My Life is a Book

At the beginning of my 8^th grade year I wrote a song called, “The End of the School Year Blues” and it was suppose to be about how weird it was to be moving from middle school to high school and all that jazz but now as I look back, I laugh at myself.  Because here I am, fresh off my last test of my high school life and I am sitting here trying to cope with how weird it is now to yet again be facing those end of the school year blues and to be moving onto the next part of my life.

            This isn’t going to be one of those sad and mopey blogs about missing high school and all that I promise but as I look back over the last four years it would be wrong for me not to let myself be nostalgic for a couple of brief moments.  I entered my freshman year of high school as a built up, punk and am leaving a broken bondservant.  Not for my glory or my recognition but simply because Jesus has captured my heart.  I remember the first time I ever fell to my face and told Jesus He could have everything and since that day, my life has never been the same.

            Jesus has rearranged my life in these last four years.  I went from believing that my days were about sports and being the best to believing my life is Christ and I am called to not be the best or the highest, but the lowest.  I went from trying to convert people to my religion to loving people and desperately longing for them to know my Lover.  I went from trusting in my own abilities, how high I could jump to how hard I could hit, to embracing my weakness and knowing Christ is glorified in those.  I met Jesus face to face in these last four years.  I have seen my friends become my brothers and my sisters.  I have seen injustice and I have swallowed poverty and I have been broken.  I have fallen out of myself by the grace of God and I have learned to walk again, literally.   Jesus has cut me open and replaced my heart with His. 

            I am deeply humbled when I look back over these years and realized how dearly Christ has held me.  I am reminded of that old story of a man and Jesus when they look back over his life on a beach.  The man sees two sets of footprints most places and one others and he thinks that those places are when Jesus has left him and when he asks Jesus about them Jesus replies, “those are the times I carried you.”  The same is true of my life these last years.  He has proven that He is faithful when I am faithless because friends, I have been faithless many many many times.  I have turned my back on my King and disobeyed the Spirit too many times to count.  I have run away from His Love but He met me with a scalpel and a promise the beginning of my sophomore year, which led me to breathe Him in deeply in the cold mountains of Mammoth, California.  He has taken me to the Nations and shown me Glory. He has placed Himself as a seal upon my arm and by next week, He will be a seal upon my heart as well.  I am my Beloved’s and He is mine.  Hallelujah.

            Jesus has blessed me during these last four years by allowing me, by His mercy, to be a small part of His heartbeat for Robinson High School.  It has been my Calcutta and it breaks my heart to leave that flock.  Even as I type this I feel an empty longing because I am done.  I have been privileged to see lives run head on into Salvation and Jesus redeemed those who seemed hopeless.  But even still I am stranded here thinking that there is so much more to do at that school and I am not finished yet, but I feel the powerful hand of God and His voice saying very clearly, “yes, you are”.  The easy thing for me to do would be to be sad about the work not finished in those halls but instead I will be thankful and give praise to Jesus for the thing that’s were done.  We have felt the Holy Spirit begin to rapture lives as we have walked by the lockers and the classrooms.  We have seen kids fall to their knees and give everything to Jesus.  We have seen disciples making disciples and I cannot begin to capture the love that has been unleashed at that school.  I get emotional when I write this because I keep getting flashbacks to the night during my junior year when Jesus wrung my heart out and I began to weep for the lost at Robinson and beyond.  Oh, that the Lord will continue to raise leaders there and set Robinson on fire for His glory.  And I leave with hope knowing Christ moved and is moving and that Jesus still has His hand on the campus. 

            The most beautiful thing about high school has been waking up each day with Purpose and Reason.  I have fallen in love with Jesus Christ: not the idea, not the good intention of religion, not the show, but the person of Christ himself. 

So here I am, the end of the school year blues playing in the back round, ready to run.  I will not look back but only forward to Jesus.  He has known since the before time that I would spend four years learning to love at Robinson and that I will spend four more (or however many more) at Fayetteville, doing the same thing.  I will follow Him and go where He desires for me to go and I will open my mouth when He allows me to.  For I am alive for His glory, to know Christ and to make Him known.  Hallelujah, all I have is Christ.

            To end this shorter post, I want to share a poem that I wrote about if my life were a book.  I wrote this poem from an idea my friend Zac gave me.  He once asked me if I ever thought about life being a book with the letters being seconds, words being minutes, hours being sentences, days being paragraphs, weeks being pages, months being chapters, and years being parts.  Since I hadn’t ever thought about it like that, I began to meditate over this idea and a poem formed soon after.  The main reason I share this is because it puts high school in focus, with it just being a small part of my life, and how the end is always just the beginning to something new.

What if my life is a book?

If I am the main character

In a story that will soon

Come to an end.

Each second is like a letter,

And as they begin to tick by,

One by one, an image starts

To come together of possibly

Something much greater.

A minute is a word.

But with that word, what am

I trying to say?

I only have so many words

To write and live until I run out of space.

The words form into sentences

With each sentence another hour

Of my life passes by unaccounted for.

Do I still believe that the hours

Will go on forever, even now,

Since they are passing so quickly?

Tonight as I crawl into my dreams

I watch another day walk away which means

Another paragraph has been written.

And therefore I start to question,

What was accomplished with that paragraph?

Maybe nothing? Maybe everything?

Nonetheless, my heart is burning

To never waste another paragraph.

This week was a blur for me

And a whole page has been revealed.

With that page, another comes into view.

But with this flick of the wrist

I seem to want to know

What will be written on the blank white abyss.

It’s as though I am not even

Writing my own story.

A month ago I was holding my breath for

The next chapter and what it would hold.

I only have so many chapters

Until there can be no more written.

So I have moved, and am changing,

Letting my heart burn and move

Deep within me where I am to go.

One more year down and who knows

How many more there are to go.

But this part of my story has

Been opened up to a new one.

Where I will go in this part,

 I won’t know until I get there.

But I have tasted Purpose

And I intend on not losing another letter.

I can only pray that as my

Right hand turns the week

And my left hand fills with another page,

That the end of my story

Holds a beautiful beginning.

Isn’t the end of something always

Just the beginning of something new?

Because although I am coming to the end,

I feel as if I have just begun to live.