His Vigorous Heart

"New beginnings give me hope, but they also scare the living daylights out of me. Will this be the one? Will this make me happy? Will I be successful here? Can I serve Jesus here? Will it meet my expectations? What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t belong? What if I fail? What if I’m miserable? What if I suck at my job? What if I can’t do the things I want to? What if I’m too old? What if I’m too young? What if it’s not what I thought it was? What if…? So many questions, so many doubts, so many fears. As a millennial entering his 7th job and 6th city since graduating college a scant 4 years ago, I’ve had more than my fair share of transitions. From a support-raised ministry position in Chicago that burned me out, to a non-profit internship in Shreveport where I attempted to heal, to a swim school instructor job in Richmond just to do something different, I’ve put a lot of effort into keeping my options open. ...Mostly because I’m scared of commitment. If there’s one...

There is a very thin crack between the worlds, and I always seem to find myself stuck at the bottom of it, wedged between its narrow walls, stuck between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Once again, the world has chewed me up and spit me out. Once again, its system has allowed me to somehow slip through the gaps and fall through the cracks, forgotten, unnoticed; The Crack Between the Worlds, my forever home. Maybe we all live here, or have at least visited it a couple of times. Maybe we don’t like to talk about it. Maybe we’re all too uncomfortable with the idea to even admit it to ourselves, even in the privacy of our own souls. Or maybe I’m just different. Unique. ...Broken. But from my vantage point in this chasm so often accompanied by loneliness and despair and the shadow of death, I can see the outlines of two very distinct cities on the clifftops above me. To one side is the world we’re all familiar with, full of jobs and cell phones and money and Netflix and...

Pictured below is the piece of art I made to commemorate my Yellow House experience, which was hung on the living room wall (slightly crookedly) just in time for our final house show/Goodbye Party last night. I’ve always wanted to be artistic, but I’ve never really experimented with it until my time here at the Yellow House. Since my most notable creative accomplishments this year have been my feeble attempts at string art, I chose to use that medium for this reflection piece. I should probably note that I see life as a journey and God as an ocean. I am a sailboat gliding across His sea, and His Spirit is the breath in my sails. Maybe it’s because of the small fisherman town I come from or the fact that my childhood home was right on the Bay; maybe it’s because I taught sailing for two joyful, magical summers and fell in love with the complex simplicity of it; maybe it’s because I resonate with the idea of a powerful, moving, deep, mysterious, and ever-changing yet ever-steady p...

We were sitting around the living room, sprawled out on couches or on the floor, when one of the high school guys in my small group spoke up. (Actually, he’s a seventh grader. We have a bit of a diverse group.) “Hey, Jesus is kind of like the hot wings at Buffalo Wild Wings.” We’ve been going through the book of Mark, using Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross   as our guide. It can be quite a challenging book, especially for teenage boys who are more interested in playing Just Cause 3 on their Playstations or who have the attention span of, well, teenage boys. Tonight we read the part where Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem as a king riding triumphantly...on a donkey. This strange juxtaposition of royalty and poverty seems to plague Jesus’s entire ministry, symbolizing His manifesto for a Kingdom that is upside down to our world, completely backwards to our natural way of thinking. And those apparent contradictions aren’t just limited to kings and donkeys. The youth p...

I’m Nine-ing so hard right now. For those of you unfamiliar with the Enneagram, it is a personality assessment tool that we have found helpful at the Yellow House to help manage and understand our differences. Essentially, it categorizes 9 primary personality types that people can fall into, along with associated “wings” and periods of health and unhealth that expands and encompasses a wider range of emotional fluidity….whatever, it’s all very mathematical and complex and has already filled up countless hours of conversation in our house, with people who love it and people who are absolutely sick of hearing about it. (I fall somewhere toward the latter, but I do find it fascinating.)  The Enneagram goes deeper than the Myers-Briggs and other similar tests, looking not only at how we act, but our motivations for doing so. Apparently, this tool stretches all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, developing popularity among the monastics and Eastern Orthodox priests, and is st...

The sun beats mercilessly through the windshield as I wind my way through the streets of Highland. Yet again, my arms are not so much glistening as they are dripping with sweat. The seatbelt has already stamped a diagonal wet mark across my chest, and I haven’t even been driving for 5 minutes. It’s a good thing I remembered to stash an extra pair of clothes in my backpack this morning. My car has a leak somewhere in the air conditioning system, and none of the windows roll down--so in this Louisiana heat, some days can get pretty miserable. I arrive at the Cedar Grove Friendship House where I volunteer with under resourced high-schoolers every afternoon absolutely drenched, mumble some hello’s, and head straight for the dirty bathroom in the back that never seems to have any paper towels. As I stand there trying to wipe off enough sweat to avoid soaking my fresh change of clothes the moment I put them on, it hits me: This isn’t easy. And I’m not just talking about crappy cars or Caju...

I don’t know how personal to get, because I don’t know who might be reading this website, but I welcome you, friend and stranger alike, to discover who I am as we journey towards Christ together. I’ve been encouraged by more than a few friends to keep sharing my life by expressing it through writing, so I’ll allow this blog to be my outlet. I hope you find my “vigorous heart” refreshing, and I hope perhaps to inspire you to see life--and the Christian faith--a little bit differently than you did before. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know all the answers; I’m nobody special, but I do know what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned, and I feel compelled to offer my experiences as a chronicle here.  All that aside, it’s been awhile since I last posted a blog, so let me fill in some of the blanks that have happened in the last 9 months or so. 1.) Leaving Chicago First of all, and perhaps most importantly, I quit my job back in January. I’m not sure I ever officially ...