Car go boom

So I'm realizing that when you jump a curb in the snow, your car takes some damage. :)

Not a smart thing to do. For those of you who enjoy mathematics, I wrote my little excursion out in equation form.


1 curb + 1 car + snow = 1 tire - air (x flattening) + 1 tire - 1 axle (x breaking)


So, yeah... that's what happens. Hooray for snow. Hooray for stupidity. Hooray for dumb luck. Hooray for life!


You can sort of see the tracks from my car in the last picture.



I am realizing through all the junk, if I take the time to listen, He will speak.

Here's what I heard.
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in Your arms

The snow falls softly.
Quietly covering the world around me.
Leaving a false sense of security
Making you think that nothing could be better
And it leaves everything cold and numb
Yet it effortlessly falls.

The truth of the matter is
That there is nothing more comforting
Than to be wrapped in Your arms.

in Your arms I am free.
in Your arms I am content.
in Your arms I am secure.
in Your arms I am satisfied.
in Your arms I am Yours.

in Your arms the snow starts to melt
And my heart starts to thaw.

This gentle snow
Reminds me of how my sins soon find a way to cover me
They cover me like a security blanket
A blanket that never seems to cover all of me
Reaching and pulling and trying to stretch it to fit
How often I find myself wrapping up
And attempting to winter the storm
When all I need one thing to be wrapped in:
in Your arms.

More than just words

I'm starting to find myself falling into poetry again. It's been such a long time since I found myself curling up and just letting my heart fall onto the paper.

Let me explain this to those of you who don't know.

My heart speaks in poetry, it speaks in rhythmic timing. My heart beats with the steady flow of the dramatic and the thematic. My veins course with rhyme schemes and methods. I can feel the words before they become thoughts in my head. I feel every piece that I write flow through my body and onto the page. More often than not, my writing seems to be a sub-conscious thing. Half of the time it seems like I don't know what I'm writing until I've written it.

If you've read my post from a week ago Friday, you noticed that I made a huge realization in my life. Through that entire weekend where I had my revelation, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. See if you can follow my change of heart through the 3 days I was gone.

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*Take My Eyes* (Day 1)

I'm at the point of moving on
I can feel my heart shifting
Yet my mind is trapped in idle
Stuck on this situation
Lord, help me, take my eyes
And turn them from the beauty I see
and focus my sight on You.
I feel so turned around so often
I need You to show up and be here
Every step seems like a miscalculation
Like I'm searching for fulfillment
In a source outside of Your grace.

I'm at the point of falling down
I can feel my legs failing
Yet I continue to walk on
Pushing forward while my heart seems empty
I'm looking for something in someone else
Lord, help me, take my eyes
And turn them to the beauty in You.

I'm at the point of turning around
Tired of fighting
Tired of searching
Tired of hoping ... for something that is uncertain
Lord, I'm laying my heart at your feet
Take it
Make it
To search after You
To find Your face
In the beauty I see.

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*Fearless* (Day 1)

Close your eyes
Take a breathe and let it linger
Let your breathe flow from your lips
Let your breathe carry all your worries
Flying far from you
Leaving you free
Leaving you fearless

Can you take a second
And release all your tension
Leave it at my feet
So you can walk forward
Fearless.

Close your eyes
Take a breathe and let it linger
Let your breathe flow from you
Let my breathe fill you up
Leaving you fearless.

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*So Tight* (Day 2)

I'm sitting in total confusion
Lost in this distraction
Unwilling to leave my desires
And I feel so unworthy
Because I am buried beneath
Everything that I hold so tight

I know what I should do
Yet here I sit in utter anxiety
I want to let it all go
I want to leave it at Your feet
But my hands hold so tight
To the things of this world
I want to let it all go
But I don't know how
I don't know if I can

I've been holding on so long
It seems like such a part of me now
My desire is taking over
And I hate every moment
That I am distracted from You
My life seems emptier
And I know why
Lord, I need your help
I don't have the strength
To let go of who my heart is crying out for
Lord, I know You are everything I need
But my human-nature craves
To love and be loved
And I know there is a reason
That she is in my life
I only ask that you give me the strength
To move forward and pursue
Or take my heart and wash it clean
And remove this distraction
To relieve my confusion.

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*Untitled* (Day 2)
Explain this to me
I am so focused
On not being distracted
That everything within me
Is in total disarray
My world seems so overwhelming
I'm losing focus of everything
My mind is crashing in
And I don't know what to do
So I fall into my coping system
And I wish I didn't have to resort to it
But here I am
Focused on what I tried to leave behind.

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*The Absence* (Day 3)

You are changing my soul
And I can see
My heart seems to slowly fade
Into the nothingness around me
This void seems never-ending
But I know this is for my benefit

You are changing my soul
Setting me free
To follow this path
Lord, I want that.
And now I can see Your face
Within this absence

Lord, I want that.
Within this absence
I finally can see
That you are setting me free.

In the silence

Have you ever just closed your eyes, and taken a deep breath, and just let yourself be in the presence of our Almighty and awesome Lord? --- If you haven't done that lately, please stop reading this blog and do that.

Take a second. Take two. And just be. Turn off the noise. Turn out the lights. Quiet your mind. Let your heart speak rather than your head. Take a second and remember the names of our Lord.

Take the first word in this list that makes your heart flutter and think about it. What does that word make your heart say.

--- Lord --- Holy One --- Savior --- Christ --- Adonai --- Elohim --- The Lamb --- Messiah --- Spirit of Truth --- Living God --- Eternal King --- Everlasting One --- Alpha and Omega --- Father --- Protector --- Shepherd --- Almighty --- Immanuel --- Teacher --- Rabbi --- Prince of Peace --- Sacrifice --- Deliverer --- Sovereign --- Jehovah --- Healer --- Provider --- Pierced --- I Am --- Anointed One --- Triumphant --- Faithful --- True --- Bread of Life --- Salvation --- Shelter --- Rock --- Love --- Peace --- Strong Warrior --- Spotless --- Perfect One ---

Think about that word. Think about the images that your heart conjures. Think about the words that your heart speaks. Think about how amazing our Lord is.

Close your eyes. Take a breath. Breathe that word in, and let everything from today wash over your lips when you exhale. Breathe in our Lord and let him fill you up.


Take a moment to be. Stop being so busy and just be still in His presence. You will never be the same once you let Him speak into your silence.

Out of Darkness

For those of you who don't know. I've been in Nashville since Friday morning, for the National Youth Workers Convention. - Its a gathering place for thousands of youth workers to come together in community, fellowship and to go on a journey of the Spirit together. I've gone to this for the past 3 years; Cincinnatti, St. Lousi and now Nashville. With each year I learn things and grow in my walk, and this year is no different.

For probably about the past year I have been in this funk. It has felt like my God whom I love was absent from me. I felt like I was alone, and reaching out in all the ways that I knew how, and He wasn't there. I felt abandoned. Prayer was unfulfilling. Scripture was dry. Worship was routine. My walk was stuck in idle, and I didn't know what was going on.

Throughout the convention, there are large community "sessions" - that is, times when we all gather together for a "message" from a speaker and worship. As well as smaller seminars about different topics that we deal with as youth workers. They try to make the seminars fit into a series, so that if you are looking to go deeper into a topic ie. middle school, post-high school, theology, whatever. There was a series this year, its available each year, called Soul Care. I went to most of theses sessions, because I thought that maybe my soul wasn't right, and that's why I felt abandoned.

Yesterday afternoon the seminar in the series was taught by Mark Yaconelli, an amazing man in his own right, he spoke about "the Dark Night of the Soul: When God Feels Absent" ---- Could it have been more of a Godsend? I think not.

So I go to this seminar and I'm listening to him speak and everything that he is saying is just resonating in my heart and the deepest parts of my soul. I realize that God has been absent. That sounds weird to say, but it is so true. the dark night of the soul is when God is obscure. When you can't see Him. --- The whole idea of the dark night of the soul, is that this is a time in your life where God is retooling you. He is taking you apart and rebuilding the things in you that He wants. - So often we find ourselves walking in routine. Just "repeating" our practices and we lose focus of that God that we were so in love with. (This is exactly where I am)

He even backed up this idea biblically. Look at Saul. Saul was on a mission. Jesus came upon him and blinded him. While Saul was blind Jesus worked in him, he rebuilt him and made a new creation, Paul.

Even Jesus was in this darkness. On the cross when He took on all our sin he felt as though God had abandoned Him. "My God, my God why have thou forsaken me?"


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The big kicker is that there is nothing that we can do about it. We cannot free ourselves from the darkness. The only way to get out of this darkness is to Surrender yourself to it, to allow Jesus to rescue me and rebuild me and teach me to love Him once again.

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I am so happy to be in the darkness. I'm trusting that He will walk me out the other side a stronger and better man.

White Peaks

Every once in a while, I get to a point in my head where I just have so much going on, and I don't know where to turn. I get so lost in my thoughts that I lose focus and start to question everything. It's something that I've had to deal with my whole life. Whenever I hit a wall, my mind starts swirling with everything and anything. The curse of an analytical obsessive-compulsive with A.D.D.

Anyways, When I get this way I tend to write, or create or do something as my release. I'll grab a notebook and go out into the woods and write, or I'll grab a guitar and disappear for a while and just play some music.

I came across my notebook from early this year, and was looking through it and I cam across this piece, and wanted to share it, because I know that I am not the only person to ever feel like that.
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White Peaks

Suffocating underneath my own ambition
Fighting to find a foothold
On this mountain turned from mole-hill
The weight of my own anticipation
Bearing down on my heart.

I see the white peaks of this mountain
So close yet they seem so out of reach
I can feel the cold air enveloping me
Yet with each breath of air I breathe in
I seem to lose my strength and cannot continue

I've come so far
I can turn around and see
the base of the mountain far beneath me
The truth is evident
But it seems so eventual
That I will fall
That I will lose my grip
And tumble back to where I began

I see the white peaks of this mountain
So inviting yet they seem so imposing
I can feel the cold air enveloping me
Yet with each breath of air I breathe in
I seem to lose my strength and cannot continue
Using what might I have left
To hang on this ledge
My fingers slowly slipping

I can feel the tears in my eyes
Slowly forming
Turning to ice
Freezing before they can fall
Trapped inside
My emotions cannot escape
The cold air of this glorious mountain
Affecting me so

I see the white peaks of this mountain
So inviting yet so imposing
I see the white peaks.

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I think we get so caught up in the things of the moment that we lose focus of the beauty around us.

Let me put this in perspective for you. This piece came out of a time in my life where I was so busy, and so overwhelmed with my life that I was starting to question whether my life was worth living. This life that we live often seems like a roller coaster of sorts. There are always highs and lows. The difference that I see is that on a roller coaster, you tend to climb slowly up to your high and then fly through the lows.. With me, that doesn't ever seem to be the case, I tend to sit and wallow in the lows. I climb up to my highs and then putz through the lows. When I hit my low times, I wallow in self pity, frustration, whatever you name a negative emotion, and i feel it...

Well, I hit this low in early April, and questioned everything. Nothing seemed to be going my way, and that frustrated me. I was just starting to climb my way out. I was dealing with it. And my world came crashing down around me. I was struggling to make ends meet, I was in a relationship that was dragging me down, I was just in the midst of major self-pity. Everything seemed to just spiral out of control.

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So how often do we find ourselves climbing the mountains of this life, and we are so concerned with finding our footholds, or worried about falling that we forget to look around and see the glory of the moment. The next time that you find yourself climbing a mountain, take a second to see the beauty of the moment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Bwt5MaGvDQ

Strumming My Heart Strings

---So I've been sitting here for the past few days with this melody in my head. Not sure what it was, still not sure what it is, but that's beside the point. It's a simple progression, simple melody but for some reason it seems so much more than simple. If it were as simple as it sounds it wouldn't keep me awake at night.

I hear this melody everywhere I go, everything I do I hear it. It is slowly starting to take over my thoughts. This sounds like a problem, but it is so much more than that. Every time I here this pattern, for some reason everything seems to fade into the distance.

Every so often I get a rhythm, or a pattern, or a melody stuck in my head and it sticks around until I play it out.

Well, I played it out and I started hearing words. It's a simple pattern, here's what I've heard so far:
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Lord, here I am searching
Here, searching for you.
Yet all I find is myself
Waiting for you.

Lord, here I am crying
Here, down on my knees
And all my words fall so short
of calling for you.
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I just thought I'd put this out there. See what you all think?

It is paid

Jesus Paid It All - Kristian Stanfill

I hear the savior say, Thy strength indeed is small
Child of weakness, watch and pray, Find in me thine all in all.

Jesus paid it all, all to him I owe
Sin has left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.

Lord, now indeed I find thy power and Thine alone
Can change the leper's spots and melt the heart of stone

Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe
Sin has left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.

And when before the throne I stand in him complete,
"Jesus died my soul to save" my lips shall still repeat

Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe
Sin has left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.
Sin has left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.
He washed it white as snow, he washed it white as snow.

O Praise the one who paid my debt
And raised this life up from the dead
O Praise the one who paid my debt
And raised this life up from the dead
O praise the one who paid my debt
And raised this life up from the dead
O Praise the one who paid my debt
And raised this life up from the debt.


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This song is one of my absolute favorites.

How often we find ourselves struggling to carry the weight of the world, to carry the weight of our own burdens. When we carry the world, burdens, worries, struggles or whatever; we find that our lives seem dead. We find that our lives have lost something.

So the question is, what are you carrying that you need to let go of? What burden is making you dead on the inside?

It's time to let go. It's time to be free.

The weight you carry, isn't yours to carry. He want's to carry it. He wants to free us from our chains that bind.

So can you let Him? Can you let Him wash away your sin?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brVIlXlJRkQ