The Greatest Fall Since Adam's

I had chosen the spot on the floor next to the door so that when I had to get up and leave I could do it quietly. See, 1 hour into prayer group I needed to be all the way across campus in another meeting, so I figured that I would just sit here for 50 minutes and then in-between prayers, I would silently get out so as not to disrupt the mood.

I failed.

A prayer ended so it was a perfect moment to get up, as to not make noise during someone's prayer. However as I started getting up, the guy next to me started to pray, "Lord, my heart is so broken for the people-" and that's all that anyone heard.

As I began to stand up I very quickly realized that my right leg had fallen dead asleep and was completely numb and useless. I had been sitting against a door that was really loose in the frame so any movement would create a large banging noise as the door wiggled around. So here I am banging on the door behind me because I need it to lean against because it's either that or fall over into the sitting people because my leg won't do anything that I tell it to. I have to get out of there! So I shoot up as fast as I can and my shorts get caught by the doorknob and it starts pulling down my pants. Great, now I'm going to be de-pantsed in the middle of prayer group and then fall down on my face with no shorts on. I grab my shorts and pull them up as fast as I can, but since my concentration is shifted off of my balance, I start to fall. I use the momentum to jump over the laying down person in the doorway, using my arms to brace myself against the door, wall, desk and everything in my path-thus hitting and banging on everything as I go. I reach the hallway and fall flat on my face. I can't just lay here in front of an entire room of people! I pop up with my arms, take one jump with my good leg and then fall down flat again. I jump back up and balance on my leg and my slowly working leg. I whisper "sorry" and start my limp across campus. My leg didn't fully work for a good 5 minutes. I was later told the group didn't stop laughing for 15.

But it's pretty interesting, because even in the midst of intense brokenness, we can still have joy, because God is a God of brokenness and of joy.

Do Insanity People Know They Are Insane?

So we have been doing the Insanity workout for about 3 weeks now. To give you a hint about how rough this 38ish minute workout is....

-The nutrition book that comes with the DVDs tells you that it is smart to eat 5 meals a day because you are burning so many calories.

-5 minutes into the workout you are sweating like faucet.

-Even the amazingly in-shape people in the video are dog nasty tired and sweating like a faucet 5 minutes in to the workout.

-A friend came to watch us to the workout tonight and before it started he was making fun a little bit and saying about how he does his own workout and he doesn't need a video to tell him what to do. But after about 4 minutes he changed his mood. The rest of the video he was talking about how hard it looked, how much it must stink to do it, and how he was going to be there tomorrow doing it with us.

-By the end of the workout the floor beneath you is wet from sweat and it's hard to make fluid movements for a good 10 minutes.

Jesus is Powerful

I saw a girl almost die today. I was turning a corner onto a small street and a girl was laying on the road because she had just fallen off of her bike with her husband bending over her. I was in the car with my good friend, Curry, and we parked the car and ran out to her side.

In my whole life I will never forget her face.

I have never seen anyone is more intense and unspeakable pain as this girl was. Her entire body was convulsing and curling up and from her head to her toes, she was turning blue. Her eyes were rolling back in her head.

I will never forget her blue lips. I will never forget her eyes.

Before the ambulance came and I think she may have died. I am not sure if she just went unconscious, but to me it looked like she died, especially because when the ambulance came they put the shocking pads on her to revive her.

Curry and I prayed. Hard. We didn’t know what else to do. So we prayed. Prayed to bring her back. Prayed to have mercy on her. Just talked to Daddy. And He definitely answered. After a while she was breathing on her own and then soon she could even tell them what her name was.

I don’t know if she died during any of that, but I know that she almost did. There is no doubt in my mind about that.

The crazy thing is that literally two minutes before this happened, they past me on their bikes. I saw them. I remember seeing them. I thought thoughts about them. They were quickly pointed out in conversation as the people on bikes. And then they turned the corner and she almost died…. We see people every single day and they could very literally turn a corner and die a horrible, painful death two minutes after we saw them. That blows my mind. It scares me! It overwhelms me! How can this be? How can we let this be, that people are passing by us and we are not giving them more than a thought. More than a slight mention in our ‘busy’ days. God wants us to love them!! This overwhelms me too! How can I love everyone? How can I possibly reach everyone??

Another thing that God showed me tonight is His incredible timing. As Curry and I were leaving the Hastings parking lot, we saw a friend, Sean. We talked with Sean for about five minutes, and then left. If we would have left one minute earlier, we wouldn’t have been able to pray. We wouldn’t have been able to call others to pray. We wouldn’t have been able to comfort her husband. God had us there at the exact right time! Also the nurse that was passing by, she told us after that she and her husband were just going to get a movie from Hastings. She past just in time to give this girl CPR. God is incredible. There is not one ounce of doubt in my mind that God orchestrated the people that were there. Why didn’t He stop her from falling? I don’t know. But He did not let her fall alone.

And He will not let us fall alone either. Just as she dying on the ground, so are we! But THANK THE LORD that He did not just leave us there. He has revived us! And He did not stop at just reviving us! He has given us a name and a place as His children!!

Happy Valentine's Day!

The Lord's Mercy on Isreal

[14] “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. [15] And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. [16] “And in that day, declares the LORD, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’ [17] For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more. [18] And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety. [19] And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. [20] I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD. [21] “And in that day I will answer, declares the LORD, I will answer the heavens, and they shall answer the earth, [22] and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil, and they shall answer Jezreel, [23] and I will sow her for myself in the land. And I will have mercy on No Mercy, and I will say to Not My People, ‘You are my people’; and he shall say, ‘You are my God.’” (Hosea 2:14-23 ESV)

What is wrong with you?

This is a video that we made for the youth group that I help out with on Wednesday nights. It's awesome!

It intro-ed the idea that we are all weird! and that we live in a broken and sinful world.

Watch out, that rainbow might attack you

I know a couple of girls that are afraid of balloons. Really? Balloons? Yes.

For example it was Valentine's Day and girls were getting giant stuffed bears and chocolate and roses and junk like that delivered to them in their classrooms. Well in walks about ten huge balloons and immediately this girl shells up. She huddles into herself at her desk and starts to cry a little. For balloons!

And then there are the people that are afraid of clowns. Clowns were created to make people laugh! How weird is it that something that is supposed to make you laugh actually making you cry? It's like telling an elephant joke and then someone covering their ears and crying because it scared them that an elephant was in the fridge.

So this makes me think... if people can be afraid of balloons and clowns, what else can they be afraid of? Rainbows? Flowers?

I can literally imagine a 300 lb. tough guy waddling down and street and then in a high pitched voice- "AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!! A 3 year old ballerina!!!!!!!!!" And then running off and weeping for fear of his life.

Sick.

Should have brought sugar along...

I'm sorry to tell about this, Colin. But the people, they have to know.

Behind my Grandmommy's old house in Alabama is a large field with a creek in some woods. The neighbor owns this land and raises horses in it. My cousin Helen loves horses and many a time I saw how the horses just came to her and she would talk to them and pet them, leaving me with the impression that horses are nice.

Not all of them are.

One day Colin and I leave the house bound for the creek. We take turns lifting the bottom string of barbed wire so that the other can crawl through and once we are over we notice a horse that I have never seen before.

When I was 8 I went with a group horse back riding and my horse suddenly decided to take a completely different route than my peers and I had cried because I was afraid that it would take me somewhere and I would never get back. So as we approached this horse in the back of my mind I knew that horses could be unpredictable, but I had seen Helen with these horses before so I knew that it would be okay.

Ten feet before we reached the horse, it suddenly reared on it's hind legs and started to neigh. Mouth open and eyes bulging I remembered hearing that horses could sense fear so I turned to tell Colin that we should not run, but walk away thus showing this horse that we had no fear. But as I turned to look at Colin I just kept turning and turning until I was watching my cousin with his back to me bolting it back to the barbed wire fence.

I wasn't going to be the last one there.

There is a Star Trek episode where the ship is locking up because of a leak on one of the decks and as the bay doors are slamming shut, one of the main characters dives just under it and rolls to safety. When I watched that I thought, "Wow, there is no way they did it that perfectly. They would need to crawl a little at least." I was wrong. I rolled under that bad boy as beautifully as I had seen on TV.

That demon horse came right up to the fence and stared us down as we stood, feeling weak and a bit silly, a safe 5 feet away.

Hope is a knowledge that something that we don't have yet will be enough. When we hope, it is not something that we already have, but a belief in things that will be. My hope is in Jesus, that one day I will be done running away from my fears and pains and will finally be safe.

GGGGGOOOOOOOAAAAALLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!!!!!

When I was about a sophomore in high school, one of my best friends Andrew and I went on an e3 Mission trip to Bolivia to share about the wonderful news of Jesus Christ.

And my faith was far too small.

About halfway through the week Andrew and I were walking with our two translators (one of which was about to be picked up in an hour and go home because he was feeling really sick) across the neighborhood that we were working in when we passed a soccer field. We had passed this field many times before but today the schools had been closed, so there were several teenage guys doing what they had learned and had practiced every chance they got since they could walk: play soccer.

I looked down onto that soccer field and thought that these guys were really passionate about their soccer game and there would be no chance that they would ever want to listen to us. But Andrew looked down and saw instead of a soccer field, a harvest field.

So he led us onto the field to interrupt their game to offer a challenge to the unwilling listeners. We will play them a game to 5. If we won, they would listen to what we had to say, and if they won, we would leave.

Team Jesus: Andrew (who is an athletic baseball player), two native translators (one who is sick and goes home later), myself (who thinks this will end up in us doing the walk of shame), and one of their friends who they wouldn't let on their team and we called him off the sidelines to join our team.

Team Harvestfield: 6-7 Bolivian teenagers who have been playing and perfecting soccer since forever.

It truly looked like a David and Goliath situation. We creamed them. It was amazing to watch our ragged team beat their rugged one. And instead of us doing the walk of shame, we walked them through the story of the gospel and lead every one of them to Christ.

We should not have won that game. In fact we probably shouldn't have interrupted their game. But the love of Christ prevailed. is prevailing. and will prevail forever.

Eureka!

There are times when God gives me a small piece of the puzzle. And in those times I feel like there are miles more left to be discovered just above my head and beyond my reach. And although my head is working and churning to grasp the explosive, exponential yet finite abundance filling my head, I can feel this massive endless completed idea hovering above my reach.

It is like a huge juicy steak that I could never hope to digest.

It is like a giant hand has reached inside and has gripped the deepest parts of me.

It is like a mile wide balloon has inch deep roots inside my mind, filling it but being so much bigger than what I can grasp.

And there is so much left to discover, but through it He brings me closer.

God is so big.

tell that fairy that she can have them... Part III

So for those of you that like stats...

This past week in my struggle against teeth:

13 times my dentist has dentist has filled a tooth

11 shots that I have been given to numb my mouth

8 cavities have been filled

7 teeth have been worked on

4 dentist appointments

2 fillings have fallen out

There are times in your life when you look and realize that you just can't keep living the way that you have been. For me and this whole fiasco I have realized that I can't keep eating and drinking the stuff that I have been. My dentist told me that having an explosive amount of cavities is becoming incredibly common among college students because of one thing: soft drinks.

I think that one of the things about maturing and junk like that is that the realization that what we do really does matter. It has cost a lot of pain (and money) to fix my problem of drinking too much coke. And the same goes for in our spiritual lives. What we do, or lack to do, really affects how we live. I can tell a difference in myself when I have been diving into God's word and when I haven't read for understanding in a while. So I guess the question is, do we want to live with cavities in our teeth and soul or not?

Who needs color TV when you have books about color?

So I'm reading an INCREDIBLE book series right now. There are four books: Black, Red, White, and Green. And they are about theming your house and life different colors based on your personality. hahaha not really! They are about this guy named Thomas Hunter who whenever he falls asleep he wakes up in a different time. Like he will go to sleep and wake up in the future and then go to sleep there and wake up back in this time period. Wow. It's legit.

And it has made me see all the similarities that it has with my life, because every night when I go to bed I wake up in the 1930s... I don't know if you knew that. Nah, but for real God is teaching me so much through these books. It is making me look at myself a lot and see things that I'm messing up with. I just finished an amazing chapter in which the people have forgotten what they once knew and are committing unspeakable evils in the name of following a shadow of their former truths. I read that and I just hope and pray that I never reach that point, becoming so familiar with something that it loses all meaning and I start to follow the rules and the boundaries that I've created for it instead of the life and the passion of what it started out as.

So if you are a reader, definitely check out these books. If you aren't a reader, go to the first grade, learn some words, and then definitely check out these books.

Tell that fairy that she can have them... Part II

So I literally finished my blog about teeth last night, got off of the couch, walked to my bathroom, started flossing, and a filling popped out. Called the dentist this morning and she won't be in until monday morning, so I'm going to have to wait all weekend to get this gaping hole filled back in. Looks like I'm getting flanked on all sides!!

Tell that fairy that she can have them...

So I have lived through 10.5 hours of WWII this past week. We watched The Pacific and Saving Private Ryan. And it took this long to realize that I'm in a war. Against my teeth.

I like teeth. Not in a creepy "hey teeth ;)" kind of way, but that's what I look at when I talk to people. If I look at their eyes I will completely zone out, so I have to watch their mouth, meaning that I stare at teeth a whole lot. So I'm cool with teeth. Just not mine.

I had braces for four years and during that time (my entire HS career) I broke 28 brackets. Guess how many teeth you have? 28. I broke them with gum, lollypops, granola bars, half frozen pizza bites, skittles, pillows, fingernails, water bottles, walking sticks, and some of them just broke cuze I was breathing too hard. One time my orthodontist, an incredibly nice man, got right in my face yelling at me telling me that I just didn't care. After he was done with me he changed his policy on how many free brackets he will give patients.

I got my wisdom teeth out a couple months ago. Actually my wisdom teeth wasn't as big of an ordeal as it is for other people. I told the technician 'thank you' while I was under and he told my Mom that I was a nice guy.

My Dad decided to take us off dental insurance and so I went to the dentist on Dec 28 just because it was free because we were on insurance. I had 8 cavities. We went back on insurance. It took two separate appointments to fill them all, yesterday and today. I went in and she told me to tell her if the numbing shot worked very well because she remembered that my Mom was pretty resistant to the numbing stuff. So after one I told her that I could still feel everything and the only difference was that my tongue was just a little tingly. So she gave me another shot. And then another. She started drilling and it still hurt. So she gave me another shot and then another one in five places. So I ended up getting 9 shots. And it still hurt a little.

This is a war that I'm going to win. Even if I have to fight it tooth and nail.

a Converseation

When I was in middle school I went to a private school called Canyon Creek Christian Academy. I made some wonderful friends that I have to this day, but even still, I was terrified of how people saw me.

For some reason I have always loved Converses. For years before I finally bought a pair, I realllly wanted them. Not in a covetous way and I didn’t sit around thinking about them, but there was something inside of me that thought that they looked really cool. Too cool for me in fact, and that’s why I never worked up the courage to do more than look at them or occasionally try them on. I wore tennis shoes. Not Converse.

Finally my senior year, now at Richardson High School, I sucked it up and got them. I just stopped caring about what other people thought of me. I liked them, if other people didn’t or thought I looked goofy in them then that was their problem. I wasn’t going to let a bunch of people decide what shoes I was going to wear. Now if they all had knives, bats and strong opinions I might have gone with them…

Remember Sea Monkeys

Do you remember?

Do you remember?

Do you remember Sea Monkeys?

This was scrolling on the DART trail billboard tonight as Courtney and I rode back from meeting up with some friends and hang out downtown. It struck us as really random because while we do in fact remember Sea Monkeys, nothing more was said about them and as soon as we were remembering Sea Monkeys, a huge “DIABETES?” filled the screen and some hypnotist doctor was advertising his 26 year proven method.

This weekend I worked at Carolina Creek Christian Camp as a counselor for a cabin of about seven sophomores. The theme of the weekend was “Remember” and it reminded me (heh heh) about a book that I read by Don Miller titled A Million Miles in a Thousand Years in which one character says that without his memories, his life has flown by. Memories are the things that give our lives flavor.

And if we don’t remember what we have done, seen, experienced, felt- well we just might forget about Sea Monkeys!