Spiritually Sore?

I was thinking today about how ridiculously sore I am in comparison to the tiny amount of exercise I did yesterday.  As with most things in my life, I eventually drifted into the comparison between my spiritual life and my physical life.  The questions I have been struggling with is this; what can I do to work out spiritually to the point of being spiritually sore, and secondly, is it possible to be spiritually sore?  This is probably a ridiculous thought, but then again, so are 96.3% of the other thoughts that cross my mind

I'm interested in this concept because I have felt similar effects from spiritual experiences as from physical and mental ones, so why can't these be paralleled?  I wonder what it feels like to feel spiritually sore, and what it takes to get there? Is it a good thing or is it a bad thing?  If I can become physically sore so easily, why is it that I don't become spiritually sore as often?

The reason I am so sore today is that I worked out with a friend and we pushed each other the whole time.  Usually I work out by myself and don't end up feeling like my entire body will freeze up like the tin man at any given point.  Working out with Patrick gave me someone to struggle with, compete with, support, and be supported by.  We kept each other going even when we both wanted to quit. It is perfectly natural and normal to grow and gain muscle without ever feeling super sore, but when we push ourselves physically, we grow much faster.

I have decided that this is exactly why I have not experienced much spiritual soreness. I don't push myself very often, I have experienced growth with little effort before, and so I haven't had much of a reason to push myself.  Until now.  I'm convinced that if pushing myself physically to the point of exhaustion and soreness, putting forth similar efforts in pursuit of God will do the same.  Now I just need to figure out how to spiritually "work out."

I think a really important part of the parallel here is having someone to work with.  Sure it is possible to grow spiritually without outside influences other than God, but we will never reach our full spiritual potential if we don't allow ourselves to be pushed and supported by fellow believers.

I'm really intrigued to discover spiritual soreness and hopefully the exponential growth that I expect will come with it.

Communication is a good thing....

...and too much of this particular good thing is definitely a bad thing.

I spent all of last semester out of cell service and without a laptop, often going a week or so without reading the news, checking facebook, sending a text, or reading an email.  To those who have done month long facebook fasts, this probably seems like nothing, but I guarantee you, until you've been forced to limit your communication to face to face, you haven't experienced life unplugged.  Part of what I loved so much about the trip was that the focus was almost ENTIRELY on my own thoughts and on my relationship with God, at least for me.

Being in a culture where you can't understand the TV shows, you can't text your buddies, and you can't really even communicate with anyone really stimulates growth. With instant wi-fi connections, a 3G iPhone 4 with tons of games on it, and television I can understand, it's difficult to have the self discipline to pursue God.  When I was away, not only were my eyes opened to seeing God wherever I was, but I also had few distractions to pull me away from Him.

I still had my phone, but there was no service, TV still existed, but I didn't understand it (even some of the stuff in New Zealand and Australia didn't make sense).  None of these things were as big of distractions because it took a lot more effort to A) Find wi-fi, B) figure out how to connect in a weird language C) figure out if it was a reasonable time to call or message anyone, and D) spend fifteen minutes struggling with weak signals and dropped calls.  All I had to do to grow closer to God was send up a prayer, open my Bible, or even just talk with one of the many great christian friends I made on the trip.  I had no option but to share my burdens with my closest friends, and I had every opportunity to be refined spiritually.

This is why I am currently really frustrated with cell service, wi-fi, the internet, facebook, twitter, TV, even my car.  All of these things are individually good in my life; I call my friends and family with my phone, I keep in touch with friends via the internet, I make people laugh (usually) on twitter, and I can use my car to go places.  However, after spending about 5 minutes in a near-berserk state searching my apartment for my phone, I came to the conclusion that these awesome conveniences are taking over my life.  I got frustrated that I almost lost my head because I had gone 5 minutes without checking emails, facebook, texts, phone calls (part of my head-losing was because it had JUST been in my hand).

All of these things are COMPLETELY unnecessary to my life. That's right. COMPLETELY. I would NOT die if I never had any of those luxuries again, I do not NEED any of them, even more frustrating, almost NOTHING I ever said or will say matters. Wall posts don't matter, text messages don't matter, whether or not I watched all six seasons of lost (I did, by the way) DOES NOT MATTER.

Here's why; I am going to die at some point, that is a fact, and the only thing that will matter when that happens is whether or not I chased after God with every ounce of energy.  No matter how much I try to justify it in my mind, 98% of the posts I write, messages I send and calls I make have next to no eternal value.  The fact that these things hold me back from pursuing my Lord really frustrates me at times.  I need to learn to be more disciplined with my use of these things (I feel weird blogging about this topic because blogging is part of the problem...).

I honestly would rather not ever have to have a phone, a computer, a TV or any of these things, no matter how convenient they may be, they really don't do anything positive to bring me closer to God very often.

Repeat

Sometimes it seems like the same exact things happen over and over again in life.  This frustrates me.  Mostly because I tend to expect that the outcome will be different when a familiar situation arises, but that rarely happens.  Some of these things shouldn't frustrate me because they are my own fault, and that is another story all together, but I tend to struggle with the ones I couldn't have changed anything about.

God is good, there's no doubt about that in my mind, and to complain from my circumstances would be insane.  Where this leaves me though is just questioning, I have a great desire to understand everything.  I want to understand things that I know I never will.  Specifically I want to understand how it is that some people (Probably guilty of this myself at times) can treat other people so absolutely terribly and then expect no scarring.  I haven't really had any landmark tragedies in my life, and I am grateful for that, but over the past few months I have experienced a whole lot of betrayal, and I am still trying to figure out how to deal with that.  David writes in Psalm 51:12-14;

"If an enemy were insulting me, I could endure it; if a foe were raising himself against me, I could hide from him.  But it is you, a man like myself, my companion, my close friend, with whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship as we walked with the throng at the house of God."

So I guess my struggle isn't with God for letting it happen, but with people for being okay with it, and being callous about the destruction their actions cause.  How is it that one who claimed to be a friend can justify taking something from me and try to blame me? Why is it that I am the one left dealing with the negative effects of someone else's sin while they seem to be living carefree and easy? Any offense against me would be easy to move on from if it were accompanied with remorse, but blatant and brazen betrayal just hurts.  This story told by the prophet Nathan probably describes the way I feel best; 

"And the LORD sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, “There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor.  The rich man had very many flocks and herds, but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb, which he had bought. And he brought it up, and it grew up with him and with his children. It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him.  Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him." -2 Samuel 12:1-4

Here's the problem; I KNOW I'm not guiltless in this. If I apply this story to my life I have to admit that I have been both characters at different times.  It was never someone I'd call my friend when I was the one doing the taking, and I didn't take the same thing that was taken from me, but it was just as bad.  I have faced betrayal in different ways all my life, so why is this one more difficult to move past? I think it is because I had never thought about it from so many different angles, and it had always been easily escapable before.  

My thoughts are torn between guilt and hurt, guilt for all of the people in the past from whom I have taken things, and pain from the constant reminders of recent events.  My memory is generally impeccable, which can be a blessing in some situations, but definitely seems to show up as a curse fairly often as well.  This means that when I was betrayed, the first thoughts that flooded to mind were of times in my past when I had treated a friend like an enemy or when I had gone behind someones back to undermine them.  Thats why it hurts so much. Because it revealed to me the way I may have hurt people in doing things that didn't seem like a big deal to me.

I stated earlier that God is good, and there has still never been a doubt in my mind about this.  I can tell I'm growing because this time instead of hating God because he let something difficult happen to me, I can praise him for showing me the evil I myself have been guilty of and giving me a taste of what it feels like.  I can thank Him for giving me an experience that forces me to double think all of my actions to ensure that what I'm doing isn't hurting my brothers and sisters.  I can thank Him for showing me that I have no business living my life to please myself without a thought for how others feel. 

This post got way off topic from what I intended to write when I started, but the original idea was just going to be complaining that XX's are crazy, and I think what I ended up writing was a lot more meaningful anyways, more proof that God is good.

I'm glad He's in control and not me; my foresight doesn't even come CLOSE to His knowledge.

Tuning

I started blogging cause I liked the idea and it seemed cool and stuff, but now I don't know what to write about. Since I know having a blog is useless unless you blog, I had to come up with something to write about.  Other than the fact that my day seemed to last an eternity, the only thing interesting I can think about is this new tuning I used on my guitar.  For anyone who doesn't know me, I am really terrible at guitar, but I like the way it sounds and I like pretending I know how to play it (not a poser, but close).

Anyways, I really like this new tuning because it sounds good pretty much regardless of anything I do, I can strum open strings, sounds great, use one fret on one string, still sounds great, randomly press down frets and strings? STILL sounds great.  Basically this tuning makes it super easy to sound great, the downfall however is that the variety of playable chords is severely limited (doesn't really affect me because I only play like 2 chords anyways).  Another thing I like about it is that it is relatively easy to tune to it and then back to regular tuning, which makes me feel like a pro. Like many simple things, this tuning concept got me thinking about it's applications in life.  Using a tuning like DADGAD may make a beginner sound like a professional, but only in a very limited sense, it's basically a short cut.  In life, often times taking short cuts and looking for the easiest way to be great with little to no effort leaves us in a very limited place.  There are some options that seem right when they are presented simply because they will simplify life or get us where we think we want to be faster.  Often times these end up limiting what we can do in life, especially for God.  I find myself going back and forth on whether or not a choice I am about to make is right because I don't think I can always trust myself.  I think a lot of times my reasoning is overpowered by the obvious easy (while generally flawed) option and jump onto that for a while only to realize it doesn't go anywhere; there's no room for growth.  Playing guitar with DADGAD tuning can make me sound great with very little effort, but it severely cripples the variety of music I can make and limits me to the same 4 or 5 chords, whereas regular tuning takes more work but has a lot more possibilities.  I tend to lean towards the easy and quick options in life instead of working and being patient to reach the more rewarding result.

In other news, it's LITERALLY raining cats and dogs outside (not literally) and I am going to bed.

The Room

Over the past week or so, one particular image has been bouncing around in my head. This idea originated at a recital I went to in which I drifted off for a moment and in my daze of course decided to become a poet (I've had a dream of publishing a self-mocking poem for several years now). For some reason all I could think about was a room, a room with four walls, four doors and windows on either side of each door, everything in the room was white. Outside the windows in each direction is the rest of the world, and what I see is big cities, green hillsides, rocky mountains, unending oceans and all other sorts of natural and manmade things, intriguing and inviting landscapes. At first I just thought it could be a comic way of depicting the frustrations of decision making, but the more I thought of it the more I realized it really does a better job of illustrating my life than any other image that comes to mind.

People use the expression "Whenever God closes a door, he opens a window" to describe pretty much every situation, and however true that may be, I think it is more true to say that "Whenever God closes a door, He'll open it again when you're ready in His eyes." I spend a whole lot of time looking out the windows and seeing what looks to BE the Adventure of a lifetime, but realizing that what I see is not even a fraction of what He KNOWS . Sometimes I'll see an open door from across the room and run full-forced at it only to have it Close before I'm halfway there. Of course, being the stubborn man  that I am, a closed door does not always stop me from trying to get out of it. More often than not, I run headlong into a solidly shut door and only get a load of embarrassment and a massive headache to show for it. The open door always promises good things, but never fulfills. The image that kept running through my head was of me frantically running from door to door in my cubic room getting shut out (or in) at every single one.

Before I go on, I should address this fact; NO ONE WANTS TO READ ABOUT A GUY WHO'S TRAPPED IN A ROOM. At least not if theres nothing else interesting in said room, and there definitely is not And that's the reason for the title of this blog. From this point on in my life, I'm leaving the room. I'm not trying to leave through a door that opens and closes at random times anymore, rather I'm asking God to lead me out of this room. I'm coming to the realization that God does not close doors just for the sake of closing doors, God is just waiting for me to trust fully in Him. Before, I thought that once I got myself out of the room He would show me his power, now I realize that his power becomes apparent when I let Him lead me into his kingdom.

What I intend to write about for whoever wants to read is my adventure with God. Adventure because that's exactly what it is and also partially because that has been my favorite word / subject since I was four. I realize I probably should have started writing about these things a while ago before I left for the journey of a lifetime and as my friends put it "Traipsed around Asia for three months," but this is how I do things, and I guarantee you not one of the adventures I had in the . last four months was bigger than any of the ones that I'm about to have The word adventure to me inherently involves risk; there is no adventure if there is no risk involved, you can not sit inside a room and have an adventure at the same time * PLAYING ZELDA IS AN EXCEPTION *. Adventure is about facing the things you fear the most, fighting the giants and trusting God even if past experience advises hiding in a hole. Adventure is about taking leaps and stepping out on faith regardless of apparent consequences or past experiences, when God says go, I intend to go. And that's what got me out of The Room, God said go and I went and He is leading me. Now words can not even describe my excitement for every moment of this adventure that God is leading me on. I know that like all good stories this adventure is going to have plenty of ups and downs and I am GOING to have a lot of times where it seems more like a death march than an adventure. I 'm going to follow paths that seem to be right but will end up wrong, I'm going to fall down a few times, I'm probably going to get distracted by earthly pursuits a whole lot. The story in the end will show , The Room is behind me and God is before me.

I'm not going back to how things were.