Senioritis

Senior year of High School was easy. I mean, I wasn't one of those people who took easy classes like Photograpy and 21st Century Study Hall. I took all real classes, because I like to learn. But being that close to the end was really neat. I could see the end of the tunnel, and on the other side was a world of possibilities. I didn't know what was going to happen when I graduated, but I was excited about it.

Right now, that's where I'm at with this deployment. Just two weeks until I go on leave, and three months until this whole deployment is over. I'm a mixture of excitement at the prospect of leaving, but intensly focused on all the things that I have to accomplish in order to leave. It's a weird balance between looking toward the future, but being wary of the present, and not getting lax. I still need to stay sharp in order to keep my guys and myself safe.

(Quick token spiritual tie: Isn't that how it is with this whole life? We're always looking foward to heaven, knowing it is the reason we live. We will one day live with God without anything filtering out our vision of Him. But we still have to maintain focus on the present in order to accomplish the thing on earth He has left us here to do. Token thought complete.)

We're towards the end of this deployment, and we're going to face the challenges of heading home. Many people's families have been damaged by this deployment, some stregthened. Some people have found God, some have left Him. Some have made good financial decisions and will return to a job. Some have been laid off, and only gotten to pay of debt, so they are returning to a worse situation. Please pray for the soldiers of my company. And for the opportunities God is going to open up over the next three months.

Betrayed by My High Tech Friend

I'm a bit frustrated today.
I was working on my computer doing some editing on the book I've been writing, and my computer decided to die. Like, one second I'm typing, and the next second, the screen is black. The computer is plugged in, so it makes no sense for my computer to just die. Most of you know I'm a die-hard Mac fan, so the fact that my Mac is betraying me is kind of an emotional experience.

For those of you who did not know I'm writing a book, let me let you in a little on that experience. It's something I started without the idea of publishing. I just wanted to us it to think over some of my life experiences and process some unanswered questions. As I progressed through the process, I started to feel like my experiences might really be able to help some other people, so I kind of wanted to try to get it published, though I was very self-conscious about it. It's got a lot of extremely personal thoughts. But as I was talking to God, and venting about this, He told me, "If I put a desire in your heart, it is your responsibility to figure out how to make it happen." And so I've been quite driven to try to get this moving. (I don't like that "responsiblity" word, but God's God... and I'm not... so we know who's word is going to matter.)

Well, I was just about done with my initial edit, and ready to send it off to some of my friends for their opinion and editing, when my computer died today. I have saved the first draft other places, but the second draft... and the last month's worth of work is saved to that computer and nowhere else.

Well, I'm online right now, and I just looked up some trouble-shooting tips, but if you don't mind praying for an inanimate object, could you pray for my computer? And for my book.

Cause God told me that even though my computer is finicky, I'm not off the hook.

I love you guys...

Plagues

A couple of days ago, it was hot. Like abnormally sweating as soon as you walk out of an air conditioned room kind of hot. Isn't it April? What kind of place could be this hot in April. Nasty little bugs came out of nowhere and flew into our mouths and eyes.

The next day a dust storm hit us. And when I mean storm, it was unlike anything most people have ever seen. If you've ever seen the movie, The Mummy, you might have a decent idea. A wall of dust could be seen rolling over the horizon. You could see it from several miles away. Moving at about 20 miles per hour, it ate the earth underneath it. As it came over us in our trucks, the world went from a sunshiney day one second, to complete brown out the next. We couldn't see more than 15 feet in front of us. The fine particles clogged our lungs. It was altogether one of the most disgusting experiences.

The day after that, a rainshower came and coated all of the land, turning everything into mud. A couple of hours into the shower, though, everything began to rinse clean. The air smelled good and felt good to breath in. You could see some red flowers begin to pop out of the brown landscape. And for just a minute, I got a reminder that... yeah, this place is desolate, and yeah, it pretty much suck here, and there is no reasonable explaination for why dust was a necessary part of creation, but I got the reminder that God still cares about this place. He is willing to water it.

Cool thought, huh?

God Stoops

I got this image in my mind the other day of Father. I don't know if it was a flashback, vision, dream or what, but this was the thought that hit me:

I was a little boy playing in a playhouse, and Father came out to play with me. He went down to His knees and still had to bend over to barely fit through the door of the playhouse. Once inside, He took up so much room that I could barely get around Him to show him all my toys. The table, the stove, and all of the fake food that me and my friends played with.

The image faded into a bigger picture of God stooping to fit under the sky. It may make His back hurt, but He stoops because He wants to see what I'm doing and because He cares about my activities.

Isn't God a great Father?

I know this might be the most confusing thing you've ever read, but I hope it's worth it.

"Not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near" Hebrews 10:25.

I want to admit that I missed church this week, mostly cause I was lazy. And I immediately regret my decision. (That's kind of a weird side thought. Cause it wasn't really a decision, more of a forgetfulness that turned into passively neglecting to make a decision. But even the neglect to make a decision is a decision to not do what I should have done.) And once you figure out what I wrote in those parentheses, you can join me for the real topic.

I've been reading a book that makes the point that our major job as Christians is to praise God by delighting in Him. That's a good point, and I thought further that I like to praise God, so it's a nice set up that God gets praise out of something I like anyway. But then I thought further, lately, I haven't been praising God as much, or thinking about Him as much, or pursuing Him as much as I'd like. That frustrated me. Why am I having a hard time praising Someone Who is so praiseworthy, Who set up such a good system? (Still following?)

Then I thought to myself selfishly, that I couldn't wait to get home and be in a youth ministry again because it's so much easier to follow God when you are socially expected to follow God. This branched into two thoughts that are the point of this blog:

1) Being around Christians is important. We have the ability to excite each other about God. Fire breeds more fire. When I missed church due to neglect, I cheated myself out of an opportunity to be excited about God, and I stole an opportunity for God to be praised by me in a corporate setting. I don't get to go to church every week, why did I have to waste this opportinity? So pleases don't get used to it, or take for granted your ability to go to church. Not everybody can go to church, and seriously, you need to realize that it is a priviledge and go with the desire to be lit on fire and to light others on fire. Go to church.

2) I cannot wait to be home to be delighting in God. When someone loves something, they can't help but talk about it. Let's take drugs for instance. Drug addicts lie to their friends, steal, beg, or anything else undignified to get their fix. Is God not a delight way more pleasurable? It's simply that I let other stuff get in the way, and forget that God is more desireable than anything else. And that's dumb. And I need to get over it. I need to stop talking like any regular Soldier, and love God enough to stand up for Him. It's about love and passion for Him, and not guilt.

Just brainstorming. I know this might be the most confusing thing you've ever read, but I hope it's worth it.

I'm distracted.

Though it is easy to get distracted, I just want to pause and remind myself that this is the season to remember Jesus' passion for us.

There is often a lot of drama in my life. Maybe you have a boring life, but I think there is a lot of drama in everybodies lives, so I'm going to make this blanket statement just as a reminder for me and for you.

Let's remember Jesus again. Remember why He came to earth, and remember how He came to earth. This very earth, walked the dirt not very far from where I am. Probably got the same dust in his eyes, and accidentally swallowed one or two of the same the little gnats that fly into my face and I eat. Saw the same sunsets and the same clouds. And put on an aching and paining human body every day so that He could identify with us. So that He could be the best possible sacrifice for us.

Let's dismiss the distractions for just one minute. Even if we can't get rid of them all day, let's give Him one minute right now to remember His sacrifice and his love for us.

How amazing.

Sustainer's Challenge

So it's been a minute since I've written here, and let me tell you why.

I was voluntold that I was going to try out for a competition here. I was talking with my Commander one day, and he was telling me about this competition called the "Sustainer's Challenge." Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, he said in passing, "Since you and your LT are trying out, we should have a good chance of making the team." So... when you Commander says "since," it pretty much means you're going to do it. Well, the tryout was basically a test to see who could be tortured the longest and survive. That may be a slight exaggeration, but here's what the competition included. You start by completing a six mile ruck run. You wear all your gear, and run/walk as fast as you can to the finish line. The finish line is at a weapons qualification range, where you get forty rounds to fire as many as possible into the targets. Shortly after that, your team, changes a tire on a Humvee in full body armor as fast as possible. Then you had to carry a litter with a person on it 500 meters while completing various medical tasks. All of those human fitness feats are followed by the Army's Physical Fitness test. In which you do as many push-ups as possible in two minutes, as many sit-ups as possible in two minutes, and run two miles as fast as your already ground up legs can handle. All of that is followed on the second day by a combatives tournament (which is the Army's slightly safer version of UFC fighting). So, during the tryouts, we skipped the tire change and medical tasks (because they were team events) and jammed all the others onto a hot afternoon day-- thus the torture comment.

So I tried out after having been sick for three days, and just barely made the five person team. (I will spare the sickness details, but it was a light case of Saddam's Revenge, which is kinda sucky before a competition.) One of the requirements was for one person to be an officer, one to be over 30, and one to be female. The other two of us were the young PT studs. We took the five most fit people from our very large battalion to send to this competition, and we trained for two weeks.

We went down to the biggest base in Iraq for the competition. Hundreds of people showed up to watch including our commanding General. It was an intense couple of days. We realized when we got down there, that all the other teams had been practicing for this even for months. So we were a bit behind the bell curve, and we got totally whipped. Out of 22 teams, we placed 12th.

One of our highlights was the ruck march. The rule on the ruck run were that the whole team had to finish within 25 meters of each other, but you could share gear. This event that many other teams had been practicing for months, we were at a severe disadvantage.

We realized early on that our female was going to have a hard time with this. The gear we carried weight about half of what she did, so that's a tough task to ask. So right at the beginning of the race, we took her ruck, and I threw it on top of mine and carried it for her. Later on, some of our other guys took her other gear to free her up to pump her arms and just run as fast as she could. At the end of the race, we gave it all back to her so she could cross the line all geared up. We took third place. One of the other females complained that our female didn't carry all of her stuff, and our female responded, "It's not my fault that your team didn't have enough hooah guys on it to help you out. I just had an awesome team."

And you know what? That is an awesome answer. I was thinking about how in our Christian walk, we're all going to finish together. And you know what? The Bible commands us to carry each others burdens. It's not a problem that some people are going to have a hard time with someting, it's a blessing to get to work together and finish well. Regardless of how you have to do it. I like her response because there was no shame. She didn't feel like less of a team member because she hadn't carried her own load, she had done the best she could and was a good enough team member to realize that she could probably finish if she carried it by herself, but to finish well, she had to pass her burden off. Have you ever thought about strategically passing your burdens off on your Christian friends in order to finish well?

Anyway, sorry for dropping off the edge of the world for a while. That's where I was and that's what I was doing.