August 04, 2005
A Prophetic Image (What God Has Been Doing in My Life Lately, Part 1)
I wanted to share this picture with the general public. It has come to be a fairly prophetic image concerning where God has placed me at this juncture in my life. The picture was taken this past May on my graduation day, and oddly enough it happens to be one of the only pictures I took at my graduation. Just a random moment where the Belz brothers, Adam and Max, grabbed me and hoisted me up between them for a quick kodachrome moment during a major epoch of my academic career.
At that time, I had no idea that a month later Andrew Belz (their father) would grab me in a very similar way out of the exhibition hall at the Chattanooga Convention Center during the PCA General Assembly and recruit me for a teaching position at a Christian boarding school in the middle of corn and soybean fields in Iowa. This photo captures the expression of a young man who had no idea how providentially and miraculously the Lord would work in his life in the near future and how the Lord had in fact been working in his life for a very long time.
It has been a remarkable thing to meditate on how the Lord has worked in my life particularly in the past two years, and how well ordered and purposeful His plan seems to me now that I see it in hindsight. I doubted it greatly in the midst of last year's events for sure. So for the interested reader, I would like to share my story in segments over the next few weeks. I'd like to convey what the past two years have looked like, how I walked through a valley of fear and doubt, how I made some very regretful mistakes that stemmed from great unbelief, and how the Lord providentially protected me, guided me, and taught me invaluable lessons with more ordered, purposed wisdom than I had ever dared give him credit for previously. I think its a good idea to take advantage of the times when the Lord gives me a little bit of clarity about my life to share it with my friends and glorify God for it, so that I will have something to look back upon when I reach the periods of cloudiness that are sure to come up pretty quickly here while teaching at the school. And I happen to have a lot of thoughts going through my head right now to share, and i havent had that in a long time, so I plan to start spitting them out while I still can. So if you desire, let me start off with my first segment, starting the story a bit beyond two years ago, when I finished up my last semester of classes at Covenant College.
I finished my last semester of classes at Covenant College in the spring of 2003. It had been a rough senior year at Covenant. My mom and younger brother Tim had moved to the Chattanooga area in the fall and I was a bit stressed out about being a part of a family unit again after having put off that responsibility for about six years. Plus things were just emotionally turbulent for me. I was confused about my future (I wanted to go to seminary but didnt know how I could make it happen), girls (I was having a rather pathetic case of 'senioritis' in which the senior freaks out and thinks he needs a girlfriend before he graduates in order to fulfill his life), classes (it was going to take an incredibly extensive schedule to be the academic superstar I felt compelled to be and finish both my majors, Philosophy and History, on time), church (I was leaving the church I had been a member at for two years to embark on a journey of finding a church my whole family could agree on going to together), and my own spiritual life (why was I still so slow in learning how to love people, love my family and friends, and live an obedient life before God).
So naturally, because I was stressed out about all of these things, so much so that I wasn't sleeping at nights (just ask the Alton Park boys if they remember), all of these areas of my life simply fell apart. I avoided my family a lot, gave up on the idea of going to seminary the next year, I embarrassed myself in the girl department, I started underperforming in my classes to the noted disappointment of my professors, I dropped my history major, I started avoiding church, and I let my spiritual life go the way of the buffalo.
And yet God managed to do some amazing stuff in my life during that time. He started to draw me closer to a circle of friends that would surround me and support me for the next two years of my life, friends like Vincent Howard, Phil Harvey, Courtney Withington, the Kaufmanns, and Hope Davis. But God also continued to strengthen me in my older friendships with guys like Matt Allison, Kieth Riley, and Jason Bintz, and many others from my Catacombian days, including new Catacombians on the scene like Eric Brown. Dont feel excluded if I didnt just mention your name and you are reading this. If I knew you as a friend at all in the past two years, then you are immensely important. My friendships are what have kept me going for the past two years. I have been so strengthened and uplifted and sharpened by the community God has allowed me to be a part of for five years in Chattanooga, that I cannot hope to express my thankfulness on this blog.
God also led me to a most wonderful church during this time, Rock Creek Fellowship. He planted seeds for a relationship between me and my pastor, Eric Youngblood, from whom I would later receive the most intimate pastoral care and friendship that I had ever experienced.
And so, though the 2002-2003 school year would be one of the most difficult years of my college career, and one of the most costly to my grades, I ended it on a surprisingly high note. I was blessed with an inordinate amount of rich friendships, and I was beginning new relationships which would become crucial for the next two years of my life. And I had a lot of fun that spring semester, perhaps more fun than I had ever had in college up to that point.
But then the summer hit, and I had a lot of choices to make. I had given up on the idea of going to seminary, so what was I to do. Well I decided to live in a big yellow house on 41st avenue in St. Elmo (one which would have a long legacy of Covenant students) with Jason Bintz, Jason Luther, Steve Strawbridge, David Page, and Paul Nedelisky. I decided to get a job waiting tables at the Tortilla Factory. And by the end of the summer, after nearly avoiding a decision to move to East Texas and become a house parent for troubled teens (a position that I actually went to East Texas to intervew for and one that I actually accepted before I rejected), and after attending the Howard family crab feast in Silver Spring, Maryland where I met a girl named Kathy Miner, I had finally decided to raise money so that I could begin a short term missionary internship in Trnava, Slovakia by the next spring.
More on that in the next chapter.