Road outside Columbus...

Well, I have returned from my 4 1/2 day excursion to North Carolina (come on and raise up) and there are all sorts of things to be said. It was a great trip to be sure, and one that I won't soon forget. If you remember, it was a fact finding mission to the two cities of Charlotte and Raleigh in order to determine how viable moving to either place would be.

Going into the weekend, what I knew was that Young Life was great in either place and that the people in either city were incredible. What I didn't know was the spiritual climate of either place, as well as what exactly the city was like itself. Both things I was able to determine fairly well during my trip.

Now I must apologize initially, I don't have the time to fully breakdown the trip in this post. However that will come quite soon, I promise. Know though, that it was an amazing trip and that at the very least questions were answered and some decisions were potentially made. Sorry to leave you with a teaser, but that's how it's gonna be as I continue to pray and work through these decisions.

Side note: our softball team won tonight to move to 6-3 with a 5 game winning streak. There's one game left before the playoffs and we should be in right now, but I'm not 100% sure...

Side note: I hate the Geico caveman commercials. They started out great, but are really annoying now. The Gecko can stay though...

We will now break for a short intermission, the rest of your trip will commence shortly.

So this is just a flurry of activity, is it not? Are you all able to keep up with all my posting? Seriously though, I can't believe I'm posting this much, but hey...I've got a lot to say right now and a lot I've been thinking about and I want to get it all down on paper.

Well, I guess it's not really paper. Whatever.

I gotta be honest, I just spent the last 15 minutes not writing in this entry but rather looking for some poignant lyrics from the Pat McGee Band to post on here. I guess I wanted to sound artsy and also relative, since I just saw him in concert tonight for free on the top of a small building in uptown Charlotte. It was pretty cool, especially since I've always wanted to see him in concert. This was super great though, because it was with great friends, it was free, and I was about 25 feet away from the stage. Cool beans.

So I'll keep this brief because I have to get to sleep so I can wake up early in order to drive to Raleigh. My time here in Charlotte has been incredible, granted most of the time has been spent in Uptown and Lake Norman, which if you've never been here are two really great areas. However, I have discovered that this is a really great place. A few months ago for whatever reason, I would've sworn up and down that I would never have moved here. Now, I can see it happening quite easily. As my friend Jordy says...the bug bit me.

I'm off to Raleigh tomorrow morning to get there in time for Church At The Triangle service at 1030. We shall see how God moves in Raleigh as well. I'm excited to see the Spruills, my boy Robby Callis, and hopefully Dave "The Silent Coyote" "Mother f*ck*ng" "It's his world, we're just living in it" Reed.

That would be nice. Yeah.

"Well I guess we'll just see what we'll see, won't we?"

Ok, well I didn't exactly get more of a chance to digest things but a great friend of mine (who I know is one of the very few readers I have of this thing) has mentioned multiple times a very poignant suggestions that was also hinted at in Experiencing God.

He said that what if God's will for us is just to fall in love with Him and to experience Him however we can by committing ourselves fully to Him in everything we do. Then whatever we do will be to His glory because we are ultimately doing life for Him and not for ourselves. So therefore where we do life didn't really matter as long as we were everyday giving ourselves over to the Lord and striving to glorify Him in whatever we did.

An interesting thought isn't it? The other one that comes from Experiencing God in Chapter 3, is that all we need to do is to learn His voice well enough that we are content in living day to day following His lead. That we need to get to a point of dependency and living faith upon our Creator that we depend on Him moment to moment and don't have to ask the questions of "where do you want me for the next couple years", "what sort of things do you want me doing", "why don't you tell me where i'm going".

Both are quite interesting concepts and I like them. I don't know if I can live them and if I believe them though yet. At least not the first, and I probably feel more conflicted on the second than anything.

We shall see...

I'm thinking of staying an extra day in Charlotte to go to the free Pat McGee Band concert with all my friends down here, then heading to Raleigh on Sunday morning in time for church and then leaving for Columbus on Monday morning.

We shall see...

Take your shoes off...

Here's just a quick update from my travels so far...

I left Columbus around noon-thirty yesterday and zipped on down to Charlotte. I mean really I drove, but it was absolutely one of the easiest drives of me life. A sign? Haha...not sure about that. However, it was great when I finally made it and the drive was just gorgeous.

When I did get it, Ashley and I went out to dinner at this great uptown place called Nix's. Incredible burgers, and a ton of them. Uptown is really cool place, filled with a bunch of great restaurants and bars, lots of great places to hang out, and was a really clean place as well. Quite unlike many downtowns in Ohio. After that we headed down to the National White Water Center, where we train Olympians to win boatloads of medals (get it?) where on Thursday nights they turn it into a place to be for anyone. There's live music, a restaurant, bar, families go, there's lots of dogs which is kinda weird...and all of this adds up to phenomenal people watching opportunities. Today Ashley had tennis practice at Hopewell HS and I decided to go with her. Despite my waking up early, getting ready, eating breakfast and having a cup of coffee...I apparently still did not wake up enough, to remember my shoes. I realized this when we were half way to the school, when I looked down and noticed my socks in front of me and no shoes to speak of. Weeellllllll...I decided to play without my shoes then. And let me tell you, I am good at tennis. Tennis All Star and MVP are actually on my resume; if you go back to the ages of 6-8 at Sycamore Creek Country Club. Whoops. It was great fun though and I didn't embarrass myself nearly as much as I expected. Yay for that! I did however begin to develop a bit of a blister on my right big toe.

Then we drove around and took a bit of a tour of sweet, gigantic homes that are on Lake Norman, went to the town of Davidson to see Ashley's YL office. Now I just got done watching some Fight Club and Scrubs, while Ashley did one of the things she does best: nap. Hah. We're trying to figure out what we do the rest of the night. What I do know is that we'll be making a second trip to the airport at some point. I'll let ya know how all that turns out...

In my preparations for this trip, my good friend Jordy Sparks warned me that the bug may bite while I was down here. Well as I drove into town and drove over Lake Norman, the bug began buzzing around my head. Coming into the weekend, Charlotte was usually the lowest city on the list. While it had a bevy of my great friends down here, including great brothers in Neil, Jack, and Jordy, and my sister in college Julia, and great friend in Jaclyn who always speaks truth to me, and one of the most incredible women I know in Ashley...I wanted to know about the city itself. So far it has yet to disappoint. I asked the Lord that coming out of the weekend that I would have clarification on things, and that perhaps one of the two places would be eliminated. So far it's definitely not Charlotte. Surprisingly, Orlando has started to fade significantly in my mind. Columbus has continued to fade. Blacksburg continues to recruit me.

I've been reading some really great things in Experiencing God that I would love to share, because it directly applies to what I'm going through right now. I need a bit more time to digest it though and sift through things that I'm reading. So you can read about that later tonight if you'd like.

Also, there's two wicked stoned people on Cash Cab right now and they are just crazy looking. Why don't things like that ever happen to me? Not the stoning, the Cash Cab-ing.

Roots.

Right now I'm packing my bags and car for a trip down to Lake Cumberland for the weekend with some friends. For me, this represents a return to childhood innocence hopefully. For those of you who don't know, I spent my summers growing up zipping around on my wave runner here at the Houseboating Capitol of the World. It's a spectacularly beautiful place as you can see above. Really that picture doesn't do the place justice either, so hopefully I'll take a good amount of pictures for sharing.

I'm really excited about this trip though, just to get away from Columbus, which will be my second trip away in the last three weeks. There's even a trip in the works next weekend too, which I'll talk about after I get back from this one. Hopefully on this trip though, I'll start to get some clarity on my future and my life. God has slowly been bringing things into focus for me I believe, and while I don't exactly want to put what that is up on here just yet, know that this process is still on-going.

In getting back to childhood roots I'm hoping to find a parallel simplicity of mind and thinking as I pursue God's will and plan for my life. Christ himself speaks on having the faith of a child, and that unless we become like them we will never enter the kingdom of Heaven. So let's hope that my return to a sacred childhood place and time will bring the faith of a child and the adventurous and undaunted spirit of a child back into me. I'm feeling too old at times and I don't like it, so this should be a good time.

Unless I get bit by a water moccasin, cause that would really suck.

Chiggity Check It Out...

If you've got a few minutes you really need to check out the sermon this past weekend from Heritage Christian Church in Westerville. It's by Andy Sieberhagen, the missions pastor at the church, and he's from South Africa, which alone should compel you to listen to it! His accent is incredible!

Anyways, a little preface is that during the month of July they did a mini-series on Unlikely Heroes in the faith. It was a great idea, but unfortunately not the best carried out that the church has ever done. Except for the last one, this past Sunday.

I highly encourage everyone to either download the sermon from itunes or go to the church's website www.heritagecc.org and go to the podcast page, where it'll be towards the top.

So yeah, go listen to it. It's worth at least a hundred angel-bucks.

My life be like...

This weekend was a freaking blast. Let me just let you in on a little secret...the Turner family is awesome. I love them. Kitty and Howie might be the most awesome friend's parents I know. This camping trip was probably made all the more spectacular though because of the incredible delay that happened from my first invite until the actual coming to fruition of sitting around my first campfire with them. See, I had been invited for the previous five years but something always came up at the last minute...from bachelor parties, to family weddings, to family crises...something always prevented my attending. Perhaps it was because God knew I just wasn't ready yet, perhaps it was because He knew they weren't ready yet. Whatever the reason, it is what it is, for now I have been and have come back alive to tell of it.

We arrived late on Wednesday night, and when I say late I mean around midnight-thirty. Howie and Kitty stayed up for our arrival, but soon after that Howie and the Swartzels crashed while Kitty, Ashley, and myself stayed up for another hour and a half or so enjoying an adult beverage and catching up on life. The next day was filled with an insane amount of food (as was the whole trip really) and spending the day lounging at the beach of Kneff Lake. Great times...floating to the other side on our Cadillacs, beating old men in Washers, throwing small children onto and off of a large inflatable raft, log rolling, and hearing funny stories about Ashley from both Howie and Kitty. Great times. The next day we prepared for and took the epic canoe trip, from which many stories came out of in the past. The big story this year, was perhaps my relegating of Ashley to the front of the canoe and putting her in her place when it came to all of that jazz. Apparently Miss Ashley is not used to not steering and having control of the canoe. Suffice to say, that yours truly did so well that she barely needed to paddle. Count one for the good guys. Saturday consisted of playing lots of games while the foolish ones of the group played something called "golf". Silly rabbits, tricks are for kids.

Overall it was a great weekend, and I count many new friends amongst these people. I would feel comfortable going back and being with them next year, even if Ashley wasn't able to attend. I'm sure the Swartzels will be back as well.

Speaking of Andrew Swartzel...he and I decided something crazy while on the way back from this epic trip. While we were up in town, we saw signs and such for this canoe marathon that people just somehow knew what it was and so there wasn't a whole lot of explanation. Well we investigated it, and found it to be the longest canoe marathon in North America this coming weekend: 120 miles! Talk about epic! Well we started discussing the viability of us attempting the intense physical feat that goes anywhere from 14 to 19 straight hours of paddling. Through a river, dams, ponds, eddys, over a little land, through the night, bugs, wind, rain, whatever Mother Nature would throw at us...we would continue to paddle until it was finished. Now I know what you're thinking: you can't just sign on and do that in one week! You're right, we can't. However a year from now? Yes please.

So that's my weekend and life update-ish. There still is a lot of things that I haven't decided yet when it comes to the next stage of my life and what I am going to be doing next. As of now it's still:

Columbus: work for Max & Erma's as a manager, lead, coach

Raleigh: find a job, help with Church of the Triangle, lead

Blacksburg/Virginia: find a job, lead, unpaid intern training for YL

Orlando: find a job, lead, raise up committee, revitalize First Year Fellowship/New Leader Training and therein the whole leadership/city from a YL perspective

So yeah. I suppose you could throw in there: curveball from God - who knows?

Welp, that's all for now. Wish I had a cool sign off saying, but I don't so I may start trying on various ones.

Word to your mother.

Knowing.

Here's a question to ponder when you get a chance...

How do you know when God is calling you to something? How do you know what God is saying to you?

No idea if I'll have any sort of follow up to this post. Just wanted to throw it out there and see if anyone had any thoughts on it...

So please comment with your thoughts.