I am no longer the same.

This past year, I was a dull piece of metal. I sat on the shelf and saw others being used as I was turning to rust. God has changed me and has brought me back to a place where I can serve him again. Oh, the excitement and joy I have experienced as I have come back to the Lord. It has been so refreshing to come back to the well and drink my fill! I feel like words are inadequate to express the awesome joy that God has given me the past few days. I feel like there is so much to tell about the past three weeks but I am not sure if I�m up to the task of writing it all down. Maybe I�ll tell some of my story now and finish it later.

It began when God took everything away:

The past year of college was tough for me, and slowly as more and more things fought for my time and focus, I lost sight of God. He slowly became a separate part of my life. A separate file stored away in a drawer that was rarely, if ever, taken out and looked at. It was something that was easily put away and forgotten. Slowly God took away things that I had come to depend on. The crutch that I was using was snatched from me and nothing was going to break my fall from the fast approaching asphalt. I hit the ground and wallowing in my self-pity, I laid like a crippled man who had fallen out of his wheel chair.

This was just before the summer started. After a couple weeks of being at home and working, I started project and began to get to know the 9 other college students I would be spending the rest of the summer with. Outnumbered by females, I made a promise that I would look more deeply than the outside since I am prone to trip over myself trying to win the affections of any girl that comes along. My relationship with Meghan this past year may have been a poor decision, but it helped me see that there is a lot more to a girl than her looks. My relationship with Meghan had an outer shell with nothing inside. No friendship. Nothing. I came to find out that looks are an extremely small thing in the grand scheme of things. When I look at a girl, the first thing I want to think is how much I love her walk with the Lord. Then the second thing I want to think is, how much I enjoy their company and am sad when it is absent. I want to covet time with this person because being with them brings me joy and is encouraging. I haven�t thought too much about it though. I guess I�ve been preoccupied.

In my life, I have felt like my relationship with the Lord has grown extremely slowly. It has probably been due to my inability to grasp the complete truth of the gospel. As God has taken my pitiful view of who I am in relation to Him, it has transformed the way I live my life. All of my life I have been so full of myself. This summer, God has slowly been doing away with my old view of him and has been replacing it with a radically new view.

My old view of God grew on the premise that things revolved around me. I was completely convinced that God existed to improve my quality of life. I was under the impression that God had placed his affections for humanity above everything else. I had also come to believe that I deserved God�s love. I had broken God down to be a harmless lamb when I had conveniently forgotten that he was a mighty lion. As my view of God became smaller, my excitement for the furthering of his kingdom followed suit. Pretty soon God became unimportant to me.

In the last month God has replaced my old way of thinking. He showed me that no matter what I would like to think, I am not important. He will receive the honor that is his due, with or without my help. We are objects of wrath and we don�t deserve his affections, but deserve death instead. God has reminded me that His own glory is his greatest priority and we were created to glorify him. He is in NO WAY someone to be used to improve my life but I am here to be used by him to improve the measure of his glory. He is helping me see that the greatest consequence of my sin isn�t about how it will affect me, but how it will profane the name that I bear.

God�s greatest act of love was letting sinful man bear his name when he knew we would get it filthy. He gave us his son when he knew that we would spit in his face and nail him to a roman cross.

God put his most prized possession in the hands of a fumbling child�

and we broke it.