Waiting

Hey guys, how is it going?  I know you haven't heard from me through my blog for a while, so you may be wondering what Has been going on in my life. I have been super-dee-duper busy, like never before.  This is not due to homework, but to job applications, resumes, and student leadership positions for next year.  At this point, I have a possible position at a private engineering firm/contracting company and applied for summer employment at TXDOT.  I never knew how much time these things take up, but I am glad that I finished them.  Over the last couple of weeks, I also had to do several things in order to apply for IMPACT positions at LeTourneau, which included several applications and interviews.  I applied for Chaplain Intern and Peer Adviser, and ended up getting chaplain; I am really excited.  This means that next semester I get to lead devotionals on Wednesday and be a spiritual leader on my floor. Because of my busy schedule, this was the most I had ever looked forward to spring break.  I did not go home but took a missions trip to San Isidro, Texas.  I went with twenty one other people, which made up two teams.  My team was the construction team, and we helped to build a house for a family; the other team put on a sports camp for the kids in San Isidro.  We stayed in a small baptist church in San Isidro, who's lead pastor and youth pastor worked for Buckner.  We worked very hard building the house, including a fourteen hour Friday.  It definitely was an oasis for my brain though, even if it wasn't an oasis for my body.  It was so nice to get away from LeTourneau and go to a little town in the middle of nowhere.  I also had the privilege to worship in a bilingual church, which was a great experience. More than anything, spring break was a chance for me to get away from everything and reflect on what I had gone through in my life.  God has definitely been working in my life, and teaching me many things through my circumstances, especially the lesson of patience (something you had to put in to practice while waiting for me to write another blog post).     God chose to teach me this lesson in a very clear way this week.  At the church in San Isidro, there were some small devotional booklets that happened to be on the subject of patience.  They contained some very important advice for me that was very helpful.  However, the divine providence did not stop there.  The Sunday morning after I visited a new church with some of my friends, and they sang Everlasting God.  The words of the chorus go like this: "strength will rise as we wait upon the Lord".  I know God was speaking to me through this song. In today's culture of instant self-gratification, waiting on God is not something that is easy to talk about.  However, if we truly want to follow God's will for our lives, patience is something we HAVE to have.  This applies especially to college students.  My present concerns include job opportunities, educational choices, relationships, and friendships.  It is easy to find one plan that you think will work and latch onto it, thinking that it has to happen a certain way.  However, waiting on God to guide your path in His direction is what we are called to do as Christians.

Frustration

I am frustrated.  I don't usually vent my feelings, so this post will be a little different.  Now this doesn't really have anything to do with school itself, so far, in fact, the classes are going well and the homework is easy.  However, this second semester has started off very differently from the first.  The excitement of meeting new friends has been replaced with the comfort of coming back to good friends; the blind embracing of others as the greatest people in the world has been replaced with the knowledge of the lives of others, both the acts characteristic of a saint and those characteristic of a sinner.  The cohesiveness of a floor due to the unfamiliarity of others has turned into smaller groups of friends who share certain personalities, ways of thinking, and leniency on certain types of faults (dare I say sins?).

None of these differences between this semester and last are due to an unnatural progression.  But why do I feel so much tension?  To be unfortunately negative again, why do I feel like I am personally experiencing such theological doctrines such as the ultimate depravity of man and motivated to create new doctrines like the inherent laziness of man?  Why do I feel so much tension, and why am I so negative?

Maybe it's because I hate conflict.  I know my Dad also has this characteristic.  When people disagree, both he and I tend to shy away from the situation and find a more amiable conversation.

Maybe it's because I was homeschooled.  Maybe attending a public or private school for the majority of your life prepares you for the messiness of life in a community.  Maybe these events that I am experiencing in college are normal, and it just took me until college to experience them.

Maybe it's because I have never had friends close enough to now their deep faults.  Maybe, with smaller numbers of possible close friends around me, and friendships mostly set up because of our parents' friendships, I never got the true opportunity to start in a new situation and truly choose my friends among a plethora of people.

While I really do not know exactly what is causing my frustration, I do know one thing.  I am losing my faith in human beings.  Even Christian ones at a Christian college.  Of course in principle, I know faith is supposed to be in God, but I have shown faith in human beings through my actions.

Surely the great moral person I see myself as could not be guilty of a sin like idolatry?

Yes, I could be guilty.

This sin of having faith in people is not excluded to just me.  Sometimes I think even Christians put some of their faith in people, especially the great theologians of the past.  People like Martin Luther and John Calvin have been put on a very high pedestal by some Christians.  Since they were so awesome, it only makes sense to conclude that they were right on every single doctrinal issue.  Yet, according to what I know, Luther seemed to believe in a form of baptismal regeneration and John Calvin believed in what is called 'double predestination', two views that many find repulsive and/or contrary to scripture.  On the internet, I have seen people mention these negative aspects about these two men, and proceed to discredit much of their other work just because of one fault in their doctrine.  Does this come out of an assumption that theologians must be perfect?  It makes me wonder: did God allow even these men to have faults?  What if their faults were supposed to imply that even Christians are not perfect, no matter how great?

No one is good - truly perfect - but God alone.

So why do I feel depressed when people seem to be someone worse than I thought they were?  Do I have too much faith in humans; namely, the ones who have the special label of Christian?

The Bible says we should only hope, trust, believe, and have faith in the Savior and only the Savior.  There is no other name or person under heaven, on the whole earth, who will save us from our sin, malice, greed, and depression.  I have come to realize that there is only one solution to humanity's problem: Christ IN us, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27).

Listen to this song by Peter Furler to understand what I am talking about.

When I first listened to this album by Furler, this song really stuck out to me.  It has a simple message, and a simple tune, yet it really proves that scripture best speaks to us.

Scripture also speaks to us through our brothers and sisters in Christ.  To provide a case in point, right after I finished the previous paragraph, I had to leave to go to lunch and then class.  In my Intro to Engineering Class, my professor also used Colossians 1:27 in his devotional.  Obviously, God was trying to teach me a lesson through that Bible verse.  Let me share that lesson with you.

My observations about the faults and sins of the people around me are in no way invalid.  This is not some issue about my close friends or the people that I do not get along with or the people that irritate me sometimes.  This is a human issue, an issue that, as I said earlier, frustrated and continues to frustrate me.  As I have come to find, it is a massively practical issue.  There is often nothing glorious in the natural man of humanity.  That is why the Bible states that it is not us, but Christ in us that is man's only hope for glory, that is, splendor in the way we act and treat other people.  Colossians is filled with references to the power we have that makes us able to bear fruit and do good works.  This power only comes through the Holy Spirit, who convicts us of our sins and allows us to work for the Kingdom of God.

Don't put your trust in humanity like I do.  Put your trust in the One who gives humanity the power that they need.  This power motivates us to hard work and encourages us to look beyond our feelings to the things that need to be done in this world.  And this power cannot be overcome.

GREATER IS HE THAT IS IN US, THAN HE THAT IS IN THE WORLD

My First Semester: How do you feel?

As headed back to college on Monday, I was excited to go back yet unprepared in many aspects to restart my busy life after the lull of the holidays.  As I return to college, I do not feel completely ready to both learn more things and put in to practice the things that I learned last semester, especially the life lessons that I have outlined in my previous two blog posts.  I think it is important, especially in the life of a young person like me, to continuously look for life lessons.  This normally comes by good and bad experiences.  As R. G. LeTourneau once said when reciting a certain billboard: "I got my good judgment from my experience, and my experience from my bad judgment".   So as I look for lessons in my own life, especially those made fresh by the college experience, this is one principle that has really stuck out to me:

Feelings are not as important as we make out in today's society.

Now let me clarify myself, I am not throwing feelings out the window.  We should not attempt to make others feel bad or find feelings somehow undesirable.  Nevertheless, feelings play a much larger part in our lives than they should.

A few years ago, on the drive back from my weekly piano lessons as a student teacher, I would catch a certain podcast on the radio by Robert Jeffress.  This pastor presented a certain picture of persistence in a particular podcast.  One of his quotes was particularly eye opening for me: "It is much easier to act yourself into a feeling, than to feel yourself into an action."  Now that quote sounds like a mouthful at first, and it took my a while to truly understand it and take it to heart.

In my previous blog post, I talked about hard work and motivation.  When I look at these two concepts in today's world, their biggest enemy is one's feelings.  In a sense, our feelings rule our lives.  All around us, we are bombarded with advertisements and objects that offer us positive feelings.  We are offered positive and beneficial feelings through financial security: the latest electronics, sexual experiences, and the biggest and best possessions.  This attitude that our life should cater to our feelings is in many ways antithetical to hard work and motivation.  As a result of this attitude, when presented with a task of any size or shape, we often fail to go through with it because we do not feel like doing it.  We do not feel like doing our homework, we do not feel like being nice to that guy, we do not feel like spending our time and energy investing in others, we do not feel like working on our relationship with God.  However, if we look to our feelings to govern our actions, we usually end up accomplishing nothing.  And this is where I find the quote previously mentioned so applicable to today's society.  "It is much easier to act yourself into a feeling, than to feel yourself into an action."  The fact is, we often rely on our feelings to motivate us to action.  Yet when this becomes our mode of self-motivation, we seldom get anything accomplished.

Contrast the futility of being felt into action with the power of acting oneself into a feeling.  Start working, and motivation will soon come to work harder.  For those of you that have been on mission trips before, isn't it right after a mission trip when you are most fired up and ready to help people?  Assuredly, it is after the mission trip is done that you feel that you have been lacking in the actions department.  Many a time have I been fired up to help others after a fulfilling Church mission trip.  This illustrates my point perfectly.  Sometimes, when the feelings do not come, you just have to follow Nike's slogan: "just do it".

This whole idea of feelings being insufficient for action has a great correspondence to the greatest quality in our Christian faith: love.  Here is another quote by one of the greatest Christian minds, C. S. Lewis: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”  As Christians, we are clearly called to love others.  However, our cultures view of feelings often gets in our way.  We often wait for some butterfly feeling in our stomachs before we do something.  However, as Lewis points out, this is not the Christian view of love. The Christian's idea of love is a constant desire for another person's good, something that can never be produced by feelings, thereby proving the futility of feelings as a motivating force.  And now an excursus into some theology, Christians, we understand the futility of feelings and realize that this power to be motivated to good deeds is ours through the power of the Holy Spirit.  Recently, I have been reading through Colossians, and this stuck out to me: "May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy."  (Colossians 1:11 ESV)

So what does this have to do with school?  As I head back on Monday, I am challenged to put these ideas into actions.  They are ideas that I have learned, yet in many ways, they are still ideas.  Putting these things into practice is much more importance.  And now to quote another smart man, Mark Driscoll, "it is not just about information but transformation.". My feelings are always present, and seldom ignored.  I hope to come to a point where I will not be controlled by my feelings, but act myself into a healthy way of life.