Giving Up

This post actually semi-goes along with the Horizon Retreat post.

One thing that I grew up with is the idea that I have to become someone important.  It's an idea that's been instilled in me since forever.  I have to become important.  I have to get rich.  I have to become powerful.  So my entire life was riding around that central theme of having a great career.  And when that career never happened, I become lost, devastated, and no one was helping me.  I was doing everything I can to do something.  I even enrolled for a M.A. in Teaching at USC.  (Which also didn't pan out.  I quit because of the stress and anxiety that was going on in my life.)  But March happened.  And I became renewed through Jesus Christ.  After being okay with who I am and where I am in life, God gave me a path to follow.  It was a wonderful blessing to me.  I started becoming slightly obsessed with it to the point where I was idolizing that path instead of God.

What?  How can that be possible?  Isn't that the same thing?  is what I've always thought.  If you follow God, you're following the path that he's given you.  But through Horizon, one thing I came to realize is that you can idolize many things.  Money, career, even family, and the scariest thing of all is idolizing your God-given ministry.  And that was what I was starting to do.

On Sunday, we were going over the story of Abraham, and how he had to sacrifice his son Isaac.  Isaac wasn't just an only son to Abraham.  Isaac was the embodiment of the future that God had promised Abraham, the future that Abraham was waiting for his entire life.  God had promised Abraham as many descendants as the stars through his son Isaac, and God had asked him to sacrifice that promise, that dream, through his son.  And he was willing to do it.  So I asked my students what their dreams were, what their goals in life were.  One of them said she wanted to study criminology.  Then I asked her, "What if God told you to give up the dream of even going to college?"  Her eyes grew big and her cheeks grew red and she exclaimed, "No!  No way!  I can't do that!!"  And I guess that was what it was like for Abraham.  And that was what it was like for me.

So during the Horizon retreat, the first thing I was able to lay down was my dreams of my own personal 'success.'  Even though I was trying to follow God's plan in my life, I was able to sacrifice even having a plan for my life at all.  It's a constant sacrifice for me.  Every time I go to work, I want to do something better.  Every time I go back to my apartment, I want to live somewhere else.  Everyone I pay my bills I want to make more money.  But I have to remember, that my life is just a life on earth.  It's only a wink of an eye in God's eternity.  I'm living my life for Him now, not for myself.