I'm Home!

I have been home for a little over a week now, I just have been lazy about blogging. I got home on Tuesday, the 8th and went home with my family to Tulsa. I spent a couple days at home and then on Friday I went back to Oklahoma Christian University with my brother Nathan to visit with my friends who I hadn't seen during my three months of traveling. I not only got to hang out with friends which was just awesome I also played DnD which I hadn't played in 6 months or so. Taylor my friend in Alpha wasn't going to be in his room that night and was kind enough to let Nathan and I crash there so it was really good.

There is one other thing that is going on with my life that I would like prayer for, I need more of God's grace, strength and wisdom. I also need to continue to live Galatians 2:20 "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." It is the verse that God gave me when I was 18 as my verse to live in my life. I still have not got it down after 3 years, but God is still working so that is good.

Also I will hopefully finish uploading my pictures on my Picasa, then I'll start putting them on facebook.

If you want to see some of what God has done in my life while I was on PACrim look at my previous post.

How my faith changed during my travels

First a little background.

I was born and raised in a Christian household; I grew up with Christian parents and went to church on Sunday morning. When I was four years old, I asked Christ to come into my heart and be my Savior. I was not baptized until I was ten years old.. In my life, God has always been working and looking back, I can see His hand in my life. I also saw Him do a major work in my life when I was about eighteen years old; it was like a complete renewing of my life.

At the beginning of the trip, I was struggling in my relationship with Christ. I was having a hard time hearing God’s voice. It was a spiritual low. It was hard because of how powerfully I have seen God work in my life in the past and I know what He is capable of doing. Despite my knowledge, I was as the man described by Paul in Romans chapter seven verse fifteen to twenty-four. In that passage, Paul says, “I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead I do what I hate.” (Romans 7:16b NLT) I was trapped in the same sin and I knew that Christ had the power to release me from my sin.

In that time of darkness, I had brief glimpses of God’s power. I still saw Him working in me and through me. I honestly marveled at the fact that God could and would still use me. I was wallowing in my sin. It was like getting clean water out of a muddy stream. It was a miracle; there was no reason that I should have had God working through me at all. For example, when we were on the train from Beijing to Xi’an, the Lord gave me a verse. That verse was Jeremiah 29:11. It says in the NIV, “I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you, and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future.” I wrote the verse down in the back of my journal because I felt like God wanted to teach me something about it. Before I had written anything else on the page, Kamery came into my compartment. She was very upset about something and I felt like the Spirit told me to share Jeremiah 29:11 with her. God was able to use that to encourage her. After that, everyone in my compartment had a time of worship and God really refreshed and encouraged me personally; I believe it was the same for the other people as well. I know at that time my life was far from where I should be but God was still at work.

Right after our time of worship, God gave me an allegory about how Christians and I, in general, are like a pen. He is the writer; we are the pens. I will not go into the details of the allegory but it gave me a deeper insight into how God uses me. I was surprised at how God reached out and was talking to me even though I had not been spending enough time with Him. I had barely read my Bible and I had even been forgetting to fellowship with God in prayer. God has His plans and I am glad that little things like us humans do not get in His way.

With all that I had seen and all that God had done, one might think that I would jump to spend more time with Him. Still after China, I could tell I was not in line with God’s will for my life. One of the biggest hindrances was in the area of my personal thoughts; they were not as they should have been. Philippians 4:8 says, “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worth of praise.” My thoughts were of sinful things. I was like the Pharisees of Jesus’ time; I was a whitewashed grave. Outside I looked fine but inside I was dirty.

It was easy to be just like everyone else. I am with a Christian group and it is easy to ride on the Christianity of those around me. God really started to get through to me while we were in Ibaraki. I was living with a host family and was not with the group as much as while we were in China. At first with my “freedom,” I started to go the wrong way. Not being around the group made it was easier not to keep God a priority. However, the other thing that happened with the host family was that I got computer and internet access, so I could talk to my friends back home. Talking to my friends back home actually was actually a huge blessing and God was able to use them to help me get back on the right path again. That has been a huge challenge of this trip. I have not found many people that I consider really close friends. I like the people on this trip and I consider everyone a friend but I do not feel comfortable sharing about what is going on spiritually with anyone. So having my close friends to talk to again and to share with again was a very beneficial for me.

I remember this one evening during our time in Ibaraki. I walked home almost every day. It was a half an hour walk so I had some good times of prayer and meditation while walking home. On this evening, God gave me another allegory about the current situation in my life. He showed me a picture of a tunnel going into a mountain. The tunnel was like my relationship with God; the deeper into the mountain I tunneled, the closer I got to God. A problem about tunnels is sometimes one has cave-ins and the same area needs to be cleared out again. This happens when the tunnel has not been reinforced properly. I realized that in my own life, God had taught me and worked on me but I had not properly strengthened the tunnel that was dug. The tunnel had collapsed and I was reclearing the same area. The tunnel needs to be properly reinforced with God’s strength and power.

The other thing I had been wanting was for God to step in and just do something big. As part of my allegory, He showed me another thing about tunneling. One needs to make sure that the tunnel is stable before one uses dynamite to blow away the big chunks. I wanted God to use dynamite but I had not strengthened myself so that I would be ready for God to do a big work. He also showed me that while I am working, He is there beside me and for every rock, I chip away; He has chipped away at least twice as many. I felt a renewing of purpose and a clearer tunnel and some of the rocks chipped away-between Christ and me. I thank the Lord that “He is at work in me, both to will and to work for His good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13)