Jon the Baptist.

Looking Out

Jerusalem 2009

Interestingly enough I look out my window and I find myself in looking out towards buildings and plants unlike any I’ve seen with these eyes before.  In fact if I am to look out my window and down I can see hell…  Well, maybe not your typical idea of hell.  But when Jesus talked of hell he refered to the valley of hennom, and it just so happens to be right below my view from the school.

But so far things have been really great.  Either then having a really bad fever for 3 days upon arrival, I have continually been able to take in and enjoy the place I am at.  Though enjoyment is of the greater category, it’s hasn’t been what my entire focus is captivated with.  Sure I can look around and see new things, but soon those will be old things.  What I have just been introduced to was a much larger view of my own life.  I went to some of the places of worship and places of just living here, and the more I saw the smaller I found myself.  There is just so much to learn, so much that I had not even the slightest incline of existence that I feel 10,002 times smaller.

Going to the Holy Sepulchre (place where Jesus was crucified and burried) and gazing upon these men following a path that they have followerd there whole lives, carried the same insence baskets there whole lives, sang the same songs their whole lives, all out of the sake of tradition.  Their lives are given to follow a tradition.  The weird thing to me was that they worship Jesus, just as I do.  Yet… look at how different we act.  They do things because thats what has been done and told them to do.  I do things because I want to know more about God.  They sing songs and walk in the same fasion everyday (every single day!) in complete belief that that is what worshipping God is…  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m looking up to these people.  Their detication to the things that seem extremely boring are amazing.  I have no idea how I could do such things over and over again without going crazy.  But, is one of us wrong?  Would God let one of his children be wrong?  Can there but such veriety in the worship of Jesus that you get people that can do it without even knowing that their hearts are supposed to be in it as well, and people that do it out of the overflow…  I don’t really get it…  I feel so small…yet so comforted…  I have not a shred of doubt in my mind that I love to worship God…  I don’t really know why I want this, but my goal in life is for eversingle thing that this body can muster up to be worship for God.  It is totally possible.

While I looked upon their form of worship, all I saw was bordom and what seemed a total ignorance as to what they were doing and who they were doing it for.  I mean I would do the exact same.  If I worshiped God with the same song, same walk, same choices, same thing everyday I would get bored and not want to do it anymore.  Maybe God even gets bored…  Maybe thats why he put in us the ability to get bored… for the sake of saving our passion, that we might be forced to use our imaginations to worship him, and not just a comfortable routene.

Walkin around campus

I guess my real thought is: if these these people have totally given there every day to the sake of Jesus, and it looks like hell…and I am attempting to give up every day…and it feels like heaven… Then how can we be seeking the same Jesus?  Everyday I give up more (which is not nearly as much as they have given up), yet the closer I come the greater joy I have; the greater passion I have; the greater desrire for more I have…  Are we after the same Jesus?  If so… what if the difference between them and me?

Again… I feel small, yet the God I’m intertwined with seems to be getting so much bigger.

My Room