Week 1 of LT

So last week, the day finally arrived that I left the midwest for the summer, and went to the east coast!  Specifically, Wilmington, North Carolina.  I'm actually not staying in Wilmington, but in a smaller town just south of it called Carolina Beach.  It's incredible so far.  I'm in an ocean front beach house!  Yeah, OCEAN FRONT!  The atlantic ocean is seriously in my back yard!  I love it!  For the past week, I've been going to bed to the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore instead of my iTunes playlists!  

Spiritually it's a little different however.  Since high school, I've felt very spiritually dry, and that God is very distant from me, and so far, this continues to be the case.  I've been doing a lot of journaling, and the mindless writing, that is, writing without thinking about what I will write about before hand, has brought a lot to light.  There are several things that I didn't realize that I believed until I just wrote it down before I could talk myself out of it.  I would love to talk to one of the staff members about it, but I'm not sure who.  I definitely don't want to talk to the other students about it very much.  Mainly because of my trust issues with students, which makes the fact that I don't want to talk to a BSU staff member really weird.  If at all possible, I'd like to talk to one of the V Tech or WVU staff members.   I don't know.  It's mainly about my 8+ year dry spell.  My dry spell has been thrown into sharp light this past week.

On the first day of LT, everyone was sent on a prayer walk, asking God the question; "What would you like to do with me this summer?", or a question similar to that.  The assignment was actually to pray about the answer if God were to ask us the question "What would you have me do for you?", but is the same thing basically.  The answer I kept coming up with was "I'm going to work on your faith... faith... faith"  I kinda fought it at first because I thought there were so many other things God could work on besides my faith, but then as I thought about it, I realized, pretty much all the issues I've been dealing with, are either directly, or indirectly faith related.  Last night (Thursday night), during service (kind of a church service) we had a speaker named Jim Pace who hit the nail on the head when he closed his sermon with the phrase "This summer, God want's you to say 'yes' to faith, and 'no' to fear".  Scary, I know.  

For the rest of the summer, I'm trying to keep my mind open, and my expectations low.  I'm afraid of being disappointed about it when I leave, but I don't want to keep God from doing what he wants to do this summer.

Leadership Training

For the past few month's I've been doing some hard core support raising so I can participate in a program my church does called Leadership Training.  I'll be living and working full-time in Wilmington, North Carolina, while ministering to people in the community, getting to know a group from my own church on an entirely new level and getting to know a group from a sister church at Virginia Tech for the first time.  I'm really nervous, but I'm also really excited!

So far, support raising has been going well.  I've sent out almost 40 letters to various people I've known from church, school, family and other various organizations and activities I've done, and I've received mostly yeses from these people and even some checks already!  It's been an incredibly humbling experience.  I hate asking for help, especially if I'm asking for money, but it's been very helpful, and I've learned a lot about people, about myself, and about God.

As I said earlier, I'm nervous about this summer, but I'm also extremely excited to see what God has in store for me!

Bitten by the grouch bug

So I've been kind fo a grouch today.  Don't really know why besides teh fact that pissed off has been my normal state of being for the past few weeks.  Why am I writing about this on a blog as opposed to my off-line journal I write my oober personal stuff in?  Well, mainly because I know certain people read this blog and I wanted to apologize to them if I've been overly grouchy to them. In BDubs today, if I was grouch to you, I'm sorry.  At the party tonight, if I was grouchy, I'm sorry.  This morning, if I was grouchy, I'm sorry.  In the car, if i was grouchy, I'm sorry.  If there's any other time I may have been grouchy, I'm sorry.  If I have been, and even if I haven't been, come talk to me and let me know.  There's prolly something I'd like to talk about.  There's a lot of my mind and it'd be nice to vent to someone who could respond to me besides a neutral computer screen.

Eh, why not?

So, I'm finding that I'm giving in more and more to Google.  I think I'll try out Blogger for now.  I have a xanga that I post more regularly on, but what I'll prolly do is just copy and paste my blog on xanga to here.  I don't know, maybe I'll decide I don't like this one at all, and I'll stay on xanga, or maybe the opposite will happen, I decide I really like Blogger and ditch xanga.  Only time will tell I guess.