Getting Dirty

A couple of weeks before we got out of school for Christmas, I was blessed by being able to have a short, yet touching conversation with a friend after prayer in our elective class.
One thing led to another and she mentioned something that only until now I've been able to process.

God was completely and absolutely willing to get His hands dirty with you. 

At the time, I wasn't sure if I should've taken it as an insult or if it was, in its own unique way, a compliment.
I sorta pushed it aside for a while, but no matter how hard I pushed, the statement seemed to push a little harder every time.
After a while, it was the only thing I would find myself thinking about.
God, the perfect One, getting His hands dirty with me...WILLINGLY.

It boggled my mind then and it still does.

You see, God gets His hands dirty with us because He loves us.
I remember thinking very strongly back in 9th grade that I had to clean myself up in order to be able to stand at the foot of the cross. As time went by, I began to see why the cross was there in the first place. I wasn't supposed to clean myself up before I went to the cross...its the cross itself where I find the One that provided that which I was to be cleansed by: the blood of God's one and only Son.
And it is this that overwhelms my heart, in every good sense of the word.
The cross; the love and freedom that it provides.
A love that brings us to our knees and a freedom to live a life worth of the calling that we've received.

And here we are, Christmas has gone by and our Savior was born.
A Savior that would get His hands dirty because of the love that He holds for us.
May we never let Him go.

With Jesus, change is inevitable

As of late, God has been asking me to change a lot of things.
Which is wonderful...but definitely hard.
To be honest, the hardest one has to do with the friendships that I hold on to and what I expect from them.
I've always expect people to care a certain amount about my life and what's going on it.

While in Leticia, feeling completely alone and forgotten at times, I began to realize that I can't just stand there and wait for people to love and care as much as I want them to.

Maybe I'm interpreting this completely wrong, but God first loved us. And personally, it was the way that He overwhelmed my heart with His love that led me to desire to love Him back.

I don't want to OVERWHELM someone with my love; that's what Jesus is doing. But I gotta show someone the love that I have for them. Period. Not because I want them to love me just as much or cause I want them to care. No. God sent His one and only Son to die for ALL. He doesn't expect for EVERYONE to turn around and love Him just as much. But He does desire for that to happen.

Anyway, maybe I went a little of track for a second.

So yeah, God has been asking me to really evaluate the reasons why I hold on to a friendship and if maybe I'm being completely selfish in certain ones.

Without mentioning names to save the innocent, God has asks me to let go of the way that I hold on to a specific friendship. My intentions of why I would hang out with them and why I would talk to them were extremely selfish.

It's definitely been hard.

This whole..process of letting go has been going on for a while.
And to be honest, there's times when I fail and fall flat on my face and get up more bruised that I used to be. But man, God is so faithful.

With every fall and getting up, He helps me realize something new about this certain friendship.

I feel like at this very moment, my intentions have made an indescribable shift. I feel like I can talk to the person without having second intentions. I feel like I can talk to them just for the sake of talking. I feel like I can be their friend just for the sake of being their friend. I don't know if that sounds wrong, but it's true. I mean, I can be their friend and well, that's it. I can be their friend and hopefully, we can both be blessed through the friendship that we share.

God has changed my heart and my life so much. Some changes have been really hard and some not AS hard. But change, man, it's a beautiful thing.

IT'S ONLY THE BEGINNING

It's been months since I've gotten back from the Amazons. And believe it or not, it still hasn't been enough time for me to process everything that happened there.
I find myself missing it a lot at times.
That's always hard.

I don't think I've ever written a blog about my every day life. It's a little strange, really. Having people read this is just a foreign thought.
But exciting.
Exciting because it's one of the many ways that I'll be able to share with people everything that God has been doing in my life and everything that He was been teaching me.It calls for brutal honesty.
Hard.
But wonderful.

This is basically an invitation to those who read it.
An invitation to be part of who I am and what God is doing in my life. An invitation to be -- one way or another-- part of my journey.
The journey will have bumps and obstacles to have to be faced; the journey will have certain storms to survive; the journey will also have sunrises and sunsets to remind me (and everyone involved) that God's mercies are new every morning.But above all, because it is God's love leading the way, this journey:
it will be beautiful.