The Burdens in Life

Bismarck, North Dakota

    First off, I want to tell everyone that I have officially hit the half way point in my quest to play golf in all 50 states. My dad and I just finished playing state number 25, Montana! Here is a picture of me at the golf course. It was kind of an overcast day but I still shot another 72 today so I am extremely happy! I am going to be playing state number 26 tomorrow here in North Dakota so it will be great to know I am getting closer and closer to my goal!
    Now onto the reason for my title of this post. With long road trips like this with six hours of driving between point A and point B, you have a lot of time to think about your life and how it has gone so far. Don't get me wrong, my life has been great. God has blessed me with some many people in my life helping me get closer to becoming the man God wants me to be. He has blessed me with amazing family that will let you know that they love the blog you are writing or anything else in your life where they think you have excelled and they are proud of you. The only thing that is upsetting is even with amazing friends and family, you still do things that become burdens in your life.
    Burdens can develop in your life even when you think everything is going great in your life. I know that is true in my life and it sucks to think about these burdens and how I let them develop. My biggest burdens have been my relationships with girls and with friends. I have had great relationships with girls, but there has been one that has stuck out the most to me. God blessed me with the opportunity to get to know this person better and to care for this person deeply. But when I think of how it ended, I tell myself that I am the biggest idiot in the world. All because of selfishness, I ruined this relationship and I think back about it wanting to have a second chance to show her that person back then is not me. NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY, YOU CAN'T GET THE BURDENS OUT OF YOUR LIFE! The only thing you can do is accept it and learn from it.
     I have had a kick recently in trying to mature in my relationship with not only God, but with my relationships with girls and friends. The thing with maturity is that you have to really learn forgiveness and apply it to new and old relationships. I have had relationships with friends that have gone sour, even if it is from a complete misunderstanding like a text message read out of context or a conversation with someone that they just don't want to hear. It is hard to forgive yourself someone when it's your fault the relationship went south. This ties in with the relationship I was talking about earlier.
    But even with the burden of self destruction of relationships, I need to forgive myself to let me move on from this. I am glad that I can build up the strength to do this through Jesus Christ. He is my rock, my foundation of life and with him behind me, I can break this. Even if this means that I don't get a second chance to prove to these people I have hurt that I am a different man than I was when we were together, I can still pray that forgiveness will come through them and we can still be friends.

"Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." - Matthew 11:28

God-given Talent

Billings, Montana

    If you don't know me all that well, I am an avid golfer. So naturally one of my goals in life would be to play all 50 states before I die. Well, after a beautiful wedding in Carpenteria, California, my dad and I are on a four state golf trip. As of right now I sit at 23 states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, and Utah.

    Today marked the day of adding the 24th state to that list, Wyoming! Today my dad and I played golf at the 3 Crowns Golf Club in Casper, Wyoming. It was an awesome course and I played really well. I shot an even par 72!  Here is a photo of me at the course today, rocking my Baker University golf team polo! I looked like and played like a Baker University golfer today.
    Going on my golf trip I have had a lot of time to think about my spiritual life and how I can use this god-given talent to help others in need of faith. It is kind of hard with a sport like golf to use it to help someone but I think if I keep at it and look hard enough, I can find some way of using this god-given talent for some good. As of right now though, I can think of a work in progress that could possibly be using my god-given talent of golf to help someone else. Sean Walsh, a future freshmen golfer at Baker next year and a great friend, is joining the faith first group at Baker next year. I haven't really had a good chance to talk with Sean about his faith but I think that this is a great step toward faith, if it isn't already present in his life. I hope that this will lead to a great spiritual life for Sean and that we can use golf as a source of faith.
    The other great thing about my goal of playing all 50 states is that I am going to experience all of God's land and see all of the wonders He has put into His "playground". Although the great amount of hours it takes to get from state to state is tiring, the unfamiliar views you get from driving through a new state is amazing. It is wonderful to see snow capped mountains in the middle of June! God is amazing and His land is beautiful.

"If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." - Romans 10:9

The Hardest Part

Carpenteria, California

    While I sit here tonight on my couch bed, I start to think about what the hardest part of being an "open" Christian is (when I say "open" I mean a Christian who is open about his faith to other people). The hardest part by far is when you tell someone about your faith and then later in the night they apologize for saying something just because you are around them, kind of like you are that different from the group because they think they have to change their ways to be around you. The reason why this comes up is because this week is wedding week for my sister Sarah and her fiance Jacob and I am in the wedding party. Well with every wedding there is a bachelor's party and at the bachelor's party someone asked me what the bracelet on my wrist represented. When I told him that my faith first group made them red to resemble the blood of Christ, he automatically changed his ways whenever he cursed or did something inappropriate. It kind of made me feel like a burden for the rest of the night.
    The unfortunate thing about this, is that this happens a lot to any "open" Christian. This definitely is not the first time that this has happened to me because it happened every time I told someone on the golf team that I didn't drink and that I was a devoted Christian. Every time I got the same reaction, "Oh... I am sorry for earlier when I was cursing." It's nice to know that they understand they are doing something wrong, but it sucks that they just realize it once you openly profess your faith to someone.
     The lucky thing is that we have this amazing help on our side, Jesus Christ. It's great to have him in times like these. It is nice to know that whenever I am in trouble I can look up to see him right next me to help me get through it.

"I hear you say my love is over, it's underneath. It's inside, it's in between. The times you doubt me, when you can't feel. The times that you've questioned, is this for real? The times you're broken, the times that you mend. The times you hate me and the times that you bend. Well my love is over, it's underneath. It's in inside, it's in between. These you're healing and when your heart breaks. The times that you feel like you've fallen from grace. The you're hurting, the times that you heal. The times you go hungry and are tempted to steal. In times of confusion and chaos and pain. I'm there in your sorrow under the weight of your shame. I'm there through your heartache, I'm there in the storm. My love I will keep you, by my power alone. I don't care where you've fallen, where you have been. I'll never forsake you, my love never ends. It never ends." - Times by Tenth Avenue North

Beyond Belief

Carpenteria, California

First of all, I want to start off with this. The new iPhone 4 was announced today from Apple and of course with me being an Apple enthusiast... I WANT IT! Luckily for me I have had my iPhone 3G for 2 years so it is time for me to get a new phone anyways, so what perfect timing. Let's just say that this phone is going to blow people away. It can do video conferencing! I can see someone's face and talk to them at the same time if they have another iPhone 4. How awesome is that?!?!?





    Well after all of that, I wanted to talk today about this book that I just finished and how it has helped me change my mind set in my spiritual life and to help me reach my goal. The book is called Beyond Belief (hence the title of this post) and the book is about the life story of a professional baseball player named Josh Hamilton. The book was simply amazing! His story is about how he used God and all of his glory to help him fight a four year long addiction to drugs.
    In the book he explains how he changed from the most promising young talent in baseball since Alex Rodriguez (boo A-Rod!) and how he wasted away all that talent for cocaine and the crack later on. In 1999, he was the first overall pick in the MLB draft to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and had a record breaking signing bonus of four million dollars. After a couple years in the minor leagues, he had trouble dealing with injuries. Well in 2002, while he was rehabbing an injury, he tried cocaine. This sent his baseball career and his life in a downward spiral. What followed was a four-year nightmare of drug addiction, despair, and repeated suspension from baseball.
    Even during his drug addiction era, he was able to bring something good into his life, his wife Katie and her daughter Julia. They got married in 2004, right in the middle of his drug addiction and had a baby with her named Sierra. Well for most people this would be enough to let anything go (i.e. alcohol, drugs, etc...) but even that wasn't enough for him. He was so addicted to cocaine at the time, that he would go clean for a couple days and then would go straight back to doing lines of cocaine.
    In baseball, and most other sports, the players have to take drug tests checking to see if the player has been taking illegal drugs or performance enhancers. For baseball there are about six tests that you can fail before you are banned from baseball forever, well Josh failed five of them before going clean for good. So from 2002 to 2006 Josh didn't play baseball and spent all of his four million dollars on drugs. It got so bad for him after all of his money was gone that he even bartered his wife's wedding ring just so that he could get some crack. How awful is that?!? To top that off, his wife had to a restraining order on him so that he couldn't come to their house when she was going to sell it to get away from him.
    It wasn't until October 2005 that he finally made a smart move and went to his Granny's house to have her help him. By this time, all of his family had given up on him and they decided to let him ruin his own life and then would help when he finally realized what he was doing. Well his Granny was stubborn so when he came to her house she let him in knowing that he would use her just to stay at her house so he could sleep in a bed. Eventually he realized what he was doing and decided to turn to God. He prayed to God before to get him out of his addiction but never just prayed to tell him that he was giving his life to Him to let Him do what he wants his life to do.

"Humble yourself before God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you." - James 4:7

    This was the verse, the message God sent him that helped him kick his addiction. Every time he got the urge or the visual reminder of his drug life, he would recite this verse to get the thought out of his head. When I first read this part of the book, I was asking myself how can just saying a verse help you get the thought of the sin out of your head. Well I tried it with this verse and it worked! It shows how amazing, how powerful God is.
    In the book, he has a dream that repeats itself. The dream is of him fighting the devil with a baseball bat and he would him with this bat, but every time he did the devil would get back up. Eventually after he tired the devil would take a hold of him and then he would wake up. I took this dream as a representation of how sin can take a hold of you even after you try to fight it off. Especially once you confess your faith to Jesus, you are attacked even harder and you are more susceptible to sin.
    Well in the closing chapter of his book, we has that dream one more time, but this time it was different. He goes through the same routine of hitting the devil with the bat but gets back up every time, but this time when he got tired he looked up to see Jesus standing next to him. He was overwhelmed, that his strength came back to him and with the help from Jesus they defeated the devil together. How amazing is that?!?! This just shows you that when you give yourself to Jesus he will be there with you in the time of trouble.
     This book really helped me to see how much my faith means to me. I would never do drugs and let myself get into the situation that Josh faced, but I am right there with him trying to fight off sin. Everyone has sin in there life and it is the strongest that fight it off to become better Christians. It has also helped me realize that there is more to life than just living to make yourself feel good. In the book, his wife tells him that, "This is about so much more than baseball." It made me think that this life is about so much more than me. It's about Jesus and the sacrifice he made for me.
    Overall, this book was one of the best reads I have ever had. If anyone knows me at all, I do not like reading at all. But, for some reason I felt that I needed to start reading and I had this book laying around after my parents bought it for me to read. I picked it up and haven't stopped since. The lessons that I have learned from this book will help me with my forgiveness issue and also to help me fight sin to get to my ultimate goal.

"Humble yourself before God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you." - James 4:7

What's my mission?

(Actually written yesterday June 6th)

Los Angeles, California

     We just landed in California for my sister's wedding and I decided today that I am going to start a blog. I feel like that if I keep up with this blog that it will help me achieve my goal of becoming stronger in my faith and live the life God wants me to live.
     I have had a lot on my mind this week, mainly pertaining to maturing in my relationship with God and with other people. I have been looking back on my past and realized that I am not the Christian who I was raised to be. I did things in high school I am not proud of; none of it was illegal but still something that a Christian should not be doing. I honestly feel like there are so many things in my life, even now as a newly reformed Christian that I could change that would make me feel better about how I am living my life.
     Today I got the chance to talk with my Grandma and we got onto the topic of mission work. She was telling me that she wasn't completely happy with her church that she goes to now because they don't have the drive to go out and make quilts or deliver food to worse off areas in the world. So this go me thinking about my mission work and if I feel like I have honestly done my best to preach the word of God to others who need/want to hear it. I can really only recall two times where you could say I did mission work, last spring break (2009) to Gulf Shores, Alabama and in middle school when I went to Montana with the youth group at St. Paul's United Methodist.
    In Gulf Shores, I did Habitat for Humanity work to help with Hurricane Katrina clean up and wildlife area preservation. At first I only went because the golf team was going. I wanted to get this chance to show Coach that I was dedicated to the team after I had a bad semester of grades the fall of my freshmen year. But it eventually turned into a great way to show my Christian faith to not only the golf team, which was hard enough, but also to show my faith to others who needed the help in the Gulf Shores area. The university pastor, Ira De Spain, went with the group and I got to talk with him about my faith and show him that I don't fall to the pressure of under-age drinking. I am not going to name how the individuals are, but some took a great opportunity in Gulf Shores to be able to drink heavily each night. God was able to be there with me to help me not fall under that pressure. He gave me the strength to let my faith shine through those temptations. I thank him everyday for that kind of strength.
    The second mission trip I can think of is the trip to Montana to help out around a Christian day camp, rebuilding cabins and doing other manual labor. I remember it as a time where I really bonded with my fellow group members and was able to show the strength of my faith. Unlike Gulf Shores, I didn't have to worry about the pressures of drinking, so it wasn't as much of a test of my strength but it was still good to be able to work with my friends.
    But after talking about what I did and the test I went through on these mission trips, I feel like one important thing is missing, I didn't directly tell someone about Jesus Christ. I feel like a major part of mission work is going out of our way to help lead someone to Christianity or to help someone renew their faith after it had left them. The group that I am living with at Baker, have talked about doing a mission trip around the Kansas City area. I hope that we will be able to help people find God.

"Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me." - John 14:6