Harder, Lord Jesus

I'm working reallyyyyyyy hard to be able to have a new post at least once a week. I'm not quite there yet, which is obvious, but realize that if it takes me so long to come out with a new post, it means I'm sitting in the dining room working until 10pm every night just to get caught up on school. Like I talked about in the last post, I was EXTREMELY far behind on school. Currently I'm so much closer to being caught up, but I'm not there yet.



OK, so I'll keep this brief, but I wanted to continue on what I was telling you in the last post.

After church the day I rededicated, I went out to dinner with my family and basically explained to them why the heck I was up there. My mom-if not the boys too-knew that I just wasn't myself and that I was behind on school and that I had had some issues with depression earlier that fall, but even the people closest to me in my life had NO IDEA what I was really going through because I was bottling it up and not letting anyone know what was going on.

So I urge you, if you have a friend that's generally quiet and seems happy, drag answers out of them on how they are ACTUALLY feeling. Even if they won't pour out their heart to you and tell you exactly what's going on, they'll know that you care enough to persist and that alone will give them some encouragement and pull them out of their little funk.

Anyways, I digress: The weeks after I rededicated were incredible. I was flying by the seat of my pants and realizing just how many areas of my life needed fixing. My school world and work ethic obviously needed some help....so I simply moved the area where I was doing everything and listened to music from my Zune instead so I could block everything else out. That isolation was REALLY hard for me at first, but now I definitely prefer it because I get so much more done when I have no distractions.

There were a ton of other things in my life that needed reformation as well. My prayer life was on the rocks, my living area was a disaster, I realized I hadn't even touched my Bible in about 4 months, I was eating in an unhealthy way, I was getting pretty complacent as far as physical activity is concerned, I was neglecting my relationships with friends and family, and I was not even considering how God would have me serve.

I'm not going to lie and tell you that turning your heart back to God makes everything easy...because these last couple months have been some of the hardest I've ever had. It's hard to reform just one area of your life, but it's so much harder to try to fix like 20 things at the same time. I pretty much just went to bed later and got up earlier; and even if it ended up taking me 3 hours on a given morning I would spend as much time as I needed with God. Morning after morning I was waiting to become normal again and start becoming numb, but it hasn't happened yet. I wake up and feel this overwhelming love that leaves me curled up on my bed weeping almost every morning-but definitely not the sad kind of weeping. I have never been happier in my life than I am right now.

When I was in middle school, I spent a HUGE amount of time learning about spiritual disciplines. At that point in time I was like, "yeah, yeah, spiritual discplines...those neccesary things that everyone hates....those things that ya just kinda have to do to be a good Christian...." It was all kind of surfacy then, because deep down I KNEW I needed to cultivate spiritual discplines, yet I saw no need to start any time soon.

Now, however, I am ever-increasingly convinced how vital spiritual discplines are to your relationship with God. If you aren't listening to God (a.k.a reading the Bible), how can you learn Him? If you aren't being held accountable (a.k.a being in fellowship with other Christians), how can you grow? If you don't even talk to Your Creator, how do you think you're gonna know what His Will is for you?

I'm reading an incredible book currently called Praise Habit, by the fantastic David Crowder. He essentially speaks of the importance of wearing Jesus the way that Nuns wear their Habits. Worshiping God is not confined to church on Sunday mornings or standing on a beach at sunrise. He can be seen in the good times of our lives AND the dark times.

However, there's also a fragile balance between having spiritual disciplines and becoming a super-religious legalistic monster. I definitely don't want to be that again. I think though that as long as you are growing and enjoying the habit you are in, and as long as you do it out of sheer love for God rather than obligation, that that habit is good and beneficial to you.

So, all at once I started to cultivate some disciplines into my life. It's been really tough. I can't tell you how much it's changed me though....I can't even measure it anymore. I've read through so much of the Bible since then and I look forward to spending that time with God every morning and every night. I finally started doing Bible Bowl again and it's been kind of addictive. I'm so excited about playing now and want to just get better and better. I also look for every moment now to serve or be a blessing to other people.

Now, if all this is starting to get obnoxious to you, I have some advice: STOP READING. If you're still here, I just want to mention that I tell you all this not to toot my own horn, and boast about what I've accomplished in the last couple months, but rather tell you what God has done. I mean, I had to get up every morning and submit, but that's really all I've done. 1&2 Corinthians tells us manyyyy many times in many ways, "Let Him who boasts, boast in the Lord". If you read the last few chapters of 2 Corinthians, Paul does a LOTTTTTT of boasting. But he always does it with the attitude of "Well, here's what happened, but it wasn't me. If you're gonna be impressed, be impressed with God." That's kinda what I'm aiming for now.

Finally, I want to just tell you what the title means. I often have a particular phrase or a song lyric that's stuck in my head for weeks or months at a time. It is literally in my thoughts every moment of the day that I'm not thinking about something else from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep. Well, since all this craziness started, my thought has been "Harder Lord Jesus". And sometimes I'm sitting there at 11:30 at night studying Bible Bowl and my head is throbbing from a headache and my mind shifts to old thinking. I sit back for a moment and sigh and think, "What is the point of working my butt of all day every day? I am TIRED of this. I can't do it anymore. I WON'T do it anymore."

Then that sweet, painful, beautiful, testing thought comes into my mind again: "Harder, Lord Jesus. Harder. Harder. Harder. Push me harder. You were perfect and still you pushed yourself harder for me. Harder, harder harder." And pretty soon, oddly enough, I feel like I have the strength to keep going.