I Want To Live

Bay City, Oregon
Volume 3, Issue 23
August 30, 2008

-I Want To Live-
…by the freedom he has given me…

I am so thankful to be alive, to be truly living. I would have it no other way. As I read stories of the Lost Boys of Sudan I am ever more drawn to know them, to honor them, to learn from them. Their stories are horrific, their trials beyond what anyone should have to bear, the pain and suffering so intense and endured by so many who were so young.

How am I so privileged to lead the life I do? Some days I weep for the lost, the forsaken, the scorned. I wish I wept more. I wish I lifted others up to God more than I raise myself. Sometimes I desire so badly to change this world that it makes me hurt inside. Sometimes I desire to change myself – why can’t I be more loving, why do I so often fail to care, why do I neglect the abandoned, why do I love myself more than I love others? The list goes on.

I don’t want to live an ordinary life. I want to live a life focused completely on Christ. I have a long way to go.

I wish I knew what to do more often, what to say to make everything right, how to react when things are going wrong, how to change the generational mainstay of poverty, how to help the homeless and journey together to find life, how to gently help the atheist to see and walk beside the agnostic hand in hand, how to ease suffering and help carry the burden of my neighbor.

I am filled with hope as I write this. God is working, in me and in all of us. He has not abandoned nor forsaken his people. I know how he has changed me, and it is amazing. I know he can change this world. I know we can change this world through him.

I hope I always have thoughts about why the world isn’t right, and what I can do to help. I hope I always seek to be extraordinary, not for self glory, but to live out the life God has called me to so that his glory can be proclaimed. I hope we all seek to be extraordinary. The more I consider the notion, the more of a rebel I think I am. I do not buck authority, at least not often, but I buck the notion that I must satisfy the status quo, that I must conform to the world’s desires, that I must sacrifice my identity to be normal. I am not normal, and I don’t think I ever will be. I want to live life and live it to its fullest. I want to drink deeply from the well of Christ and live by the freedom he has given me.