So much for subtleties

So it's been a while. A bunch of stuff has happened since I last wrote, but I feel like a summary of my week would be boring. So let's go deeper than that.

So lately, God has really been working on getting me to be okay with giving up things that I hold dear and really letting him take control of my life. It's crazy. I'm being hit from all sides with this. Not that I'm complaining, but I have a feeling this is a pretty important lesson that I need to get through my thick skull.

Take this for example: at Vertical, Afshin has been going through the book of Jonah. Everyone knows the basic gist of the story: God says "go preach to Nineveh," Jonah runs away, gets eaten by a fish, spit back up, preaches to the city, everyone repents. Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub. Yay God. (Bonus points if you get that reference)

However when you look closely at it, there are a lot of things that seem contradictory to the general direction of that overview. For one, when Jonah preaches and the whole city repents, the king loses it. He immediately gets off his throne and does the whole sackcloth thing (a bible-times way of showing mourning or sadness). Meanwhile Jonah, the dude who successfully reached a whole city with what amounts to five Hebrew words, is juxtaposed to him starkly. He is furious that God doesn't destroy Nineveh, who he sees as the enemy. (After all, it was the capital of Assyria, the nation prophesied to take over Israel one day.) He claims that the reason he ran in the first place was because he knew God wouldn't destroy the city because he is a generous God who "relents from sending calamity."

Now this is clearly selfish and stupid. Jonah is telling God what he did was wrong, but he didn't want to preach and save the lives of some 120,000 people because he didn't like them, and it would make him get outside his comfort zone.

When I really thought about it, it clicked that the whole thing about the book of Jonah is that no matter how hard you try, God still gets what he wants. Always. So why not make it easier?

Add that to the list of other things God has pointed out to me or challenged me with regarding giving up things for the sake of his will. I would enumerate, but I don't have the time or the battery life on my laptop.

And cue the shift...

I don't know about you guys, but I'm soooo ready for spring break. Fall semester is nice cause it has breaks spaced out just right so about the time you get tired of school, you get a day or two off at least. The spring has not been so nice though. I'm about to lose it. I just need to have several days where I don't have to worry about school and I can just hang and relax. It kind of sucks that our spring break doesn't coincide with anyone else's, but I'm pretty sure we'll make a week out of it. I'd say that I have some fun things planned, but the group I'm hanging with hasn't actually decided what we're doing yet.

I'm also quite ready for summer. I'm so excited about being a Line Camp leader, I can't even put it into words. So I won't.

I also think I'm going to start a "Song of the Moment" on my blog. Just to let you guys know the song I can't get tired of at the moment. This time it goes to:

Trouble by Ray LaMontagne

Well I think that's about all for this go 'round. Until next time, keep your pants on straight, but your hats tilted just a little bit to one side.

-Andy

Subtleties are always what get me

For my leadership class I'm taking as a requirement to be a Line Camp leader, we had to write an autobiography and one of the suggested areas was to talk about how we've changed since coming to Baylor. Just an interesting observation I had while writing this paper.

This year—this semester even—God has shown me how perfect his timing is and how when something is his will, it is incredibly undeniable. In the past month, I have become truly at home in BRH in an incredibly short amount of time. I find that an awesome blessing. God has provided me with people who have become my best friends—truly my best—in a matter of weeks. Things like that don’t happen unless God is at work. Sure I have spent a lot of time with them and gotten to know them well, but more importantly we have an amazing amount of things in common. It’s like I’ve met people who are practically myself. And I love that. Yet at the same time, there is enough difference that we have begun to shape each other, and I can already see that. It is great to be able to see how things change you for the better when you are in the right situations and you are allowing God to do what he wants to in your life.

I love when God decides to sneak something in on you like that. You're just rockin' along and then one day you wake up and realize what he's done and you just have to sit back and smile.

-Andy

Back from the dead

So I decided to start blogging again. I've gotten to a place where I think I need to put some thoughts into words, and a blog is a great way to do that. Hopefully, I'll actually stick to blogging this time. Random musings and such to follow (since this is sort-of the first blog post):

Yes, if any of you have ever visited my blog before, I deleted all the old posts. They were from two years ago and I wanted a completely fresh start with this. But before I did I read them all, and it was cool to see how far I've come.

Crazy, but I'm almost done with my first year of college already. And probably looking at joining the masses of major-changers within the next few days. It's not really a big deal, I just feel like God's taking me in a different direction than the one I'm currently going in.

God has placed me in an incredible family now that I am a part of the BRH choir and it is easily the greatest thing that has happened to me. I love when God does things in your life that you didn't even expect. By simply looking to play bass in some choir a couple of people had told me about, I've found some of my best (or rapidly-becoming-so) friends. It's amazing.

BRH played in chapel today and I loved it. I really enjoy playing my bass and apparently it shows. I got tons of "good job"s and I was very happy to receive them, but one thing that stuck out to me was that multiple people pointed out that I just looked "so happy" on stage. Like, I heard other BRH-ers get encouragement, but not anything as specific as what I was hearing about myself. I don't know where I'm going with this, I just thought it was really cool and encouraging. I guess it just reaffirms that playing in BRH is where God wants me to be.

Well I think that's about all for this time. But tune in next week (or year, or decade, or whenever I decide to post again) to hear more about my life. Same bat-time, same bat-channel!

-Andy