Waiting

        I think that possibly the most difficult thing in my life is waiting. It's something that God is always drilling into me. Wait, wait, wait... In the past I have looked at waiting in a different view. Waiting on God to bring me the right person. I've always looked at those waiting verses in that way, maybe because it was my focus. Finding the right person and settling down. Something hit me today as I was reading Isaiah 64:4 which says,

      "Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him."

        It was such a beautiful passage and as I was sitting on my bed I realized my focus has slowly switched. I am no longer waiting for the right person but I think I am waiting for God. Not the effects of what God can give me if I follow Him, like a husband or success, but truly just waiting for Him to make something beautiful of my life. I want so desperately to have a life of meaning not just an existence filled with what I said in my last post, the "American dream." I am living it but am not satisfied with it. It's a live of taking for yourself and not reaching out to others. This must change. I can live in a shack for all I care but I just want to be satisfied with my life knowing that I am where God wants me.  To have a relationship with God that nothing can shake. More than anything I want it and I want to want it more. I have to learn to look for what God is teaching me in the waiting times of my life and be satisfied with where He has put me at this moment. I see Him leading vaguely, through a veil, and I must cling to this vision regardless of where the meandering, learning path of God's will takes me.

"When God gives a vision and darkness follows, wait. God will make you in accordance with the vision He has given if you will wait His time." Oswald Chambers

"The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them they would be too many to declare." Psalm 40:5

"Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord." Psalm 27:14

"We are calling out in the thick of the war, I am standing down to fight for something more." Humanity- Tim Be Told

A Mother's Perspective

Floundering... That's what I feel like I am doing presently. On the outside and to everyone else it may seem that I am living the so called "American Dream." I have a good, steady job, I am single without a lot of money going out except to pay off loans, my family is supportive, I have tons of friends, and yet with all of this I am still searching... It's exhausting to try to fill the black hole of the soul.

I am frustrated with my lukewarm attitude about my relationship with God. I either want to leave the church entirely or have a relationship with God that separates me from the world. I am so tired of fitting in with the worlds standards and still pretending to have God. You can't tell a difference between most Adventists and everyone else. I feel that I am turning into what I have always fought against. I want to want God. I want to feel Him near. I must fight, refusing to give up because He has never given up on me.

I didn't realize what my frustration with life surrounded until talking to my mom the other day as the tears trickled down my cheeks. What is it about mother's that brings so much clarity to life? She said something that will stay with me to the day I die, "Alex, you will never be satisfied with the American way of life, with a husband who works a normal job, who provides enough money for a house where you raise a family, live on a little country street and have a typical American life. I know you, YOU will never be satisfied with the American Dream. Some people may be satisfied but you will not."

This reality took a little bit to sink in but I realized that my mother has read me correctly.