My Old Kentucky Home

What a great song eh? Ok, maybe not. This past week Megan and I have been in Kentucky visiting various friends and family.... a total of 1,200 miles of driving Just around Kentucky. You could say it was a busy week. We had a blast... It was truly a great week. Over the week an especially as we were flying out i came to several realizations:

-Kentucky is no longer my home. I'm now into the great unknown, i'm not sure if God would ever call me to live there again. It's really scary, but it's cool because i am totally up to where the Lord is leading myself and Megan.

-I have an amazing women in my life, she is amazing and my life is forever changed from moving to vegas and meeting her.

--My friends and family are amazing, they showed so much hospitality to me... and truly welcomed me with open arms.. It was awesome.

-God roots us deep only to transplant us. Let your roots be deep, but make sure your able to grow wherever God may place you.

- I've realized that God is all that i have in this life. I have no fall-back plan.... OUr live should look very different from others. We should be extraordinary people who do things that do not make sense, crazy things, you don't play it safe... you take risks.... and we're not to sure what God's going to do with our risks. But we are going to take them...

That's what i realized as our American Airlines jet parted the clouds... It was quite revolutionary.

rj

Be.

Life really amazes me. Everytime that i doubt God, and what his plan for me is, he blows my mind. Last week we had our baptism after the service on sunday morning... we were expecting about 17 or 18 people to be baptized because of their commitment to Christ. 35 people were baptized, at this point it's just affirmation.

Tonight at our small group, i got pumped up with our students. We were just sitting around (and honestly i was waiting for a topic to come up to talk about and so it did) talking about our goals for this upcoming year..... and it came to my attention that 90% of my students don't give a rip about anyone else but themselves and their close friends... the were all very open by saying that.. They told me that other people were just an inconvenience.. At that point i realized that they had never experienced Jesus....So i preceded to ask them if it was just ok to believe in what ever, and they all agreed that it didn't really matter as long as you believed in something.

So I told them my story.

That I was lost and God found me and changed my entire family. And that was how i knew that God was real. They were all pretty much silent.... It really showed me that we were getting somewhere.... that they were getting their locked up feelings out, and mostly that they realized that it's a problem to be a follower of Christ and to not care about people......

God told me this......

"Let us not lose heart in doing good, for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary."
Galatians 6:9

Keep on truckin baby....

Bringin' the heat...

Well.... Hopefully since these are imported to facebook things will be easier. Today, July 4th, 2007 it was 117 degrees in las vegas... Yipes I know. It seems as if life has been coming at me fast ever since i stepped into the unknown. God has been stepping up in ways that i could never have imagined.

This past weekend we did a retreat with our students in Beaver, Utah... one of God's special places. That weekend was the best retreat that i have ever experienced in Youth Ministry thus far. It truly made me realize why we do what we do. I saw students come together in a way they had never experienced. A few of our students had never been camping or even out of the desert really so it was really amazing. As we pour our lives out waiting for some to soak it up, i personally am learning so much about myself, the way God has made me and the future that i want to have. It's amazing to realize that though i live in the land of oppurtunities i want to take the route of Christ. If that leaves me poor and homeless, i'm up for it.

Megan and i are doing great, were just doing the whole "planning thing" for the wedding... some of it's not really that fun and also quite stressful. If anyone reads this, just be praying for us. She is truly an asset to my life already, I can only imagine where things will take us off to after October 27th. It is going to be amazing to have some as supportive and "sold out" as she is to be my wife. At times i feel confused about everything, but at the end of the day, i know that my life is spoken for....

meaning of it all....

Dust and Ashes is a passage in Genesis that basically talks about our humanity. We are only dust and ashes. Things that are dead and dirty, but the beauty of it all is that Christ makes us shine.
...one word...

SHINE!
My goal in life is to shine so bright that others are affected by it.

People make me move.

Lately, well in the past year, I have started to become more of a thinker. It's a good thing, I used to be real shallow. Now it's like I'm learning to see people, and not to just see people but to really feel people. To feel what their feeling and experience what they are experiencing. I'm not going to lie at all, since i have been in vegas, my like has changed. Adjustment is continous. I've felt like this culture has been overwhelming me, it's all flsh and glitter. But that's not who i am at all.
--The culture will consume you if you let it.
--it's important to talk to God so that you don't think stupid thoughts...

....Anyway back to the people thing. This past weekend i've felt that i've made some of the freshest connections with people. If anyone reads this, which they probably do not, get this if you haven't gotten anything else. LOVE people. Sometimes i think that you can live life but not really live. What i mean is life isn't the things that you can attain but life is simple. Life is breathe.


Days go by and i feel like inever even breathe. Those days are wasted.

............let people move you...
-ineed to return to reality...in essence... the basics.

traffic... at midnight...

So i guess you know you live in Las Vegas when you wait in traffic for an hour on a Saturday nigh at midnight.....



I have almost been disconnected to the stereotypical statement Las Vegas carries which is... Sin City... Until now. This place is so dirty and i think i've figured out why... People come to Vegas to live their secret life. The one they do not want to remeber but always want to have in the holster when story time with the guys comes up. I

-Its good to be thrown out their in the midst of it all... it keeps me fresh and on my toes.

thoughts on working on the strip..

-God always gives us a way out from sin.... i hope to continously live in the exit door when i'm around sin...

late saturday nights equal no sleep....
-- set-up for church starts in 5 hours...............

Denny's....

So tonight i got off work and was just thinking i needed to go do something.... so i called up one of my friends and we all went to Denny's, alex and his four friends. Alex had been telling me that his friend Steve-o had been talking a lot about this whole God thing...... and for some reason alex brought that up tonight while we were at Denny's. He said that he was going to commit his life to christ on sunday morning..

I posed the question to him... why not now? Needless to say..... Steve-o committed his life to Christ tonight in the denny's paring lot.... we all got facedown and prayed, and steve-o got the "hook-up" form God. God is good....

- who said Denny's was just a restaurant....
-lesson learned...
-Expect God to move no matter where you are!

untapped.....

Oswald Chambers once quoted this phrase....." it is a crime to be weak in God's strength." At first when i read that, i didn't think twice about it, but eventually the meaning of that phrase began to sink in. It essentially means this.... when people claim to follow Christ, and you see no fruit of this i their life.


I say all of that to make this point.... most of us just go about life living untapped lives. Its like having all of the food in the world and refusing to let anyone eat it...... God has given us this strength to over come the world and what are we doing with it.

..."the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world...." -John

I have caught myself continously living a defeated life..... what does that mean? glad you asked.... i have previously lived life like there is nothing i can do about the way things are going in this world. I have essentially felt overcome but all that life has handed me.

i say all of this because:

-i think we fail to realize the power of prayer...

- we fail to realize the pwoer God has over the world and his creation.

- We are God's people, we belong to him...(i don't say this to be cheesy), which means that people who are also born of God listen to us...

- we must be each others strength, the more we grow together as believers, the more we look like God.

- I believe what Rob Bell quotes often....that if we allow ourselve to unleash our institutional lives, we can witness "bits of heaven crash into earth."

3 months and counting.....

So... i have now been living in Las Vegas for 3 months. Things here are great, i'm absolutelty loving the church that i'm apart of which is Grace Point, check us out at www.gracepointvegas.com . I plan for this blog to be a rehash of what goes on in my head on a day to day basis. If no one reads it that ok, but if i have some fellow bloggers who want to respond and react to my daily thought of life, that would be great. Here we go....

I finally gave in...

I guess i'm tired of reading blogs and not being able to respond....