Eek - wow. It’s a Friday @ 5:34 and I’m in that anxious stage between being off for the weekend and going to church, so I thought I might as well put together a quick blog post. Most of my life is still pretty routine - I just go to church on the weekdays and I go to church on the weekends. I might rock climb in the mornings and eat something from Trader Joe’s at nights, then talk to Suzi for some amount of time. Sometimes we don’t talk until late - so late that Suzi finds herself in a weird half-dream state, where she only dreams that she’s communicating with me.

We’ve finally gotten our marital counseling figured out, which meant that we had homework recently. We had to go online and fill out a quiz of about 250 of those “Rate from 1 to 5 to Strongly Disagree or Agree” questions, covering all sorts of topics like family upbringing and background and how we spent time together or how we felt about finances. To be honest, I’m really nervous about counseling because I’m afraid that at our first session, Jeremy Horton (our college pastor) will pull out the results to our online quizzes and tell me that I failed. And that I’m no longer allowed to marry Suzi.

But yes - things have been good lately. I’m still really enjoying the community that I’ve been able to find at church, the transparency I can show, and the truth that others will hold me to keep. I’m glad that I’ve been able to get so involved and feel like a leader, though it’s been less than 6 months. As stats have shown Seattle as one of the most unchurched regions in the nation, perhaps that is a reason I’ve been so encouraged - I go to church with a bunch of guys who didn’t grow up in church. Almost all of the core leadership grew up in nonChristian homes with nonChristian parents - two brothers even brought their parents to faith. A good friend named Fred (he’s providing the music for Suzi and my wedding!) is the only Christian in his family and will be going to San Francisco this fall, against his family’s will, to attend seminary and study missions, with the goal of becoming a missionary to an unreached people group.

Being around people like that helps me see that people with no Christian background, no Christian upbringing, still yearn for Christ. It’s a rather nice defense against people who believe that we only believe what we’re sociologically set up to believe. At the same time, being around people who pursue God out of desperation and understanding of what their lives were like before Christ reminds me where my hope and strength needs to lie. I can’t allow myself to grow in pride, because I really can’t allow myself to desire self-sufficiency, though I tend to perpetually drift in that direction.

With that said, I pray I can grow and learn and lead a Christ-centered life and that I wouldn’t be so foolish to think a marriage or a life can stand apart from Him. I pray I take each of these next 78 days slowly.