Art... Creativity... Poetry... and biking

Where the heck does all the inspiration come from...

It seems like I am either totally dry or overflowing with creativity.

It kind've sucks. Maybe I have not found my muse. but I do not think that is it. I have begun to realize that I already have a muse maybe a couple. But the one big thing that inspires me is mountain biking.

Actually just biking period. I have been contemplating this as I sit at panera bread and look at other peoples blogs, but that is almost beside the point because I was able to bike here from our new house. It was so refreshing. I have not really made a point of biking anywhere since the first 6 months I lived in Colorado before I got motorized transportation.

I LOVE IT!!!!!

Why the heck did I stop doing it. In college I would be biking all the time. I did have more free time, but my life is so much more enjoyable when I am biking.

It really calms my soul to bike, I have sometimes pondered if the only time I am truly worshiping the Lord is when I am biking. A peace comes over me whenever I go. It does not matter if it is hard or easy or what. God has put biking in my life to let me connect with people I would not normally meet.

I love riding my Buell to but I am not passionate about it like I am biking. It is a tremendously enjoyable form of transportation but It does not fulfill the need to meditate that biking does.

Poetry is not in the title to actually signify any poetry in these words but more because one of my friends, katie inspired me to write this when I read a poem on her blog about the way a vw camper van brought her parents to almost a place of peace with each other.

Ideas curse the vibrant ideas in my mind.....

In the midst of this one thing i am confronting in my life is that I tend to have lots of over the top ideas, maybe not over the top ideas but more ideas that I really have no chance of accomplishing and that I take to far in my mind. I tend to lay in bed at night just working through ideas detail by detail, which is fine when it is just a cool idea about a car or some landscaping but when it is me falling for a girl or thinking about how my life will go in the future sometimes I just think about it to much and think I could do this or this and maybe this will work out just the way I think it will. Sometimes this leads to disapiontment even with car stuff because I defintely get in over my head sometimes and just ahave idea after idea. I guess part of that can be seen in post in my blog from last July and August when we were playing around with the 2 jeeps.

Somehow I need to pull myself back and look at stuff from what I know is reality that probably would have nipped the jeep idea pretty quickly if I had someone say what are you thinking. Even though I pretty sure a couple people did, and I just tuned them out because I also had people encouraging me. One of my friends a couple nights ago basically just told me to take a step back when I get any wild hairbrained ideas, which is just what I needed. The idea I was talking about this time was not wild and crazy at its base but I tend to get too excited about stuff. In fact the basic idea is great. Thanks friend for wacking me on the head and bringing me back down before I really get started. I needed it. Curse this vivid imagination of mine.

A car and a house

The past couple days have been somewhat frustrating... Alot of it has to do with the car. I finally got the oil filter adapter installed and the engine is sitting in the engine bay ready to attach to the transmission. I spent all last night working on getting the transmission and the engine lined up which you have to do before you can bolt the engine in to the car. Unfortunately I was not able to get it attached last night.

Today was not as bad though. I got to work with a group of home school students who were volunteering at the Glen. They were great!! I took about half the group up to trim back trails and it turned out to be really fun once they got going. It is pretty cool way to introduce people to volunteering at the Glen because you get to go hiking and it is work I need to get done anyway.

I am moving away from the Glen!!!! That is probably some of the happiest news that I have been able to write on this website in a long time. It is definite now we signed the lease today!!! It is not exactly the house but I feel good about it. I always get worried when money is real tight which sucks, but I think even though money will be real tight a for few months till we find a fourth person it will all work out okay. The house is nice but not really a looker. It is one of those houses that does not really have any style. But it has lots and lots of amenties. a really nice washer and dryer, a hot tub, a pool table. All these are good but I am still looking about a peace for the house.

Oh yeah and a great group of guys to live with. Jev, I'm actually moving out, but Derek never got the wireless installed before I left :-) You were right. I'm definitely way to optmistic sometimes....

Things I own keep having catastrophic failures :-<

I do not know how this keeps happening but I just seem to break stuff alot. I guess what brought all this on is not even something I did but I am dealing with the after effects of a destructive force inside of a jeep engine. It really sucks to try to get parts of an engine with a piston sticking out. que fuzzy picture

Actually this is a car I got from my Uncle and Aunt. It was a real blessing because I have been able to put together a decent car for under 1500 dollars. I am moving off the Glen in the next couple weeks which is a really good thing. I have been aching to do it for a while. It is kind've grinding living under the watchful I of derek strickler and being possibly held responsible for other peoples errors all the time. below is a picture of the house we will hopefully get. It is a really cool house built in 1914. I went in the house the first time and it just felt right. Even when I saw it on the net I was like this is the perfect house.



So we'll just have to wait and see if we get it. It would be really exciting to live in an older area of town. The newer areas of town are kind've dead feeling with all the cookie cutter houses (at least the ones we can afford)

I have been sitting here pondering what I was going to write about in the first place. I started thinking about the house and kind've got off track.

I think that one of the big things about places I go and places I live is the feeling of the place. The right feeling maybe cool peaceful, i am not sure what exactly that feeling is. Jeremy was talking about how he was hoping to find a house that felt right. But I think it is more then that. I think that different aspects of the house add up to a certian feeling and for some reason older houses tend to feel more "warm and fuzzy" then newer houses. I am not sure if it is the quality of material that they were built with or what.

At the Glen I have drawn up alot of plans for different places to meditate. But without fail everything I've done changes a little in the final product. To make it fit more with the landscape and unfortunately sometimes more into the budget I have almost always changed placement or shape.

I really hope that as i move away from the Glen I will be able to experience the amazing peace that people find there more when I do not spend all my time there. Also i hope that I will be able to get more inspired because I do not see the Glen 24/7 I will be able to step back and really push creativity into all the aspects of my job and really create a even better place for people to come and meditate on the Lord.

At the Glen if a place does not help people focus on God i 'm not sure if it is worth creating.

How does all this relate to the original thing about castrophic failures. Even as I want change and new things my time in facilties at the Glen has enabled me to see that I need to maintain the landscape and not just create new stuff no matter how tempting it is.

Fall comes early when your biking

Somehow I have managed to replace almost my whole bike since the beginning of the summer. I did not start out to have a new bike but circumstances conspired against me to break way to many bike parts in my many adventures this summer.

As a culmination to year of bike breaking Todd, Jamie and I went out to Buena Vista to bike part of the Colorado trail and camp. The day started a little late but the ride was great the air was crisp like it supposed to be on a perfect fall day and we were riding single track that twisted through the aspens at the base of Mt. Princeton. I was following Todd pretty closely down the trail and all of a sudden he goes off a nice kicker and it looks great till he starts riding on his front wheel and then the wheel slips off the trail and he is on his back on a log. It's quiet for just a second and then Todd is running around like a maniac cursing and hitting trees and then he somehow ends up face down in the dirt.

Needless to say Todd did not bike on Sunday, or probably for the next couple weeks. As opportunity would have it my Aunt and Uncle live in Breckenridge and love to have people over so we stopped in there to give Todd a chance to rest and recuperate (which didn't really happen). Then we went on to the peaks trail which is a blast this time of year. The weather was perfect and Jamie's wreck happened when she got the brakes confused (We have been taking her on all these pretty hardcore rides and the peaks trail was only her 5th time biking.) Which of course meant that she ended up on her ass, but hey I think she might have still had fun go over to http://off-and-running.blogspot.com and you may find out a little bit more about how she sees the wreck. She recovered nicely by the end of the trail and all of a sudden was going off 1.5ft. steps which was totally unexpected after a wreck because everyone is supposed to be more tentative after a wreck right????

If you guys get the chance you need to go check out the aspens with in the next week and 1/2 cause it looks like winter is coming early this year.

Sorry for no pics hopefully the will come later when I get them from Todd an Jamie.

Ack! I broke my bike frame :-<

I went biking with Ian and Jev at Palmer Park on Sunday and Ian definitely pushes me to ride harder which is great, but I kind've ran straight into a big rock when I was trying to stay ahead of him going down the Cheyenne trail.

Rest, biking and relaxation

What does rest mean?? I am wondering if I am just hanging out or actually resting most of the time. Three different terms exist in my mind rest, relaxation, and rest in God. I think that the 3rd may not involve the other 2. I relax a lot but may not rest. This culminated about a month ago when I just started to crave sleep and getting away from people for a while. I had been relaxing with all my friends and having lots of fun but not resting and it finally hit a wall. At the monthly Glen meeting today one of the guys said that many of the people who come to the Glen for conferences got more out of the rest they experienced during their weekend at the Glen then the actual conference.

I think I get a lot more rest then many people or at least relaxation. I'll admit that I do not have any real responsibilities outside of work. I get to spend much of my time of in leisure activities. Why do other people fill up their lives with so much meaningless crap. I can understand if you have a couple kids a weekend away from them would be great. I met a lot of people in my old bible study at pierced that did not seem happy with their life. I definitely tend to grouse about stuff a lot, but in reality I'm pretty happy with my life and my job. My job is very frustrating at times, but never horrible no matter how much I dislike my boss.

In terms of rest I think it would help a lot if I would forgive some of the people at the Glen and give up the grudges I have towards some of them and the Glen in general. I think that I have some valid points but nothing is ever as bad as I make it out to be.

If I give all this up it will be much easier to focus on God and experience rest in him. I do not rest in God very much. God is sometimes the farthest thing from my thoughts even when I am meditating on the Bible. I tend to be all analytical or all emotional and often there is not an inbetween area for me when I meditate on who God is.

God is... Open ended statements like that bring up many different trains of thought, but When I meditate on God I think it might be better for the present to just focus on God when I meditate and not any specific aspect of him and see where it goes. Maybe then I can rest in him even as I stop thinking.

It's Early.....

I don't think I have been up this early in a year at least. One of the guys at the house I'm in charge of had a brother go into the hospital last night at 12ish. It turned out to be really serious with what sounded like major internal damage to a couple organs and the lungs. It was a really interesting situation.

I was somewhat a sleep at 1 or so and I here a diesel truck go by and then I here joey's voice. Whenever I here joey's voice in my house at 1 in the morning I know something has gone wrong. Joey takes care of the front gate during the night and would always be sleeping and groggily answering the phone. I stumble out of my room and joey's trying to explain to one of my roomates who is deaf that his brother is in the hospital. So joey takes him to the hospital and I groggily go back to bed about 2. Then at 3:30 I hear a pounding on my door and am praying that things are not going any worse then before. But it is just our security guy waking me up so we can find someone to stay at the hospital with robert, because joey has to be in denver at 8am.

Even though a couple of us have been up all night, what has really amazed me has been the servants heart of all the NCP guys. A couple of them went to the hospital to stay with robert @ 3:45 and I asked one of the guys that works with me to help out in the kitchen at 5:45 this morning and he willingly if not happily got up to help out up there.

For anybody who reads this before I update it. you can be praying for robert's brother jonathan who last I heard was in really serious shape at the hospital and on the brink of death and for robert and his family.

I guess that is the end. I can not even imagine how I would feel if it is was my brother in the hospital right now. I would probably be sitting in shock and not really comprehending what is going on. Robert is taking so much in himself with his parents out of town and him being the only one by his brother's bedside so pray for him also.

Does Christian culture tend to destroy art and other cultures

An article I was reading in National Geographic Adventure about Wade Davis poignantly illustrated what I was thinking about in the Garden tonight. He is a ethnobotanist who has gone all over the world experiencing the plants and traditions of cultures while trying to let people know how important it is to preserve cultures all over the world. He states that one of the biggest problems for smaller cultures today is that they are being absorbed by larger societies because the people in these cultures are told that to be successful they have to earn more money at a plant in a big city. In reality their culture is destroyed and they are not any better off because of it.

Reading this article made me think of the Christian culture all over the world. It is what I was thinking about tonight when I was in the Garden of the Gods after a night mountain bike ride to go sit on the rocks and think. I realized that I was questioning God in a large part due to the failings of religion around me. When I look at Christians as a whole there are not very many that I respect for their actions outside of the church. If I was hitch hiking back from a long bike ride the chances of someone picking me up who was a christian are not high. At least in Colorado, a redneck or a bike/snowboard bum would be more likely to pick me up. Or if I needed food I would be more likely to get it from some hippies camped beside the road then if I went up to a car full of Christians and begged for it. Why are Christians so afraid of the world around them. God has brought so many beautiful things out of the non-Christian culture. I mean why is it that not many Christian bands are really any good??? And why is it that if you have a boss that is mormon or a co-worker that he is more likely to treat you with respect and dignity then if that person is a Christian.

Why is it that so many Christians expect new converts to conform to their culture. It is kindve like how the southern Baptists expect members of their church not to ever drink and say that it is biblically wrong to drink when they encounter other people. Or how a lot of churches ask their kids to give up secular music for Christian music. So much Christian music really stinks. If a kid is really musically inclined he or she is probably going to go for non-christian bands so instead of steering him towards inferior music why not find secular bands that are clean and present good values. It is really not that hard

My friend Patti was saying yesterday that relationships are really the cornerstone of a good church. Not the sermon or the music but the relationships you have with the people in that church and how they make you feel loved and cared for and inspire you to want to show that love and care to everybody you will meet in your daily life. The Christian life is not about rules and figures, it is about loving your neighbor to show them christs love and the rest naturally follows. Rules tend to drive people farther away from God while love tends to drive them closer to him.

Relationships

I think relationships are one of the most important things about life. I was sitting with a friend at It's a Grind today and she said that she went to a church in town because of the people who went there not for the preaching or the worship, but for the people. When I really think about it my life is all about relationships with people. I think one of the reasons I have such a hard time with my boss is because he is so anti-social. He does not really allow you to have a relationship with him.

I keep saying how hard a time I have at Glen Eyrie, but really the reason I stay there is because of the relationships I have with Joey, Derek, and all the garden volunteers I work with. I love interacting with people and being able to just provide and bless people through the relationships I have with them. I have definitely taken all my friends forgranted... the guys I hang out with most of the time are both leaving one for china and the other to go to grad school.

The good side of this is that I am in the process of moving off the Glen. It is much easier to break with a place when you do not have any good friends living their anymore. I told one of my friends once that I sometimes struggle with valuing friendships above God. It is so true. If I am studying the bible or praying or just meditating on god and a friend comes by I will usually drop what I am doing to go spend time with them. That is why it has been weird the past couple weeks when I have cared alot less about hanging out with all my friends till late at night talking about everything. I cannot decide if I am drawing away kind've preparing myself to be alone more or if I am just being emo and introspective. I have been thinking alot about what my life means outside of my friendships with people. What else is their in it. I struggle to live in any time besides the now, I struggle to keep in touch with people who are not right around me and keep up the valuable relationships I built with people in the past.

I love all my good friends from before bbut why should I sacrifice all these relationships for the now. All my friends in the past are worth keeping in touch with. Is it selfishness that prevents me from keeping in touch with them or just laziness. When I say I sometimes value relationships more then God, I realize that it is only the people who are present right in front of me at that time.

Adventures :->

I think one of the biggest reasons I love my bike... besides the thrill of leaning over in a tight curve... is all the cool places I've been able to go on it. Normally I would not consider deckers colorado an adventure, but when the grocery store lady tells you it is only 25 miles to castle rock on this little paved road and she is wrong it can turn in to a pretty good adventure.

I started out just taking a ride out to cripple creek colorado on friday morning to enjoy the curves on the way out there, but as I left cripple creek I decided that it was a shame to waste my day off and decided to head out to deckers,co which is in exactly the opposite direction. I got to deckers and decided I wanted to go someplace I had never been before...which is how I ended up on some backwoods dirt road.

Gas isn't usually something you have to think about in a car, but on a motorcycle you can't ignore it or you may be pushing your bike to the next gas station. My bike has about 140 miles before it runs out of gas. When I got to deckers I was at 105 and I knew that I couldn't go very far out of the way. The grocery store clerk in deckers said," It is only 25 miles to Castle Rock" (which has gas!!) I followed her directions but I ended up following this dirt road that crossed the colorado trail and praying I would find a town soon. the ride was beautiful but I was always thinking in the back of my mind about gas and the next town.

I ended up getting to a place off US 285 with 141 on one tank of gas and somehow God has blessed my motorcycle and it got 61 miles per gallon when I usually only get 45. I wish I had more pictures (mental note...must by digital camera...). I think I might start keeping a list of all the towns in colorado I have visited but then it would noot be as much of an adventure going random places at the drop of a hat. It is kindve like bagging 14ers just to bag them and not really going for all the enjoyable experiences you are going to have along the way.

So more an adventure us not just for the excitement it is for the experiences that you gain from it, for the joy of hanging out with friends or seeing beautiful scenery as you ride your motorcycle beside the south platte and see the canyon closing in around you as the road gets lower and the river gets higher and you wander if you are going to be riding a sport bike through water in a couple hundred ft.

Glen Eyrie and the christian work place

I talk to so many people who get burned by christian organizations and get burned out because they feel or are made to believe that they are expected to work overtime for no pay because you are working for a non-profit "ministry". Is there a reason that so many people struggle more with their beliefs when they are at christian organizations. Just because someone working for a place like Glen Eyrie believes in their mission and loves it does not mean that the salaried people can take advantage of that and ask people to do things that would be illegal in any other place.

You would expect a christian ministry to be a model of workplace satisfaction. You would expect that the employees would be able to say that they can see in the dimeanor of their bosses and higher ups that they are cared for and valued.

Conversely, these same employees should be willing to listen to constructive criticism from their supervisors and employees and if a worker is not the right fit they should be asked to leave. Grace only goes so far before it hurts the person it is being given to. So when does this grace go to far... When a boss cannot communicate with his employees... when a boss cannot communicate his expectations without being harsh and grating... when a employee ignores the requests of his boss due to the harshness of his bosses requests???

Everything I am talking about relates directly to me. Ever since I have been at Glen Eyrie I have seen countless employees dismisses or just leave because they are so fed up with it all. I do not know many employees who have left since I have been here that would ever recomend that someone else they know and like work at Glen Eyrie. Some of the higher ups have left and come back. They tend to be the ones who lack in people skills when it comes to disipline. I have seen more ministry going on in the secular work place then I ever do at the Glen. One of our supervisors does not even make any pretence of trying to have any caring about his employees spiritual lives and has to be forced to have bible studies with his employees and will not initate it unless he is forced to.

Sure Glen Eyrie is a business but they always say that they are ministry based. So were is the ministry to employees or vice versa. I have great repore with my fellow employees at the Glen but the managers seem to make rash decisions with out any thought to the employees or example they are setting.

I see the examples the guys above me set and I think, how are these guys representing christ to their employees. I have struggled with not believing in Christ and his influence on Christians ever since I've seen the way that people seem to get trampled over without any regard for their spiritual lives. They think of ministry to the guests, which is great but not ministry to the employees. Do they not see that if the employees are being ministered to that they will be more effective and have a greater drive to be a blessing to the guests.

Right now my reason for staying at the Glen is to be a blessing to the volunteer gardeners and NCP. I do not care if the If facilities succeeds because in terms of my department my moral is super low. my boss has no clue how to motivate people only how to make them resent him. When I first came to facilities I would study for bible studies ahead of time but once I realized that marv could really care less about it I decided that it was not worth it to spend any time on it which was not right but I still did it.

It is kind've like the reality that about half the people who have fish on their cars tend to be horrbile drivers. IF YOU CAN'T DRIVE DON'T PUT A FREAKIN FISH ON YOUR CAR!!!!! It is the same way at the Glen. My expectations are higher because it is a christian organization. Yet they try to skirt the rules, and derek wonders why I try to skirt the rules when I do things around the Glen. He does it to just in different ways.

This is a very negative post but It was something I really needed to get off my chest.

I thought it was summer??

I went camping with some friends this last weekend. I had the brilliant idea to climb a 14er named La Plata that is a really easy hike. Well the hike is only easy when there is not 3 feet of snow still laying everywhere.


We only hiked up to a clearing about halfway up the trail but as you can see by the pictures there was no one up there besides us. We made a little campfire to warm up when we got to our campsite and drank wine with trail pizzas for dinner which was fun. Hopefully in a month or so we will be hiking the whole thing once some of the snow melts.




Oh yeah, I went up with todd, jamie and jev (jev is the one who took all the pictures)

It' summer?????

It is not supposed to be this hot in colorado yet. It is already hitting over 85 degrees!! This was great for my friends Ian and Camille's Wedding.

We had the bachelor's party last week out by Shelf Road. Ian is really into climbing and the Shelf Road area has an amazing amount of climbing. We camped at a Blm campsite for 2 days and partied, climbed and rode dirt bikes all over the place. It was really cool to be out camping again!!

This week we were preparing all week for the wedding. And so it went off without a hitch last night. I love it when 2 people feel so right for each other and when you can tell god is blessing them as they get ready to get married. I did not actually get to see the ceremony because i was out getting burritos for the dinner afterwards, but I heard it was beautiful. The Glen really hooked them up. They only had to pay for the stuff that the Glen did not already have. The reception was really cool with a whol

It's 80 degrees

I wish I had some pictures of colorado today! It is amazing. It is not supposed to be this warm out today. It is supposed to be freezing cold or at least mildly chilly.

I need to get a copy of the pictures from our trip to the sand dunes 2 weeks ago. Jev had just gotten his motorcycle registered so we rode down to the sanddunes and I am hoping that he got some amazing pictures with our bikes. The ride was beautiful. We rode down from the springs to canon city to Salida to the sand dunes and then up to walsenburg to the springs. Unfortunatly, we ended up riding from walsenburg to colorado springs in the dark. i think we probably stopped 5 times in 150 miles because we were so cold. Hopefully we will get to do some 3-4 day rides this summer around the west!!! Here is one of he pictures from when I was in Baja at Christmas to hold the place until I get pics from Jev. Also a hooka picture from the top of our roof.

It is getting to be the time again where we get to spend many hours talking on the roof of the t-house. I sometimes despise living on the Glen but so many other times
I love living at the t-house. The community and just having lots of people to hang out with all the time. I do not think i would have gotten to know Jev, Todd and Ian so well if we had not lived at the t-house.

Todd's sister Carrie, her husband Graham, their son Hudson, and Joel all came out to stay with todd for the weekend. It was fun to hang out with those guys at todd's house and then we had everyone up to the t-house last night for drinks. There is another idea for the t-house. a patio and wet bar out on the roof. Graham and Carrie are some of the coolest new parents i've ever met. They are just so chill about having a 5 month old.

more pictures to come later

Authority

Why is authority so hard to respect?? Is it the pride inside me? Is it that I will not obey people I do not respect.

I struggle everyday to respect and obey willingly those in charge of me. The guys that I respect I listen to with a willing and open mind, but my bosses who are just total idiots are so hard to obey. I talked about this with one of my friends I work with and we both struggle to listen to the guys in authority over us. If we think something they are telling us to do is stupid or just plain idiotic then it is almost like pulling teeth out (or getting a haircut in my case). My friends dad, told him that it does not matter what your boss tells you to do, if you do it like he says it will fall on his shoulders. I will admit that if i listened to everything my boss told me I do not think i would get my job done as effectively.

All this deep thinking of late is hurting my brain... colorado Springs is so beautiful this time of year!! The grass is just starting to turn green and flowers are peeking their heads out of the ground everywhere. I feel so much more alive every time I look around and see another garden that is coming alive. The glen is so beautiful when God brings everything out of dormancy in the spring.

I guess he has been doing that with me lately. My mind has been opened to many things lately. How i treat people has been at the forefront of my mind. It was brought to a head this week at church. JR was talking about inclusiveness. I hardly ever hear the way jesus treated people called inclusiveness. It really was inclusiveness! He did not exclude anyone from his kingdom if they were willing to come clean with him. There are alot of people I reject in my daily meanderings. I just decide that they are not any fun to hang around or not worth it. or just un cool. Where I get off deciding that I do not know, because even though most people like me i am hardly ever considered cool.

What happened to updates!?!

It is amazing how little I have written period in the last couple months.
I have not written period in anything, not a journal or a web page.

If I am honest with myself not an awful lot has gone on. It has kind've been life as normal. Or not.

I have been in a very introspective mode of late. It has been almost to introspective though because I have not wanted to think about what kind;ve state I was really in lest I get depressed by it.

I think I finally came out of my funk in the last week or so when I started writing again about my disrespect for authority over the past 5 years or so. I have finally admited to myself that it is something that needs to change in my life. I am trying to figure out what was the root of the disrespect for authority, when it started and why. Was it a gradual thing or did a certian event start it all.

I theorized that alot of my disrespect for authority especially in the navs has stemmed from a bitterness towards the leadership of Glen Eyrie . It has seemed like alot of their actions have stemmed from a lack of caring for people and more caring about the business side of things. But that is what everyone says and I know that most of the leadership here really care about people but they are not neccesarily very good at expressing it.

If I look back to 2001 when alot of it started it really all based on a bittereness towards people and then I lose respect for them and do not want to listen to any authority they have.

This bitterness has really drawn me away from the Lord. As long as I have harbored a deep seated bitterness towards people, I have not really cared about spending anytime with the Lord or seeking after him. I have felt like I should care and seek, but no matter how much I strived to love him and seek after him I couldn't. I think there was a big wall of bitterness built up, preventing my soul from any real communication with God. Even my time at Eagle Lake was marked by just doing what I needed to instead of really showing God's love to kids. I loved the kids but God seemed so far away during the past 5 years that I do not think I even desired to show God to them except out of a sense of duty.

I have loved people but really not loved God for a long time. He would always come last as people in my life would come first. Even when I was seeking after him before all the bitterness welled up inside me; I still put people in my life ahead of God. If it was a choice inbetween spending time with people or with God, people would usually win out.

I think when I was a freshman in college I was involved with so many bible studies and functions with IV more to spend time with people then learn or grow closer to the Lord.

It is going to take a long time to re-focus myself on God. All my habits are driven by a want to be with friends, not to be with God. I know that it sounds hypocritical saying that I will re-focus myself on God but I also know that when I seek after him he embraces that and makes up for the 95% of the way I cannot come by myself.

I think that alot of this train of thought came about because I finally began to feel the absence of God in my life as I had a desire to seek him again. I have felt that desire for a long time but he started to bring it to the forefront of my life in the past couple months. The strong desire to spend time with God had not been present in my life in a long time along with the will to do anything about it.

I have not sought after God for a long time but he has been after me that whole time and I put up my wall of bitterness to shield myself from his gaze it was easier then confessing and getting rid of the bittereness.