Let the blogging begin!

I have realized something over the past few months—I’m getting old.  Or older, at least. 

An 8-year-old girl at my church was telling me all about the new Justin Bieber movie.  I told her that I wish they would have made an N*Sync movie when I was her age.  Her blank stare indicated that she had never even heard of N*Sync—are you kidding me?

I cited a source from 2004 in a paper, and my professor told me I couldn’t use it because it was outdated.  I started high school in 2004.

We had two snow days in a row this semester, the first snow days at Truman in 37 years.  I didn’t even feel slightly compelled to build a fort or make the trek to the nearest sledding hill, makeshift cafeteria-tray-turned-sled in hand.

The other day, I used the phrase, “Back in the day” to refer to something that happened in my own life.

And…

I’m starting a blog.

Blogs are for people with important things to share, people with lives.  News about family, professional opinions, recipes, pearls of wisdom—these are the things that people blog about.  I can’t possibly be old enough to have anything of worth to write about, right?

Well, posts with pictures of kids or delicious dinner ideas will be in short supply, but I think that I’ll have a lot to share with you in the coming months.  As I inch closer to graduation in December, I am realizing how many changes, challenges, and blessings God will bring into my life this year.

As the last year of college begins, I know that many opportunities will come my way.  The choices I make will take me down one of two paths.  One path is wide and worn.  It leads to the illusive “American Dream.”  This is the path where all my talents will be recognized, where all my hard work will pay off, where I will get all the credit for my accomplishments.

The other path, much narrower than the first, is one that requires its travelers to embrace radical abandonment to the person and purpose of Jesus Christ.  This is the path where my talents are given to me in order to inspire others to glorify the Lord, where hard work plays second fiddle to the power of the Holy Spirit, and where God is recognized as the giver of every good gift in my life.

The path I choose will determine my response to lots of questions that I must answer in the next year.  Which job will I take?  What city will I live in?  How will I spend my money?  What friends will I have?  Where will I serve?  What will consume my time?  These decisions are coming, and I want each choice to glorify the Lord.

In his book, Radical, David Platt poses this question:  “What if God in all his grace is radically committed to showing himself strong on behalf of a people who express their need for him so their lives might make much of him?”

Platt goes on to say, “God delights in using ordinary Christians who come to the end of themselves and choose to trust in his extraordinary provision.  He stands ready to allocate his power to all who are radically dependent on him and radically devoted to making much of him.”

Radical dependence and radical devotion—that is what the Lord wants from me.

Already the Lord is causing me to stretch and grow as he molds me into the woman he wants me to be.  I’m a planner by nature.  I like to set goals, and I have long been dreaming and making goals about the phase of life I am about to enter into.

But over the last few months, God has been exposing my goals for what they are—altars to myself.  My dreams for my life were things that I could accomplish in my own power.  They were risk-free and disappointment-proof.  My goals were safe, and that’s a problem because my God is daring.

He is changing my dreams and making them reflect his own dreams for his Kingdom.  He is expanding what I thought was possible as he reveals the power of his Spirit.  I’m excited about the direction he is taking me, even if the changes are uncomfortable or unpredictable at times.  But if that is what it takes for me to discover the character of God and become more like his Son, then I’m all in.  I wait in eager anticipation to see what God will do in me and through me in 2011.