Happies and Crappies.

Today was awesome, here’s why.  I went to lunch with my friends Victoria, Lindsey and Amelie at Chickfila.  We used coups because we all camped out this summer at a chickfila opening along with some other friends.  After lunch I was dropped off for class.  

After class I started my walk home and I had two options. Option 1: walk down the sidewalk along Port Republic road…boring. Option 2: Have an adventure walking through the train yard and over the bridge back to the house. I chose the adventure.

I call it an adventure and it was but part of this journey home has become my usual walk to the quad from my house. As I was walking around I was thinking about a couple things.

First Thought of the day:

It is much easier for me to see God in warm, beautiful weather.  Great days this time of year are very bittersweet because I know that cold weather is coming and I know that there are going to be cold and cloudy days that I will beg the question “Where are you God?”  So it’s much easier for me to see God when my life is full of color and warmth but when it gets cold and grey…those are the days that seem to haunt me. 

It’s interesting to me that on great days, like today, I can see God but if I’m honest I don’t see or feel that I “need” him too much today.  But, on the grey days, that I know are coming, I don’t see God but very desperately need Him.  Strange...

We have to have the best of both of those things; in our best days we have to realize our unbelievable NEED for God and in our worst days we have to learn to praise Him for another day of a beating heart in our chests.

I know there are days that are much easier to love God, much like marriage, there are days that I’m sure it is going to be much easier to love your wife/husband.  That’s if we define our love in terms of “liking” people…that’s always much easier, to like people.  That’s why God asks us to make the COVENANT of marriage…to make a choice to love our wives/husbands.

            Today on the railroad tracks I made a covenant to love the Lord in the grey days to come.  The days that loving and being thankful aren't easy.

Second thought of the day:

I mentioned my walk back from class.  As I was walking back I was thinking about Moses and how he walked the same stretches for 40 years.  I’ve only been walking this route for a week and I already feel kind of bored.  I can only imagine how bored Moses must have been.  Then God showed up one day in Moses life.  God spoke to Moses through a burning bush and he told him to take his shoes off because the ground he was standing on was Holy.

I didn’t have a burning bush but I did have a huge pile of metal spikes and bolts and screws and as I looked at them I realized how similar my situation is to Moses’.  Every day I walk to and from campus and I rarely look around at the world surrounding me.  Even more rare than that do I think about the dirt underneath my feet.  When God told Moses to take off his shoes because the ground he was standing on was Holy; the ground didn’t just become Holy.  It had been Holy this entire time but Moses didn’t know it.

This thought isn’t mine, I heard Rob Bell say this at some point but it’s truth is awesome.

Am I passing burning bushes on the left and right every day on my path to and from classes but I’m too distracted to see them? What conversations are waiting to happen with people at JMU if I was bold enough to not wear headphones on my walk to class? Do I really live and understand that the ground beneath my toes is Holy ground?

I’m praying to know this deep in my bones every day.