Desires of your heart

Psalm 37:4

"Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart."

John 15:7

"If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you."

I haven't thought about these verses and others like it in a long time, but today the pastor at the church I went to spoke about business, happiness, and how we live our lives and he quoted psalm 37:4 which got me thinking about it. For a lot of people these verses are serious stumbling blocks because people think that what they want and what they pray is right.

Most people associate prayer with bringing requests before God. They ask God to heal this person or help them achieve something or they just ask for his blessing. None of these things are necessarily bad, but the problem is with the expectations that come with prayer, largely because of the verses above. We expect God to bless us, to give us certain things, like we deserve it. Pastor Aaron spoke on this once. He used the example of when he was student teaching. He once gave one kid in his class a small bag of candy, and all the other kids in the class got upset. Why? The candy wasn't theirs. He didn't take it away from them to give to the other kid. He didn't tell them they were going to all get candy. They assumed they would get some, that they deserved some.

The second and far more serious problem with our prayer lives and these verses is our tainted perception. We assume that because we read our bible every day, go to church, support missions, pray, and all that jazz that we are delighting in the Lord and remaining in His word. While all those things certainly are important and have there place in ways that we exercise our faith, they aren't our faith. Our faith is built on God. His mercy, His grace, His justice, His glory, everything about him. Our part in our faith is the complete and total submission and trust in Him. Anything else is for exercising that faith and learning more about it and about God. Who is prayer for? Who benefits from it? God? Or was prayer made for us. To comfort, encourage and challenge us. Under our normal, basic understanding of prayer(communication with God), God really doesn't have any need for it. He can communicate with us anyway he wants, and he already knows what we're going to say to him and what we're going to ask of him.

Anyways, that was all secondary thought to what the pastor said today and what caught my attention. He said that when we delight in God he gives us the desires of our hearts. That just blew me away. The fact that God would give us the desires of our hearts is just so incredible. If you're thinking that I'm talking about my wants and needs, that God gives us "the desires of our hearts" as in the stuff we want or things we want to see happen, you're wrong. God's gives us "the desire of our hearts" as in our actual desires. When we delight in God, He doesn't give us what we want. What we want changes to what He wants and has planned for us. I'll say it again. When we delight in God, He doesn't just give us what we want or think we want but He changes our desires to match His own. If He merely gave us what we wanted then it would be a lot harder to be satisfied and delight in God because we will always be able to come up with more things that we want or think we want. But God goes gives us His desires, so that we may be satisfied and find peace in our lives. Oh, how He loves us!

One final thought: Do you ever wonder why we rarely pray to Jesus and almost never pray to the Holy Spirit? We typically address God the Father. Why? Aren't they all God? All equal?

Because of his grace and for his glory.

Final exams

So at the beginning of the semester I wanted to try to boost my overall GPA to a 3.4. To do that I needed to get a 3.7 for the semester. Up until my second round of midterms I thought I could pull it off, but as I started to calculate the grades I was getting, I quickly lost hope. Then came finals week. I only had three finals but two of them were awful. I would have been ecstatic to get 60% on them. Anyways here are my final grades

EE 311: A (got like a 50 on the final. I guess it helps to know the professor and have him respect you)

Stat 418: A- (Thanks to a midterm drop)

English 202c: A (lots of projects but nothing too difficult

Racquetball: A (and class champion after an epic comeback)

Math 412: B (thought I got a 40% on the final and never did very good on the homework)

So totalled up, guess what my GPA for the semester was. 3.7. After all the stress and worrying, when I finished my finals I was able to just let it go, and commit my grades to God and whatever happens happens. It's crazy how much God blesses us. I've really been able to see Him work in little things and prove his faithfulness this year.

Because of his grace and for his glory.

Pile it on

I am very hesitant to say that my life sucks. I know how blessed I am and how so many people are far worse off, but sometimes life is really difficult. The past couple weeks I feel like everything has been going wrong. My parents are stilled unemployed. I lost a scholarship from Penn State. I've been spending a lot of time with this girl, hoping that it would develop into something, and we talked about, but she doesn't want to be in a relationship. For a while it looked like my grades were going to slip a a decent amount. I've been trying to get this job, but the guy hasn't been calling me back and it's been pretty frustrating. My grandmother had blood clots in her spine and passed away today. It's that time in my life where life just seems to pile it on. I don't know when it's going to stop. All of this has just added to my struggle with being at ACF.

I don't know if I can do it anymore. I don't know if I can keep going to ACF. I don't think anybody really wants me there. Earlier this year I didn't go to ACF for a couple weeks and the only people that said anything to me didn't really care why I wasn't there. They just expected me to be just because I'm always there and I'm the head trustee. It's really frustrating. Especially when there are people that I am directly responsible for their involvement and ACF, like Jenny, Charlotte, and John, and people want them to be there, and they are more a part of ACF in their little time there than I have ever been in three years.

My walk with God hasn't been too good recently and I'm at the point in my life where I really need to take care of myself, and be selfish and think of myself first for a little bit. I'm not really sure what I need, but I don't think ACF can give it to me because it hasn't the past three years. I'm not going to keep going to ACF if people don't want me there and if I don't really want to be there.

Because of his grace and for his glory

So close to being this far

I've been writing recently. It's not really a poem but if you want to classify it as something I guess you would call it a poem. It's far from done, but this is what I've got so far:

I sit here at the end of the day
wondering what happened
Where did it all go?
It seems like it was yesterday
I was living like a prince
Indulging myself with all the riches
the world has to offer me
Now there's just You and me
It barely feels like it's enough
Not wanting to stay
Not able to go
There's nothing left to do
but let these feelings consume me

Lost in the desert of my thoughts
with nothing to subdue my thirst
Your voice flowed like water
curing me of all my ailments
And I felt like there was no other choice
So I followed
All the while wondering if you knew
Knew who I was
Knew what you were getting into
but who am I to question God

Now, that burning bush is gone
without a trace
Well, this must be a dream
because no fire dies that fast
I open my eyes
and you are nowhere to be found
All this time I never realized
how close I was
to being this far away

I look down to find a serpent
latched onto my leg
with no intent of letting go
I swear it used to be a stick
with no other purpose than to help me
on my walk down this long forsaken road
I let that snake stay
Not caring enough to just reach down
and try to pull it off
And so it consumes me
My blood flows thick with despair and regret

Where do I go from here?
Nothing short of losing my inheritance
could make me change my mind
I feel so cold
I can't even remember
what's it's like to be warm
I never knew how close I was
to being this far away