Yay I'm finally writing a new post!

It's been months you guys!

Hawaii Next Week

Hey yall!

Last saturday was so good, just listening to Jason speak truth into all of our lives. It was killer.

I leave for Hawaii next week to visit my girlfriend. She goes to calvary bible college on Maui. I will be gone April 8 - 18th. So I will actually be missing two saturdays in a row for April. I let Darin know, but he never got back to me so I hope he's not surprised. Anyways, Love you Darin, now you know if you're reading this.

What I've been learning lately: God has been teaching me to hate sin, Love him, & just love people and let them be who they are. Learned that mostly from last Saturday. Thanks guys,

Love, Peace, and chicken grease,

Nick A.

Herro!!!

Herro Everyone!

I'm on spring break woohoo! Excited about that. I have a bit of homework I need to do over it though. I'm gonna be leading worship for middle school next week so i'm excited about that too. I also like the rain right now. I also think I need to really start praying against all the horrible things happening in Japan. Mostly those nuclear reactor things right now. I'm excited to go visit my girlfriend in Hawaii in a couple weeks.  Meeting with my mentor, Aaron, for the first time today. Alright gotta go! love yall

Expectancy in CIRCLES

If any of you Slices ever have a monday night open then you should totally come to your CIRCLES lifegroup. It is so awesome!

One of the greatest thing I love about it is that it is such a healing place. The last couple weeks there have been people that needed prayer for things and so we all layed hands on them and then God started his healing work on them. Whether that's over an important relationship or a lost family member or even a physical ailment... we all have NO inhibitions to just start praying for it. I can't wait for someone to come on a monday night with a deep sickness or a broken body part or something because they honestly have a great chance of being healed.

I know I am sounding weird to a lot of you who have read this far, but it just doesn't matter to me. I'm so excited for CIRCLES and the fellowship that we all can have. Let's pray together, worship together, receive healing together and bear one anothers burdens. I love you all and my stoked meter will be continually rising over the next 6 months.

Junior High Winter Camp

My lab piece for CIRCLES is being a Junior High leader at RH. And we leave for our annual winter retreat tomorrow. We are going to Big Bear Lake.

All I want is for these kids to encounter God. To see a change this weekend in there hearts for God and then in their behavior for God. I want them to be changed by the Holy Spirit and realize that Christ's death and resurrection are the two most important acts that ever happened in all of history. I want them to worship wholeheartedly, passionately, and give themselves in total unhindered consecration to the Lord. I wanna see revival in our middle school and in ten years I wanna hear about how the middle school kids of Rockharbor Church are changing the world for the King and His Kingdom. Come Holy Spirit and pour Yourself out on Your children!

World religions class

I don't usually post two separate posts one right after the other. Sorry to make you read two in a row, but I had to.

I'm sitting in my Philosophy 112: World Religions class right now and these are some of the questions that are coming up right now...

What is religion? Why is religion?
What is the goal of religion?
Is there one true religion?
Is religion just dogma?
Does religion deal with truth?
What is enlightenment?
Is it ok to judge?
Does God exist?
Does God have a nature?
What is faith?
What is truth?

Man...I'm having a really hard time to know what to say and how to say it. I'm a religious studies major and I will be sitting in these types of classes for a looonng time. Just pray for me that I will hold up the gospel in a loving, rational, correct way in the midst of all these questions that are absolutely HUGE and numerous.

Romance...That seems like a good title

This was going to be a comment on Caydin Sanders' blog about being in a relationship with God before we can enter into a relationship with another person. It seemed like to big of a comment so I'm just gonna make it into a post. 

Before people can enter into a relationship with someone else, both parties must be united with God individually. Before we can healthily partake in Eros love, we must first know & receive Agape love from the Father, Son, and Spirit. 

Caydin wrote, "And foremost, He is giving me the gift of a deepened relationship with Him."

I can't agree more. So many of us want that deep relationship with another person, or to be fulfilled by an achievement, goal, or human. We become "relationship-ly", we become  "marriage-ly", or our heart becomes taken up by another person and we become "_________-ly" (insert name there). People, things, and passions fill the parts of our hearts that only God can fill! 

LET US BE "GOD-LY"!! Filled with His love and devotion to us first before any other entity can enter. 

Prayer

Sometimes it feels like my entire prayer life if simply filled with decisions and requests. It can be filled with anguish and struggle. Doubt and worry. 

Given: there are times and places in life where this is extremely valid to do; depends on the person and their season of life at the moment and a lot of people are appropriately at that point. I say that to make sure no person is offended from reading this and to say that I am at a different (not better or worse) point in my relationship with Jesus.

For me though,  I wonder if there is more. I think alot of my problems and issues, especially the ones I talk about in my prayer life are either brought on or made drastically worse simply by the way that I handle and think of them. We can worry something to death. We can make it a problem by thinking and worrying it into one. I get really tired of doing this. I heard a pastor talk about this and he says that now his time with God usually just looks like being the presence of the Lord. Just loving and being with the Holy Spirit. And if he has a request he presents it, but it takes no more than a couple minutes because the Lord knows all his needs. He isn't perfect, he isn't at some "perfect" point in his prayer life, but just chooses to make his prayer life about spending time with his father, his best friend, and Lord. 

I think I wanna take up this challenge by taking a few days or even one day and simply not presenting any requests to God. I will pray without ceasing but never with worrisome asking. I will simply and solely love on Him and worship Him for this period of time. And at the end of time see how it went. If I do this challenge for a day and at the end of the day realize that I didn't pray at all then I think there would be a problem. Or if throughout the day, I found it extremely hard to pray, then I think there would be a problem. 

The Lord is faithful. He hears all. He knows all. He knows when a leaf falls to the ground in the middle of a forest. He knows what I want the most in my life. His love endures forever. His love never fails. His love is the one thing that remains.

I don't know what I should title this post.

I have had a lot of great things happen to me since the last time I posted but at the moment I am extremely frustrated with the way the day has gone! why do I always seem to post on my blogger when I'm frustrated about something? I was gonna write about spreading the gospel and that I talked to a stranger for a while about Jesus last night, but nope! I'd rather have a vent sesh about how I had one of the worst days ever at work today. Im not gonna go into details about it, but long story short it feels as though I have been trying my best all day at my job and after everything is said and done, at the end of the day the only thing I managed to do was to have people get fed up with me. That's it! I would understand why my co-workers would be upset with me if the reason for their "fed-up-ness" was because of lack of effort on my part. I would understand if I had ill intentions, wrong motives in my heart, or if deep down inside I full well knew I was being lazy. I was doing my best all day and it just never seemed good enough to anyone. Tomorrow I will probably apologize for making you all read this dumb post, but this is just coming from a place of frustration right now. 

I'm just gonna go pray or something right now.

Just to put a face to a name/blog everyone...Here is what I look like! Just me bein stupid! :)

Boredom

When a child is little and they express that they are bored, a lot of times that can be translated as them being lonely. At the moment, they feel lonely. They want someone to be with them, to entertain them, to talk, and love them.

I have a pretty busy schedule with school, work, church service, serving, and CIRCLES. Even amidst all of the business of life, whenever I get a free moment I simply feel bored. I can't wait for the next thing that I have to do. I hate that feeling because like a child, it truly does feel lonely. Even as I write this, I have been alone for the past few hours and it some ways it hurts. But in the midst of these feelings I feel conviction. Because isn't God always there? What if there was a point that even if you were alone you didn't actually feel lonely. That's where I wanna be. I wanna with the Holy Spirit all the day long. Communing, fellowshipping, and speaking with him. I do do that often, but not enough.

I guess...I guess I just want more of the Holy Spirit. So Come Holy Spirit. Come. Come fill me and my brothers & sisters of CIRCLES. Fill us up so much that you just pour out of us, overflow, and flood the world around us. All we want is you. Your son, Nick.

Response to Saturday

(Disclaimer: God can speak whenever and however he chooses, but I would say the best place to host the Spirit of God if we want to hear Him speak is to be in silence.)

This is such an interesting concept because whenever I think about listening to something, I think about how there is an assumption within the definition of listening. I guess the assumption would be that when we listen, we need to be hearing something; there needs to be physical sound frequencies entering into our ears canal's. After reading this and thinking about it a lot, that is not the way to listen to God. Just as Tozer stated and as it says in Psalm 46:10, "Be still and know that I am God." The way to start listening to God is to be quiet. When I have a conversation with a person, just as it is with God, to hear them speak I must not be speaking or listening to anything else.

Let us listen to the God of all sound by closing our mouths, shutting our ears, and opening our hearts.

First Post

Hello Everyone,

This is my new blogspot that was originally created for CIRCLES, the discipleship program through Rock Harbor Church. This is my first post. This blog will primarily be used for posts related specifically to CIRCLES. We'll see how long it takes until my posts start to deviate in content from CIRCLES related topics.......


Welcome!