My Current Prayer

Mark 4:10-12; Luke 8:9-10

Lord,

         

I want to hear & obey. I don’t want to be the kind of person you’re talking about in this passage. Grace me with better understanding and wisdom. Give me humility to know when I’ve done wrong & when my pride is in the way. Forgive me for my attitude today. I thought I had the right to be mad. But really I don’t have a right to anything. My pride made me want to be mad and frustrated. I wanted to react in the way the world expected. Please give me the strength to react in the way you expect and empower me.

Love,

Owlee

What's in a Fisherman?

Mark 1:16-20; Luke 5:1-11; Matthew 4:18-22

Why did Jesus pick fisherman for his disciples? A number of his closest 12 were fisherman, and his 3 closest were fisherman. There was obviously a quality about these men that caused Jesus to pick them to be fishers of men.

-Patience is a virtue. We've all heard that, but it takes A LOT of patience to fish. Both for men & actual fish.

-Have to be willing to face the storms. (One of the requirements for the job)

-The more you fish, the more experienced you become and the better you are.

-When fishing nowadays, you have to know which bait and line you want to use for the type of fish you want to catch. (I don't know how they fished in the Roman empire). For example, you're not going to plan a rock concert to win the elderly over to Christ...

-Disciplined with equipment. Reading the Bible, talking to God, etc.

-Perseverance: some days you don't catch anything, but you go out the next day anyway.

-Jesus brings in the multitudes.

When thinking about fishermen, I realized that God has a sense of humor. He likes to connect everything so that it might not make sense at first glance, but there really is a reason why Jesus decided to hang out with people that smelled of fish guts. All of the qualities that are required with fish fishing, are required to fish for men. I hope you make the same connection I did when you read these passages.

From Concussion Times

Concussion. Slows you down. Frustrates you. Makes you emotional. Sucks. But everything happens for a reason. Full scholarship through college, gone. 28 on ACT's when I needed a 29. Narnia, The Last Battle, Ustace and Jill didn't get to Narnia using the rings, the play THEY had come up with. Aslan didn't need the rings. God doesn't need my ACT scores. "I finally got some sense knocked into me, and I have the bump to prove it." Simba. I have my bump from falling to prove what I learned. I prayed that God would teach me something through Narnia since I can't read yet, and he did. He used Narnia and Disney, two of my favorite things. God works in mysterious ways. It gets me trusting in Him again. I had it all figured out. I didn't need him anymore. Now I see I will always need Him, and if I feel I don't, He'll make sure that I'll do.


14 January 2012 journal entry
I wrote this in my journal 5 days after I hit my head and got my concussion. I have just gotten around to putting it up in my busy schedule. Still a good reminder of our dependence on God.

Longest Days of My Life Thus Far

Pain.  Confusion.  Anxiety.  Depression.  Bewilderment.  Lack of Hope.  Mostly Frustration.  This concoction of emotions intoxicated my body the moment my head hit the wooden gym floor.  A concussion changes a person, for better or worse, I don’t know.  It forces me to be still to rest even when I don’t want to.  The harder I push myself, the worse I feel.  It’s an odd feeling to be still when you’re used to running one hundred miles an hour.  To not participate in all the activities, to not be able to understand concepts you understood earlier that day, to not be able to work.  What good ever came out of staring at a wall?

It forced me to listen, to notice, to read, to pray, to calm my spirits.  But none of these things would have happened if I had not hit my head..  Two days after receiving my concussion, my ACT scores were reported, and they are one point below the needed score to apply for a certain (quite large-60-100%) scholarship.  This news broke my heart in two.  I had been counting on that scholarship to go to my dream school with pretty much no debt.   Through the trauma and the crying, I believe that I was set back in my recovery.  Through the process, I discovered that I was becoming too comfortable with my decisions to trust God in anything.  I still want to attend Messiah College, become an occupational therapist, and someday go to Africa, but it will all be on His dollar because I know that I CAN’T AFFORD IT. Because I can’t read for long periods of time, I’ve been listening to my beloved Narnia stories and asked God to teach me something through them.  He’s shown me a lot actually. In The Last Battle, Eustace and Jill are trying to get to Narnia, and the group has this whole plan with the rings from the Professor’s house and the whole shebang.  The children never needed them; Aslan did all the work.  The rings are the scholarships that I wanted, and Aslan (God).  I’m still asking why He let this happen to me, my senior year when I was just coming into my grove.  Why did He take that away from me?  I don’t know what He wants to reveal to me, but with so much time on my hands, I can really dig into what He has to say.  But I know I am to listen, and it will be revealed to me.

“Call unto Me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which though knowest not.”  Jeremiah 33:3 KJV

Justin Bieber?

                Being a pastor’s kid, or a PK as we call them in my family, life has thrown a lot of pressures and expectations my way.  One of them being the challenge of answering one of life’s most difficult questions: do I believe everything I have grown up learning about Jesus and the Bible?  Are my answers my own?  As a senior in high school, I am fortunate enough to have a clear path of my next five years—attend Messiah College for 3 years and then transfer to Thomas Jefferson to complete my master’s program in occupational therapy.  But even with the dreaded “senior” question answered, I still felt like something was missing, almost like a doubt.  This feeling drove me to search and discover Christ in a way that I never had.  I started reading A Case for Christ by Lee Strobel from an objective viewpoint and meeting with a woman from my church to discuss the book once a week.  But it wasn’t through the book that I understood the answer to my question.  Don’t get me wrong; I have benefited wonderfully from my weekly get-togethers, but something was said from a voice that I have literately heard from birth.  Who would have guessed that my dad’s analogy of Justin Bieber living in my town would have explained how Jesus could be fully man and yet still be God.

            Let me set the scene for you.  I attend a high school that has a whopping total of 800 people in grades seventh through twelfth.  We say pop instead of soda, and a vacuum is also known as a sweeper.  Football and hunting make up our culture, and if you weren’t born here, you probably don’t belong because everybody knows everybody.  Now my dad had asked, “What if Justin wanted to move here but didn’t want anyone to know it was him.  He wanted to have a normal high school experience.  What would he have to do to make that happen?”  Automatically the small group of us started shouting out answers: play football, kill a deer, wear ripped jeans and flannel, color his hair, maybe even get plastic surgery, and above all, NOT USE “BABY” AND “OH” IN THE SAME SENTENCE!   But the thing is, even if he did all of these things, he would still be Justin Bieber with all his beliebers.  He would still have the bank accounts, Selena Gomez, guards, house, and fame even though he would have chosen not to use any of it.  It’s the same way with Jesus.  When he came to Earth as a baby, he still had power and authority as God, but he chose to lay it aside and not use it while he was on Earth.  This doesn’t make him any less God.  It makes him a loving God.  Suddenly, I don’t doubt what I have been taught because it makes sense.  Yes, I still have questions, plenty of them.  But I’m starting to appreciate them because they force me to discover new things about Christ every day.