My experiences thus far in this trip has been very revelatory for me in many of my convictions that I have. It's revealed many ways of life that is need of being calibrated and others that has been reevaluated as I aim as becoming increasingly conscious of how I am practical of my convictions.
One certain thing I've noticed is that I have a very weak desire to produce conversations because I'm fairly lazy and feel like conversing requires an astronomical amount of effort. Maybe an exaggeration, but sometimes maybe not. And because I despise conversations that are unauthentic and ones that are ignited through the compulsion to talk because of our Christian stereotype, I rarely choose to talk if I do not believe the conversation is worthwhile - how foolish my fleshly discernment deceives me in situations like that. When there is no desire, as A.W. Tozer once prayed, [paraphrased] I desire so that I would desire more of you, I thirst that I might become more thirsty. I truly desire to desire, and thirst to thirst, that my acquiring of a very fallen social ability would become transformed into an authentic desire to come into further communion with God's chosen people, God's holy nation.
This brings me into my second thought. I have a strong conviction for communion and unity amongst God's people and for us individually in conformation to the trinity. As I have been living with a Christian community in a semi-isolated area of Wisconsin (to me at least because I'm from Chicago), it seems to me that I do not visually see unity as a beautiful thing. I almost condemn unity internally when I see God's people seeking after him as a quotidian need for his grace and his empowering word. That is when I stopped and soaked in the despicable and deteriorating thoughts within my head. How can I go on discovering this holy structure of communion and unity in my own life when I do not truly see the body uniting together with Christ as a beautiful thing? Can I begin to adore it? I need to want for the people of the Lord, I need to be affectionate in truth. Knowledge without transformation is idolatry. I do not want to be caught up in the act of idolatry. Only the Father can produce change, and I wait and thirst with my life desperately for it.
And then there is this thought of always wanting to be high and exalted in almost everything I do. I hope for a miraculous, yet possible cycle of transformation within me. I desire that Christ would flush out the ugliness of my flesh and move me to become coministers with his people. A humility that never ends in such an intangible cycle that I can not comprehend. That I might be humble that I'm humble that I'm humble that I'm humble...
I'm weak and I'm being sustained by the hands who have made the ancient paths and sustained his those of the ages of old. Father, would you work as I believe, and would I believe as you move me to believe, and would you move me to believe that the grace in which control permits.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Amen
