Countdowns are for lovers

Only 6 days left until I venture off to Puerto Rico for a week.  Why, you may ask?  To share the love of Christ, of course!  I'm going on a mission trip with a friend of mine's church, and how grateful I am to have the privilege of accompanying them.  There are about 40 youth going, I believe, along with a handful of chaperones.  We will be joining a group of roughly 130 other youth and adults if I am not mistaken.   It is set up through the organization World Changers, if you are indeed a web surfer.

I am an awkward non-youth/non-chap, and I am okay with that.

This post is bound to have little direction or clarity.  I am excited, so do not hold happy feelings against me.  Have a heart!  And a sense of humor...

I have been on 6 other mission trips in the past to various locations: Alabama, Kentucky, Canada, Georgia, and Chicago twice.  I am so excited to be heading a completely different direction with a completely different culture.  This trip is feeling rather special to me.  It kind of fell out of the sky, but not like the completely whimsical, careless fall from the sky that has little prayer basis.  It is more of a gift from God that kind of landed on my front doorstep, floating in slow motion (maybe in a cute little basket with a little parachute attached to it) until it was perfectly placed at the perfect time. And my front door at home has a porch covering over it.  So that God is pretty skilled, I must say.

Also, this is my first mission trip as a college student.  I have only been through one year of college, but God has taught me so much in that one year that it is one of those thoughts that requires extra effort to even attempt to sort out, and if I try to do it in one sitting, my brain fries.  It sizzles, my friends.  But those are the thoughts that I know I will be sorting out the rest of my life, those lessons I learned for reasons to be revealed in the year 2024.  I like those kinds of brain-sizzling thoughts.

I have changed a lot too.  Well, God has shaped me.  Numerous posts in the past reveal this slow transformation, this triumphal procession.  I am still intrigued by the concept of passion right now (I think it has something to do with reading Paul's letters in my quiet time for the past month or so), and how my passion has... become passion.  How my passion has originated and cultivated and accentuated and other words that end with -ated.

Passion is passion when it's all you think about.  God and everything that comes with Him...He has filled my thoughts.

Ever thought about what "comes with" God?  Interesting.  Perhaps I will save that for another post...

Let heaven fill your thoughts.  Do not think only about things down here on earth.  -Colossians 3:2

My thoughts are filled with this trip.  With what is going to happen.  With how I am going to present the gospel.  With what God is doing, what He will and can do, how much He loves those people I have yet to meet and yet with His perfect timing, we will cross paths.  We will cross paths and they will forever be crossed.  With the relationships I can establish.  With how I can be prepping in constant prayer and meditation for the trip.  With the agony and suffering I should share for the needy people of Juana Diaz, Puerto Rico.  With the lost and broken, struggling to find the right way because they do not look toward the only way.  With how I can be hollow.  With how I can rejoice.  With excitement and passion and joy and praise to the Maker of thoughts themselves.

With the Father who is over it all.  With the Father who is the Father of all people.

In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us. -Colossians 3:11

 

I am in love with these thoughts.  I am in love with the Originator, Cultivator, Accenuator. 

6 days.  Countdowns are for lovers.

LMB

Hallowed be thy name; hollowed be thy servant

I wrote on fullness a few days back, so it is only fitting that I write on emptiness.  I do not know why I wrote on a different topic in between.  I guess I was passionate about passion with a passionately passionate passion.

Oh yeah.  I'm in that kind of mood.

I have been wanting to write about being empty for a long time, so I am relieved that I can finally organize these thoughts in my head.  Or at least try to.  God has really been teaching me about being empty.  I guess you could say that I am so full of emptiness, I have to let it out now.

Irony, for the win.

I know it has taken me longer than usual to get serious, but here it goes.  As followers of Christ, we are to be empty.  Now, do not use the word "empty" loosely, for if we are empty of Christ...yeah, that is not good!  When I speak of being empty in this post, I mean only of being empty of the world and all that comes with it.  I mean being empty of our prideful selves.  I mean being empty of everything that is not the Everything.

Humility is not easy, nor is it ever a finished process.  You will never get a polished trophy for humility.  I once read a quote that I am struggling to find via Google that said something along the lines of, "The moment a man says he is humble, he is not."  Pride could be its own post (actually, it has been), and is an issue that I contemplate over frequently, because I admittedly struggle with it frequently.  Pride is engraved into me.  My head is big.

Thank goodness, God is bigger.

I fill myself up with the world and the things I cherish and the jokes I make and the people I help and the prayers I say and the friends I make and the smiles I form and the hugs I give and the difference I think I make and the words I write and the wisdom I believe I possess and the diving catch I make and the little kid I keep from crying and the grades I make and the people who wave as they pass by me and the leadership positions I hold and the conversations I have and everything else that is mine that is not mine in the first place.

Yes, that is a vulnerable (and extremely long) sentence.  But if we are not willing to admit our pride, how will we recognize it?  How can we ask God to remove what we don't think we have?  How can we pray to God to empty us of the very things keeping us from filling ourselves with Him if we avoid them or look straight through them or leave them to collect dust.

Dust adds up.  It takes up space.  Little by little...

I like to visualize.  It helps me.  Well, really, God does a pretty beautiful job of painting pictures in my head.  I pray this prayer, and at the risk of sounding like a therapist or a meditation instructor, I ask of you to try it:

(Oh and a note, this prayer is a lot more meaningful if done from the knees or bowing position.  The symbolic act of becoming as lowly as possible makes it more intimate.  At least it does to me.)

I picture myself, in bodily form.  I ask God to hollow me (emphasis on the word hollow).  I picture my body, my arms and legs, my entire being, hollowed.  Everything that is enclosed in my skin--gone.  "Hollow me, hollow me so that I may have more room for You."  That is what I ask.

I can almost feel the flush of my inner organs.  I can almost hear the sound of the emptiness inside of me, the soundwaves bouncing from side to side, like the echos of a cave, like the ting of a metal pipe when you flick it with your finger.  That's how empty I want to be.  I want to be hollow.  I want Him to dig out every pound of dirt that fills my body.  By the shovelful.  I picture my skin, my entire body filled with dirt and just maybe God is driving the bulldozer with a yellow construction hat on His head or maybe that is rather childish.  I am His child, though...

I want to feel my own blood burst out of my veins and I want the blood He shed on the cross to fill them instead.  Oh, how He will fill me!  My bones, my blood, my being!  I want Him to be packed into me, tighter than brown sugar in a plastic measuring cup, tighter than the one suitcase you can take to New York in the winter, with big heavy coats that take up a lot of room, the kind you (and three other family members) have to sit on to zip up.  I want the fullness of God to stretch my skin, to leave no room, no air bubbles.  First, I must become hollow.

I want to be hollow so that I may be full.

This prayer does not "make" you humble.  It does make you constantly more aware of your pride, more prayerful about demolishing it, and more passionate over He who is most humble, He who is most exalted.

And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross! Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. -Philippians 2:8-11

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.  -Matthew 23:12

Hollow me of this earth and fill me up with You.

LMB