'All I Want Is...'

I wrote this a while ago but it definitely has been a resounding theme throughout the last couple months.

"I find that a lot of times in life I come to God without any words to say. I come to him tired and burdened, weary and broken and on the verge of apathy. There are those times where I just lay down on my bed and let my mind drift off trying to come up with any combination of words that I can express to God in order to tell him what is on my heart and ultimately I fail to do so. His grace, however, refuses to let me fail as it grants me assistance through the Spirit. I really like the verse in Romans 8:26 that says, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” Like that verse says, as I lay there on my bed, I really believe that it is the Spirit that always leads me back to the simple but important bridge of the song “For This Cause” that says, “all I want is You, Jesus.”

Amidst the chaos of everyday life, God knows the magnitude of how much and how often I need to pray this prayer of redirection and refocus on the one constant, the ultimate sufficiency. I go about everyday throwing my heart at every tangible and easy route to some sort of stimulation I associate with happiness only to end up with the same emptiness and bitterness and grief. But God loves me too much to give up on my heart and brings it back to pray this prayer again and again and ask to be consumed by His presence and nothing else.

I just want more of You."


this is completely unrelated to the post...

But this is a picture from back in the day (2006 nba eastern conference finals miami heat [go dwade] vs. detroit pistons [you guys are done this season]) and it is one of my favorite pictures of all time. I freaking love it. The game, as you can probably tell, is at miami florida but that did not stop this single pistons fan, though consumed by a sea of white, to proudly cheer for his team when they scored. That's what I'm talkin' about.

I greatly admire his courage and team pride.

I Freaking Suck With Girls

I tried for a very long time to think of a better, more eloquently way of saying my tragic downfall as a man for the title of this blog post but I couldn’t think of one besides the single truth: I freaking suck when it comes to interacting with girls. There is something about my brain that causes it to basically go crazy and turn into a turbo/noz/bargardi-1000-crazy-horsepower-shizzle-car quickly causing an internal meltdown that just shuts down all my common sense fluid banks and eventually depletes my entire spirit. They should just harvest this mysterious chemical from my brain and distribute it to women everywhere to use instead of mace when a sleezy guy tries to hit on them: 1. It’s a lot less deadly and will inflict a smaller number of possible casualties, 2. I’m sure it’s utterly hilarious to see the guy completely bomb his encounter with the woman. Genuine entertainment.

But one thing I’ve come to believe and cherish from this disability is that much like myself, other people deserve second chances. I am reminded of the old idiom that first impressions (well, in my case second, third, fourth, and well past my tenth impression) of a person are just “tips of the iceberg” with thousands upon thousands of gallons of frozen personality ready to thaw out at any moment under the person’s elastic skin surface. I really believe that God wired my-quirky-“acquired taste”-self like this in order to help me learn and live out what it means to not judge people based on first impression. To be honest, it freaking sucks not getting a second chance with not only girls but also more importantly, people in general. I think it ultimately returns to the beauty of God’s grace, the underlying principle of life, that though we were imperfect and completely undeserving, he gave us the concluding second chance ushering in our own salvation from our own filthy transgression. But the beauty of that grace does not end there, rather it actually allows Him to still draw us even closer to himself every single day regardless of our faults the day before. How many second chances would that make?

Speaking of girls...

those glasses look familiar...holla!

p.s. district 9 is a solid movie