A prayer

From A.W. Tozer's book The Pursuit of God. (with slightly updated pronouns because I like them better)

O God, I have tasted Your goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want You. I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Your glory, I pray, so that I may know You indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, "Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away." Then give me grace to rise and follow You up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long. In Jesus' name, Amen.

True Compassion

Hey again. I'm back to tell you a little more of what God's been doing in my life and people around me. First of all, I want to praise God for the relationships he's given to me: the many good friends I have and am growing closer to here at college, my family back home who I get to talk to on the phone fairly often, the girl I'm mentoring long-distance over the phone (I love Amanda!), and the older friends that I still get to keep in touch with. The first couple of weeks here I had a hard time trying to sort out who to spend my time with now that I was no longer dating, and I felt sorry for myself that I didn't have the close relationships that I wanted. After a while I came to my senses and realized that I had been waiting for others to come to me and picking and choosing who I wanted to be friends with. Instead, I should realize that friendships are not a selfish endeavor. I should be friends to those who need friends, not just those who I think are the coolest, nicest people. And I should not expect others to expend more effort than I do. Anyway, it all comes down to the fact that my wants are not that important.

I thought I had learned this lesson, but I was in for a surprise. God continued to expound on the idea of loving people different from me and having real compassion.

In one chapel and two of my classes last week, we talked quite a bit about multi-culturalism. These discussions reminded me of my tendency to gravitate toward people like me, rather than those I perceive as very different (whether by race, gender, background, or appearance). I think everyone has this tendency to some extent. It is important to keep it in check because (1)we can learn a lot from people different from us, and (2) in the church it is vitally important that we reach out to every culture and every type of person.

So, I was thinking about these things, and I was filling out an application to work at Bluewater this summer (I don't know yet if that's what I'll do, but it's a possibility). One of the hard questions was "what do you consider to be your strongest character quality?" Man, I don't know. When I start thinking about it, none of my character qualities seem that strong. I put down compassion, thinking about my sponsor child and my passion for the poverty of the Third World, the AIDS pandemic, and other things. But I wondered, am I really compassionate? Maybe it's easier to care for people and their problems when all I have to do is send a check in the mail. Do I really have compassion for the real people I encounter every day?

On Friday night I was convicted of just how far I have to go in the area of compassion.
There's a group on campus that works with the homeless every Friday night, and I decided to join them for the first time. We went to two homeless shelters, serving food, talking with the people, and listening with them to testimonies, sermons, etc. We also were encouraged constantly by the woman who leads it to be praying, another thing that impacted me. When we were done at these shelters, we set out in some vehicles and looked around the city to see if any people were actually staying outside that night. It was probably about 30 degrees below zero with wind chill. (There were signs on campus that warned as little as five minutes of exposure could cause frostbite!) So we brought blankets, scarves, coats, and whatever other donated materials we had so we could offer them to people that were living outside in this weather.
Being outside for about fifteen minutes in that weather was almost unbearable. I could not imagine what it would be like to sleep out there. But we did find people out there, about 5 or 6 of them camped out under an overpass. At first it seemed they didn't want to accept much from us. But we gave them some food and several scarves, which they appreciated. We gave them a couple of coats. One of them asked if we had any gloves. We all relayed the message back: did anyone have any gloves among the donated things? I don't know if there were or not. The guy said he wouldn't take them off of anyone's hands; he'd buy some later. All along I had been thinking about my mittens, my warm, beautiful mittens that match my hat and scarf that my roommate gave me for my birthday. I rationalized that they were probably too girly for these guys. After a while, my friend Melissa take off her mittens and handed them over. The guy didn't see that they had been hers, and gratefully accepted them.

Perhaps this wasn't a great sacrifice for her. But I was stunned at how much I rationalized clinging to my possessions instead of offering something that was so obviously needed. Though I've never considered myself materialistic, I realized that I am far too attached to the things I own. I am also generally far too focused on myself. I was glad for the experience Friday night that helped me see how incredibly blessed I am.

After mulling all these things over in my mind, I checked out Tyler's blog. The drawing he posted was so relevant to what I was thinking about. Check it out.

Thank you for reading all the way through. I hope this will spur you on to not be complacent. We need to love more than just the people we like. (Matt. 5:46-48)Biblical love is not a feeling, but an action. It takes a lot of effort and sacrifice. Join with me in striving to see people through God's eyes and loving others as if they were Jesus himself. (Matt. 25:31-46)

Wow. What a week this has been! Hallelujah! God has done so much in me that I'm sure I'll miss something in this blog, but that's ok. I am just so alive and I have joy in God that I haven't had for a while. I've learned some important things and been convicted by the Holy Spirit several times this week, and I've seen and experienced some pretty cool things too.
Where do I start? Ah, what the heck, let's just do a random order.
I'm doing a book study with my hall on A.W. Tozer's Pursuit of God. I really look forward to reading all of it, but even just the intro and first chapter have been really good for me. First I was reminded by my RA of a sermon by C.S. Lewis called the "Weight of Glory." Let me quote some of it:

...If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

I read this a couple years ago and then a couple months ago and then a couple weeks ago. Every time it hit me again. We are far too easily pleased. The church settles for program instead of worship. Christians settle for "accepting Christ" and then going on with their lives however they want, instead of pursuing him and finding out that he is exactly what they really need. He is the one thing that humanity desires without realizing it.
Here's a quote that I liked from Tozer's book:

There is today no lack of Bible teachers to set forth correctly the
principles of the doctrines of Christ, but too many of these seem satisfied to teach the fundamentals of the faith year after year, strangley unaware that there is in their ministry no manifest Presence, nor anything unusual in their personal lives. They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy.

And another quote:

How tragic that we in this dark day have had our seeking done for us by our teachers. Everything is made to center upon the initical act of "accepting" Christ (a term, incidentally, which is not found in the Bible) and we are not expected thereafter to crave any further revelation of God to our souls.

To desire God. That's what life is about. We talked about how a lot of people look forward to heaven to see people they love who have died. But that won't be the point in heaven. We will be drinking in God's presence and worshipping him for eternity. That is what heaven is. But if people don't desire God on earth, what do they have to look forward to in heaven? Yes, we have sin in the way now, but my point is that God is what we should desire now. God is all that is good wrapped up in one magnificent being.
But many Christians don't live that way today. Perhaps this is because a lot of churches focus on the outreach and do very little with discipleship--growing like Christ, growing closer to him, and becoming mature enough to disciple others. (We talked about this in my Intro to Ministry class the morning after we talked about it in Bible Study.) Let's look at some stats about the American church today: 4 out of 5 belivers say that having a deep growing faith is a top priority. BUT only 20% mention anything directly spritual as the most important thing they want to accomplish in life. And some stats from the WallStreet Journal said that 26% of born-again Christians don't believe that the particular religion someone lives by really matters because they all teach basically the same thing, 52% don't believe in the Holy Spirit, and 56% don't believe in Satan. Wow. Yeah, I know statistics can be misleading sometimes, but if these are even close to correct, there are some problems. I would love to discuss all the eight roots of the problem that we discussed in class, but this is getting really long. I guess I'll just say that I am realizing how important it is for the future of the church that we are discipling people. How about another random quote. Cal Thomas (I don't really know who that is) said:

The problem in our culture isn't the abortionists. It isn't the pornographers or drug dealers or criminals. It is the undisciplined, undiscipled, disobedient and biblically ignorant Church of Christ.

Keep this in mind my friends. We must intentionally witness to people and intentionally walk alongside believes to encourage, equip, and challenge each other toward maturity in Christ. This includes equipping the disciple to equip others as well.

So, this is already really long. I have a lot more to say, but I should probably do a little homework. So chew on this and come back later. Hopefully I can tell you about some other exciting things that are on my mind.