YoungLife

I’ll admit it. I am a Younglifer. I love everything about it. People that haven’t ever gone to Younglife or haven’t even heard of it before just can’t understand it.  Honestly, it’s almost like a different culture. You can act crazy and nobody thinks twice about it because everyone else is acting crazy too.  All of the Younglife people I’ve ever known have been real and genuine.  They truly care about other and their mission in life is to love people.

I’ve been working on my portfolio that I have to submit to get into the teacher ed program and one of the sections we have to do is a personal section.  For my personal section I knew I was going to do my family for one of the two things I put, but I just couldn’t figure out what to do for the second.  When I thought about it, I realized that I basically needed to include Younglife for my second thing.  So my portfolio is going to be awesome because I just made two videos with iphoto and imovie.  One with pictures of my family and the other with pictures from when I did work crew, summer staff, and from Wyldlife this year.  As I was working on this, I started to miss everyone that I’ve met and worked with over the years.  I’ve been so blessed to meet so many amazing Godly people.  Plus, YL people are just cool; I think you have to be cool to do it.

It was when I did work crew, the summer before I came to Anderson, that it finally clicked and I understood for the first time what it meant to truly know Jesus and have a relationship with Him.  The people that I’ve met through YL have shown me Christ’s love and how share at times when I really needed encouragement/had no idea what I was doing.  So YL isn’t just your normal ministry, it’s people, mostly college students, who give up hours and hours of their time to go out into the community sharing God’s love and then sticking around to keep pursuing those teenagers.   So next time you wonder why I spend so much time at McCants or over at Clemson for Younglife/Wyldlife, you’ll know why I do it.  I want to show Christ’s love to those crazy middle schoolers and be there for them and if that means going to McCants and sitting through 4 or 5 lunches with them and putting myself out there and fighting past the intimidation, yes middle schoolers can be intimidating, then that’s what I’ll do.

Yes, I do follow the crowd.

Yes, I’ve given in.  Everyone else has been blogging so I’ve decided to give it a try.

This week has been hard, to say the least.  This semester I have been ridiculously unmotivated, which is abnormal for me.  Usually I do really well with school and I may not like it but I get everything done eventually.  This semester there really hasn’t been anything that I’ve disliked more than school, basically I hate it.  I love Anderson minus the actual school work part. (Yes, woe is Pinkie)  So the other day I was more frustrated and angry than I’ve been since I don’t even remember how long ago.  I was doing homework and feeling extremely overwhelmed.  My mom called and I told her that I didn’t even know if I should be an education major (we’ll see how that part turns out.)  While I was talking to her, she asked if I’d had my quiet time yet. Well I hadn’t. So I got off the phone and took a break from working on my portfolio and starting reading My Utmost For His Highest.  Literally I was so frustrated that after I finished reading Utmost I could not read my Bible.  I just laid on my bed and had a little conversation with God. Yes, I was still aggravated afterwards but I felt more at peace with the enormous work load I’m facing until the end of the semester. Shortly after all of this I was checking out everyones’ blogs, it’s my replacement for FML since AU blocked it, and discovered where Matt had written a blog about exactly that, being still and spending time with God.  It was encouraging to read that so good job Matt Brammer! Also late Friday night @shadrocks and I had a very refreshing and encouraging convo, it was good for my heart!

As I said earlier, I’m having doubts about whether or not I should stick with majoring in education.  It’s just been a ton of work lately and I haven’t enjoyed my classes. This could all simply be due to my lack of motivation and frustration.  When I was reading My Utmost For His Highest, I read it every day or at least I try to so a lot of references may be made to the book, today’s was about not questioning what God calls us to do.

Oswald Chambers writes,

“I know when instructions have come from God because of their quiet persistance.  But when I begin to weigh the pros and cons, and doubt and debate enter my mind, I am bringing in an element that is not of God. This will only result in my concluding that his instructions to me were not right. Many of us are faithful to our ideas about Jesus Christ, but how many are faithful to Jesus himself? Faithfulness to Jesus means I must step out even when and where I can’t see anything. But faithfulness to my own ideas means that I first clear the way mentally. Faith, however, is not intellectual understanding; faith is is a diliberate committment to the Person of Jesus Christ, even when I can’t see the way ahead.”

I know that this was exactly what I needed to read this morning and it’s definitely one way that God’s showing me what to do. I still don’t entirely know what to do so now I’ll just be praying waiting for Him to continue to reveal his will to me and to see if there are any changes in major to be coming.