Where is God in the night sky?
Where is God in the city light?
Where is God in the earthquake?
Where is God in the genocide?

Where are you in my broken heart?
Everything seems to fall apart
Everything feels rusted over
Tell me that you’re there

I know that there’s a meaning to it all
A little resurrection every time I fall
You got your babies, I got my hearses
Every blessing comes with a set of curses
I got my vices, I got my vice verses
These are my vice verses
These are my vice verses

-switchfoot

I’ve seen several other people observe this phenomenon- Twitter has made people much briefer and not as elaborate (and maybe dumber), and it has made blogging much more difficult.

Well. it’s true.

In the meantime, as I figure out how to write profusely again, here are some choices God has been giving me lately…

Am I God’s employee or His lover?

Is my life defined on the fear and/or shame of failing God or in His unconditional affirming embrace?

Will I fight myself or realize that “myself” is what He loves the most?

Will I keep myself in control or will I surrender it to God?

The choice to believe that God is not only a good God, but a loving God, is a choice I realized I have not made in a very long time. I cannot live under the shame of obligated obedience and the shame produced by the futility of attempting that kind of obedience.

My obedience must be rooted in love. My determination must be rooted in love. I love how David Benner makes the distinction between “willing obedience” and “willful obedience”. I’ve been making all these hard choices of obedience in these past 2 years, but rarely have I allowed God to remind me that it’s because He loves me. These aren’t the commands of an overbearing boss, but the desires of a loving father.

I look back at the past 3 years and realize that God has been patiently waiting for me to love Him back. But I’ve been obeying out of passive agressiveness, refusing to let His love break into my heart. This past week, the knocks finally became un-ignorable and I found myself sitting by the hotel pool weeping because the love I had been avoiding since my desert season ended 3 years ago had finally pinned me down and demanded my attention. After my desert season, I was talking to God again, but He wasn’t just satisfied with that. He wasn’t satisfied with me just hearing His voice. He wasn’t satisfied with sacrificial but obligated obedience. He wanted me to love talking to Him. He wanted me to love hearing His voice. He wanted me to love choosing obedience.

God is more than a static presence. He is more than a stoic peace. Although peaceful, it is a violent and furious longing that defines the heart of our Father.

I came home realizing I could worship like I used to again. I let myself feel His love again, and didn’t fake it. And… it felt good.

…how He loves us…

I was sitting with my team leader a couple weeks ago. She looked at me and told me how much I had grown and that I was ready to take her place. I had grown so much in maturity… but she looked straight at me- “but Daniel, what you don’t have yet, but I’m excited for God to start growing in you, is to give you a voice. You have no voice sometimes, Daniel. You have authority.”

It’s ironic that I don’t have a voice. In college I used to be the crazy dreamer. I was the guy yelling out vision from the rooftops. God gave me a heart for UCSD so much. Much of the reason why I was at UCSD was because God gave me specific signs that I was called to UCSD. And my heart would break for that campus. I remember the pictures God gave me, the visions. I remember sobbing with the heartbreak of His Spirit at the foot of Geisel, in the late hours in the abandoned classrooms in Center Hall. I had a voice, and it was not my own. It was (to borrow some language from Brennan Manning) the furious longing of a lovesick God. Many people looked at it strangely, many others agreed quietly. I don’t agree with all of what I did- I was a lot less mature then, but there was something ferocious and genuine about the things God was putting on my heart.

And then… God told me to leave. The last year I was a student at UCSD was one of the most fruitful and explosive years we had seen. In one Large group, we saw over 50 people stand up to receive Christ. We had seen a person healed of cancer. At the same time, the signs were clear- God was telling me to leave. Much of my heart was torn- Why was God making me leave right when what I had been crying for was actually happening at UCSD? Why was He sending me to a place like MiraCosta?

I can’t really articulate what’s been happening to me these last few weeks… Some of it because I don’t think it should be that public and some of it because i’m still piecing it together… but God is teaching me to vision again, to dream again, to be a prophet again. I found myself weeping again though. But these tears… they were so familiar but so different. They were for MiraCosta now.

Again, this is a strange feeling. There were some things that have been happening in my spirit these past few weeks. I’m still trying to piece it together. Something, though, is being restored in me that has not been awake in a long time. There are groanings in me that I don’t understand, but are so familiar.

God’s kingodm is not limited to a place. It is rushing around us, and is ready to break into our realities with healing and restoration. The question is not if our current locality and temporality contain the movement of God, but if we are brave enough to see the movement of God surrounding all of space and time, in the process of restoring reality to the wholeness of the Kingdom.

This entry is scattered, because my mind and heart are scattered as well. But this chaos is of God, and I sense there is a higher order to it all. Can’t wait to see where it goes, and what God wants to do at MiraCosta.

Isaiah 43:19

Stretching isn’t always the most comfortable thing.

I’ve had to spend a lot of alone time on campus.  I tell people this, and they think the whole Intervarsity world and my own sanity is all falling apart. And honestly, there are days I actually feel this. But it’s simply not true.

But I do have that feeling on some days. It’s not a pleasant feeling, but I’m recognizing it’s God stretching me.  This year honestly felt like a coming of age for myself. But as new responsibilities come my way and new challenges present themselves before me, I’ve realized I have to get out of my groove again and enter into this next season standing up and not shocked and unable to get up.

Perhaps it was going to a meeting with all the team leaders in the division with my current team leader, Natalia. She has been having me accompany her so I know how things work when I’ll be a team leader next year. Although it was somewhat intense, it really wasn’t the content of the meeting that I was unprepared for. What I was unprepared for was being surrounded by such mature leaders. Most of these people I had considered either as my mentor or somebody that I admired and aspired to become. And I felt like a child.

I always hear Christians pray to God to give them a more child-like heart. But honestly, a child is the last thing I want to become. A child to me represents insignificance, insecurity, helplessness and a naivety that I worked so hard to exterminate in myself. A child is not a leader. A child is not confident. I’ve been asking God to grow me up in these last couple of years, and the last thing I want to do is to feel like a child again after working so hard to become a mature individual.

But perhaps a real leader is a child. Or rather, isn’t afraid to be one. It’s in our helpless child-likeness in which God can grow something new. I’ve been thinking about hard hearts and soft hearts lately. There are students who just have such hard hearts that I deal with, that I simply have to stop pushing them to grow because it just makes their hearts harder. And then there are those with such soft hearts, ready for God to change and guide them into the people that they want to be. As I am looking at students’ hearts, I look at my heart and realize that sometimes the only way to soften my heart is to make me a child again where I feel completely powerless.

I was having a conversation with a friend about how it seems like there are seasons of growth and seasons of basking in the progress you’ve made, and then it repeats in this ridiculous cycle. She then gave me one of those responses that hit me:

I think people are always growing no matter what stage. So just lean on God in all circumstances and no matter how incompetent you feel God’s work will still get done. That’s the only important thing. people can be experts at anything, but if God isn’t in the middle of it, nothing worthwhile is actually accomplished I’m learning more and more about how insignificant we are and really how it’s just God doing everything and us just being obedient.
Us feeling less competent is just more of a reason to lean on him.

Well at first, it didn’t hit me. It actually hurt. Frank, direct, and oversimplistic. This sounded like advice I would give a student. And the mighty Daniel was not listening to his own advice. My pride didn’t want to hear this! I’m not supposed to need somebody to tell me this! I’m a staff worker! A minister of the Gospel! a… child.

Perhaps my heart is harder than I thought. And I’ve reached the threshhold for how far a hard heart can grow, and it’s time to put down my pride in my achievements, my expertise, and simply trust that God is in control (not myself) and just faithfully obey.

So of course I don’t like being a kid. But some of my favorite memories of my life are from my childhood. We often look back and regret not being able to experience our childhood again… but perhaps Jesus gives us that opportunity- to be born again and to learn things all over again. While the process of becoming a child again can be painful and bring us back into my insecurities and immaturity again, I have to remember that it is children that experience the most joy, and that this is not a cyclic curse, but a blessing to feel the joy of newness again.

A very well done video that gives a pretty good picture of our ministry in San Diego

The school year is almost over. I can’t believe it. Less than a month and half from now, my 2nd year of staff will be complete. And the awesome things I’ve seen. When Mark Manuscript camp at Catalina ended, I had a sigh of relief as it was one of the biggest things that I had to do this school year. I literally stress out about it like I do for a final during school… except for a final, you don’t get to see God break chains on peoples hearts and transform lives. ha.

As I sighed out of relief, I found myself in a strange state of mind last week. I had this funny assumption that since I was done with the most stressful season of the year, I could just go into cruise control. As I walked off of campus one day last week and was reflecting, I think God slapped me in the face and poured a bucket of (not real) ice cold water on me.

I realized that I could not walk in this stupor. God didn’t call me to MiraCosta to maintain a status quo- He called me to be a leader on this campus, a light into the darkness, a city on a hill, a breaker of chains, and one who fights for every single soul that walks onto that campus. Not for somebody who just made sure that I had a bible study planned each day.

There are a whole 5-6 weeks left for God to work. In that time, there could be somebody that God wants to radically transform- there could even be somebody who is ready to enter into His Kingdom.

I don’t want to be asleep when God brings the opportunity to me to be a herald of His Kingdom. I saw 7 people commit their lives so far this year, and 5-6 weeks is enough time for Him to do the same, if not more. I know that He’ll work whether I’m asleep or not, but the question is if I will be awake when He does so. I don’t want my spiritual sleepiness to be the reason why I didn’t get to witness Him do great things in peoples’ lives.

God, open my eyes to see what You are doing at MiraCosta. I even pray for the grace and privelege to watch somebody make a decision to follow You in this short time.  Give me the spiritual alertness to hear Your voice and the humility to obey that voice at any moment. Give me the expectation and faith that Your Kingdom is always breaking through into reality. amen.

Lately, I’ve been realizing I might actually be a quality leader of sorts. The reality of being a team leader is becoming more… real. I spent a week alone, made decisions on my own, and started to dream about what I wanted to see happen. I did an activity where students had to learn how to do Godly affirmation to one another (and then do it for their non-christian friends). This conveniently had time where they got to affirm me. One of the students said something really sweet that I want to keep- he said that I was like a light in the darkness, and that any time I talk to him, no matter what state he’s in, he always feels better. I’ll take that. Then I got an email earlier this week telling me that I had been invited for a big position for the Urbana conference. That also helped my self esteem. The more I go through this year, the more I’m realizing that God is preparing me for more and more leadership.

At the same time, in these past 2 or 3 weeks, I’ve been coming to a ridiculous realization that I hate failure. I fear it. It is one of my biggest fears. It is the fear that all will fall apart when I fail. I’ve been facing a lot of things that signify my failure, or at least my lack of perfection. I led 2 horrible bible studies this week. I would have puked at the horrible exegesis if I were one of the participants. Heck. I wish there were more participants. At every bible study, I had perhaps two other students sit out there with me on the tarp (forgetting that it’s midterms week). On Wednesday, I had perhaps 3 students (from ~20 last year) signed up to go to Catalina and 0 dollars in scholarship. I felt like a failure in my recruiting abilities (forgetting the fact that we are in fact in a recession when people can’t pay 225 bucks to go to a camp). Then there’s the other part of me that doesn’t even want to go to Catalina from remembering the supposed failures I had last year teaching Mark. Let’s not forget that I have a fuller class that I haven’t had time to do at all and all the work is due on the 20th. I feel failure creeping up to me with the possibility that I could do mediocre in this class. And then there’s my room, which I have failed to clean for the last 3 weeks. And then, just as I was getting over it all, while I’m finally cleaning my room, I find that something very important that my sister let me borrow has disappeared. I don’t know if it’s misplaced, or if it has been stolen. I feel the weight of failure pressing me down.

I realize that I equate the successes of the Kingdom of God with my own success. I wonder how much God laughs at that assumption. But I really have the audacity to think that.

Last year, after messing up a session at Catalina (students, you probably didn’t know, but I accidentally ended early on one part, leaving my other staff worker with an extra passage to teach that she didn’t prepare), I was apologizing profusely to my co-teacher. Then our leader turned to me and just straight up said, “Stop apologizing. It’s done. Guilt doesn’t make sense right now. God meant for you to end early there. God meant for you to mess up. And He’s going to use it.” That moment has been haunting me for the past year. I’ve been avoiding returning to that moment, because part of me secretly still feels guilty for my “failure”.

Two weeks ago, I had a dream that I was driving in my car. All of a sudden I started feeling water dripping in my eyes. I kept wiping the water away, until I realized that my sunroof had cracked, and I was driving in a wild storm. My team leader interpreted it for me (she took a dream interpretation class at one of those crazy charismatic churches… I’m pretty crazy, but… yeah. That’s crazy.). She said that God was purifying my ministry. She said she was excited. I kind of felt excited, but in the back of my head I was thinking “excited? What is she smoking? Purification is never an exciting thing!”

And… God has been purifying me since. Purifying my motives for leadership. He’s weeding out my desire for success and my tendency to equate it to the success of the Kingdom of God. I’ve been realizing that as I step into higher leadership, I can’t be consumed with my performance and continue to blow up the effects of my failures. Yes, I have to still pursue excellence. But I’m not perfect. God is. And there’s the miracle. Out of the beautiful mess of our failures, God somehow breathes in the success of His Kingdom. We can’t achieve that success. God has mercy on our inability and allows us to witness His success despite and even through our failures.

I sometimes forget that Christianity started out as a failed local movement with its leader brutally nailed to a cross. And out of the ashes of failure, came the resurrection of the Kingdom that was surely of God, which transformed cowardly fishermen into the rock and foundation of a worldwide movement. Right now, I feel like that scared fisherman, wondering why I even joined this movement; wondering if my convictions were misplaced if all I see around me is failure. But perhaps I’m in this place of fear because I have not really realized that after the ultimate failure that I have witnessed, there is resurrection.

These past few weeks, I’ve had to convince myself to get out of bed and face the day, leaving the failures behind me. And you know what? His Kingdom still advances each of those days. My last Bible study, I felt the conviction return to me and had everyone including myself in a quiet awe of the power of the scripture. God has been merciful, and I now have 9 or 10 students going to Catalina with enough scholarships to cover their lack. As I was preparing for Mark next week at Catalina, I felt a strange excitement for what God was going to do with my students, no matter how sucky I performed. I finally got around to cleaning my room. And I have enough money to replace what was lost.

And no, my failures are not fully undone. But I feel the tendrils of fear and guilt slowly release as I realize that His Kingdom is not dependent on my success. I realize the depth of the statement that is thrown around in evangelical circles- His grace covers us. And wow. His grace does cover me overwhelmingly, and will continue to cover me no matter how successful or how much of a failure I am.

This last week has been treating me well, God has definitely been good. I definitely would not have expected this all, coming from the crappy week we had last week. I really felt the prayers of my community this week… I almost forgot that in my work, as I fundraise, the people who partner with me aren’t just income providers… they lift me up in prayer consistently, and I can be sure that their prayers were at work this week.  I won’t share everything that happened here, if you’re on my email list, you’ll probably get a full update of this last week… but just wanted to share a slice of a conversation during one of the funniest GIG’s (Groups investigating God, bible studies with seekers) I’ve had, which happened yesterday.

We were talking about Jesus turning the water into wine, and the guy just didn’t want to believe that Jesus actually did a miracle. The conversation went like this:

“Well, i just don’t see how this could have scientifically happened. Like, what if Jesus had some powdered wine and threw it in the stone jars? Kind of like Koolaid or gatorade?”

“…uh… i’m not sure that they knew how to make juice powder back then.”

“Okay. so what if Jesus was a time traveller with a time machine, and when he was born, there were two of him? perhaps, they travelled back and forth in time, replaced stuff, replaced eachother, went on vactions while the other Jesus was dealing with the disciples? And once in a while, they’d help out each other with a trick that the other Jesus wanted to do, like turn water to wine?”

“…Ferdinand. Your story sounds more ridiculous than the Bible. You have twin Jesuses travelling through time in a time machine.”

“oh. yeah. you’re right… okay. well. then here’s the most logical explanation. Jesus didn’t do anything to the water. The host was just so wasted that when he drank the water, he started shouting hysterically that it was wine.”

Amazingly logical. He smiled and stared at me. We both burst out laughing.

I seriously would go insane if I were not hanging out with people who aren’t Christian. They keep me humble and keep me laughing.

Today we talked with our students what it would look like to be a champion of something. A champion of evangelism. A champion of prayer. A champion of community. We wanted them to think about it.
I told them that I wanted them to become mentors of others, and that most of my mentors were champions of something. Chris was a champion of what it meant to be a community. Lars was a champion of what it meant to fight for social justice. Audrey was a champion for worship. Benson was a champion in prayer. Although Ryan didn’t directly mentor me, his leadership over me as a student showed me that he was a champion in evangelism. Each of them did amazing things, they made amazing ministries and made changes to Intervarsity when I was a student at UCSD. But their legacy in me wasn’t really a specific ministry, structure or physical thing. It was something deeper- it was the inspiration to be a champion in those things as well. To have eyes to see what they saw when they looked out. To have their passion. A passion for community. A passion for social justice. A passion to see true worship. A passion to see communities engage in prayer. A passion for evangelism. What they left was passion and culture.
It was hard for some of my students to think about what they want to champion. It’s strange to say “I want to become a champion” or “I want to be the best at this” when you don’t feel that you really are or can’t see that you could be gifted at it. But I pray and hope that they become champions of something. I dream of champions of evangelism. of prayer. of community. of worship. of social justice. And that they would draw in others that want that passion
It made me think to myself- man. what do I want to be a champion at? Am i pursuing something that I can champion? shrug. It’s a thinker, but I’ve gotta go to Large group tonight. I’ll finish this thought later.