Man Up

So, life has been pretty great the past couple weeks. I've realised certain things about myself...not only that, but finally seem to have the motivation to do something about them. Reading some Tozer ("The Pursuit of God"), Chambers ("My Utmost for His Highest"), Dostoyevsky ("The Gambler"), and memorising some new Scripture (Job 37:21-24..beautiful, beautiful passage) have been helping me kick-start certain areas of my life. As a recovering Calvinist, I'm still more used to asking God to change me than trying to change myself. Asking Him for a heart-change is, of course, a very good thing to ask, but it also requires hard work.

When I look back five years from now, will I be able to say, "I am so glad I didn't waste any more time," or will I say, "Why hasn't anything happened yet?"

To this end, I've been taking some steps to become more disciplined in certain areas of my life. I've been exercising more (strangely enough, I've missed it...), being more intentional with my time in the morning, reading more, spending less time on the computer, keeping the house more clean, and trying to live without fear (in a good way).

For several months now, I've also been a part of a small online prayer group with two of my friends. At the same time as God was getting the ball rolling with all these things in my life, our group got re-energised and we're moving forward with a new strength. God's timing rocks.

My long-time friend Mike stopped at my house the other day, and I discussed a little bit of this with him. I told him I'm sick of being a little boy, and I want to be a man. I'm sick of wasting time playing video games, even if it seems like there's nothing better to do (which is a lie, anyway). I have so many productive things I could be doing that I actually hardly have enough time for any of them; I just haven't been taking advantage of them.

One afternoon last week, I had a fight with a bout of severe depression. I don't like admitting it publicly like this, but it is what it is. Interestingly, the last time I struggled with depression this hard was the beginning of this blog, and I haven't had it so bad since then. At the time it happened, I'm actually not surprised at all. I'm finally making changes in my life to become more of a Godly, disciplined man, and Satan tries to ruin me in the best way possible: convince me that there's no point to anything I'm doing.

When Satan tries to screw things up that hard, you know you're on the right track.

One of my friends gave me a word a while back: sehnsucht. It's German, and we don't actually have an adequate equivalent for it in English...but when I looked it up, I realised that I actually know this word very well. C.S. Lewis describes it like this: "That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of "Kubla Khan", the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves." This feeling (described more in my post Wapiti Wilderness) has been with me more and more lately, if you couldn't already tell from my previous post, Green Walk. I don't know why; I just feel like I'm on the brink of something huge, but I can't tell what it is...like a blind man standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

God's got something big in store.

Peace.