Be here now.

I'm just going to be brutally honest with you, as well as myself: I have been terribly impatient. I have been trying to make what is not yet to be to happen now. I want to be at YWAM right now, to go to school right now; I want the healing process to end and the pain to end right now, broken relationships to be mended right now; I want to be with Jesus right now; I want [insert something here]... right now. I keep wanting to speed up what has not yet come because I want to know where I'm going and what God is doing in my life. Is that wrong? Yes. Is that natural for me to feel at the moment? Yes, but it's still wrong. I must surrender that to the very God that created me. I feel as if everything that I have talked about goes back to surrender, but all things involving faith and trust usually do - heck, anything involving being a follower of Jesus Christ has everything to do with surrender.

The want to know (not need to know, because we don't need to know) what is yet to come is wired within us. I was given a book to read that I finished not too long ago, concerning God's ultimate will for our lives. What it said stuck out to me like a sore thumb: "Live for God. Obey the Scriptures. Think of others before yourself. Be holy. Love Jesus. And as you do these things, do whatever else you like, with whomever you like, wherever you like, and you'll be walking in the will of God." The author had also given evidence from Scripture time and time again, pointing to the fact that God really gives us a lot of free reign, more than we would think. As long as we are loving the Lord with all of our heart, soul, and mind, as well as our neighbor as ourselves (Luke 10:27), keeping with His commandments, we are walking in His will. There is so much more that I learned from that book, but I won't go into that here.

I will be working full-time for the next few months in order to get to YWAM, and in the meantime I will be applying to colleges for next fall. I will be going to the Compassion DTS in YWAM Denver this coming January. If it doesn't work out for some reason or another, I will figure something else out. But all of that will come in time. While I am here, I refuse to just sit and not do anything because I'm not meant to live life that way, waiting for God to "show me the way" and speed up the process. After all, I am here, not anywhere else, and I am going to be here for the next three months. I strive to be content with where I am at, as well as patient. It is my prayer that I say this: "If the Lord wills, I will live and do this or that," as it says (slightly tweaked by me) in James 4:15. And as Ray LaMontagne would advise, I will "be here now."

"We all have the trick of saying—If only I were not where I am!—If only I had not got the kind of people I have to live with! If our faith or our religion does not help us in the conditions we are in, we have either a further struggle to go through, or we had better abandon that faith and religion."