okay, look, i admit it. when i was in high school, i was one of the emo kids. i wasn’t one of the ones that wore skin tight jeans and scarves and all of that, but i could’ve been classified in the emo kid group. i shopped at goodwill. i had chucks with song lyrics written on them. i wore the t-shirts of bands that you’ve never heard of. i went to shows in crappy bars and church gyms. i listened to saves the day, thursday, taking back sunday, brand new, and fall out boy. i had a pair of low cut american eagle corduroys.

i even wrote song lyrics to songs that didn’t exist.

i may not have looked like the emo kid but i most definitely was one of them. one of the things that emo kids do is put up song lyrics in random places. it used to be that we would put them up as our away message on aim. sometimes the lyrics would describe what we were doing and others would be just for the heck of it. then after aim sort of died, the cool emo kid thing to do was put those song lyrics as your facebook status.

now the cool emo kid thing to do is to put those song lyrics as titles to blog posts.

in case you didn’t pick up on the sarcastic irony of that statement, every title to a post on here is a song lyric. sometimes i write something and then go searching for a song lyric to use for the title that fits the post. i’ll sometimes spend more time looking for the lyric than i do writing the post. other times i just put a line from the song i’m listening to as the title. then there are times where i hear a line and it sort of “inspires” me to write something new.

this post is that third type.

i told you guys a few weeks ago that i told my boss that i wasn’t going to take the extra year at my job and instead was going to go ahead and dive into the whole full-time ministry thing even though i have no clue where i’ll end up. since word has gotten out about that decision, i have heard advice and questions from every direction imaginable. the question i hear the most is “what’s next? where are you going now?”

i have no. freaking. clue.

the fact that i haven’t heard anything, positive or negative, from some of the places i’ve applied can be a little frustrating. when i tell others this, the first thing they normally say is, “well why don’t you just go back and take that extra year at your job now?” i’ll be honest. i’ve thought about it. i’ve thought about it a lot.

but i feel like going nowhere is like giving up.

i feel like staying here is giving up and even worse, giving up at the first sign of adversity. i feel like that’s the easy thing to do. i know that god has put this passion inside of me and has been building me and forming me in a certain way over the past 23 years. i owe it to myself to at least give it my best shot, right?

this time last summer i had no clue where i was going to spend my summer. one night in late march i got a phone call saying i was accepted into an internship program at a church. i was ecstatic and looking forward to spending my summer in georgia. then one afternoon in mid-april i found out that the funding for that position had fallen through and i had to find something else. that was on a monday. by that friday i had found another opportunity that was an absolute god-send.

i didn’t give up, i just looked in a different direction and found god standing there with a better plan.

i’m human just like every single person reading this. obviously i would love to find out today where i’ll be going after may. unfortunately that’s not how god works. god wants us to trust him. he wants us to fully believe that he’s got our best interest at heart. sometimes he’ll even test us to see if we really believe that or if we’re just saying the right things.

i don’t want to just say the right things.

i want to do the right things.

i want to trust god that he’ll provide something.

and sometimes that’s really, really hard.

i realize that maybe god will provide something completely different than i expect. after all, that’s what he did last summer. i also know that when he does provide something i’ll have a peace about it in a way that i will know that it’s absolutely from him and right now, i don’t have that peace about anything.

i once had a pastor tell me that god does things on his time and that a lot of the time his time is our last minute.

i’d rather get up big early and be able to coast for the win but hitting a last-second shot is still a win, right?

murray state says yes.

say your prayers and take your vitamins.

have a nice day.

-jonathan