Week Three and Four

By the third and fourth week I was used to the flow of the school schedule. It was a busy one but I enjoyed the structure. Week three was uncomfortable. We talked about freedom and entitlements. I realized that we are in a war and Satan will do and is doing everything in his power to keep us from knowing who we are in Christ. We must LET GO of our past, and partner with Jesus, standing firm against the enemy. We have to put our complete and total trust in God. If we are holding onto something, wanting to control it, that means we aren't fully trusting the Lord with it. We can so easily feel entitled to control, or to possessions, or to relationships but the truth is that we must give EVERYTHING over to God. The truth is we are entitled to nothing. We don't deserve something because we earned it... everything we have is because of God, therefore it belongs to Him and not us. Giving everything over to Him will make life a lot easier anyway. I realized it was time to start letting a lot of things go.
The fourth week was Corporate Week where all the schools come together for one teaching. We talked about beliefs. One of my favorite quotes is by Elisabeth Elliot. She says in her book Let Me Be a Woman, "Know what you believe and hang your soul on those beliefs". I love that quote because, as Christians, we must know what we believe and why we believe it. This really hit home for me because there are so many things that I believed but I never took the time to explore WHY I believed them. Another quote that hit home for me was by Darlene Cunningham "If you believe something is right but don't do it, you aren't living with integrity". WHOA! Convicting! This is basically restating "Don't just talk the talk, WALK THE WALK"!! I was very convicted by that statement... Darlene then went on to communicate that we are like trees. the soil we are rooted in is our worldview, our roots represent our beliefs, our trunk represents our values, our branches are our decisions, and our fruit is our actions. If our fruit isn't good, it's probably time to rethink some things in other areas of our lives. "Okay Micah," I thought, "it's time to test and examine yourself..." which by the way, is one of the hardest things to do.
All in all, both weeks went by pretty smoothly. Around the time of the third week I started experiencing intense chest pain, shortness of breath and became nauseous very frequently but I payed no attention to these things because I associated with anxiety attacks which I thought would go away... little did I know it would dramatically effect my life in just couple short months...

The beginning of the beginning

My first week in Kona was scary. I kept hearing things like "some of you will stay at your outreach locations and buy your gravestones there" and "you're all amazing gospel preachers!" I knew the missionary life wasn't for me and I sure as heck had never preached before so there was no way either of those were going to be true for me (or at least so it seemed in my mind at the time). "I can't believe the guts this guy has... he thinks he can tell me what I'm going to do with my future" I thought to myself... then I remembered I came here to be changed... Oops.
It was weird. I felt as though I was surrounded my many mature Christians and I was the only one who wasn't really sure about everything. Though I was nervous and a bit timid I pressed through and pressed in, determined to find truth... The truth that would change me. The change was gradual. It was so slow that I didn't even notice I was changing. By the end of the first week I was a professional gospel preacher and really actually believed it. That in and of itself was amazing because for the first time in a long time, my heart believed the words I was saying about Jesus. My heart believed the simple gospel. Which leads me to one of the first things I learned: The gospel is SIMPLE. I had grown up in church my whole life and never heard the SIMPLE gospel. Sometimes people try to complicate it and say all these things that can taint our view of what Jesus did on the cross but the truth is that He died as a sacrifice in our place and rose from the dead so WE could live eternally with Him in heaven. No hidden "but you must do this to be saved from hell" or "to be good enough to get in to heaven you must"... NO! Jesus wants us even though we're imperfect because the truth is nothing we ever do could make us good enough to enter into heaven without Him. I had so wrapped my brain in religion... in the "do" mentality that I forgot that. Religion says "do, do, do", "You must do this to be saved" or "you must do this to earn God's love."but relationship (Jesus) says "No, DONE". Whoa, my mind was blown.
One day, we broke up into small groups and did something called original design. Basically, we go around the group and pray for each person asking God to show/tell us what His original design for that person was. I was skeptical that God would even talk to me still but I obediently closed my eyes and prayed, "God, please.... PLEASE show me something." Words and pictures began to fill my mind immediately, I didn't even know these girls, how could it be that I knew these things? When it was my turn to say what God had shared with me I was surprised to hear each girl say how accurate I was. My mind was blown, God was trying to get my attention. I knew for sure I was hearing form him when it came to one of the girls in the group. I started praying and all of a sudden a heavy, thick and tangible presence fell on me.... I could hardly sit in my chair it was so strong. I felt so much love... joy-filled love I could hardly breathe. I started to cry. Not tears of sadness but of joy because I was so..... I don't know, filled with love I guess. It was weird but it was also the coolest thing I was ever felt. Then, for the first time in ages I heard God say "Micah, I let you feel my love for her... and it's the same love I feel towards you." WOW. It was the first time I had ever felt a love so deep... "God," I thought "If you're trying to get my attention, you have it." Then the presence left, I could no longer feel it as strongly and immediately my heart ached to feel it again.
During that first week God relentlessly pursued me. I thought that it couldn't get better, that I couldn't possibly be closer to Him, but God knew otherwise and prepared me in those seven days to be changed, to go deeper in relationship with Him than I ever had before. 

A little bit of background

I returned about three weeks ago from the most amazing adventure of a lifetime. It was the most incredible experience my life has seen thus far. I do hope I'll have another adventure like it some day. Since this adventure was so incredible I thought it would be nice to start a blog about these last six months. You may read it or choose not to read it. I cannot promise it wont be wordy, and I cannot promise my grammar will be perfect. Everything I say here is truly form my heart. I'm an open book. I do wish that as you read you get something out of these words. I hope this blog refreshes you and I hope that somehow God uses this blog to touch your heart in new ways. This adventure changed me. and I cannot deny that. It changed the way I think, the way I act, the way I view God and the way I view myself.
You see, before all of this I was alone, or at least I felt like I was. I had been hurt by the world and by people so I shut off my heart to all feelings, to all people and to God. I was numb. Not the kind of numb that makes you glad you can no longer feel the pain and the hurt. No, it wasn't that kind. It was the kind of numb that makes you lay awake crying, weeping, wishing you could feel something, anything just for the sake of being able to feel at all. Every night I lay there in my bed thinking about the day. Thinking about how meaningless it had been. About how God probably didn't even care about me anymore because I was such a far cry away from what I thought a Christian should look like. I was sure He had given up on me a long time ago. So there I lay, night after night. Some nights I cried so long tears would no longer run from my eyes and the sound of my deep sobs filled the quiet void of the night. Others I would sit there wishing I had never been born.
I was going through all of this but I never told anyone, not even my family. From the outside looking in you would see a young girl, probably guess she had many friends, was confident in herself and had a purpose driven life. But none of that was true. I was striving for the approval of everyone around me. I was looking for love in all the wrong places and no matter how hard I looked or tried to find Him, I always failed.
One day, I remembered YWAM (Youth With A Mission). I had wanted to attend a DTS (Discipleship Training School) with YWAM for a quite some time and in June of 2012 I finally decided to apply. Soon after I applied I got accepted and began to raise the funds. Although I wasn't one-hundred percent sure that God loved me, I knew I had to go somewhere to find Him and that seemed like the perfect place. I had somehow adopted this weird view of God. I knew He was real and believed in Jesus but I was beginning to believe that He was distant and not involved in every day life. Applying to the school was my last effort in finding out if God was really who He said he was.
I knew I couldn't feel God but I couldn't deny that some people had an intimate relationship with Him. I would look at other Christians and just stand in awe at how happy they were, how they spoke about God and how they lived their lives honoring and worshiping Him. I wanted so badly the joy and happiness they had but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't get to their level. I could not feel God. I could not be happy. I saw who these people were. I saw who I was. I knew who I wanted to be but no matter how hard I tried I could not become it so I lived life in hopelessness and depression, striving but never achieving.
Finally January came and my bags were packed. I said teary-eyed goodbyes to my family and I walked through security, not looking back. I was done with myself. I saw where I had gotten me and was ready to fully surrender to God, if He was real, if He would have me, I was ready to be changed.