God's been speaking to me this past 3 months, a lot. My heart is discontent and I feel conviction. I love feeling that way though because I know that the Holy Spirit is doing something inside my heart. I don't ever want to feel content spiritually because when I do that will be the moment when I stop running toward Jesus. I want to continue to sprint toward our Lord and encourage others to run along side of me. I think that the conviction is partially stemmed because at my university I have two very distinct group of friends, believers and non-believers. Almost all of my believer friends all associate with each other and befriend other believers. I love these people with my whole heart. They challenge me, and make me think. They hold me accountable for my actions and they push me to better myself. The one thing that I am coming to realize about that group is that they all hold such a strong bond with eachother that it is intimidating for outsiders. Now i will come back to this but I wanna describe my other group of friends and they explain why my heart is discontent.
My nonbeliever group of friends. This is a group of about 8 girls who I bonded with last year. They don't believe in Christ as their Lord and Savior. They reitcule me for believing in him everyday. They push me in my faith all the time and make comments that can make my heart break. But you wanna know something? I love them all with my whole heart too. See I believe that God calls his followers to run into the chaos and befriend the ones who don't believe in him. I pray everyday that I they will come to find him. Until that day I will continue to love them and show them grace. I am extremely transparent with them and show them all of my faults. They know what I believe and I talk to them everyday about it. They know that it is my life and they are starting to respect that and become interested in it. I am here for them to plant seeds. It's not up to me to get them to make a decision for Christ. I am there to show them Christ and explain the gospel but they will find God in God's time. It's his thing.
Here's the issue though. I want those two groups to befriend each other. I want the believers to engage the non-believers. I want them to make relationships. I want them to all become brothers and sisters in Christ. This is where my discontent heart comes into play. The churched friends that I have are so tight that my non-churched friends are terrified of them. I wrote a paper this week for my social psychology class regarding stereotypes. In the prompt I had to break down the 5 biggest social groups that are present on campus and describe how the whole see's them. One of these groups I named the Ministry Makers. This is how I honestly described outsides view of us, " The Ministry Makers are the students whose identities are founded in a religion and they are pursuing their faith publicly. The common stereotypes and traits that this group exhibit are that the students are prudish, close-minded, kind, stuck-up, loving, non-relatable and ignorant." I wish that this wasnt their view of us but for the majority of students on this campus that is how we are seen. How can we break that? I am not sure. I think that a great place to start is to stand firm in our beliefs but to be completely transparent about our brokenness with others and share that we need a savior to save us and his name is Jesus.
My heart breaks when I say this but I am afraid to bring my non-churched friends around my churched friends because their lifestyles are so incredibly different. This is not how it should be. The believers should flock to the broken with open minds and heart to hear their stories and show them God's grace and the road to redemption. Now, I am not an expert on this and I am still trying to understand how God is explaining to me how to bridge that gap, but I am trying and that has to mean something.
God's been using music a lot to remind me of his beauty and power and I want to share with you a few of my favorite lyrics that have resonated within my heart this weekend.
I breathe You in, God
Bryan and Katie Torwalt
The presence of the Living God
Satisfies the depths of my heart
And all of me I change when you came
And I'm led free by Your glory and grace
And I breathe You in,God
Cos You are there all around me
The kindness of Your love's pure light
Pierces through the darkest of all night
And everything is possible now
For God is here
And God is good
And You are good, God
For You are good to me
And when I don't understand
I will choose You
And when I don't understand
I will choose to love You, God
Sing Holy
Another Bryan and Katie
All of heaven, all creation
All the angels, sing holy
