My friend Melissa Crawford and I became friends my freshman year in the Fall of 1996. We later became roommates and when she got engaged to her boyfriend Wes, I was honored to be a braid's-maid in her wedding. Melissa and I were ridiculous together. I remember going to an event for inner city kids and when it was over Melissa and I decided to act stupid. The event was in a gym and we thought it would be fun to run up to one of the padded walls, throw ourselves against it, and freeze like a chalk outline of a dead body. With our faces turned towards each other, eyes crossed, and tongues sticking out of the sides of our mouth, I yelled, "DROP AND ROLL!" We then started to roll across the gym floor. After rolling one direction for a while we got bored and started rolling the other direction. We rolled back and forth for around 2 hours laughing like demented hyenas. We weren't alone either; people were in the gym. I had so much fun with Melissa and I have so many great memories from that time in my life. My heart wasn't always in a great place however. My knowledge of the Bible was growing rapidly but I was incredibly legalistic. Discipline was my focus and all the Lord wanted was for me to rest in His grace as I rolled around a gym floor laughing like a demented hyena.
College Life was the college ministry at Denton Bible Church and it was amazing. The best part of college for me was College Life. I loved being active in Church but my heart was dealing with a lot of deception. I had begun to believe lies as to the character of God and who I was in relation to Him. I'm still dealing with some of those lies. The biggest lie was that God was always disappointed in me and that nothing I did was good enough. When there is a lie involved in your motivation to serve God, it makes it very difficult to navigate life in a healthy way.
It's amazing that a person can study so much Scripture and not learn a damn thing about God. I would spend hours in God's Word. My studies involved studying it, memorizing it, teaching it and having it taught to me. It's tricky because I was doing eternal things but I was doing them largely for self glory and praise. Isn't it wonderful that God uses us despite ourselves? Seriously. This is just another act of His amazing hand at work in His creation. He will use whomever and whatever to bring about His purposes. I wanted to honor God but my ego was the size of Montana. It's now about the size of Wyoming. Progress!!!
I was focusing on the wrong things. What I did was my identity. My goal was to be the Christian who was on the A-team (I pity da fool!) not the B-team. I wanted to be the one that everybody looked up to and the one everybody admired. Knowing God's Word was increasingly something to make me look good rather than something to deepen in my walk with God. I was so young. I felt defeated a lot. It was as if I had completely forgotten about God's grace. All of the energy spent trying to be on the A-team (Hey, sucka!) left me exhausted, though few saw it. Just to further reveal how jacked up I was, I commonly told myself that "I was without excuse because I had knowledge". That meant, I had no excuse for my sin because I knew God's Word. Clearly I was missing some key points. My life had little grace and little peace but I did have a lot of passion and a lot of drive. That's just not enough and I know that now.
I was talking to my friend Chris Stouden McQueen the other day and we were both sharing how we wanted more of the fruits of the Spirit in our lives. She made such an insightful comment, she said,"isn't it interesting that passion isn't one of the fruits of the Spirit? ". I thought that was interesting. Thoughts?
But first...
"I pity the fool who drinks soy milk."
one more...
"Hey, you with the teeth."
I cant stop.
"I'm Mr. T and I'm a Night Elf Mohawk! What's YOUR game?"
BAHAHAHAHAHA
Ok. Thoughts?
4 comments:
Ash,
Great post and thanks for being transparent. I never thought you had an ego when I knew you, just the opposite. I thought you were the bees knees. Anywho, this is a great post and I agree, God is good to use us even when our motives are misguided.
Big Hugs,
Eddie
Oh, and I LOOOOVE Mr. T!!
Yeah, the whole "passion" thing has been a struggle for me to understand, too. It seems, looking at the balance of scripture about it, to be a tool that God can use very well, but that if we use it for ourselves, it usually ends badly, mostly because passion is so demanding. The only way to sustain it is by receiving the energy from elsewhere, and even then, it doesn't seem to work well as anything other than a seasonal engagement. When I'm reading the New Testament, I sometimes wonder if Paul or Peter, when they were shipwrecked, jailed, or sick in bed, thought to themselves, "Sweet...some time off."
I've certainly let the engines burn hot at times, but looking back, I can see that the times that were most spiritually productive were those in which I desperately sought God and had a mild sense of balance in life. It wasn't until recently that I realized that this pretty much describes what God has told me all along to strive for, like in Ps. 119.
Eddie,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. My heart was actually in a a much better place when I started serving at the Hanger. I'm not saying this lightly, but I really believe that serving at the Hanger was a total gift to my heart. After serving in College LIfe, the Lord starting to show me some real yuck in my heart and I was going to step away from ministry for a but to re-focus my focus. Well, Keith Chancey had other plans and he thought serving at the Hanger would be great for my heart and he was right! I'm actually going to share some of this in my next blog.
Sonny, I always look forward to your comments. I think passion is tricky as well. Like all other areas of our lives, if not surrendered to the power of the Holy Spirit, it turns into the ME show. Passion, however, is typically bigger and louder so it can cause more problems. I don't think that passion is bad any more than thoughtfulness is bad. It depends on what the focus is what is driving it I suppose.
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