PaulPrins.net

This past weekend was our spring retreat for our crusade movement here at Stout. It was a fun weekend to spend hanging out with friends and meeting new people. While the content of the talk was fairly familiar to me, the Lord still moved in that time to revel things to me that require my attention.

Nothing in my faith has been as fundamental or important as the time I spend daily praying and weekly fasting. This past weekend the Lord reminded me how much he wants to hear my prayers so that he can give the answer to them that he wants too.

“You do not have, because you do not ask God.” James 4:2
For a long time now I have been rationalizing my prayers to god, trying to explain to Him why he should answer my petition and this truth had been forgotten. That God desires to answer our prayers and I was lacking to confidence to believe that.

Instead believing that it was my persuasiveness that would bring God’s will to earth, not his infinite love and passion for his children.

If only Aristotle was alive today to observe and comment upon everything in our present world that he could have hardly dreamt of. Lately in two of my courses we’ve revisited his study of rhetoric in one form or another. They always say that ethos, or personal reputation, holds the most weight with people and is the most influential towards our decisions. Yet I wonder if this is true in the traditional sense anymore.

With the advent of the internet it has allowed anyone with grammatical skill, ability to research, and to present sound arguments and professional appearing materials and literature. What reputation does anonymous Joe have who creates an alias online under a presumed name and background. Only a perceived reputation and thus perceived ethos, this ‘phantom ethos’ would allow anyone with wit and skills to influence multitudes of people as themselves or as a fictitious character.
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I’ve never had one. It wasn’t that there weren’t people in my life who had admirable accomplishments, but they all had so many failures attached to them. Here is the other catch that is never realized. By defining a role model we are un-verbally deciding that the level of their achievement is un-attainable. No matter what I do, who I become, I will always be second to this person.

By looking up to and striving after anyone other then the Christ we are going to fall short of everything that we are possible of becoming. Since no-one can become Christ, we all fall short by our very nature, we are thus striving to the peak of everything possible. Until the day I die I will be running after my first love, the tender embrace that brought me life, the one who saved me from a life of routine, and for whose name I will scream with my last breath before the hush of the worlds.

Fall short of perfection, or fall short of imperfection. The choice is not mine.

It’s muses like this which are so rich in my life that cause me to wonder if I am truly the same as those around me. Things I’ve known since I before I can remember.

Look around yourself and you see people, more noticeable then the majority of their characteristics is there confidence. It is something that people can just sense in others. So here is the base of confidence. It will always fail you, no one is perfect and we all struggle and falter. No one is exempt. Yes there are things one can do to improve his odds, to stumble and fail less, yet it is still there. False confidence is something else all together, the man who has given in to believe he’ll never be what he can and doesn’t have the courage to show the world.

Here is the clincher, God will never fail, and He is never wrong. Men run to the ends of the earth to build their confidence in themselves when God is just waiting. He waits for us to put our full confidence in the only confidence that will never fail. The plans of God are flawless from tomorrow’s provisions of food and love, the minor details of life all the way unto eternity in Heaven. So like really is just what the title states, confidence. The only determining factor is where we place ours. Where do you?

Lately this has really been press upon my mind. In one of the forums God helps me provide spiritual insight and prayer a person is really challenged as of late. Best friend died, parents split, and his whole life seems to be going down the drain. But at the same time God has been showing me more and more of His glory than ever before.

The higher the God becomes in our sight, the further above us that He rises in all his Glory, Majesty, Splendor, Righteousness, and Holiness, the less unjust the world appears. For in truth, the very rising of the sun every morning is an act of completely mercy on a worthless and broken creation, that had it been me I would have abandoned. Yet God is continually choosing us, loving us, and searching for his lost folds of sheep in this world.

In the presence of the indescribable Glory of Jesus Christ, every ‘injustice’ is beyond deserved because there is nothing we deserve, even today. May this truth only increase my worship and praise.

In elementary school the girls used to fill pages in the notebooks with names, and the names they wrote didn’t exist. They were the name of their friends with the surname of their crush, or even theirs. There was this excitement at the prospect of changing their name. An excitement that was laughable by nearly every boy.

Ten years later Jesus saves me. Yet my name is still my name, even though the word of God says I am now part of the bride of Christ. How I wish I had the same excitement about this truth, as those innocent and young school girls had about a crush. That I would desire my name to fade that Jesus might be exalted in everything and though every breath of mine.

Not much to this picture, just an elder plant that is drying up in the dank ally and the younger vibrant guy. Not sure what I’m getting at with the juxtaposition or why it really strikes a cord with me. Maybe it’s the looming fear that the life I’ve left behind, the one of this world, that is wilting away, is weighting on me. That what I’ve left has caused me to feel that what I have now is somehow less permanent (even when it is eternal).

The only problem with trying to identifying foreshadowing before the end of the show, is that you never know what was written in to mislead you. God is the author and perfector of my faith, and He alone knows my heart. I know I’ve chosen that which is wise and life giving, and have left death behind.