This blog was started one year ago out of the passion of two hearts to serve God and inspire others to do the same. It continued for a little while, but quickly fell by the wayside. Why? It is not that our passion is gone, I am really not sure what it was exactly, but you know, things get busy, especially for High school students, and we figure some things have to fall through the cracks.
So, this is the new year; exactly one year after the initial conversation that led to the creation of this blog. One year can hold so much, and there is a lot we think about on the eve of a new year. So much to imagine; where we will be next year, what our relationships will be like, what we will have accomplished. Especially for me (and all other high school seniors I presume) it can get pretty scary; I don’t know where exactly I will be going to college, how that will affect my relationships, or if where I will be is where God truly wants me. This can get very overwhelming and most nearly discouraging and frightening. I know you know the feeling, anxiety of the unknown fills our hearts and minds.
What we need to learn is that these feelings are pure selfishness and pride in a very clever disguise. It seems like the world wants us to be frightened and stressed; I know in my senior year all people want to ask me is where I will be next year, and what my future plans are, and that stress is also encouraged when taking SAT’s, ACT’s, SAT 2’s and whatever other college preparation tests schools want to throw at us. Living in the moment is moved to the backburner while our future is simmering and being planned and seasoned. This, I believe, is one of the prime reasons we are told to be in the world and not of it. Our anxiety about the future depletes our reliance on God.
Every new year I take some time to be silent and just listen to God, I usually go outside actually, and I want to share what God revealed to me this year, not more than an hour ago:
Wherever we are, wherever we are going, wherever we will be in our lives, in our relationships and in everything, doesn’t matter. The reson why it doesn’t matter is that simple two letter word: “we”. Why would “our lives” and “our futures” mean anything in the broad scope of eternity? We are a blip of sound in an endless loop of God’s music, (or to put it into generational context, one millisecond of one song in God’s infinite Gig iPod Shuffle). To make it short, we are nothing, and God is everything. Where “we” will be doesn’t matter at all. What we should ask when thinking of the future is where God will be. I don’t care where I will be, I only care where God will be; will He be glorified in my life? Will He be shared with my friends? Will He be shown in my actions and relationships? It’s not about us. And it’s kinda funny, because once I started to think about this, all my anxiety went away, and I truly found peace. Once I stopped my pride and selfishness and stopped thinking about me, that is when I felt God’s presence with me, and I knew everything would be alright. God has His plans for me, and I am a vessel to be filled, and that’s not scary, that’s exciting!
So, this is the new year…
Security is something everyone longs for, and few view as something they would be happy without. But the truth is, we are not called to be secure. We are called to be insecure with everything in this world and open to the security that only Christ can provide us with. Do we ever think that our own security in ourselves and our surroundings is depriving us of the Love of God? I don’t think we do, and I certainly don’t think that very often, if at all. We are all too preoccupied with making ourselves secure and approved by everyone else that we miss the fact that our sole security should come from our God. It’s just something we don’t think about.
Imagine yourself not having any money, or a place to sleep, not knowing where your next meal is coming from, and alone. Would you feel secure? Of course not. That is because our sense of security comes from our ability to survive, thrive, and be approved by others. Why doesn’t our sense of security come from God? In the old testament God told His people this: “Do not fear, O Jacob my servant; do not be dismayed, O Israel. I will surely save you out of a distant place, your descendants from the land of their exile. Jacob will again have peace and security, and no one will make him afraid.” -Jeremiah 46:27 And we are told in the new testament: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
So why do we still find our security in earthly things? Have we forgotten that Jesus has saved us and we don’t have to be afraid of what we will eat, what we will wear and where we will live? God is calling out to us, and He is telling us that he will save us. He wants so much to be our security, and He Loves us in a way that we can’t even fathom. By rejecting Him and finding security in our own things we are telling Him that we don’t need His Love, and thus depriving ourselves of it.
My challenge is very difficult, and it’s probably not one you haven’t heard before, but I challenge you to get out of your comfort zone for the Lord. I mean really get out and find your security only in Him, because he can bless us with so much more than we can even ask or imagine. We shouldn’t be afraid of what people will do if we talk about God in school, or wherever else we are. Go out and live like you mean it, finding your security not in everything you have and how many people like you, but only by God’s everlasting grace.
“The church of Jesus Christ is a place of promise and possibility, of adventure and discovery, a community of love on the move, strangers and exiles in a foreign land en route to the heavenly Jerusalem. But the security seekers are the enemies of openness. Their insistence on preserving the status quo thwarts innovation and spontaneity and discourages the exploration of new roads into the mind of Christ Jesus; wanting to keep things the way they are automatically introduces a new insecurity with more cautions, threats, and nervous tension” -Brennan Manning
Our longing for security on our own doesn’t make us secure, it makes us insecure, because the only true security comes from God. So what does that leave us with? Without God we are left alone and scared, with nothing but our false preconceptions of security to comfort us. So get out of your own false comfort zones and let the only true source of security be your portion and your strength.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Belief, Believing, Doubt, Move Mountains
As we go through our everyday lives we can surely lose sight of anything we aren’t doing at the time. We just don’t feel God’s presence in our lives because we don’t really take the time to let Him in. Has anyone ever felt like they are far from God and are unsure that He’s even there? I feel kind of like that sometimes, and that can easily lead to doubts. And sometimes we think we can get closer to Him by just by prayer and bible reading, but if we do it without an attitude and knowledge that He really is there, listening to us, and wanting to speak to us, we aren’t going to get anywhere, because we’re trying to talk to and read about someone who isn’t real in our minds. It is especially hard when bible reading gets confusing because we don’t understand it, or something seems contradictory, but those are the times when we need to believe the most.
We can often find ourselves questioning God, and questioning His word, especially when our lives seem pretty out of our control. [article] When hard times come and we don’t understand where God is in all of it, we doubt His love, and God is love. What we all have to realize though is it’s okay to doubt. Jesus knew we would doubt, but He needs us to believe. Even in the great commission: the purpose and life verse of the church, it says that some doubted:
Mathew 28:16-20 “Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
It is okay to doubt, we all doubt at one time or another, but the thing we cannot do is allow our doubts to change what we believe. We are all going to doubt, we aren’t always going to feel God’s presence all the time, but that’s okay, because God is drawing us back to Him and all we have to do is know He’s there. I mean really know He’s there, and since we can’t see Him directly, or hear Him directly, the only way to do that is through belief.
I challenge you to make God real in your lives, because you’re in His hands and He is holding you all the time. Make Him real and He will be, believe and you will see.
Jesus said it pretty nicely in Mark 11:23: “I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him.”
Go move mountains!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: God's Grace, Grace, Love, Sin, Volunteer
The hardest thing about life, is that it keeps on going. You have no time to relive or redo, the only “re” you’re left with is to rethink, which I do a ton of. I rethink whether or not my decision was a smart one, whether those harsh words were worth the pain they caused, and whether everything I do was what God would have wanted and a lot of times I come up short. One thing I have really been struggling with recently is accepting God’s grace. this may seem really silly but I have been observing Christians recently and I realize that this is something lots of them struggle with. I can readily recognize the Christians who have accepted and are embracing the gift of God’s grace. I so often find myself defining myself by the hours of volunteer work I do, the few nice words I can muster and the “show” that makes other Christians want to be as godly as me. I am thinking that God will love me more because of what I do. It is a horrible thing because it is forcing yourself to be stuck in that old testament mindset, one that paralyzes you with sacrifice’s and the need to always be perfect, which is underlining the whole reason Jesus died for our sins. I am mocking his death with my posed perfection, and that is maybe the hardest thing to grasp. God knows that we are going to make mistakes, he even knows what mistakes we are going to make. The thing to remember is not to forget.We cannot forget the justice of God and ignore that we have any guidelines or laws. But on the flip side we cannot forget that God’s grace covers everything we have ever done, we cannot live like we are good enough because it is when we get confident in our mortal selves that God is unable to use us.
“My response is to get down on my knees before the Father, this magnificent Father who parcels out all heaven and earth. I ask him to strengthen you by his Spirit—not a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in you as you open the door and invite him in. And I ask him that with both feet planted firmly on love, you’ll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ’s love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
Glory to God in the church!
Glory to God in the Messiah, in Jesus!
Glory down all the generations!
Glory through all millennia! Oh, yes!”
-Ephesians 3:16-24 (The Message)
This passage addresses the idea that we cannot even understand his love, but we are told to try and grasp how high and deep and wide and long his love is. His love that never ends. The only way we can live full lives is to live through Jesus Christ who came to bring us lives to the fullest. The point is this, know God’s love, live in it and marvel in his grace, his grace that covers all our sin!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Confusion, High School, Not Alone, Spark, Time
Hi everybody,
You know, one of the most confusing things in this world to me is time; it’s always just going and sometimes it passes quickly and sometimes you can swear it’s going slower than before. As it slowly passes we just can’t help but feel like our lives have little meaning and nothing’s going to change. Or sometimes I suppose we’re just waiting on time until we are done and we think we can start something, but for now we’re just waiting. Like high school; I don’t know about anyone else, but I sometimes feel like high school is pretty pointless and it’s just a stage of your life before you can actually get out and do something with your life. We feel tied down, and we’re tired of school, but too often we just ride through it not caring to look around us and truly live while we’re in school.
It’s a common thing for us high schoolers to think of nothing but getting through school when we’re at school; we walk around blind to what may be happening with everyone else because we’re just thinking of getting through so we can get out, and I bet those other people that I’m talking about are doing the same thing. To so many of us, school is a place to get your work done, (maybe) try to get good grades, joke around with your friends at lunch, and then go home so we can live what we call our lives.
If we take the time to observe the people we are around all day, we may see through the thing they want us to see and find ourselves looking at who they really are, flaws and greatness alike. How often do we really talk to those we spend time with? Not just exterior “what’s up?” talking, real conversation. And I know it’s hard, because we all have other things to focus on, I’m just wondering what our lives would look like if we started doing that. It makes time seem a little more interesting when we feel like we’re really doing something.
But time just keeps going, and it only knows how to wait; it’s waiting for us to do something with it. Our lives aren’t just going to start after we wait enough time, time is constant, and it doesn’t define us. We define the time we have been given, so it’s up to us and us alone to make the most of it. Luckily though, we aren’t alone…
Hey there,
So this is the first real post of Deeperoots. I was unsure as to what I wanted to write about but it seems to me that I have spent this whole entire week observing people and waiting for them to fall apart. Well what I mean by that is this: Have you ever taken the time to just be quiet and watch people, and see how they look, how they actually look? I believe that the reason so many people fall apart is because no one else took the time to notice the warning signs. If we were doing what God commanded us to, which is building each other up, and being there for each other and taking the time to evaluate and to KNOW people, not know just who they want you to know, but know who they actually are, to come to understand why people hide behind what they do. I would love to be selfless and be able to take the time to just look at people and let them talk because that is the one thing that truly binds us all together: the want to communicate. But so often it is our selfishness that keeps us from opening our eyes to the people around us. So often it is the heartache and troubles of our own that keep us preoccupied with what we need and what we want, and often that preoccupation leads to neglect and neglect leads to hurt and hurt leads to seclusion which leads to depression. How hard it is to take the spotlight off of ourselves, but if we think about this logically, the way God wanted it to be we see a big picture that looks something like this: I ask you how you are, I genuinely care about who you are and how you are, you in turn care for someone else and take the time to know them and love them, and in time the cycle will return to me, someone will be looking out and loving me. How contagious selflessness would be if we would only give it the chance! I wish that we could love others so wonderfully that people are not forced to paste on their smiles, so that people no longer feel the need to appear perfect.
My challenge is this, open your eyes to what is happening around you, open your ears to what they are saying and actually hear them and want to hear them, and most important love them with everything you have, a love that forces them to gain true happiness, not whatever comes from forcing one more smile.
“So come on and sing out
Let our anthem grow loud
There is one great love
Jesus”
-David Crowder
