WOW!!! Where to begin....What to do....Where to start....Where to go....What to say....All I know is there is a burning in my heart. It's so strong. I feel as if I'm trapped...I am held down and can't get enough released out of my soul. I have so many burdens on my heart! Through God, I want to lead lost souls to Him, heal the sick, prophesy, help build others, and so much more. I want to raise others up with the same heart that I have. With a heart that is willing to give up everything else, just to be in God's will. How this world would change if Christians would stop living for themselves and start living for GOD! I am now the co-youth pastor of a church and love those kids to death! I want to be there for them! I watch them as they grow. It feels so good when you know you are helping to change their lives. I look at my kids and just pray that God leads me to be the best father possible. I don't want my kids to grow up without God. I want them to experience Him at a young age, so they never question Him. My parents did the same for me growing up. I wonder how I ever got away from God. I experienced so much as a child. God spoke to me at a young age and told me my future. How could I ever let that go? How could I ever question Him? I stop to think what can I do as a parent to make sure my kids never stray away. I begin to worry about it, but realize all I can do is put my children and family in God's hands and He will take care of the rest. As long as I am in His will, He will guide me to be that father that He wants me to be. I struggle with my time. When I get a second when I'm not at work, I want to read my bible and spend time with God, but I want and need to see my family! Wow, what to do? I need to do both. I begin to feel like no matter what I do, I'm letting someone down. Then I look at the clock and see that if I don't do either, I may be able to squeeze in 5 hrs of sleep before I have to be up for work the next day. Wow, I get to the point where I have no solution except to put this issue in God's hands and let him take it over and change the situation for me since there's nothing left I can do. I want to get closer to God... I want to study His word, I want to pray, I want to cry out to Him, but where do I get the time... I could be doing it right now while I'm at work, but I really need to get this off my chest.
I'm so excited where my life is going with my family and God. At the same time, I feel as if I'm letting them all down. As the tears run down my face from happiness and disappointment, I wonder what there is that I could be doing more of to bless my family and to bless God, but again...where do I get the time. I know that God has some huge things He wants me to accomplish and I want to make sure I don't miss them. I also know God wants me to raise up my family and be there for them and I would hate to miss one or the other while doing the other. I think of God and it makes me cry. The love He has for us...how much he cares for us...and what do we do in return? Ya, we may go to church, we may spend time with Him, we may preach the gospel, but there's so much more we could be doing. There are people dying everyday and going to hell and He has placed us on this earth for a reason. We have a purpose. I'm making a decision this day to do more for God and win more lost souls along with making sure I keep my family in my top priority and make sure I give them the time they need. I don't want to go out and have fun. I feel that there is so much that needs to be accomplished that I should be having fun while I could be growing the kingdom of God. That's great that I want it so bad, but it makes it hard to go and relax when so much is on your mind. I guess it's a strength of mine, but at the same time it does become one of my biggest weeknesses. I shouldn't be off work thinking that I should be getting something done. I shouldn't feel like I'm wasting my time while I'm relaxing. This is something else I am going to work on. Since a little boy, I've always had goals and when it came to accomplishing them, I could never relax. I became a workaholic by the age of 15. All I wanted to do was work. If I was off work, I felt like I was wasting my life and that I needed to go make money because life is short. I still seem to have that problem today when it comes to work or the church. I feel as if I am letting someone down or that I'm just wasting the time that God gave us to accomplish things. But life is more than just accomplishing things. It's also about enjoying the life that God gives us. I feel like my head is bipolar. It thinks I need to work work work, but then it thinks just the opposite and I realize that I could lose everything I have by working too much. As a teenager I just wanted to work. I always had two jobs and watched everyone else having fun while I worked. I was glad that I had great work ethics, but maybe I should have lived life a little more. Money always meant too much to me. I felt that in order to accomplish a successful life, you must have lots of money. Now I've realized money is nothing. It can make things easier, but it can also make things worse. The only thing we need in life is our family and God. My pastor was preaching a few months back on this and it really hit home with me. At this moment, I can't stop working due to the business I have, but I can work to get myself out of the situation and begin to have a balanced life. There needs to be balance in everything we do. I'm very overwhelmed with having working the gym fulltime, managing a sprint store full time and being a youth pastor which takes up about as much time as another full time job. 100 to 110 hours a week of work is just too much. I can't quit the sprint store because I need it to provide for the family and the gym. I can't close down the gym due to being in a contract for several years. And I definately won't quit being a youth pastor because that is what God has called me to do. I did decide to not go to bible school this semester to try to balance it out a little. I do know that once this gym gets off its feet, it will be great. My dream is to have income coming in so that I can go into ministry full time and not have to worry about taking money from the church. I want to bless the church. Most people look at what they can buy if they had money, if they won the lottery, if they had a business bringing in tons of money. I think about how awesome that would be to write those huge checks to God and what we could do with the church and the ministry if we had money and how much more time we would have to do it and how nothing could stop us from building the church. How awesome would that be!!!
I am going to go forward with my ideas and get this youth group where it needs to be. I'm going to spend more time with God and forget about resting for awhile. God is the one that gives us rest, so if I spend that time with Him, then He can give me the rest I need. I'm setting goals for my gym and I am going to start fasting more for it and pray that God will give me the members that I need in order to not have to be here so I can spend more time with Him and my family and my youth group. I will be fasting for the gym, my family, finances and my youth group. As I am typing this, someone from church just IM'd me and asked if I wanted to start doing a fast with him once a month....Wow, looks like a sign from God ;-)..... God is good!
I look out the window to see the car that I am driving. It makes me laugh. Wow how I've changed. It use to be all for me, but now it's all for God. I had a car that my wife and I gave away to bless someone that God told us to bless. What a wonderful feeling. It may not have been the nicest or most expensive car, but it was all we had and could afford. We went down to one car which was tough. Later someone gave us a car that is ten times worse than the car we gave away. But it helped me. I almost didn't take the car because it was so bad. I didn't want to be seen driving it. I thought God had already humbled me, but as soon as I think that, He humbles me even more. Sometimes I wonder what God has in store for us that he has to keep bringing me lower and lower to humble me so far. I believe that He has to break us and tear us completely apart before He can make us what he wants us to be. I've learned not to think of yourself as humble, because no matter how humble you are, God can always humble you even more.
I'm currently learning that my patience is not where I thought it needed to be. After taking over this youth group, I've noticed that I'm too anxious to get things going and can't wait. I just want to jump right into everything instead of taking it one step at a time. We have added another service to our youth group which is the first Sunday of every month which is going great! Tuesday night services are growing also. I'm now ready to make that next move and get into the public schools. I'm going to pray and fast to see what God wants us to do in there. How He wants me to approach things and what I should do. Everyone, please keep this and everything else in your prayers for us. I'm going to have a few meeting with people about this within the next few weeks to get info and ideas of what we can do and how to go about doing it. I have a vision for this youth and how large it will be. But in order for it to get there, I must listen to God and obey what He says. I can't do this by coming up with my own ideas. It must be all from God.
I know the breakthrough in my life for time is right around the corner. I can feel it. I want to just let go of the business and my job and just follow God. But I can hear His voice and I can hear Him saying its just right around the corner, to just hang on, you're almost there. I tell Him I can't take much more. I can't lose my family over this, I can't lose the church over this. I have to have a change soon. It's in His hands. I don't worry that my bills far exceed the amount of money that I bring in. It may sound stupid, but I don't balance my checkbook. I don't look at how much money I have in my account. I don't look to see that my bills are way more than I make. I just write out the check for my tithes and offerings, praise God, then right out the checks for the bills. Every month they get paid. The money is somehow always there and the bills are never late. It's literally impossible. Sometimes I wonder if the government is going to come after me for tax fraud. If they looked into what I make and what my bills are, they would definately ask me to explain. I wouldn't know what to say except tell them that I tithe. I don't make alot of money. I have two kids and a wife. She doesn't work because I want her to be able to be with the kids. I don't make any income from the gym. I actually pay the gym hundreds of dollars a month out of my own pocket just to keep it open. The situation is literally impossible. I've come to learn that my situation is all apart of God's big plan in my family's life. It's amazing what we go through in order to go through what God is going to put us through. I can now see that we are going to have to go through stuff for Christ that looks impossible and that will be impossible, but God is building us up so that we won't even look at the situation, but we will keep our eyes on God and the situations won't even phase us. Because of this, my faith has grown so much and my view on tithing has gotten even stronger. I just want to preach on tithing everyday! I just want to tell people that don't tithe, that they are just messing themselves out of a financial breakthrough. God actually says to test Him in this. I believe tithing shows who really and truly believes in what God says. You can't say you believe in the bible and not tithe. You can't say you believe in God and not tithe, because if you did, then you'd realize that you are stealing God's money. God wants to make sure he is top priority in your life and that nothing as silly as money can come between you and Him. If you are reading this and you don't tithe, then I want to tell you I don't appologize for what I have said. Maybe you test God in this and try it for yourself. Tell God that He really does mean more than anything and if you lose it all from tithing then at least you still have Him. I can't afford to tithe, but I even more can't afford not to tithe. I look at how much money I give God and think about all the bills that I could pay, but I look at how many bills still wouldn't be paid if I didn't have God on my side taking controll of my finances. We would be bankrupt if GOD didn't controll this situation. Let GOD have control of every part of your life and see what He can do through you!
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