was gonna be doing. The year had started out perfectly.

That New Years though, God wasn't all that talkative. I went back to school and was frustrated to the point that I dumbed down my Bible reading. Up till college, I had been reading several chapters a day, and had needed to do so in order to meet the needs of the spiritual hunger I felt. But that spring, I got so frustrated that I dumbed down my reading to just the Proverb for the day. It's still the Bible, but it's sorta the least spiritual, most practical part. I kept that up for maybe a month and a half till I was miserable enough to start reading the Bible again.

Then I went to Ireland for six weeks. I fell in love with Belfast, the Irish accents, and the gingers. But halfway through the trip, I learned through Facebook that my parents were getting a divorce. When I went back home, I thought I could stop it from happening. I knew that my being home before college and following God so much had kept a lot of this junk from happening before I left, so I thought I could make a difference. YFN came and I was scared of letting God go crazy with me, 'cause I felt like He had kinda ditched me that past year.

Then as the divorce was becoming more real, our family went on what my mom called a "Divorce-a-moon," and I was terribly perturbed. For the first time since the whole divorce thing had begun to go down, my mom sat with the children (besides the youngest, Alexandra), and we talked about it. Of course, we did so in St. Mark's Square in Venice, Italy. What a horrible way to experience one of the most romantic places in the world.

Then school came, and rooming with Adam Howard turned out to be one of the things I would miss most this semester. Since I had decided to be a sophomore during my freshman year, I switched to being a freshman my sophomore year, and I had a fun time with all of it. God and I still weren't great, but we weren't awful either.

Freshman transition would probably have ended that summer if it hadn't been for my parents' divorce. But since that happened, I spent my sophomore year mercilessly examining my insecurities, because I wanted to face whatever problems I might have inherited from my parents, not ignore them. Christmas Break came, and though I had largely blamed my mom for the divorce, I saw her as the wounded insecure human who didn't know what to do now that she was on her own. So I got past my judgmental stance and just saw the divorce as something that was done, so we needed to work with what we had.

Spring semester came and I felt myself leaving transition, having faced a lot of what I needed to face regarding my parents' divorce.

I went to Italy to study abroad, visited the very same places with our study abroad team that I had with my family the year previous. In St. Mark's Square, I experienced what I was entitled to experience as a single guy in one of the most romantic places in the world: that crappy feeling of not having a significant other there with you. Still, it was much preferable to the other option of sitting there drinking wine while disagreeing with your family's concept of love, which doesn't quite seem to fit what the Bible says about it. After Italy (and a brief hop over to Barcelona), I had the wondrous opportunity to visit Ireland again. With "Set Down Your Glass" and "The Planets Bend Between Us" by Snow Patrol on repeat, I soaked in Belfast. In Dublin I met up with Andrew Layden, and we went pub crawling. The country just feels so warm and friendly. I trusted my belongings in Irish hostels, whereas the hostels in other countries left me uneasy.

Then I went home for two and a half weeks, had just enough time to edit videos, practice skits, dancing, and prepare a sermon, and it was off to the Philippines for two weeks, where I became the most useful I've ever been in my life. And while it was a huge amount of work, I don't know that I've ever been more proud of what I've done in any other two weeks of my life. Missions work seems to be the only thing in life that makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something worthwhile, of value, 'cause no one can argue with the good of helping orphans and widows and the impoverished in their time and place of need.

Then I spent the last month of summer at home, editing videos, experiencing horrible jet-lag (13-hour time differences can really get you messed up), and finding out what state my family was really in. My youngest sister is taking the divorce the hardest, acting out like crazy and putting parents against each other. I frequently played the role of the go-between, making sure my parents didn't fight as they disciplined Alexandra.

Since I lost those two years' worth of blogs, I wanted to try to write some sort of summary of them down, so I'd have something.