There is a plea in my heart
it is screamed out in song
from every part
asking and crying, " how long"

how long, 'til i see your plan?
'til from this body i'm released
and before your throne i stand
to hear my father say,
" with you i am pleased"

There are days that i really struggle with depression. this is one of them. There is such an intense longing to know God better and just be with Him so i can see His throne, bask in his glory, praise Him, and know him. There is very little that seems worth anything when you are in a bought of depression, but the fascinating thing about Jesus is he constantly reminds me of how real life is, even in the midst of a depression. He reminds me of His grace, even in the darkest moments in my head, there is so much light i can still see. I have never had this type of hope in depression before.

Jesus grounds me in reality in my disconnects from reality in depression. Which is so amazing, since depression distorts everything you see to a point where everything has no weight and it is all completely meaningless. That doesn't happen anymore in my mind. God's grace and his love are so over powering. every scene and failure of this world really means nothing in comparison to the eternal weight of who God is and what His grace is.

I do long, i yearn to see my father.

i have my second interview with seattle drip today! WOOT WOOT.

i am joining the group of nerds now. I am a huge fan of comics that make jokes about video games i grew up on. HA. well, I am enjoying it. Old video games and calvin and hobbes are some of the highest joys in my life. Mario was my father. so, i mean, what do you expect?

Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.

The concept of an ebenezer is one i love, since it is such an amazing testament of God's faithfulness. Basically when samuel made a stone pile and named it ebenezer using the rocks at a reminder of God's faithfulness, that is great to me. My tattoos are ebenezers, since they are constant reminders of how far God has carried me and they contain stories of God's faithfulness in them. I just want to take a little time and write about some of the oddity and how god has been faithful in my trip to PA. To start, the only reason i got to come up to PA was because my boss at the coffee shop i worked at fired me the day before i got asked to be a wilderness camp counselor on a mountain in PA. Which is funny, since i had been praying that God would open up a way for me to travel north, since i had never been north.

Another area, i have been asking god to open up doors to get a motorcycle. well, the model of motorcycle i wanted was on ebay, almost brand new, and the auction ended since it was a hundred dollars out of my price range. my roomies and i prayed that if we were meant to buy the motorcycle we would be able to buy it outside of Ebay for 1100 dollars. that is the exact amount the man offered the bike to us for when i emailed him.

When i finally got to the camp i was working at i was pretty apathetic and focused on myself, since i was ready to be home, start looking for a job for the school year, get back to my home church, and my community. I wanted all these things for my own comfort in spite of i was hired to be a guide to christ to these kids. I wasn't trying to dig into the kids, get to know them, mentor them, anything. In the end, that didn't matter since God worked through me even when i was trying to work. After two days kids issues starting flooding to the surface, fights, heart breaking home stories, and pleas for God's grace all were happening around us. Every single kid we had, all 18 highschoolers, either asked for better understanding of who God is and what he has done for us or accepted Jesus as their lord and savior. All the staff broke down at atleast one point and our issues were flooding to the surface again.

in the process of leaving the ranch to head to Sam's house to pack it up, which is six hours away, a tire blew out and it was a new tire. And another new tire had a defective sidewall and was rippling. So, after a day of looking for tires, since everything was closed on sunday, we found a mechanic who said we had to buy five tires from him and a rim to get anything. The day before a guy handed sam and i sixty dollars to help out with gas, well, the mechanic asked for sixty dollars for the tires. sam and i were changing the tires on the rims, which is an ordeal when you only know half of the process. After thirty minutes of struggling in the shop, randomly an old friend of sam walks in and he worked in a tire shop for a few years. He just decided to walk in the shop to see if anyone was in there, even though it was closed.

Sam and i have a twenty hour drive tomorrow to get back to mississippi and we have two vehicles, since we are bringing sams truck down to jackson. We looked into getting a car dolly and it was going to cost $260 to get the dolly. that is double the cost of gas in my car to drive down. we decided to go into the uhaul store and just see if they could work anything out. before going in i said the max i could pay would be $140, ten dollars more than my original cost in gas. We go into the store, explain to the guy we want to get a dolly, but financially it didn't make sense to get a dolly that cost more than our gas. the guy looks at us and says, " how does $140 sound?" sam and i nearly screamed, since now we can tag team drive and not have to stop for rest the whole way down to mississippi.

also, I got a call back from an online application i submitted to a coffee company in jackson. The owner just happened to want to schedule an interview with me the day after i get back to town, knows my roommate, and a good friend of mine from church is one of his managers. so, we will see what will happen with the job, but everything in the past few weeks has been orchestrated to force me to see God's hand in my life. There really isn't any way around it, i am not in control of my life, but someone who plans things a lot better than i can is and God really does have my best interests in mind, even though loosing my job, tires blowing, getting stranded, all those things did not seem like they were good and in reality weren't great to happen, but there is a bigger plan in mind. God is faithful, and here i raise my ebenezers with gratitude, since God is faithful. these are only some of the things that happened. there are more, but i am long winded in this. so, with this i end:

" it is for freedom that christ has set us free. stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be yourselves be burdened again by a yolk of slavery" galatains 5:1

This is possibly the best use of post-it-notes i have ever seen. Go france.

The week of wilderness paintball camp is over. It is kind of an amazing feeling to be done with it, since i can finally start the long journey back home. It is an odd thing being homesick, since i have never had a place that i missed or wanted to go to, since i have never had a home before. Jackson has quickly become my home, though. Since i long to go back and see my house, my friends, my routines, all of it.

Wilderness camp: basically, we had the dream team of counselors, since we all knew each other and had worked together before and we all have the same focus. on top of that we had the dream team of campers for the most part. For the first two days i did virtually no work and had very little interaction with the campers and i was just being apathetic. then we had a fight break out between two campers on wednesday afternoon. That was basically a doorway to getting into the real issues into their heart and then we had more fights break out and more and more and more heart issues coming out and more and more and more opportunities to tell them about jesus and confront some of the kids as their christian brothers, which was incredible. This was a wake up call for me, since i was just cruising through this week of camp without really going into any depth with the kids, i didn't want depth. in the end, god was going to do his work regardless of how i felt or what i wanted and he did. The most incredible moment was after a morning devotion two kids who were open non-chrisitians talked to a counselor and said they wanted to talk to their aunt about becoming christians and they wanted to accept jesus into their life. it was increible to see God work through us like that.

To change subjects, what about joy and passion? i feel like a lot of us, including me have lost our joy and passion in the christian life. what i mean by that is like when paul tells us to be prepared to give an answer for our hope and joy. how often do you or i get asked from people why we have so much joy or hope? I have experienced that incredible joy, since i went through most of my life not seeing color. I struggled with depression to the point of where i could not see color. when all that changed is when i started to realize how much i was forgiven. a year and a half ago i had messed up really badly and it took several months, but God compelled me to accept his forgiveness. After that, i saw color for the first time. it is the most amazing thing to see a tree actually be green instead of being a shade of grey. The reason why i bring this up is we all have such sin focused lives that we forget to look at grace. we forget, i forget.

Living in guilt, in the end, is selfish. All sin, past, present, and the ones we have not done yet are paid for. We tend to focus on our sin, make a list of our top five struggles, and work on those struggles. i am all for that, but in the midst of working on this, we forget to look at grace. What are our top five ways we express and receive grace? logically if we are focusing more and more on christ we are going to sin less, and i am a guilt ridden person who struggles to accept that he is forgiven. I am though and the future grace Christ will give me when it is time is huge an amazing thought all the more. To be straight, this isn't a license to sin and if you see it as one you have never felt what grace actually is or actually seen your sin nature.

In the end, this gift is such an amazing joy in my life. I have found one thing and only one thing that i deserve: death. Everything beyond that is grace and i have been given eternal life, perfect body and being in heaven, and forgiveness here. I can't help, but grin ear to ear right now. This is amazing grace indeed. for every look at sin you take, take 20 looks at our amazing grace from jesus.