I spent the first sixteen years of my life separated from God. Of course, as an infant and toddler you can't be guilty of that, for you are incapable of being cognisant of God's existence. I estimate that around the age of five you have the cognitive ability to understand God in a small enough way to make the decision to accept Christ (or at least His existence). I say that because that was around the age I first knew of anything beyond human existence. So, if we want to be technical here, I'd say I spent 12 years separated from God, from when I was 5- to 17-years-old. I'm seven years into my faith now — just seven short years. It feels a lot longer than that, though. In that short time, however, God has revealed things to me that I never anticipated to know, and He has set the course of my life on several amazing journeys, especially now as a prospecting pastor doing my undergrad; and the ultimate journey towards salvaging my salvation when Christ returns. In just four years after giving myself to Christ, God revealed to me His plan for me to be a pastor and the necessary steps to take in order to get there. At times I feel that I'm not worthy of this great calling, although I am grateful for it. I have Christian friends who've been in the faith much longer than I have, and yet God has bestowed upon me this calling of being a pastor in order to teach them (and myself, of course). As I write this God is telling me that it is not the quantity of faith, but the quality of faith. God doesn't call the qualified; He qualifies the called. I may not feel worthy, but apparently God thinks I am and He is working in me and through me, qualifying me more and more — perfecting my faith. But I still wonder, "Why me?" Yes, I take pride in my faith (without the sin of pride) and it is better than most peoples' faith I know, which I do not take comfort in but am rather disturbed by it. At first glance my faith is great, but I fall back into sin just like anybody else, yet God not only forgives me every time, but he also still holds on to this calling He has given me.
So I grow ever more curious of just what His purpose is for me, specifically. What great accomplishments does He have in store for me? I have goals, I have visions — I have dreams I wish to achieve for the sake of God's glory. For the longest time I've seen myself the head of an organisation that takes in abused and troubled children and educates them spiritually and maybe even academically. I am no intellectual of business by any means, so I have no idea how this would be achieved. Whether this is just a desire of mine out of compassion or something God has placed into my heart to achieve, I do not know. Perhaps it is because my confidence in achieving this is lacking, which I now see is a problem with trusting God. I just don't know if He wants me to do this. If it is, I'm sure He'll reveal to me in time how I'm supposed to achieve it. I have this overwhelming desire to preach to youth, from middle school to college age, especially the younger ones approaching or already in their adolescent years. Adolescence is such a fragile state of faith, for in adolescence we are just formulating a sense of independence and identity. Because we are searching for this new independence and identity, the danger is choosing to become independent of God and not gaining one's identity in Christ, and as it appears to me this happens far too often. That was me for most of my adolescent years, for I was seventeen when I came to Christ — the brink of adolescence and just approaching early adulthood. I can understand where each of these kids are coming from because of my own darkness, and I just desire to preach to and guide each one of them I come across. Adolescence is a dangerous time of our lives where Satan targets us heavily to inspire independence from God. This is because as we transition from adolescence into adulthood, we transition from using our emotions to using our intellectual capacity, and Satan doesn't want us to use our brains for God. (It is a psychological discovery that adolescents primarily use the amygdala of the brain that is responsible for emotion control, and after the transition into early adulthood we begin to use more efficiently our prefrontal cortex that is responsible for logic and reasoning and abstract thinking.)
I've spent more years of my life away from God than I have with Him, yet God has this great plan for me. Not including infancy and toddler stages, I've spent 11 years away from Christ and 7 years with Him. I always wonder where I'll be at in my faith and in life after 11 years of being with Him, then 16, then twenty... I suppose this is one of many things that makes God so amazing, that it doesn't matter how long you've known Him; the only thing that really matters is the quality of your faith in Him. Faith cannot be calculated or measured by human instruments. Only God knows the exact amount of your faith, and if it is great, He'll probably let you know, whether it be through trials (as a test and/or discipline) or blessings. I've always had such a strong desire to increase my knowledge in God's Word, which is probably why the past seven years seem so much longer because of all the knowledge and wisdom God has already revealed to me. Time certainly flies by when you invest all or most of your time in God, and I can now agree that life is, indeed, short. It's strange thinking that I'm already 24-years-old, almost a quarter of a century, and even stranger thinking that it's only been seven years since I've known Christ and that it seems much longer than that. (Yes, I know that 24 years is youth, but for me, in the present, it's a long time. Anyone older than that, it will not appear so due to different vantage points, but all these blog entries are from my vantage point.) Maybe it's the quality of my faith that distorts the time. Time, after all, is only a meagre perception. I have come to personally know Christ so well in just this short amount of time that it doesn't seem like it took seven years to know Him this well, and yet I still have so much to learn! Basically what I'm saying is that what takes some people ten or fifteen years or even a lifetime to know Him on a personal level has only taken me seven years. I'm sure others can relate to this. This is a great sense of accomplishment for me not so I can gloat about it (and I don't), but on a personal level because of how miserable I was for all those years without Christ and the many years I spent in self-loathing. I don't boast about my faith; I boast about Jesus Christ and His amazing love and God's awesome power.
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