Dave Reed Bowls Harder Than You.

So tonight was just an overall great night. Cancel that, great day. I spent the early part of the day up in the quaint village of Granville with one of my good friends, visited with her great aunt and uncle (who are loaded), drinking coffee, and perusing a small book store. 

Back to tonight though, and the main event: Guys night. Ish. For dinner Jacob, Slemmer, Pierce, Brad, Tyler and myself headed to Fabian's which is an awesome pizza joint serving up some deep dish delights. We had some coach pops and a whole lot of laughs, during which it was easily decided that Jacob has absolutely no future as a hostage negotiator. Whichever way you slice it though, I love these guys and their friendship and brotherhood has meant more than all the gold in Fort Knox to me and my walk with Christ. Fellowship like this cannot be taken for granted. 

After this wonderful dinner and hilarity, we all headed over to the local bowling establish for more merriment and coach pops. Other friends met us there, and unfortunately this is where the guys night ended, however very fortunately the fellowship of the guys didn't end there. While ladies showed up, the guys kept things rolling and really I don't think I've laughed that hard in one night consistently for a very long time. 

It made me really think the whole night about one thing though: why am I so eager to move? Obviously I am anxious to work full time for Young Life, as this has been a dream and calling for some time in my life. Most all of you know that I have always then cherished the state of Virginia, even before I wanted to work for YL. However, all of you also know how much I absolutely love and am loyal to my close friends. A recent friend of mine from Florida wants to go on YL staff and was convinced that she needed to leave the state. She also has a group of girls that she is ridiculously close with, and because of that decided to stay in the state to go on staff. An interesting thought. 

So I'm just tossing some stuff back and forth in my head, praying a lot now, and will be spending a lot of time seeking God's presence. 

Oh yeah, and Dave "Mother Effin", "Shifty Eyes", "Silent Coyote" "It's his world, we're all just living in it" Reed does bowl harder than you. The man-beast bowled at 26.2 miles per hour. Therefore he is the faster marathoner in the world as well. Amazing.

Rubbish.

"But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ - the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead."

So I was reading again in that Piper guy's book (When I Don't Desire God) just now about how we should desire to know Christ in such a way, that everything else including prestige, power, money, all of that should be things that we allow to fall to the wayside because we desire so badly to follow Christ.  It's some pretty powerful stuff. Again, another post convicting me of a spiritual attitude and approach to life. I love it, honestly.

In light of the thoughts I had concerning Christmas and the birth of renewed Hope, how does this make me feel? It's an interesting question given Christmas and the tradition of giving gifts. Sure I want cool stuff and this is the time of the year that most of us are guaranteed to get some cool "stuff", but isn't it just that? Stuff? Do any of us really need more stuff in our lives? Do any of us actually and truly desire more stuff? Or is the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ and sharing in the persecution and therefore the resurrection what we truly desire? I know the right answer to this question, but I can't say I always live it...

Oswald Chambers will blow your mind.

I occasionally dip into the musings of Mr. Chambers in "My Utmost for His Highest" and I am nearly almost blown away by what he says. I'm sure most of you that read him are as well. This one in particular though I just loved and had to share with you all. It's from today...

"Where the Battle is Won or Lost"

Our battles are first won or lost in the secret places of our will in God's presence, never in full view of the world. The Spirit of God seizes me and I am compelled to get alone with God and fight the battle before Him. Until I do this, I will lose every time. The battle may take one minute or one year, but that will depend on me, not God. However long it takes, I must wrestle with it alone before God, and I must resolve to go through the hell of renunciation or rejection before Him. Nothing has any power over someone who has fought the battle before God and won there. 

I should never say, "I will wait until I get into difficult circumstances and then I'll put God to the test." Trying to do that will not work. I must first get the issue settled between God and myself in the secret places of my soul, where no one else can interfere. Then I can go ahead, knowing with certainty that the battle is won. Lose it there, and calamity, disaster, and defeat before the world are as sure as the laws of God. The reason the battle is lost is that I fight it first in the external world. Get alone with God, do battle before Him, and settle the matter once and for all.

In dealing with other people, our stance should always be to drive them toward making a decision of their will. That is how surrendering to God begins. Not often, but every once in a while, God brings us to a major turning point - a great crossroads in our life. From that point we either go toward a more and more slow, lazy, useless Christian life, or we become more and more on fire, giving our utmost for His highest - our best for His glory.

I don't know about y'all, but I know that I want to be more and more on fire for God, not more and more lazy in my walk. Like I alluded to in a previous post, the end of the year often brings reminiscing from people, and then the hope of something new. Maybe some of you are facing a crossroads like it talked about here. Perhaps you've already started to get more and more lazy in your walk. Either way, I know I will, but get yourself in front of God, fight whatever battle you may have, then take love into the world. Certainly I don't want to experience calamity, disaster, and defeat...that sounds horrible. I'm gonna go be alone before God.

Love Come Down.

So today (yesterday) was Christmas Day, a day of great food, decent to great company and family, and full of hope. 

Here's a brief rundown of my Christmas-time activities this year: 

24 - I traveled to meet my parents at my brother and family's house in Rossburg, Ohio after getting off work. It was a long drive, but more than worth seeing my little niece and nephews. Although they are all getting older, so little isn't quite the right term when the sophomore (Teage) is taller than me. After I got to experience a brief time of joy with them, my parents and I had to head home for church. It was great, as it always is, and the pastor, Bob Wade delivered his usual top-notch message. (hopefully this weekend I'll spend some time writing about this...) Then later that night I headed out to Southbrook for the late night service with one of my best friends and his little brother and we met up with old friends as we always do. It was quite joyous.

25 - Chill. Slept in. Opened stockings. Ate breakfast. Opened presents. Chilled out. Went to see Marley and Me with my parents, and it was surprisingly good. Ate dinner. Played cards, which my Dad proceeded to cheat at to win. This sets a disturbing trend, because he was apparently accused of trickery at my brother's house when they were all playing some trivia game before I arrived. Watched Transformers. Had a wonderful phone conversation with "Mambo #5", who never fails to bring joy into my life; I truly am blessed to have her in my life, as are many others.

The issue at hand though, that is so amazing about this time when people are constantly battling "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings", (Merry Christmas would be the correct phrase...) is that the Reason for the Season truly is one of hope. It is of the only hope that we as humans have for true life. I know that if you are a follower of Christ this is such a simple and elementary topic, but how beautiful is it in its simplicity? Our faith is centered on a God who became vulnerable. Our God is one of overflowing love and abundant sacrifice. Raise your hand if you think this life as a human being on the Earth is easy... I bet none of you did. The God that I love, worship, and give my life to, He came down because He loved me and you enough to jump into this life of crap. Love Came Down. He is merely extending His hand out to us through this act...He boldly stepped into a place where no other "god" would think of going or could bring himself to go. Because Jesus loved us that much He came down in love to allow us to be in a relationship with Him, and to free us from the crap of this life. 

"Have you ever dreamed of being free..." That's how the song "Love Come Down" by The War starts. I couldn't think of a better song or cry on this night. This time of year is when we celebrate the love coming down from Heaven to Earth and dwelling among us. Ask yourself if you have ever dreamed of being free...and then answer it honestly. If you have, now is a perfect time to grab the extended hand of God as we mark when He came down in love and to express His love to us. I did, almost ten years ago now, and everyday feel more and more free.

This time of year may not always be the best of times for everyone; maybe there are painful memories of loss, current grief, current horrible situations that just should not be, or perhaps just intense loneliness. But if any of us, in whatever great or horrible situation we are in, can focus on Love Coming Down, we will find this time immeasurably richer and we will find ourselves not just dreaming of being free...but being free indeed.

Thank you, tiny infant Jesus with your golden fleece diapers; 8 pounds 6 ounces, reading your Baby Einstein book; still omnipotent. 

Thank you God, for Love Come Down on that Holy night, that silent night.

Happenings.

So lately, life has got me thinking. I alluded to this in a previous post which had some specifics in it, but I also think that it's natural and innate (but obviously also pushed by the media) to look back at the previous year and even our lives as any year comes to a close. I suppose it's as good a time as any other to reflect back and work to change the future in our lives. 

Well in the past couple days I have been feeling that pull even more as a couple of things have started to come together, including the whole end of the year mentality,  that make me really evaluate things. For one I'm in a very exciting stage of life still where I have these two temporary jobs, but also am anticipating the future and a highly potential move out of state. Working for Young Life is a long awaited dream, goal, and calling of my mine and with all that has happened in the past couple years, the place where I am facing is really exciting. 

The other major happenstance in my life is more happenings in the lives of others. Within the last month, four couples now that I have been close with in my life have gotten engaged. Now don't get me wrong, I am obviously ridiculously happy and thrilled for these dear friends of mine. However, all but one of the 8 people are younger than I am; 3 haven't even graduated college yet! Now I'm not going to make this a post about poor unfortunate single me; not at all would I dream of doing that. I just want to point out that situations like this make one think... One of the couples involves a guy who had been my very best friend for most all of high school as well as college, until the last year and a half or so when our schedules just drifted apart to my disappointment. To my disappointment, I didn't know about his impending engagement but it would be in his nature to not tell anyone except his brother so I'm not going to get too bent out of shape, as I spoke with another of our best friends from high school a mere hours before this happened and he mentioned nothing of it. Again though, I couldn't be happier for him.

All of this makes me both simultaneously think of myself as old and yet not ready for life. I still feel like I'm in a holding pattern because I have two part time jobs while I "wait" for Young Life to come around. I feel like I'm in a holding pattern because I haven't been able to branch out from the YL group of friends here in Columbus nearly as much as I would have liked to. I feel like I'm in a holding pattern because I'm single. I feel like I'm in a holding pattern while everyone has all these fantastic happenings around me.

Maybe someone that actually reads this could shoot me some scripture for encouragement...yeah, that would be nice. 

Collections of thoughts

So lately I've had a bunch of different and really cool conversations and moments of revelation with friends...and each time I've said to myself: "Man, I should really blog about this..." The really great thing about all of these occurrences is that they all are focused around Christ and following God and how we should act and love as His followers.

One of the first ones was with my good friend BRose, and it was both profound and poignant, but overall really good. We were talking about how even as followers of Christ we do such a horrible job at taming our tongues, even though the Bible talks at great length about both the positives and negatives of such action. It's really convicting if you take a day and consciously pay attention to what both you and others around you say towards one another, especially towards other believers! We agreed that as believers we are supposed to be encouraging and uplifting towards one another, and looking for ways in our conversation to edify Christ. However that obviously doesn't always happen...although it's funny because we all know how great it feels to be uplifted by words from friends. Why wouldn't we just do this constantly then? It would be like a crazy flow of endorphins and we'd all always be happy! Haha but I kid, sorta. 

Think about it though...what if we all really tried to watch what we said and made sure that the old childhood axiom of: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" became how we actually did live?!

Momentum...

So I noticed that these blog things definitely go as swings of a pendulum of a grandfather clock. The people who don't experience this are the ones that seem to be the sports or political blogs that feel the need to post everyday. I'm not gonna touch on that subject, but they are interesting aren't they?

Anyways, if you read me "regularly" then you'll know that I don't post everyday, and that my subjects are all over the map. Many other friends that I know post in similar fashion and it got me to thinking about why. I know for two friends in particular, my little blog of nothing apparently spawned blogs of their own. Both I was ridiculously excited about because they far surpass me in html ability and the appearance of their blogs was right up there with very well designed websites. However they have also fallen by the wayside after promising starts. Momentum. Even the friend I was inspired by to start this, Mambo #5, goes through times of momentum; multiple posts followed up by spurts of nothing. 

I wonder why all of us have consistency issues...is it back and forth boredom and excitement? Is it pure busyness of life? I'm not entirely certain. Although any of you that know me, know that I'm a rather particular guy, and there have been more than a couple times that I didn't post because I couldn't think of a sufficient title for the post. Yup, that's me. 

Jigga what?

Ok so this isn't the most profound post that you'll ever see...but it is crucial to you getting a glimpse into my life. 

Here's a rough picture of me before last night. Yup, super crazy out of control hair.

Now here's a picture of me after last night. Wowzas. I have NO HAIR!

You may ask yourself, "Gee Chad, what's the big deal? Don't you have short hair sometimes?" The answer to that of course is yes, sometimes my hair is short. The thing is, this is ridiculously shorter than I have ever cut my hair. Usually I use a 3 guard, and my buddy was all set with that and almost done. He decided to work a little bit more and the razor, ummm, slipped; taking a chunk of hair with it. Faced with the only possibility, I had to cut it down to almost nothing. Really, this picture does my lack of hair little justice as well. It's nuts, and also, it's wicked cold outside and so is my head now. Brrrr.

John Piper is a smart man.

Yo party people.

John Piper is indeed a very wise man, and one who knows the heart of God intimately; yet probably not nearly the level of Moses or David or any of the other saints. But gosh dang, this guy just melts your face off every time you hear or read something from him. 

Case in point: I just started reading "When I Don't Desire God" by Piper not three days ago, and am only on the second actual page of the book (the forward doesn't really count, like a middle school girlfriend or boyfriend: not an actual relationship) and Piper has already melted my face. For your reading pleasure, since I haven't heard of this book being read much at all (in fact no one that I know has read it...) this snippet.

"Now there was only one hope, the sovereign grace of God. God would have to transform my heart to do what a heart cannot make itself do, namely, want what it ought to want. Only God can make the depraved heart desire God. Once when Jesus' disciples wondered about the salvation of a man who desired money more than God, he said to them, "With man it is impossible, but not with God. For all things are possible with God" (Mark 10:27). Pursuing what we want is possible. It is easy. It is a pleasant kind of freedom. But the only freedom that lasts is pursuing what we want when we want what we ought."

Check out that last sentence, chew it up, mull it over, let is wash over you, other overused 'thinking' sentences...let me know some thoughts. Talk it over with friends. 

Fight the team...

...across the field, show Arizona that Ohio State's back!

Haha, well for those of you that read this you know that sports are a ridiculously large part of my life, and specifically Ohio State sports. I would be completely remiss if I had this blog about me and my life and didn't include my thoughts on sports of all sorts.

We'll start off this wonderful post with just a bit of musings on Ohio State football, my unhealthy obsession. The Bucks started the season with a lot of promise, a bunch of returning seniors who could have gone to the NFL, and a favorable schedule. Remind anyone of anything, say 2007 University of Michigan football? Yeah, the similarities stop right there as we didn't lose to our 1-AA opponent, and beat down our archrivals. We obviously finished a fantastic 10-2 by almost anyone's standards, except that here in Columbus our football team we are anything but just anyone and so most folks would view this as largely a disappointing season with the exception of blasting the crap out of TSUN. 42-7, and I wanted more. Oh well, it's not like they're gonna get any better for next year.

We drew a pretty darn good matchup in the Fiesta Bowl, where Columbus goes to 'winter' every year. Should be good, with their top tier offense going against a defense better than an all star team of their schedule's defenses. Then we have our still constantly evolving offense going up against the one team that actually even attempted to play defense in the Big 12. 

We open as 8.5 point underdogs, and as it's been widely speculated probably all the Big Televen teams will be underdogs in their matchups. Knee jerk prediction? Bucks win a close game, prob 31-27; the conference goes 5-2 overall.

More thoughts on all this sometime later...

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

So I must admit, I obviously have been a bit lackadaisical in posting this weekend and I do apologize for that. A few of you have called me out on that, and I thank you for doing so actually...I hope that you all and others continue to enjoy perusing my thoughts on my life and other things.

Lately, I've been down a bit in terms of connecting with Christ on a day to day, and moment to moment basis. Of course then in struggling through that, trying everyday to take my thoughts captive for the Lord, attempting to spend more time in prayer throughout my day, only with struggles like this would me having to lead a Campaigners come up! It would be very easy to have skated by, lead on the next chapter of John, and just slide by. However, in praying through and thinking through what I thought God wanted our kids to hear, and what I thought was something that perhaps they needed to hear I kept coming back to one thought: what did I need to hear from the Lord?

As it turned out, both matched up because I was feeling at a point where I just had to get back to the basics and the foundations of my own faith. The conversation all night was definitely lead by the Lord, even from how kids responded to how their past week was. The basic premise tonight was to start with John 10:10 and talk about life, where we all look for it, what others look for, what happens when they don't find fulfilling and lasting life where they look, and then what comprises 'life to the full'. Then we spend a bit of time talking about what 'joy' is, how there's a difference between joy and happiness, and then what joy does for you. After that we delved into the beginning of John 15, and brought that around to how we are able to sustain joy and how we continue to live life to the full: remain. We must remain in Jesus Christ in order to experience life to the full and to have our joy made complete because of the love of Christ. 

Think about all that for a second...and how much easier could it be to understand? If we don't stay connected to the Source of true life, then we will be cut off and thrown in the fire. That doesn't sound pleasant; but the rest of the passage is awesome if you really dig deep! I love the fact as well that it uses the word 'remain' so many times and really forces you to grasp the concept of abiding in Christ's presence and His love.

In the end, dang it was amazing of me to be able to study that myself in preparation for talking young believers through it. It's truly great and wondrous the ways that God will answer prayers sometimes. On the same hand, one must be able to appreciate the valleys and the perseverance that is developed in times like these. 

"Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him" ~ James 1:12

Horrible at titles...

Hey hey hey...so I am finally getting into a groove in my two news jobs, and then the past two weeks Macy's has called and said they didn't need me some days. Which is semi fine and semi horrible. It's fine because when I get there I have to get there at 6am, and that's just wicked early. It's horrible because gosh darn it, I need to pay rent and such!

Really though, this is just another fun little example of me needing to trust in the Lord with all that I have, that He will take care of me. Am I not more valuable than the sparrow that falls to the ground under His will? Also, there is the fantastic scripture from Jeremiah 29, where God tells Jeremiah that he shouldn't worry because God knows His own plans for Jeremiah and that those plans are for a future and a hope and not for ruin. 

It's interesting, when I graduated and had a steady job at Zuppa, I thought that life was going to be much easier and less hectic. That in turn probably lead to an attitude of progressively less reliance on God to supply my needs in my life. So I suppose the backwardsly fun thing about not quite getting the hours I need at either job yet is leading me back to a place of utter reliance upon God to meet all my needs in Christ Jesus. That my friends is the place that we should live our lives, and the place that finds us truly connecting with God; it's not in the places or times that we find ourselves able to take any credit or glory, but the places where the only thing we can do is lift our hearts and voices in worship to God the Father.

"You keep in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock." ~ Isaiah 26:3-4

La musica...

I have no idea how many people read this blog right now, but if you do I'm about to put up a little music player. For the most part it will obviously have songs that I like, and that perhaps say a little something about me...(figure that out when you see the list)

However, I have much love for my readers and so I would like to reflect a bit of their style. So if you read this smorgasbord of schtuff and would like a track played on your behalf, leave a comment with a suggestion...

More actual posts to come soon.