| insert non-cliche title about a new year and new beginnings |

A year goes by and I'm staring at my watch again, and I dig deep this time, for something greater than I've ever been, life to ancient wineskins. And I was blind but now I see.

([above]I always have to quote a part of the song New Years Eve by Five Iron Frenzy on the New Year.)


As I looked to the approaching new year, I realized a lot of things are going to be different. 

1. My brother Chris and his wife Angela are having a baby. The first grandchild/niece in our family. 
2. My other brother Nathan is getting married in May.
3. I'm moving to Ireland. 

2010 was grinding to a halt, and 2011 was revving its engine. Normally, I try to stay in the year and prolong Christmas as much as possible, but this year was different. The three things I previously mentioned are waiting in the future, and this is the first year in the history of my life that I'm not affected by the school calendar. 

Anyway, I wanted to start off this new stage of my life with a solid foundation. Something to focus me - start the new year off right. So I went to Passion. Passion is a Christian conference in Atlanta. That's an entirely different blog post that I'm honestly not going to write. So why don't you just ... check out the website? 

The Passion conference was a huge blessing, and a great way to kick off the new year. So here's a bit of what's been on my heart for my future. 

• Jesus Christ must be my one solid motivation for everything I think, say and do. He is the LORD, and the best possible thing for us, therefore if my life is solidly based on the fact that I believe my motivations are His motivations, then I will be a living testimony to Him and that's all I can hope for. 
• I believe that my peers and I have the power to affect the Church. And I feel an obligation to be the change that I want to see in the Church.
• The Holy Spirit is on the move. Everywhere. And I think this is one of the most vital things that if the Church could grasp, things could change drastically and be cause for motivation and movement.  C.S. Lewis wrote this in his Screwtape Letters (backup if you don't know about the Screwtape Letters. They are letters from one demon to another. Lewis used this book as a major work of "reverse psychology" for Christians.) 

• One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do riot mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather in oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. 

  So, do you have any New Year's resolutions? 
  

Distant shores

Life comes in themes. Like your refrigerator, dishwasher, and washing machine breaking at the same time. Or everyone you run into tells you about his or her vacation last summer in Switzerland. Or you just so happen to go to three different churches within a month, and they are all preaching on the same thing.

My current theme can’t be simplified into a sentence, so I thought I’d share the different things that I’ve been running into lately. Or maybe they’ve been running into me.

I first started thinking about it in the car, when I was listening to a song by Five Iron Frenzy called “On Distant Shores.” The chorus of the song said “If mercy falls upon the broken and the poor, dear Father, I will see you there, on distant shores.” I had this quote hanging up in my room for a long time, so in the car I was thinking about why. Because when I was a kid I was neither broken nor poor. Or at least I didn’t think so. The part that I really loved was the concept of distant shores, and meeting God there some day.

I continued on with my Five Iron Frenzy playlist and again, the idea crossed my mind when another song called “Far, Far Away” played. The chorus sang,

“Can you hear the bells are ringing far, far away? Can you hear the voices singing far, far away? I know that one day soon a song shall rise. You’ll hear it with the sleep still in your eyes.”

All this talk of distant shores and far away singing made me hungry. Hungry for some Lord of the Rings. I daydreamed my way into the scene of the movie where Gandalf is talking to Pippin about dying.

“The journey doesn’t end here. There’s another path; one that we all must take. The gray rain curtain of this world rolls back, and it will change to silver glass, and then you see it. White shores; and beyond them, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

I imagined being on a boat looking out towards a sunrise and hearing distant, beautiful music. And with the sleep still in my eyes, my heart is stirred and filled full with joy and anticipation and I don’t know exactly why. But I know it’s coming, and I’m almost there.

Even now, typing it out makes my heart beat fast.

I decided to dive into the Word for similar glimpses of hope, and found this: “But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it, we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Philippians 3:20)

Like Paul also says “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” But he also realizes that staying is important so he can share the Gospel and fulfill what God wants him to on earth. It’s like being gone a long time from home. I think traveling a lot helps me understand this. When I’m traveling or out of the country my heart is never settled. I never feel as truly at rest or relaxed as I am at home. Our citizenship is in heaven. So it just makes me incredibly excited to know that even when I’m “home” in Indiana, I’m not feeling how much more at home and at peace I’ll feel one day when I am approaching those distant shores.

Besides the song playing on my ipod and getting my attention, most of these discoveries were self-induced. But I heard this quote this week under completely different circumstances: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

And in a very strong and tangible way, my limited understanding makes the peace I mentioned earlier overflow into this life.