Currently The Moon Is Down By Further Seems Forever see related

New life in Hawaii

Currently Watching Jarhead (Full Screen) By Jake Gyllenhaal, Scott MacDonald, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Lo Ming see related

September 11 for me is pretty different than for most people.

I was hungry for God, but I had questions. The place I had been for several months had been one of a lot of action and pushing and going-at-it seeking God and studying the Bible and praying and thinking and writing and turning things over and over in my brain trying to figure some things out and this is run-on sentence. I was trying to figure out how I could draw closer to God and why so many people were coming to God, having an experience, and then walking away a few years later, disappointed. It was a place of taking the once-awesome realization I had of the need for us to be totally 100% sold out to and committed to God, to go after Him with our whole lives, and to worship Him with every fiber of our being and set our world ablaze – taking all that just a bit too far in the sense that when I didn’t feel things were “happening fast enough” in my life, I thought I’d just push ahead in my own strength. I would *make it* happen.

I had been praying for God to use me with my friends to stir up hunger for God in them. To use me to change my world. To use me to impact the people around me physically and spiritually. To use me to pour out His power onto people. And the place I was at was one of focusing really, really hard on trying to not become the things I didn’t want to become, the things I feared becoming. I didn’t want to become a person who offered people only a twisted, requirement-filled, religious, cool-façade but ultimately empty form of Christianity built mostly on the doings and the don’t-doings.

Where had this left me? Well, after months of feeling like every step I took gained me less and less ground, it had left me in a place of frustration. A place of an underlying anger at God that He’d let me down - that the things I was told would be down this road were in fact not. A place of growing realization that I was in fact becoming just like the things and the people I didn’t WANT to become like. That scared me to death!

*An aside: Some people will point to this experience and say, "See? That God stuff just leads to trouble if you get too serious about it. People get all worked up. They start living by a bunch of rules and thinking about things like salvation and hell, and it just messes them over - they get all crazy." I disagree. It leads to trouble if you go about it wrong. Just like anything else. My problem, I was to discover, was that I was not on the road I thought I was on, so the destinations were different. Having come through this place in life, I can say with clarity that knowing God and pursuing Him with everything you are is the most incredible, freeing, and extreme route you can take in life - it's what we were made for! We were not made for 40 hour work weeks, shifting moral anchors, Abercrombie & Fitch, and slaving for the TV gods. We were made for God. And those rules? People have always had a tendency to take Relationship and turn it into religion, shifting the perspective from freedoms God gives us (like "Hey, here are some things I value, and here are some ways to not screw up your life. Try them out!") to rules and requirements. What's the difference? Religion makes you try to live up to a moral standard which is an attempt to please God by works. Relationship is whereby pursuing intimacy with God, you love Him, study Him, and just get transformed into His nature as you travel along. My point here? Religion sucks! Relationship rocks!

So, back to the story. I had gone to Bethel Church in Redding, CA for the first time over that Labor Day weekend prior to the weekend of the 11^th, and God was rocking my world there. But the entire next week was one of the most intensely dark weeks of my life. That was strange to me at the time, considering all the amazing things God had done in my life to date and all the hope and excitement I had in general in getting to know God better and better.

That week was dark because I was faced with the reality that the only thing I wanted was the thing I was not finding. The things I knew should be in me were not. Though I would instantly tell you that if you’re in a Relationship with Jesus, you will be full of things like love for others, intense joy, excitement, peace, and a real sense of freedom, I was recognizing that I was completely void of these. Empty. Bankrupt. I was missing out. Missing out! I hadn't been truly peaceful for some time, and I perceived that I was in fact having very little impact on my world. I felt rather invaluable.

On September 11^th, I walked to the rocks with my Bible and journal and couch pillow to sit on. I sat down on the rocks like many times before and stared out at the waves. I pulled out my Bible and smacked it down in frustration. The Journey with Jesus that had started so well early in college had led me to a place I hated. A place of ambitious religion, not relationship. From the observer’s perspective, there’s sometimes a fine line between (1) well-meant “Christian” religious fanaticism and (2) being totally consumed with passion, love, and devotion for God and living powerfully out of that, but the end of those two roads are totally different. One leads to the Father, and the other leads…well I don’t ever want to find out. All I could see from my vantage point along that road was bitterness, disappointment, and incongruity – that was enough for me. My road was becoming one of stepping out on the principles of the Father alone, not the Father. I didn’t want to travel any farther.

On the rocks that day, these thoughts all collided. I told God, “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but I give up. I can’t and I won’t do things this way anymore. I quit.” Not quit in the sense of forget about God and walk the other way. I just knew I was broken. I had tried to go ahead in my own understanding. I was broken, and only He could fix me, and I wouldn’t find it by reading another line of text. He would have to come. And then He did. And then He did. God spoke to my heart, and He told me basically, "Good! I don't want you to continue like that!" Over the next hour or so, He made things much, much clearer.

One of the big things He showed me was that I had been living from a performance-based self worth mindset, and I had created expectations of myself that God had not placed there. He told me in no quiet way, “BEN YOU ARE INTRINSICALLY VALUABLE TO ME!!!! IF YOU DID NOTHING ELSE FOR ME, I WOULD STILL LOOOOOOOVE YOU!!” That destructive, performance-based mindset that had been so intertwined in my perceptions (probably because that's just about all we know from the day we're born), I started to realize, would have to change. At that moment, I instantly felt weight lift off of me. I felt freedom come. I felt tangibly different from 30 minutes before. It was amazing!

God started that day, and over the next several months, to rearrange my life and my perspectives on who I was, what the Christian life is really all about, and what things are important. I had been focusing too much on the bad things, the things I wanted to avoid, and the things that were wrong, and not nearly enough on Him, His goodness, and what He had done. He encouraged me, though, that I was not that far off, though it felt like a thousand miles. It was more of a "right words, wrong meaning" kind of thing.  I just needed realigning. I knew He wanted to rekindle fires of love in my heart, and pour out His peace and joy into me. (There’s a lot more to this story, of course, but this was the over-reaching crux of it all.)

One of the major things I learned that I will sum up using a Heidi Baker quote is this: “Be wrecked for everything but His presence.” Trust me - I'm still just a baby in learning what that really means. But what I have learned is that above all else, He wants our love – He wants our hearts. He wants us to literally take time and spend with just Him – not time just spent in study, focused prayer for things, or even in sung worship, but time spent receiving from Him, time in a quiet place with Him, time just enjoying Him while walking down the street. Enjoying His peace, joy, and freedom. This is what is most important, above all else: time with the Father. It’s what we were made for, and it’s what He calls us to. And the more we’re with Him, the more we’ll be like Him in the sense that we’ll learn to love with a love that costs us something – a sacrificial love.

So today, as I reread my journal from 2 years ago, I celebrate with God of His kindness, faithfulness, and generosity to continue with me even at times I was angry with Him for what was not His fault. I celebrate that knowing Him is truly the best and most exciting thing that could ever have happened to me! Thank you, Jesus.