Post #1

What is this?

        This is a way for me to stay connected with my peeps back home. I think this will be like an open ended journal to write about what's been going on in my life recently and anything I've been learning from the Lord. I am going to try to leave it relatively unedited and just write my thoughts out. 

What's been going on recently?

• There was a big snow/ice storm the first week I arrived that became a 48 hour reenactment of covid. The gyms, coffee shops, churches, and stores were all shut down. It sucked and it made me miss Arizona
• I go to a church called Northway which is awesome and reminds me a lot of Christ Church. I've joined a small group on Thursday's (rip hollyrock trivia night) and a men's Bible study every Wednesday morning going through 2 Corinthians
• Signed up for Timeleft which is an app that organizes a dinner reservation for 6 random strangers to meet up and have a meal together so that was cool.
• Found a cool coffee/book shop that is a 10min walk from my apartment and they sell nice candles and have decent dirty chai's
• Upperroom fills in the gaps of my weeks and it's amazing. I go there to spend time with the Lord whenever I have nothing else to do. I try to go in the morning before work and then spend some time working at the coffee shop they have on the campus. It's by far the best part of Dallas for me.
• The cold is not that cold unless it is windy, then it frickin sucks. I have to drip my faucets overnight which feels sinful
• I'm on a mission to try as many dirty chai's as possible at all the different coffee shops and find the best dirty chai. I've had like 5 or 6 different dirty chai's so far. The best one is Drip Coffee.
• On a slightly more serious note, I have been missing Arizona a lot more this go around and am praying about where the Lord is leading me, I have no idea what the rest of this year will look like 

What have I been learning from God?

Thing #1

        I have been spending a lot of time in Psalm 34. When I go to Upperroom, this is normally the first place in scripture I go to settle my mind down. Specifically verses 4-7, 

    4           I sought the Lord, and he answered me

    and delivered me from all my fears.
5 Those who look to him are radiant,
    and their faces shall never be ashamed.
 6          This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him
    and saved him out of all his troubles.
7 The angel of the Lord encamps
    around those who fear him, and delivers them.

        I've been asking myself - What has been capturing my attention lately? Have I been looking elsewhere instead of Jesus to be the source of my peace, joy, hope, and fulfillment? These verses remind me that simple attentiveness to His presence will result in a radiant life. It reminds me that shame cannot coexist in a heart that is continually looking to Jesus. 
 

Thing #2

        I felt like the Lord put on my heart the reality that he looks at me with delight. It is so easy for me to judge myself harshly and attribute my own self-criticisms to the way God sees me. Last week I went to the prayer room around 6:15pm and stayed until about 7:30pm when I was thinking about leaving. I was hungry and distracted, thinking about what I wanted to eat for dinner. The prayer room closes at 8pm, and I started to feel this sense of guilt fall over me for wanting to leave 30 minutes before it ended and having a distracted mind. I had already been there for over an hour, but I was focused on the remaining 30 minutes that I'd be missing. 

        Then the thought entered my mind - what if God is actually delighted that I am here? What if he isn't filled with anger and disgust that I would leave early, but actually pleased that I have come to sit with him at all on a Friday night? I had the realization that I so often assume God is hyper-focused on my imperfections and have created a belief that my imperfections drive his feelings toward me. It was incredibly freeing to accept the fact - as difficult as it was - that God's affection for me is not determined by how devout my obedience is. It's easy for me to acknowledge the theological fact that God loves me, but it's more difficult to consider that he actually takes delight in me.

        While I know God is not delighting in my sin, it does make me wonder how God can take delight in a sinner at all. The way I've come to answer this is to believe that the blood of Jesus has removed sin from my identity. I know that this doesn't make me sinless, but rather that sin is no longer what I am defined by. I guess in one sense this might be what the Bible means when it says Jesus came to remove sin? Idk I'm not a theologist 

        I'm just grateful that the core of who I am is someone who is accepted by God. The simple thought that the perfect God of all creation has made himself a Father to me - and is not just an impersonal supreme being - blows my mind. So yeah that's what I got so far. 

Love you guys