Of Things Gained

After being home from our monastic J-term and getting some time to relax and sleep in, I've also had time to reflect and converse with others about the things I gained from this experience. Many parts of the experience were pretty far outside my comfort zone, and they raised a lot of questions in me. Fortunately, I was always able to openly discuss my questions or skepticisms among the brothers or my friends, which sometimes helped and sometimes only raised more questions. Even with my questions, my main attitude during the whole two weeks was to be open to what God wanted to teach me, no matter how uncomfortable that may be. This was probably the best thing I could have done.

First off, I would say that as a result of this J-term class, my relationship with the Lord has grown A LOT! I feel so much closer to the Lord in a day-by-day and a moment-by-moment basis. I WANT to read the Scriptures, I WANT to pray, I WANT to worship. This has been great since being back and not having anything to do, which often results in boredom and slacking off for me.

I think one of the best things about the entire experience was just to be around these brothers who have committed their entire lives to the Lord. They have given up the possibility of wives and children, they have given up earning lots of money, they have given up personal freedom in order to devote themselves fully to the Lord. To know this and to see them live that out was an awesome example to me of what radical discipleship looks like. You could tell even just by the way they talked about the Lord that their commitment was full and absolute. It's an example that I want to strive to follow in my own life now.

Even though I struggled with the charismatic aspect of the worship in the Servants of the Word brotherhood, I learned a lot from it. Within the brotherhood and their communities, they sing a lot of their own songs--songs that have been written by people within them. It was interesting to observe that none of the songs that we sang were about us at all. Every single one was purely focused on the Lord, and really praising and worshiping Him. In our pop Christian culture, we call many songs "praise n' worship," but many of them are songs about us, or about how warm and fuzzy God makes us feel inside. Not these songs. They were really PRAISE--in the true and honest sense of the word. Praising God for who He is, for His character, His love, His might, His glory, etc. And singing like this really helped me to learn how to truly praise the Lord better, on a more real level. This is something that I'm definitely taking with me.

There were lots of other things I gained from this trip, but those are the main ones. Many others flow out from those. I still have lots of questions. I still don't know if the Lord is calling me to live single or not. I think rather through all of this He was trying to teach me to be content where I'm at and to trust His plan, which I think I've gained a lot of ground on.

Now we're back on the campus of HU, and I'm excited. I know that God has something planned for our campus this semester. Something BIG. I don't know what it is yet. But I think part of it may start with the morning prayers that we're starting up. 7am on MWF. It's going to suck getting up that early 3x a week. But it should be clear that this venture is a work of God, because those of us whom He chose to work it through are notoriously NOT morning people. So that is very exciting. I'm praying that the Lord takes this, and works many other great things in order to change the face of this campus, so that its Lord and King may be YHWH, the Great One, who wants to make radical disciples of the students on this campus. For the work and the change that is yet to be done, I praise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in advance! Amen!

*SDG

Living with monks!

Today i'm leaving for my J-term class, where i, along with five other guys, will be going up to Michigan to live with monks for two weeks. These aren't traditional, live in a monastery, robe-wearing, weird haircut, silent monks. The organization is called Servants of the Word, and these guys all have regular jobs and stuff, but live together in a spiritual community and support each other. They all have also taken vows of celibacy, to live single for the Lord. I'm really excited about this opportunity. None of us going really know what to expect, since we haven't been given many details about what our day-to-day living will look like, but all i'm really expecting is that God is going to do some great things in my life, and in the lives of those going with me. I'm also really looking forward to getting their perspective on singleness, and i've been praying that God will use this to help me further define His call for me in that area.

I've known for a while (since last summer), that the call to be a disciple requires work on my end, and the practice of spiritual disciplines. But i can never seem to find the motivation to work for it. I'm praying that this adventure will show me the joys of practicing the spiritual disciplines in my life and the joy of finding growth in my relationship with God. So we're about to leave in a couple hours, and i'm just going to give this whole thing up to God, and pray that He does with this as He will. I'm definitely going to be journaling a lot, and i'll try to update on here, but i'm not sure what my access to wireless will be like up there. so we shall see.