...Life as I know it...

Rank me with whom thou wilt...

2006-01-24T13:30:00.000-05:00

Twice in the past week, I was able to attend a very strict Wesleyan liturgical worship service and each time, this one prayer just struck deep in my heart and remained with me throughout the rest of the night. It just really hit home the concept of laying my life in the hands and will of God. Part of the prayer went like this:

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt;
Put me to doing, put me to suffering;
let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee;
let me be full, let me be empty;
let me have all things, let me have nothing;
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-
Thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in Heaven.

That's a powerful prayer. In the past few weeks, I've really been stuggling with my faith. God is trying to teach me something and he wants me to work harder than I have ever had to before. It's a feeling that's new to me... It's a very lonely and frightening feeling. But I also know that if I survive this, there is something huge waiting for me. In this prayer, God taught me what it means to give myself wholly for God. I always thought that giving myself wholly to God means that I am willing to go anywhere and do anything no matter how great it is. But what it also means is that I have to be willing to do anything no matter how small it is. "Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee." If I am not of use to Him, I have to be willing to be laid aside so that his desires will be fulfilled.

It's a very humbling thought. One that I'm struggling with. But it's something that I doubt many Christians realize is part of the committment that they've made.

Please be in prayer for me.

"... for he is worthy to be praised."

2005-11-24T23:57:00.000-05:00

I praise God for who He is. I praise him for his magnitude. I praise him for his mercy, and also for his justice. I praise him that even though we are so engulfed in our sin that we fail to see just how fallen we are, he still accepts us in his presence. I praise him for his infinite nature; that there is no possible way that our minds could bind his nature to our limited sense of time and space.

I praise God for love. I praise him for giving us that part of his nature. I praise him for the many different types of love. But mostly for the love that is God.

I praise God for humility; for breaking my pride and letting me fall when I fail to pay attention to where I am going.

2005-10-25T19:59:00.000-05:00

i'm speechless...

I need words
As wide as sky
I need language wide as
This longing inside
And I need a voice
Bigger than mine
And I need a song to sing you
That I've yet to find

Carrying Cathy

2005-08-14T20:57:00.000-05:00

so i played Mable for the first time plugged in today and she performed beautifully... almost... orgasmic? lol man i love that thing

and me and booth were able to record the rest of the stuff that we were planning on doing together. so now i need to master the tracks and write them to cd and they're ready to go on the shelves at your local best buy. lol just kidding. but the recordings did come out better than i thought they would. it's crazy how well our voices blend together.

it's been a really stressful week for me. i'm stoked about school, but i can't stress enough how much i loathe moving. this'll make the third time in three years i've had to pack up all my stuff and move to a different state and it's really starting to get on my nerves. man, when i have a house and family of my own i'm staying put for a good while.... then again, in reality, i'll probably have gotten used to all this moving and i'll get antsy in one place after like three years. crap

in other news... ben folds is now my favorite. and i'm not very fond of walmart at the moment. and black hair sticks to everything white. and free shipping is the shiznit. and EVERYONE HERE IS FIRED!!

I call her Mable

2005-08-10T14:35:00.000-05:00

Man this guy was fun.. :)

2005-08-02T23:59:00.000-05:00

Like a King...

2005-08-02T23:40:00.000-05:00

hmm... it's been a pretty interesting few days...

first off, thank the most gracious Lord up in Heaven for sending my kids from last week home saturday. man... those kids were nuts.
lol so the last day of that week, major D came up to me and told me he had too many people working for the new week so he needed me to go home. so i'm home from camp for good now. it's a good and bad thing. gives me more time to get stuff ready to go off to school, but i could use all the money i can get.

so on my way home, i stopped by guitar center to kind of calm my nerves. so after looking in awe like i always do, i started talking to one of the sales guys there and somehow we started talking about prices. i don't know how, but i managed to talk him down on a price of the guitar i've been looking at for months. so i bought a martin 000c-16 RGTE aura for $700 less than list price HECK YEAH! and henceforth, she will be called MABLE.

and now we're packing to go on vacation for a few days. a couple days with my uncle and his family in myrtle beach, then to the g-rents in new bern. should be fun .

so until then, 4 SPF sunblock is not enough for 5 hours of uninterrupted sun on one of the hottest days of summer. "The more you know...."

Oh estaban, i really like your arm bands...

2005-07-27T14:45:00.000-05:00

Man it's crazy how hot it can get here. Yesterday it was officially 117 degrees with the heat index. That's insane. And what's worse, we have to keep the kids moving and outside all day. It's hard to blame them if they are giving us problems...

(segue into next topic) ... the kids are giving us problems. For the first day of the camp that goes on during this week, they were pretty good, and then yesterday they all went nuts or something. I'm just gonna say it's cause it's so freakin hot.

Two more weeks of camp before i can go home for 4 days before shipping off to school in Kentucky. And in that four days, i have to get everything packed and ready for college, we have to take a vacation that's been planned for weeks, and i have to just chill out at home. It's been a good, but really busy summer. It'll be nice to just kind of chill.

And that concludes today's broadcast of "...Life as I know it..." Tune in next time for more insights into my soul.... or just what i want to tell you. Until then, always remember that when a wet moose crosses the road at night... it hurts.

And the saga continues...

2005-07-20T23:41:00.000-05:00

wow it's been a crazy fast summer. I've been working at a summer camp since the beginning of june and i'm gonna be here till like the second week of august.
For the majority of the summer I've been a counselor and instructor for kids at a music camp. i've loved every minute of it. for some reason, i relate more to music during this time than i do when i'm playing on my own. i would be interested in coming back again next summer... but that's contingent upon another decision that i need to make soon.

so this summer i've not really been able to play either my horn or guitar much. ironically, i've played more piano than anything else.

and i finally got my roommate assignment for the fall. didn't get the building i wanted and i have no idea who my roommate is (well i guess that was expected). but it's disappointing about not being in the building i wanted. i suppose God has His reasons. and I'm sure that the only reason I'm going to Asbury is because i feel that God was leading me there this coming year. so we'll see.

bizzles.... i've said a lot of nothing. and i really don't like to ramble. so i'm going to pretend that this is the conclusion of a very thought provoking conversation (of which i have several more that absolutely blow my mind... if you would like to hear, just ask me).

in conclusion, i think that barbeque is much more healthy for you than 264 pieces of okra.

'Ok daddy'

2005-06-02T23:10:00.000-05:00

You know... I was thinking today as I was driving to camp about when I was four years old living in Burlington. I remember coming home from school and running around frantically devising ways to get my dad to play with me when he came home from work. My mom would always be finding me in their closet trying on his shoes and ties and strutting around the bedroom pretending to be adressing the advisory board on ways to convince united way to send our boys and girls club free roller blades and basketballs. And when my dad would come home, I would be the first one to greet him at the door. He would have his briefcase in hand and I would attatch myself to his leg and make him drag me through the kitchen. What I never realized then, was that he had bad days at work... there were days when he would be chewed out by the DC or the advisory council... nevertheless, he never tired of dragging me around the house. He never tired of listening to my incomprehensible stories about how kirk from preschool ate a maple leaf which caused a huge earthquake that convinced the teacher to let us have pizza instead of chuckwagon. He earnestly listened intently. Because my father loves me.

Why can't I have the same faith in my Father as I did with my dad. I want to be with You always. I swear I've been here before. Like a child, I want to take you at your word. You are always speaking to me... comforting me... advising me... but You know I am proud. I want to see these mountains of doubt fade away. I want to trust and love you more. Father, make me more like the child I want to be. I envy so much the unquestioned faith a child has in his father. A child does not worry about whether his father is leading him astray. The father says 'I love you. Follow me' and the child smiles and says 'ok daddy'. Why is it, the more we learn, the harder it is to trust in God.

Father strip me of my pride. I want to be broken... completely... broken. I want to have no where else to turn.
"Ok daddy"

Deliver me....

2005-06-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

You know in romantic comedies when the lead and their love interest are in the scene where they are at a dinner party with tons of other guests and conversation is going on all around them, some of which they are even involved in, for they are the leading couple, but then there is that moment. You know, the moment where the couple's eyes lock. They communicate without any words spoken. Things no one else is aware of. They are still present with everyone else but they have checked out for a bit. This exclusive, romantic experience is had and no one else has any clue. There is something similar that happens in the corporate worship experience that is truly amazing and transcending. I mean we know that our convening with God is not confined to any specific moment of any specific day, so what makes, say, a Sunday morning any more special than a Tuesday in the middle of traffic on our drive home? Is God less present on Tuesday? No. Yet there is something so different and other than when we are in a room full of people that have gathered in the name of Christ. But the thing that really sends my head spinning is that we can be in the middle of this corporate experience and feel like we have the sole attention of God. In the middle of a crowd it's just the two of us in this beautiful exchange. And these other individual's voices who believe, no less than I, to have his total attention start to blend with mine. It doesn't lessen my individual experience it only deepens and heightens the romance somehow. All of these individual voices blending to one...

God give me patience...

2005-05-16T22:31:00.000-05:00

Man... I really need to learn to start saving things. I just wrote a very inspiring lonnng blog that moved even me and i clicked on something and lost it all. ARRRGGGGGG!!! maybe next time...

Man, life is hard sometimes...

2005-05-12T22:25:00.000-05:00

When life get rough... yeah...

Am I at the point of no improvement,
what of the death, I still dwell in
I try to excel but I feel no movement,
Can I be free, of this unreleasable sin?

Never underestimate my Jesus
You're telling me there's no hope
I'm tellin you you're wrong
Never underestimate my Jesus
when the world around you crumbles
He will be strong, He will be strong

I throw up my hands, Oh the impossibilities
Frustrated and tired, where do I go from here?
Now I'm searching for the confidence I've lost so willlingly
Overcoming these obstacles, is overcoming my fears.

I think I can't, I think i can't
but I think You can, I think You can
I think I can't, I think I can't,
but I think You can, I think You can.
I Gather my insufficiencies and place them in Your hands

Never underestimate my Jesus
You're telling me there's no hope,
I'm telling you you're wrong
Never underestimate my Jesus
when the world around you crumbles
you will be strong, you will be strong

On planet Charlie...

2005-05-06T15:14:00.000-05:00

At last... my arrangement/transcription is finished. And just a couple days too late for the trombone section at school to try it out. Oh well... At least I know I am the master at writing polyphonic bell tones. :P Maybe I can get a group together at conservatory this summer.

Oh... this summer... apparently Ben Harper is going to be at the verizon ampitheatre june 19. That makes two concerts, for which i'd be willing to sell both my middle fingers, that I will be unable to attend. Kind of ironic actually. If anyone goes... I don't want to hear about it.

Let us be simple with Him

2005-05-03T22:30:00.000-05:00

Covenant blessings are not meant only to be looked at, but to be appropriated. Even our Lord Jesus is given to us for our present use.
- Charles Sprugeon

Jesus is our savior. He sacrifced so that we may have an intimate covenant with GOD. But GOD cannot look on imperfection; so Jesus filters our extensive shortfalls. Remember, in order to be engulfed in a pure state of humble worship, our minds must be free of distraction. We should tell Jesus of everything that's bothering us.

"GOD is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble"
Psalm 46:1

2005-05-02T22:36:00.000-05:00

my life in cartoon form :P

Do you want a cheesecake or something?

2005-05-02T21:40:00.000-05:00

Oh man... how i can't wait to be in the midst of that next year.
There's yet another chapter in the ongoing saga of my schooling come fall...

Suddenly, everyone here is doing everything they can to persuade me to stay in Charlotte and not transfer to Asbury in the fall. I'm being offered scholarships left and right, and people are laying guilt trips... especially at school. I really do like it here, but I honestly feel that God is patiently guiding me to Asbury.
HE will lead me.

Lord, hear my cry...

"What so you think we're homeless?"

2005-05-02T02:47:00.000-05:00

Tonight, I have finally witnessed a secret entity known throughout the Charlotte metropolis as ... The Delta Force. The ministry of The Salvation Army in Charlotte, NC is changing because of the efforts of these 'agents'. Tonight I was able to go with them as they met with people in the area of the downtown CATS bus station. True, we were only handing out cups of hot chocolate, but the presence of the Holy Spirit was undoubtedly with us. This is the ministry that William Booth started 120 years ago... the legacy of The Salvation Army (yeah, we're a church); the calling from God to meet the people where they live every day, and reach out to them with unbiased, yet unrestrained love. We're coming back to the very heart of worship... love.