Proverbs 4:23 is most likely a verse that we’ve all heard a time or two.
Above all else, guard your heart,
for it is the wellspring of life.
It’s a simple verse.
Easy to remember.
Difficult to apply.
Because most of the time, we don’t even know we’ve left our heart unguarded.
Our pride and arrogance gets the better of us and we think, “I’ve got this under control.”
Then we slip up.
We get drunk. We slander our friend. We look at porn. We judge and look down on the people around us. We have an affair.
We do any number of sins that show, obviously, that we left our heart unguarded.
I really like the way Casting Crowns said it in their song Slow Fade, “People never crumble in a day.” It’s a slow process that leads to us failing in ways like this.
In Genesis 4, God says to Cain, “…if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you…”
Sin waits for us.
Satan is patient, he puts little things in our path to begin the process of opening ourselves up to fail in these ways.
Guard your heart. Always.
Ask God where you are leaving yourself unguarded. Then deal with those reasons.
Above all else, guard your heart,
for it is the wellspring of life.
It’s been over a month since I was last blogging on here. Prior to last night, my last post was August 12. I was almost to the middle of a NaBloPoMo and just stopped posting. I also stopped twittering, and my time and interaction on Facebook dropped significantly.
Here’s basically what happened:
I got overwhelmed by the internet. The pressure I had put on posting everyday. Keeping up with tweets as well as tweeting. A growing numbers of blogs I subscribe to. It all felt like too much, so I pretty much put a stop to all of it, cold turkey. And then slowly, over the last couple weeks, began slowly re-immersing myself into the world-wide-social-media-interweb one step at a time.
In the meantime, since I’ve been away from the blog, I’m ecstatic to report how God is making ways, opening doors, and providing the funds for my upcoming time in Australia. As of now, the entire first year, tuition and living expenses, are covered and it’s looking like the second year will be covered pretty soon. Amazing.
Also, I’m in the process of redesigning this blog using a theme that I design and build myself. It’s slow going as my knowledge of Photoshop, HTML, and CSS are not extensive. But I’m excited and hopeful that the new design will be really cool.
So, to sum it all up, I’m back. And to conclude this post, I’d like to leave you with the song that’s been dominating time on my iPod and in my head over the last month. Peace.
I remember when I first saw this video a few months ago as a funny suggestion for my friends’ wedding. I stumbled upon it again when someone posted it on Facebook and saw it in a whole new light. Weddings aren’t supposed to be boring, It’s a celebration. It’s not a solemn occasion, it’s a joyous one. Most of the time, though, we end up making it boring because it’s “another wedding”.
Now look at church services.
Often boring, even though we’re supposed to be celebrating. We lose our joy and excitement over it as we attend service after service week after week.
What can we as the church learn from an example like this?
Today was hard.
It was one of those days where it starts to hit you that something big is happening.
I was driving out to Wasilla to mow a friend’s lawn while they’re out of town and You Hold Me Now came on my iPod.
I was singing and worshiping and during the midst of that song, it started to hit me that in a few months I’m going to be leaving here.
I have no idea when I’ll be back.
I’m not second guessing anything.
This is just that this is the biggest and hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
There will be more days like this.
But I don’t doubt for a second that this is what I’m supposed to be doing.
Last night, I was helping at a little, mini-retreat for the group of student leaders that is starting up for our senior high youth group. One of the best things of the overnighter was choosing to sleep outside under the stars. My humble setup was on the deck upstairs.
There was no youth group yesterday, so I committed to playing big church with Autumn. Kristian, the drummer I’ve been fortunate to have also filled in on drums. Our set this week looked like this:
Joyful Joyful We Adore Thee – Passion version Hosanna – Brooke Ligertwood (Hillsong United) Father Let Me Dedicate – Passion version Take My Life – Traditional/Tomlin (Passion version)
This Sunday was quite different as there was a lot of talking about ministry opportunities throughout the church and ways to get involved. There were also videos and interviews of people that show how God can take simple ideas and turn them into reality. Next week, it’s back to youth group as we kick off the new school year with our “move up” Sunday.
Over the last few days, I’ve been working pretty diligently on crafting a song that I’ve had floating in my head for a while now. I found a neat program called Guitar Pro that lets you write the music, and then it’ll actually play it back for you so you can see how it sounds. (See how is sounds? Whatever.) It’s great for writing down multiple tracks and then listening to them all together without spending a lot of time in GarageBand recording and editing them to fit over each other.
I used this program in the past during high school in my wanna-be-metallica-style-show-how-good-we-are band and liked it a lot. I found it again and decided to try it out again, this time on a Mac, and I now remember why I liked it so much. It makes writing so much easier, and you can get a much, much better feel for how everything sounds together. It also fuels musical creativity since you have a lot of control over arrangements and styles that you wouldn’t normally try. You can even write drum tracks in it. One of the fun things I’ve also been able to do is find some old tracks of my high school band that we wrote on Guitar Pro and listen to them again. They were really awesome, in a really lame sort of way.
Of the four artists included in the pack, I was most excited about the two Matt Papa records. His music was recommended to me a few years back but I never got around to buying one of his albums. The album I’ve been listening to first, the new one called Your Kingdom Come in stores August 25, is thoroughly amazing. Quite a bit of the lyrics to the songs on it are straight up scripture, and it’s arranged in a really neat and fresh way. It also has a few short tracks between songs similar to the David Crowder Band’s A Collision. I’m stoked that the CD’s are here and I really want to listen to each one in detail since I’m not very familiar with any of the artists.
Is there any new music you recently found that you’re totally digging right now? Who?
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