A Year in Blog Posts (and other links)

I would like to give you a month, by month breakdown of what happened in my life this year, but I find that such a thing would be somewhat impossible.  Though I sometimes want to be that organized, I’m actually not.  My life flows from month to month, season to season, and often doesn’t segment cleanly into little blocks.  I can, however, give a topical review.

Learning the love of God for me was a big thing this year for me.  At the beginning of the year I was still trying to hold on to rigid systems and other people’s expectations and making them the measuring rod for my spiritual life.  I was firmly committed to finishing my one year Bible reading plan actually in one year and felt like a really rotten person when I missed a day, because that was my measure of myself.  When I did read, it was sometimes worse, since I felt I had fulfilled my duty to God but got nothing out of it.  I left off with this and other self-imposed systems in April, finally realizing that--win or lose--they were taking me further from God.  It was at that time that I heard for the first time Matthew West’s "More."   It was the first of several songs that He would give me.  In that month also I read The Way of the Wild Heart, which God used to address some old wounds of mine, to show me where I was believing lies.  This helped me open my heart to Him, and that summer I dedicated to be my "Lover Summer" for me and Him, wherein I would fall fully and irrevocably in love with Him.  It wasn't exactly what I'd expected (what I'd expected would not have accomplished that purpose), but it was better.  I had some really amazing moments--a lot of them actually--and God romanced my heart through the summer months.  By the end, I really had fallen irrevocably.  When summer ended and I returned to school, I was able to draw on that love for strength and have remained in it.  Now my measuring rod for my spiritual life and worth is Christ's love for me, and I let Him lead my life as a man leads in a dance and I follow (not perfectly, but I do).

Related to this was learning to listen to God and trust His voice.  It's been a long journey for me, trying to accept my gift and learning to live with it and through it to the glory of God.  The journey started a long time before January, but some important things happened this year in regards to it.  In reading Walking With God by John Eldredge I learned so much that legitimized my own experiences with God.  His book also showed me the wonderfully Spirit-lead life that I could live if I let God work in me through my gift to its full extent.  This was especially pertinent because it happened during my "Lover Summer" and gave me the promise that the wonder of that summer could continue throughout my life and even be a living spirituality I could share with my family in the future.  After the summer, and before it, I faced a number of challenges related to trusting His voice, but I saw Him come through and deliver on some specific promises--promises that circumstances apparently made impossible, but which He fulfilled nonetheless.  My faith was even bolstered in the midst of trials from unexpected sources, as God confirmed some things He had been speaking to me through the mouths of others who had heard the same.  Forgetting this temporarily, though, I fell into some hard times toward the end of the year.  What I was hearing from God was rejected by some, which led to a lot of really ugly interpersonal conflict.  In the end, I had a conversation with one of the leaders of my church who said that this in itself meant that what I'd heard was not God's will, since His Spirit would have confirmed it to others.  I forgot that He had already done just that and was very distressed for a couple days--since if I couldn't trust what He'd said in this one place where He'd been so very specific and explicit and repetitive then how could I trust anything I heard?  And if I couldn't trust anything I heard, would I lose the ability to experience God's love as I had that summer?  Would I lose the ability to experience it at all, or lose faith totally?  In the end, not only did I remember the confirmation through another that God had given but I realized that, from the Bible, whenever God really communicates with anyone it's true--whether everyone or anyone (even the receiver) believes it or not.  I have found that to be true in my own life, and I hope to see it proved again in the upcoming weeks.

In other news, I broke page 900 in my novel (it will end soon, I swear!), started a webcomic (Dragon Hunt), and blogged...a lot (and about some things I didn't think I could ever talk about).  I traveled to Galveston, Texas and saw dolphins there, then traveled to the Black Hills of South Dakota to see Jewel Cave, Wind Cave, Mount Rushmore, and Crazy Horse.  I got an internship at Waterbrook Multnomah Press which starts this Friday--very exciting.  I made friends with a lot of cool men and women on a new combined Team at church and became involved in a Facebook apologetics forum, making friends there as well.  I mended one very dear friendship through mediation and rebuilt another twice over email etc--which it turns out is the slow way: much more is resolved much faster face to face between two friends.  By faith, I hope to have the pleasure of rebuilding that friendship for a third (and hopefully, final) time in the near future. This kind of healing, though, is a two-person affair and I came across one case where the other party just could not admit any wrong and would not come to the table for anything, and ties had to be cut.  I have admitted all wrong as though it were my own in hope of peace and reconciliation--for which I wait patiently. Academically, I completed my last full calendar year of school ever!  Very exciting.  I also realized that I would have to complete all the most difficult additional requirements of the Honors Program in my last semester if I was to graduate in the Honors Program.  I realized that, while it just might be possible, it would probably make me wish I'd never been born, and with very little gain if I succeeded in it.  Thus, I dropped out of the Honors Program and gained a much simpler final semester of school.  I also discovered the wonders of tabletop gaming (tabletop RPGs), listening between gales of laughter as Stephen Meyer described an unfortunate dragon swallowing a magically transformed frog--only to have it transform back into a "Minor Fell Beast" on the way down (no dragons were harmed in the making of this incident)--and also joining a fantasy campaign of my own (duelwielding characters automatically own, even if they're duelwielding daggers--Oh, and I discovered TV Tropes.com:  I never thought what I'd learned in English classes could be so fun!).

Well, that's about it!  Looking forward to what God will do in the new year!