such opposing souls

you and i.

you the beginning and the end

mine but a sliver

in existence.

yet, you are the fire

and i the flame.

Abba, you have handpicked me,

not as the bolt of lightning

pirouetting among the charcoal clouds

nor the deep bellow of old man thunder.

no

my soul has been chosen as both.

And just as the sun

fell in love with moon,

your light met my darkness with a kiss.

an eclipse for all souls.

chapter of choices: goals

I was recently asked what goals I had for myself. What goals I had for my career, my volunteering motivation, and my goals for my humanly existence.

Before I tell you mine, I really urge you to jot down your own goals for yourself. Don’t limit yourself to one area of your life; push yourself outside of your box and find even one goal that you can universally put into every area of your life. If you seek in purity of Christ, this goal may be fitting for the rest of your time here on Earth.

Here’s mine:

Have you ever walked into a high school weight room, and hanging on the wall are record weights lifted? What once were goals to achieve while under the squat rack, are now hanging up on the wall, to be beaten once again. Goals are embedded in nearly every aspect of our lives; for some it’s a lifting goal, others a GPA in school, shots scored in a basketball game, days without abusing drugs or abusing yourself, but all of these goals have one thing in common, the future.

Goals are reliant on the future, for if there were no future in our perspective, we would never have any goals. Regardless of what future means, being two minutes from now or twenty, our goals are reliant on our future, and our future on the goals.

My goal, my future, boils down to this: loving a new soul every day for the rest of my entirety of existence.

This is what I believe to be true in regards to my goal:

Loving a soul is never easy, for if it were it wouldn’t be based on conditions, which true love should always be unconditional. If my future can be filled and expressed through an unconditional love towards the souls i encounter, my future will have surpassed what I could have thought of for myself.

Love is sacrifice, and more often than not, sacrifice cannot be explained or reasoned, it just occurs when you have agape love for another soul. In all honesty, that’s what makes this an actual goal, actually something to really find motivation for…the sacrifice. To first, sacrifice my soul to Christ every day, so that I am able to sacrifice everything I do for others. The reasons a soul acts towards love may not be put into logical reason, but is to be put into the nature of God.

I cannot promise anything beyond the hard work and sacrifice that goes into this goal, but  I vow to undividedly and unconditionally love every sort of soul I encounter while on my journey.

Our call is to pursue the king. To seek Him not for what we want Him and our soul to be, but for what, who, and how He is in His rawness.

It seems as if our existence has transformed from the activity of one’s life, into the capacity one’s life can hold. This would mean we are expecting a finite amount our soul is capable of being filled. Our joy then, would be at a limit, and our God would be a cup that holds a finite amount of liquid.

Our joy can only be bound if we choose to shackle it to this earth. As iron sharpens iron, we must sharpen our soul to the growth pains action requires. You can’t tell God your soul is trying. He doesn’t want you to tell him you’re trying, for trying is a lazy verb that sets a capacity on God’s power within our souls. God wants us to quit trying and merely go out and “do”. “Doing” is the only action that accounts for a life of activity, not capacity.

“Behold, He is coming with clouds, and every eye will see Him, even they who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of Him. Even so. Amen. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is, and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:7–8—NKJV)

Link

 

“The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

 

I really encourage you to listen to this John Piper sermon more than once. God will reveal more to you each time.

I pray that if you’re pursuing a life of self-denial, that you will instead seek the Joy of God. He commands us to be joyous. He commands us to seek His kingdom. The rest (self-denial) will be added to us. I pray that we no longer settle for small capacities of happiness and joy, but immense magnitudes that cannot be filled anyway other than by seeking God. That this misconstrued level to which we hold happiness to, is overwhelmed by the manifestation of satisfaction in Jesus.