“Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing out eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has set down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1-2

I was reading this tonight, and I was reminded about how easy it is for me to get caught up in the things that are preventing me from becoming more like Christ. Isn’t it easy for each of us to get stuck in our daily routines and forget about the race that God has set before us to run? Just about every day I forget about what I have in Christ, and I take the time that I have in that day that focus on how I’m not getting what I want. Or… if I’m not focusing on how I’m not getting what I want, I’m focusing on trying to find a way to elevate myself above God. Somehow what I want or need is more important than God’s plan in my mind, and in the rare moments that I realize I’m treating myself as greater than God, I make myself sick.

Reading this tonight reminded me that I need to keep myself focused on the race that God has set before me. I need to keep a fact solid in my mind: God is more important than I am. Christ is the reason I am here, and any trials or temptations I am going through, I am going through because it is to His glory. Every single day I forget that simple fact. How would we all live if we were constantly focused on that?

I am one selfish human being.

What is the first thing that we think each morning when we wake up? I know that it’s not ‘Great! Yay! It’s time to wake up again!’ When I was little, my brother and I used to wake up every morning before the sun came up. Don’t ask me why, but we would spend the next forty-five minutes or so shouting ‘Can I get up now?’ until finally my mom or dad said yes. We hated sleep so much that when morning came, we couldn’t wait to jump out of bed and start doing stuff. Things have changed. Now, I’m pretty content to sit there in bed doing nothing until I absolutely have to.

A typical morning for me includes hitting the snooze button eight or nine times, finally waking up about three minutes before I have to walk out the door, and then a thirty minute motorcycle ride to work. Instead of getting up insanely early now, I just do the opposite. I don’t go to sleep. It’s much easier to get work done when you’re already fully awake and you don’t have to spend three hours trying to think of something other than the warm bed (or cold floor) you just crawled out of (only some of you will catch that reference). I keep finding it extremely difficult to keep the right attitude when I have to do the exact same thing every single morning, day after day. Unfortunately, that’s just not how my brain works.

My brain works in project form. A different project every few weeks or months, and that keeps me entertained. But the problem is, that leads to me being extremely busy and a bit overwhelmed with all the projects that I’m doing, and unable to focus on any one of them. This then leads to five minutes on one project, ten on another, then back to the first one, etc, until my head almost explodes from thinking so many things at the same time. I have a feeling that also leads to my lack of ability to have a conversation without spending a great deal of energy making myself focus.

For example, in the last few months I’ve been working the good ‘ole full-time job, working heavily on FAULT (which includes editing, business plan, website), getting a separate home business off the ground, attempting to get more involved in Church, and started learning Greek. I am pretty much schizophrenic at this point.

The problem is, there are a lot of people that do exactly the same thing I do. They build up so many projects to keep from getting bored that they end up losing focus on the end goal. Next, they forget completely what that end goal is. What should our end goal be? The fact is that God created everything… all of it! From the ant that bit me this morning to the coffee I drank, all the way to me. And He created all of it for a specific purpose. It was all created by Him and for Him for His purpose and His glory. We are all caught up in that (Hebrews 1:9, 2 Timothy 1:9, 1 Peter 4:11). I forget that truth pretty consistently. I forget that everything I do should be done with the intention of glorifying God (1 Corinthians 10:31). After all, if everything was created by Him, for Him, and for His purpose, then what else is there to live for. What other reason do we have to do anything?

The answer is nothing. If we’re going to live Godly lives, we should have a heart to do everything for His glory. Anything that we do for some other reason is both selfish and sinful. When everything is created for His purpose, and we take something and use it for our own purpose, we’re basically saying, “I am more important than God, so I’m going to do this one for me… after all, I deserve it, don’t I?” The truth is that we are utterly sinful and we deserve absolutely nothing! (Romans 3:10 and 6:23) When I really think about that, I realize how many areas of my life are completely absent of that intention. Why did I start all these projects after all?

Did I start the projects because I was trying to Glorify God through them, or did I start them because I was bored and needed something else to do? Did I begin them because I wanted to point people to Christ, or did I begin them because I wanted to point people to myself? Do I press the snooze button for God’s glory or mine? Why do I drink coffee? Why do I have a bad attitude when I get to work? Why do I even go to work? Am I even being a light for Christ there?

Truth be told, most everything I do is for my own glory which is completely opposite of what I should be doing. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to fix that misplaced focus.

“For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever.” (Romans 11:36)

Most people who know me can probably tell you that I hate sleep. I just don’t like it. I think it’s a huge waste of time, and I get incredibly frustrated by how much less I can do because of its hold on me. Just imagine all that you could do if you didn’t have to take a mandatory 6-8 hour break every 16 hours or so.

But then come times like this past month when sleep suddenly stops trying to win me over, and doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. There are times when I try to enjoy the break that sleep can offer. Those wonderful times when I don’t dream, those times when I spend six hours completely unconscious and thinking nothing are amazing, but even that’s something that I can’t do anymore. I think I have talked to myself too many times about how worthless sleep is, and my brain finally believes that it isn’t necessary. It now tries to fill that gap with problem solving.

I don’t have normal dreams. I don’t dream about puppies or flying or fluffy pillows. My dreams turn out to be six to eight hours of me thinking and trying to figure out something that I couldn’t figure out that day, or hours of obsessing over something that I wouldn’t think about for more than five minutes during any time when I’m awake…. but, since I’m asleep, my brain will get confused and spend that time circling around the solution to a problem that I don’t even have. That makes me wake up angry with myself that I couldn’t figure it out, and even more tired than I was when I first fell asleep. Never-mind that the problem I was trying to solve didn’t even exist.

So then I’ll spend the day working on things that actually do need working on, and I’ll get ‘tired’, feel like sleep is calling me to it, and I try to go to bed… but once I’m there, it plays a dirty trick and leaves me tossing and turning in my bed caught half-way between my wake-full thinking and my dream-filled ‘problem solving’, which leaves me even more confused about whatever problem I’m trying to solve until two or three hours after I ‘wake up’ when I realize that I solved that issue yesterday. It may not even be a specific issue, but more of a conglomeration of whatever my brain thinks I need to think about, and so it’s completely worthless think-sleep that lasts all night.

If anyone knows the secret to turning off a brain, I would be happy to hear you out.

I usually think that sleep is worthless, but I don’t realize how worthless I am without it until it decides it wants to keep me halfway between blissfull unconsciousness and productivity. It made me spend five hours the other night (while I was ‘asleep’) trying to translate “καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος” when I already knew what it meant.

Oh, Brain, if you would just realize that you can spend that time with real thoughts. Please stop attempting to make yourself feel better by trying to solve non-existent Problems.

Oh, Sleep, I am sorry that I offended you. I might be willing to take back what I said if you would let Brain turn off once again.

Oh, Problems, you don’t exist. Stop confusing Brain.

And, Mind, you do need sleep. Stop telling Brain that you don’t. You are not as self-sufficient as you think you are. If you could focus on what really is beneficial, you wouldn’t need to convince Brain that you need those eight extra hours. It’s all in the attitude =)

P.S. Days, if you could be eight hours longer, I would be very happy with you.

So, this past weekend I flew down to Florida to surprise my grandparents by coming to their 50th anniversary. All of their kids, and most of their grand-kids were there. It was the first time in awhile that they have had everyone in the same place. That combined with the fact that it was in Florida – which is a place that I have really great memories of from when I was little – brought back a whole flood memories of Family, Fun, and the South in general.

One thing that I have been blessed with beyond anything that I could ever ask for is a family, and an extended family, that are firmly rooted in biblical truth, and who aren’t afraid to step on toes to get the truth across. It’s one of those rare instances where hanging out with Family is actually a good thing!

I heard my grandpa preach this morning against the watered down gospel. There are so many people who either buy into, or preach the light and fluffy version of what Christianity really is. There’s a lot of “just open your heart, and let Jesus in”, “Jesus is waiting for you to accept him” and “pray this prayer, and you’ll be saved” out there.

First of all, it’s not that action of ‘praying the prayer’ or ‘opening your heart’ that saves you. There is absolutely nothing about the fact that you said you wanted “Jesus to come into your heart” that redeems you in God’s eyes, and when the emphasis is put on that prayer and how ‘easy’ it is, all it does is lead to either non-Christians that are thriving off an emotional high and couldn’t even explain what the gospel is to you if you asked, or to a whole lot incredibly weak Christians that have no perception of the depth of the Gospel, or of God’s character.

One example that was given in the sermon this morning was Billy Graham. When he was preaching on his circuits, they would actually plant people in the crowd to come forward when they had the alter calls. My grandpa got first hand experience of this. He was asked to be one of the ‘counselors’ that walked up towards the front. They did this to encourage non-Christians to do the same, and there were many that did that. But after Billy Graham was done, and he left the area, you could go into those same areas where the previous week ‘hundreds’ of people had been saved, and have trouble finding a single one of them. Where are all the converts? If so many people were coming to Christ, I’m pretty sure that the world wouldn’t be in the disgusting moral position that it’s in right now.

The issue is that convincing people that ‘praying the prayer’ saves them is the destruction of the gospel. You have to actually understand what the gospel is before you can believe in Christ and be saved. I’m not saying that ‘praying the prayer’ isn’t the point of salvation for some people, but I am saying that in order to be saved, it takes more than just saying those words. You have to understand what the gospel is, who Jesus is, and actually believe it – not just act on an emotional high of a ‘moving’ church service, but you need to understand on a more basic level, but deeper, level. If someone were to walk up and ask most of the people who ‘prayed the prayer’ when they were little, or at an alter call, what the gospel is and what you must do to be saved, they’d be unable to tell you.

In acts Acts 16:30-31 a prison guard asks Paul “what must I do to be saved”. What did Paul respond with? Was it “Ask Jesus to come into your heart”? Was it “Open the door and let Jesus in”? Was it “Pray this prayer”? No. Paul responds with, “believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved.” You must believe in your heart that Jesus is the Son of God. You must believe that God sent him here, and that Jesus paid the price for all of your sins. You must believe there’s nothing you can do of your own merit to the do same, and you must believe that Jesus rose again on the third day and that the price He paid on the cross was sufficient. You must make Him your Lord and your Savior.

Saying “Jesus is waiting, just let Him in” limits God. It’s like saying “Jesus has done everything He can to save you, but now you have to save yourself by ‘choosing’ Him.” God is the one that does the saving, and we have nothing to do with it. We believe in Him because the Holy Spirit enables us to and opens our eyes to the truth. We have the Holy Spirit because we hear the gospel, the Holy Spirit moves us to believe in Christ and we’re saved, we’re not saved because we ‘asked Him to come into our heart’.

Anyway, that was a big tangent, but I was very encouraged that my Grandpa wasn’t afraid to step on toes by confronting that head-on. There are a few in the group he was preaching to that have a more watered-down view of what the gospel is, and it was very encouraging to see him trying to steer them in the right direction. He will most definitely run into flack for that down the road.

In Acts 16, the prison guard’s entire family believes in Christ and is saved, and my Grandpa also mentioned how there is no greater joy than having your family believe in Christ and seek after Him as well. I can’t tell you what a blessing it is to have parents, and grandparents who are all seeking after Christ, and who aren’t afraid to point out what isn’t truth, and then point you to where it is in the Bible. It’s such a blessing when they also encourage you to dig down yourself and come up with truth based on biblical principle and not on conclusions that have no biblical basis.

I can only hope and pray that my family turns out as well as my grandparents family and my parents family. I’ve got an advantage because of their example, and because I was surrounded by biblical conversations. It just emphasizes how important family is. When you have a strong family, and parents that are striving to become more like Christ, you can’t really help doing the same thing yourself. I’ll say it again, I am incredibly blessed to have a strong Christian mother, a strong Christian father, and strong Christian grandparents. You can see how many bad examples there are out there, and look where the world is headed.

Fifty years is a long time to be married, and they’ve been the best examples that anyone could ask for for every one of them. Just ask my Dad! I can only hope and pray I turn out the same way! So, thank you Nana and Papa for the example you’ve been!

I can also hope that I’m in as good shape as my grandpa is in when I’m seventy-three. He still climbs mountains with us!

I’ve spent the past twenty minutes or so trying to figure out how to do this next post. I’m not sure if that’s because I have too much to say or nothing at all to say, so hopefully this post will come across with at least some meaning.

This past weekend I took an almost random (okay, it was planned) drive out to Colorado with several friends from Church. We went out to see a musical that my parents and brother were in (Annie Get Your Gun), and they were amazing by the way. You missed out. Anyway, Travis (younger-older roommate) and I could only go if we both worked on our way out there.

So, on Friday morning at around 4am we begin our journal into the unknown… which turned out to be a long drive through Utah… Utah is huge by the way…. and there’s nothing there… Fridays are normally a busy day at work for me, so I’m prepared with phone and laptop in hand and planning to be working constantly. It turns out I receive only a tenth the amount of e-mails that I normally get, and my phone (which was forwarded to my cell phone) didn’t ring a single time. This turned a day of what I thought was going to be a day of hectic working in the car into a day of great conversations, laughing, and a desperate attempt to drive through Vegas as quickly as possible…. I hate that place…

Anyway, fast-forward eighteen hours and we’re in Colorado, got 30mpg on the way, and spent far less on gas than we had planned for. We say hi to everyone, eat some amazing taco soup my mom had made for us all, talk for awhile, and then head off to sleep.

Oh! I almost left out a gigantic detail. The day before we left, my brother John and another friend (Mrs. Pitts) had flown into Denver and were driving up (yes, up) to my parents house. It was snowing, and the road was obviously very slippery. They were going around a corner a little too fast, and the car starts to swerve. It serves a little too much, and they end up driving straight off the curvy road and off the extremely steep hill next door. The car does a little gymnastics and then stops at the bottom of the hill where they both realize everyone is okay and immediately start laughing. So now the car is at the bottom of a twenty foot drop, and they’re both perfectly fine. No scrapes, no bumps, no bruises, no nothing. Oh! And they got the extra rental car insurance, too, so they pretty much just walked away without worrying about a thing. When I think about the sovereignty of God from now on, I think this instance is going to pop into my mind.

Fast forward again to Saturday morning. It’s our first day in Colorado, and we immediately head out to snowboard. Travis and Susannah had borrowed snowboards, and I had one that I could use, so it was basically free. Plus, it had snowed three feet of fresh snow in the three days leading up to this, and it was sunny and 32 degrees…. basically the most perfect snowboarding day that you could ask for. It just happened to fall on the day after we had driven eighteen hours to get there…. hmm…. God +2

After the great day of snowboarding (because of which Susannah and Travis are now master snowboarders), we head down to Salida to see the play. But Wait! There’s a catch. Mrs. Pitts had to borrow my dad’s truck to catch her flight at the airport (remember how the rental car had a run in with the ground?), and we were using the other car, so my Mom had to borrow Travis’ car (which we drove to CO) to get herself to the play. On our way down the mountain, we all get text messages that say “car won’t start”. The first thing that pops into my mind is the play, but then I realize, “how are we going to get home?” John responds with a solution, and the car starts right up! Problem solved, right? No…. it’s not.

Ten minutes later, my mom calls because she’s stuck in the driveway. That three feet of snow was starting to melt, and snowy, muddy, driveways on a hill don’t really like to let cars drive off of them. Soooo, my dad starts calling around to see if he can get her a ride to the theatre (seeing as she’s playing the starring role, and the play starts in an hour and a half), but no one answers their phone. We’re just about to head her direction to pick her up (which is forty-five minutes away) when she calls saying that she was able to get out of the driveway. There wasn’t much left of the driveway when she was finished. Here’s where we all breathe a sigh of relief.

Next, we get to the playhouse, drop off my dad and brother so they can get ready, and head off to get some pizza. This is where John’s phone rings again. It’s my mom, and the car that we had just driven 999 miles without any problems had overheated. Now it’s an hour and fifteen minutes until the play starts and the starring role is thirty minutes away with a broken car (that we have to drive home). My dad makes a few calls and gets her a ride to theatre, so the problem is solved temporarily. She finally gets there 25 minutes before the play is supposed to start, gets ready, we sit down, and off they go. For all of you who have never seen my mom, dad, and brother act, you’re missing out. Oh, and it’s a musical, so of course they were all singing, too.

The play ends, but the night isn’t over yet. We drive thirty minutes and come across our poor car which had so faithfully and fearlessly brought us out to Colorado. It starts right up, and seems to be running perfectly fine. There’s water in the reservoir, and it runs without overheating as we watch it, so we start driving up the mountain where it promptly overheats again. We then coast back down to the bottom of the mountain and start looking around some more. We couldn’t find a hose, and we didn’t have any big containers, so we’re filling up the car’s radiator with several coke bottles that are now full of water. After we start the car, my dad notices water spewing out of the back of the engine. After all of that, it looks like a hose has just come loose. All we do is put the hose back on, tighten it, fill the radiator, and drive away with a perfect car. This, again, could have been much worse and is another really good example of the sovereignty of God.

Now, remember how the hose had come loose? It wouldn’t have come loose then if my mom hadn’t had a rough time trying to get the car out of the driveway. She wouldn’t have had trouble getting out the driveway if Mrs. Pitts hadn’t had to take the truck to the airport because the car she was in drove off a cliff. And if the hose hadn’t come lose that night, it would have come loose on our way back home on Monday leaving us stranded in that gigantic state called Utah where there is nothing but dirt and sun. Am I saying my brother driving off a cliff was meant to save us from getting stranded in the middle of the desert? Not really, but I am pointing out this really good example of how God works everything together according to his perfect plan (Romans 8:28).

So, we get home, everyone talks for awhile again, eats more amazing food that my mom made, and goes to sleep.

The next morning I wake up to three text messages and a missed call from Lukas (older-older roommate). Apparently he’s in Colorado with his sister Cassia (we tried to get both of them to come to Colorado with us in the first place), and 220 miles from Denver. He needs my parents address so he doesn’t end up in the middle of nowhere. Turns out he was just a few minutes from the exit he had to take when I called him back. He’s driven 1000 miles to surprise Susannah and Travis by showing up in Colorado.

A couple hours later, when they get there, I meet them out at the road (far from the house), and we run back and have a snowball fight outside the big window. This is where we ‘accidentally’ let some snowballs hit the window which make Travis and Susannah look outside and see that they had randomly shown up in Colorado when they said that they couldn’t come in the first place! Needless to say, they were both surprised.

The rest of the day is filled with very good conversations, most of which were Christ-centered. It’s great when you have good friends, and almost every conversation that you have with them is centered around Christ and your relationship with Him. I can’t tell you how great it is to have friends that really do display Christlike character. When that’s the case, you can’t help but grow spiritually in Christ.

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling (1 Peter 4:8-9).”

When we’re selfless in our conversations and more focused on the person we’re speaking to, both people get so much more out of it, and Christ is glorified.

So… now the day is over, and we all go to bed again. The next day is Monday, and I have to work. Once again, a normally hectic day of the week turns into one of the slowest days I’ve had in a very long time which makes the fact that I have to work much less taxing on the trip. Around 1:30pm we begin on our return drive. This time we have two cars and five people, and of course, when you stick five people in a couple cars for eighteen hours, and most of them (excluding me) are selfless in their conversations, you come out on the other side knowing each other better, with strengthened friendships, and in the case of Christians, a further renewed desire to glorify Christ in whatever you do.

This trip was a big lesson for me in the fact that God has everything planned out, and His plan is perfect and sufficient. It was also a realization of how incredibly, undeservedly, blessed I am to have the family and friends that I do. If you’re ever around them, you’ll realize how you can’t help but better reflect Christ when you’re finished. One of my new-found goals is to have the same effect on people that these people have on me, in good times, in okay times, and especially when everything is going wrong.

God knows what He’s doing, and I’m going to try my best not to let me selfishness and arrogance get in the way of that. The moral of this story is: go on a road-trip with some strong Christian friends, and you’ll probably come out on the other side learning a lot more than you thought.

Plus, you’ll get to see your amazing family act in a play

I always say it, but yes, I am horrible at being consistant in sending out e-mails, or posting updates about what’s happening out here in Los Angeles, so here it goes. Hopefully this is the last “what I’m doing in general” posts, and I’ll be able to get to the specifics consistantly without months in between the posts.

I’m getting extremely excited and motivated about producing Fault. There is so much that can be done with the concept (both from a plot point of view, and from a message delivery point of view). It could end up serving as a tremendous launching point for a variety of different moral subjects that I’ve been itching to cover in some way. That usually leads to me diversing into 10,000 different screenplays because of the messages that I want to get across. This idea looks like it will allow me to focus on one plot while at the same time addressing several extremely different points and messages.

So, Fault tends to occupy a lot of my thinking time, because there’s a lot that needs to be decided when it comes to how certain points will be approached, and whether or not they’re actually approachable. I tend to think everything is approachable, but some of the concepts may just need to be introduced more slowly than others. Needless to say, if this actually takes off, and I don’t have a lot of people angry with me by the time that it’s finished, I haven’t done my job right.

But then there’s everything else.

The past two months or so are almost a complete blur to me because of everything that’s been going on. For a month and a half, we were ramping up to shooting a nine page section of the script, so that took a lot of mental energy. At the same time there’s the 40, 50, or 60 hour a week full-time job which takes up a lot of time. Once you add in Church, starting a business, starting to get involved in politics, and attempting to have a social life, you end up with one very confused Jeremy that’s running around with no idea which way is up… or down.

There is a lot that I want to say when it comes to Church, but I think that is probably going to come out in book form (longer than this book-length post), so i’ll save that for the ‘specifics’ that I’m going to get to later. Same goes for Politics. I’m really hoping that I stay consistant and actually get to posting about these things, because I’d really like to hear what other people think on the subjects as well. If I don’t continue post, feel free to pester me. I’ll deserve it.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Me and a couple others are going to be taking a road-trip out to Colorado at the end of the month to see the play that basically my entire family will be in, so I’m pretty excited about that. Oh, and I’m sure we’ll get in a couple days of snow boarding. No, this isn’t California snow, and it’s not North Carolina snow… or Georgia snow. This is the real thing. I like the real thing.

If you’re still reading this by now, I’m thoroughly impressed, so I’m going to let you go do something much more important than reading my blog. Good night, and beware the furture blog posts that may be lurking around the corner.