So far I am...

-back from camp (about 2 or 3 weeks ago)
-taking care of my grandma
-credentialed
-without income
-with a clean, organized room
-having fun being at home and with my family whom I love very much
-excited for July

There hasn't been much going on since I got back from camp in Tennessee. I've been kinda lazy to update this blog and keep you all posted, but I just wanted to let you all know that I am alright and that I'll try to pick this back up.

-Jon

Lake June in Lake Placid

Just to verify the title, Lake June is a Lake in a city called Lake Placid.

So anyways, our MC went to Lake Placid and hung out there for the day to celebrate the almost end of the year. It was a long day and it was a better experience compared to last year when we only had one boat and 13 people. This go-around I didn't spend nearly an hour trying to catch fish with my bare hands out of boredom. The weather was awesome, food was great, and the tubing was extreme.

I've come to realize after spending 2 years in Sarasota that I will indeed miss this place and I will miss my place here, as I'm sure others will miss me being in my place here as well. It's hard to leave a place when you're comfortable there. Especially at night when you're tired and you've had a full day and you crawl into bed and let out a deep long sigh and it's then you realize after you've goten comfortable that you left a light on or you forgot to move your laundry from the washer to the dryer. I loathe those moments. Because it's in those moments where you question your ability to move from the place you've goten comfortable in. You want to stay. You don't care if the light stays on or if your clothes stay soggy in the washer. And it's in those times where you find something that compels you to get up and to flick the switch or to move the laundry. That something that says even though you are in the place where you want to be, you're not in the place where you need to be. Conscience. Listen to it.

-Jon

Rei's Blog

I found Rei's Blog just recently. He's a good friend of mine and I recommend him of the highest recommendation. Check out his blog and his musings and what's going on with him.

-Jon

The Year's Winding Down

For Masters Commission, the year is sort of winding down. Big events like the Celebration BBQ, the Lake Placid boating trip, and graduation are right around the corner and I can't help but think that I really have no reason to be here.

Hear me out.

I feel like I really have no leadership over anything here and that all I'm really good for here is speaking (which I haven't done in a while). I look at other people, which when I say that you say that I shouldn't because every one's different, but I say that when I see first years and see how important they are to the church compared to me, I feel like I haven't really done much. This is a feeling that I've thought about for a few weeks and have pretty much cemented it in my mind. I know that I will be missed when I leave Sarasota, but I don't think I'll be needed at all really. I know this sounds all pathetic and everything, but it's true.

Anyways, next post I'll probably post the video that me, Nate, Jon, Kevin, and a whole bunch of other people made in the basement of the place that we stayed at in Gutenstein. It's funny.

-Jon

Back From Austria

Well, we've been back since early Thursday morning and I've still yet to get over the jet lag. My sleeping and eating patterns are a bit whacked, my ears are still clogged, and my stomach has been really really messed up. But that was all because of the flights back. When I was there, I was enamored by the public transportation, the city, and its people. It's such an amazing place and I had a lot of good memories come from it. Here's a few pics from siteseeing and whatnot:



These pics were taken at the Schloss Schönbrunn Palace. This place was heuge. Not huge, but HEUGE. It was massive and the landscape was impressive. A must see if you're ever around Europe.





That's all for now. I'll be sure to post some more pics when I can find some good ones.







-Jon

We're at the airport right now...

As I am typing this to you, I am sitting at Gate 8 over at Tampa International Airport. Loads of carry-on luggage are packed up next to me. I'm playing guard dog to everyone's carry-ons as they go do whatever. I don't mind, though. They have free internet here at the airport.

We're leaving today to go to Vienna, Austria over in Europe. This trip is basically our missions trip and yet it's almost like a vacation to me because we're going outside of the country, which is a place I've never been, and we're gonna go help out another Masters Commission over there. It'll be both fun and rewarding to catch some of the sites of a foreign land.

Anyways, I might try to do my best to update while I'm over there....maybe I'll post some pics too, I dunno. We'll have to see what unfolds. Pray for all of us and pray for the staff back at the church that is now understaffed 12 people.

-Jon

By the way...

"I will do my best to dedicate myself to continually posting every Tuesday and Friday."

That was my first post and I thought that I said Tuesdays and Thursdays. That's why the last few posts have been on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Don't know if I'll correct myself and go to Tuesdays and Fridays. As long as I'm continually updating, I'm happy.

Wanting Solitude

It hasn’t been easy for me the past few weeks or so to grab some solitude. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve gone up on the roof of our house and just sat there and watched the sunset while listening to my iPod. Both of my housemates have both been having car troubles and me being the only one with a working car has been playing chauffer the past couple of weeks or so. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the guys, but me being somewhat of an introverted person I want to be able to be by myself and drive alone and sing as loud as I want to songs on the radio and stuff like that. Now I have to be responsible for my two housemates and I have to be considerate and let them go places they want to go and when they’re tired and want to go home, I submit to them and go when they’re ready.

At first, it’s totally not fair at all. It’s not my responsibility to take care of them, it’s their responsibility to take care of their cars. Why should I carry their burdens and not get paid for gas?

I think about that and then I think about what it’ll be like to be married and how I’ll probably never have the chance to sing as loud as I want to songs in the car and how it won’t be about me and what I want anymore. It’ll be about us, and that kind of scares me. Kind of.

G.H.A.

Guitar Heroes Anonymous. If there were a group of people that suffer from devoting a small portion of themselves to the Guitar Hero franchise, I’d be the second or third in command. The game has always been a dream of mine ever since I started to get interested in the guitar back when I was 16. That was 5 years, almost 6, ago and having played it since it’s release in 2005. I remember walking into Best Buy about 2 years ago and seeing the black, plastic guitar hanging on the hook and the art of the game and the fact that I could actually hold something in the shape of a guitar and nearly pretend that I’m playing way better than I actually can peaked my interest. I picked up the shiny black SG controller and felt something I’ve never felt before in a video game. I looked through the songs and picked the one that I knew from all of them and at the time I was into classic rock a lot so I picked Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” on medium. I was hooked. I didn’t own a PS2 and I didn’t have the time or money, but I bought it. I went ahead and bought it because it was a dream to have and a dream to play.

2 years later I own 3 controllers, 2 wired-1 wireless, both games, and no have ordered online the Xbox 360 version and again I don’t have the appropriate system in order to play it. I know about the next one coming out and the video game titled “Rock Band” which will fully fulfill my dream of being able to make music and play video games at the same time.

“Hello, my name is Jon and I am a Guitar Hero addict.”

Action

I’ve been thinking about the time that I’ve spent with my youth pastor back in Mulberry. One time, we went to Taco Bell and had lunch over the summer of my senior year. We talked about what was going on at the youth group and what was going on in our lives. He asked me about how close to God I was and my habits. At the time I had a lot of posters in my room of TV shows, movies, and bands that I liked. I said something along of the line of “I just don’t think I could give up those posters. They’re who I am.” I guess that’s the line that pretty much said a lot about what I was holding onto. I was putting more value in the posters than I was God.


Of course, now the posters are long gone, but here’s the point I wanna get to. Everyone knows how to get saved. It’s the point of living that we all have trouble with. It’s why we have thousands of “how-to-live” Christian books out there. Cause people are unsure how to live for God and maintain some sort of an identity. As I continue to get older, I am finding truth in many things when it comes to living for God. One thing that is necessary is action. Not action like a movement, but action as in something you do to solidify your faith in God and your spiritual maturity. In Romans 6:6, it says

For we know that our old self was
crucified with him so that the body
of sin might be done away with,
that we should no longer be slaves
to sin-


When we give up our old lives and pray that God would come into our lives, it requires more than just a prayer. It’s an action. We follow through by leading our lives differently before than when we were living them. We daily take up our cross and bear it so we may fully be in God’s will and grace.

Movies

This is an old post that I've been waiting to put up. I went and saw Blades of Glory recently, so I can't say that I haven't been to the movies in close to a year. But I will.

I haven’t been to the movie theater in close to a year. I don’t think it’s a sad thing or anything like that, it’s just been a while and I’ve been strung out on Masters Commission and if I ever did go, it would probably be by myself cause no one else round here would go. So, having said all that, I’ve missed a few movies that I really wanted to see and now I must wait for them to come out on DVD. Again, not a sad thing or anything. In fact, over spring break that’s exactly what I did. When I went back home to Mulberry, me and my mom stopped at the Movie Gallery in town and we got around 6 movies and every night the whole family would sit down around 9 o’clock or so and watch a movie. Good times.

-Casino Royale
Probably THE best James Bond movie to date.

-The Prestige
Weird movie with good twists. It’s interesting to note that the director, Christian Bale, and Michael Cain are all in cahoots with each other for the new Batman films. To see all three of them working together for this movie was a bit intriguing to try to figure out how they were there together. Plus, David Bowie’s in it.

-The Illusionist
It was interesting and I thought that seeing both The Prestige and The Illusionist would kind of ruin the flavor of seeing two movies about magicians, but I don’t think that it did really. The Illusionist had a different flavor than the Prestige. It tasted good.

-The Science of Sleep
A Michael Gondry movie. Enough said. If you know who the man is, then you know that this movie was visually mesmerizing and awkwardly weird at the same time. Other than the foul language and almost naked people, it was a good movie. Definitely not one your mom should be watching with you…maybe your sibling or something like that.

-Stranger Than Fiction
A really good indie film with Will Ferrell, who is a really good actor both inside and outside of comedy. In this film, he’s able to show the outside of his comedic acting along with a few other familiar faces. It’s thoughtful and amusing. That and the other big actors in it (Dustin Hoffman, Maggie Gylenhall) did a good job as well.

What I am Listening to

I’ve been listening to a lot of different things recently. I’ve been listening to the new Maylene & the Sons of Disaster album titled “II”. It’s interesting to hear this album and think, “Is this a compromise between hardcore and country?” It’s quite humorous. I’ve been listening to a little of the Imago Dei podcasts. It’s sobering to just listen to someone more profound than you sometimes. I’ve also been listening to a little bit of radio. Man, I remember when I listened to alt. rock radio like it was good. Sometime between listening to 102.5 The Bone and listening to CDs and my iPod, alt. rock radio got sucky and repetitive. I listened to it this morning and I turn it on this afternoon and the same song I heard in the morning is on in the afternoon. Sucky.

Future

I've been contemplating about the future and what it’s going to hold for me. Especially at home and later on in Marietta. It’s almost scary trying to figure out how well I’m going to stick to this plan that I’ve set in my head for almost a year now. I keep on having these thoughts of failing and going back home and starting off where I was 2 years ago, with no plan and no escape. I hope I don’t go about this whole thing half-heartedly and just let failure find me. I need to continue to work hard, and I mean supremely hard, and keep focused on what I want to see come out of this thing. Success.

My Excuse

So...we've moved into our new church and things have been pretty crazy here. I've been put to the proverbial grindstone (whatever that means) and have been helping out moving stuff back and forth between the new and old church. Lots of heavy, bulky, hard-to-maneuver stuff. It's been tiring and rewarding at the same time to finally get into the new building and to get things rolling here.

Saturday and Sunday we're doing the Easter cantata. I'm playing yours truly. You should come.

Podcasts

I really don’t care for talk radio. When I’m in the car, music is constantly pumping through the speakers. Actually the only times I think that there hasn’t been music playing in my car are times when something very mournful has happened or I had just left my girlfriend’s house (these, of course, were times in the past.) In the past, the only talk radio that I remember hearing or listening to was The Prairie Home Companion, which was a national public radio broadcast featuring the famous monologues from Garrison Keillor and his adventures of his hometown of Lake Wobegon. On Sundays, Dad, after taking us to the Pizza Hut lunch buffet, would either sit in his recliner chair in the den or sit outside, during the fall months when the weather would be a little less cooler than normal, and listen to The Prairie Home Companion, eventually falling asleep listening to Keillor’s soft, grandfatherly voice. I’ll admit, even listening to it now, I could fall asleep myself. Garrison’s voice being just so smooth and so friendly, you couldn’t stop yourself sometimes from being lulled by the stories he’d share. Sometimes I never really understand or can pay attention to what he is talking about. Simply just the sounds he makes are enough to satisfy my mind.

This past Wednesday I was surfing through the iTunes store, looking for songs, videos, games, anything that looked cool or sounded new and fresh, and I had started to look through the podcasts. I only have a few podcasts, all including podcasts about video games, but I started to look through the numerous podcasts because a few of the staff at Church of Hope, Rei and TJ, had started to listen to podcasts from Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, etc. etc. etc. They would listen to them speak while driving and I thought that it would be beneficial for my intellect, or what was left of it, to listen and learn while I would drive myself. I was looking through the podcasts and I found The Prairie Home Companion podcast of Garrison Keillor’s stories of Lake Wobegon and all the people from there and it caught my interest instantly. I subscribed and got a few podcasts and started to listen to them. Within a few minutes of listening to the story of Garrison revisiting memories of the University of Minnesota and his past, I was reminded of Dad and reminded of Sunday afternoons sitting outside when everything was brown, red, or yellow because of the cold snap the previous night.

I’d like to think that I’d stay awake driving while listening to Keillor, but it probably wouldn’t happen. So, I also subscribed to Imago Dei Community podcast. If that sounds familiar to you Donald Miller fans, Imago Dei is a church in the upper Mid-West dedicated to artists loving God and being accepted for who they are that Miller visited in his book Blue Like Jazz. I also subscribed to the Mars Hill Church podcast, Rob Bell’s church, and the Relevant Magazine podcast. I thought by getting all of these podcasts I could invest time while driving to listen to pastors teach about the bible and hear things relevant that are going on in life and I could gain knowledge by hearing someone talk to me about Philippians while I got cut off by someone driving a busted up Honda.

Out of all of those podcasts, I’m still listening to Prairie Home Companion…on repeat.

The Parable of the Lost Pikachu

I know that this post has been done on a Thursday instead of a Friday, but I wanted to share this devotion that I did this morning.

When I was in middle school, I owned a Pokemon Pikachu. Basically, take a Tamigotchi, a pedometer, and Pokemon, put them all together in a blender, and you've got a Pokemon Pikachu. It was a little device that operated on how many steps you took (or how many times you shook it) and you could interact with the little pixelated Pikachu on the screen.

The story begins when my mom was taking me to the Family Fun Center in Lakeland one day. It was pretty normal, nothing out of the ordinary. Just a mother and her son playing a round of miniature golf. I had the Pokemon Pikachu clipped to my pants as we walked around the mini golf course and I really wasn't paying attention to it. Somehow, someway, it came undone from my pants and I realized that when we got into the car, I lost it. I lost my Pokemon Pikachu. I got frantic and started hyperventilating. I went back to the mini golf course and started looking in bushes, looking in little rivers that ran throughout the course, looking everywhere. I looked like I was looking for a $100 bill. I was distraught when I sat back in the car and had no Pokemon Pikachu in my possession. I started to cry as we drove away. I bawled incredibly over this little piece of plastic and technology. In fact, I cried so much that I had my mom pull over to the side of the road and I threw up. I puked. I got myself so caught up in losing this thing that I threw up.

Looking back on it now, I say to myself, "Jon, man, you were pathetic." And it's somewhat true. I was so upset that I lost something that now I could care less about. I got so caught up in losing this one thing that I completely destroyed myself emotionally. But doesn't that happen to all of us? If we lose something, we will turn our rooms upside down just to try to find that one thing that we lose. I've had that happen to me many times in my life so far.

In Luke, chapter 15, the whole chapter talks about us losing something. The first parable is about the lost sheep and how when the shepherd loses one sheep out of 100, he will leave the 99 to find that one sheep. The second parable is about the lost coin and how the woman had 10 coins and when she lost one coin, she swept and searched, and looked all over her house for that one coin. The third parable is about the lost son and how he left with his inheritance of his father's estate, squandered it, and came back only to be welcomed with open arms of his father, who thought that his son was dead. All of these stories illustrate how God is concerned with people who are lost. Not physically lost, but spiritually lost. See, God's not concerned whether or not you're good or bad, He's concerned whether or not you're dead or alive; lost or found. And it makes me wonder if God throws up because He's so frantic and caught up in those who are lost. If I get so worked up over a little Pokemon Pikachu, how much more does God get worked up over those who don't know him?

I wanna be more empathetic when it comes to seeking out those who are lost. But it gets so hard to try to sift through all the people I come across and try to figure out which ones I need to be throwing up for. It's hard because I can't see the condition of a person's heart and I don't know if they took the sinner's prayer or not. I ain't God. Be on your toes when it comes to building relationships with people who don't go to church at all. I don't wanna be in their faces about the situation, I want to be their friends. That's pretty much all we can do.

-Jon

"It's going too fast"

This year in Masters Commission has definitely gone by too fast. I can barely remember last year much less the beginning of this year. So much has gone by and we're all growing a lot spiritually and mentally. We're gaining so much experience and knowledge that sometimes I can't even remember what I did the previous day. It really has gone by too fast.

I hope that this year we will all get something from it. Something that we can use in our lives and apply so that people back at home will see a difference in us. That we've come out of this year changed by the legacy that has been placed into our lives. The legacy of being greater than what we once were.

I also hope that you guys will continue to follow these posts and remind me constantly that I need to update or that I should talk about this or talk about that. I will do my best to dedicate myself to continually posting every Tuesday and Friday.

Thanks for everything and may God bless us all.

-Jon