Coming to Terms

Hello everyone,

Here I am living my life, this is a glance at who I am, and who I'm trying to become.  I am in West Virginia doing mission trips and wow, I can't believe how good God is.  I see him working through things everyday.  I am seeing who He is, and I am excited to be a part of what he is trying to teach me as well as the marvelous work He is doing here.  The more I am here though, the more I think about who I am and why I'm here.  I question my own motivations for it all.  I believe that I am here because I want to serve God and gain tools that will help me further God's kingdom more and more in the future, but I just have the feeling of that not being the true reason.

It has been a struggle lately because I arrived here not really knowing much about my position or even how to do it.  I was scared and I didn't know how God could use me, the idiot who knows nothing about construction when my title is construction coordinator.  God came through over and over, not to say it's been easy because it is far beyond difficult, but it is wonderful at the same time.  I've been here a little over a month and I feel that my knowledge especially in construction has grown stupendously.  This brings me to my feelings of not knowing what I'm doing here.

Once I started getting the hang of things I started viewing everything as a job to be completed, not people that I'm here to serve alongside.  There was a man who needed some help finishing his kitchen and because we couldn't get a team in there to help, we decided he could finish it himself.  I have been torn ever since I realized what I was becoming.  Mission work became all about getting teams in, helping them have a good "high" and then sending them off while preparing for the next week to do it all again.  This is my job, but I feel like I am missing out on the whole idea of community and why I'm actually here.  It scares me that not even a month can change my way of thinking so drastically.

I'm now learning how I can make a difference in the community myself.  I still don't know what my true motivation is in being here, sometimes I really wonder why I am.  However, I know that  I want to be the guy who knows everyone when I walk into the  store.  I want this to be my home away from home, and I want to spend my weekends helping where I don't help during the week.  I am still far from perfect at my job, but I believe that as long as I don't lose site of building the Church everything will be better.  I want to take time with people who just want to talk, and not be so focused on trying to get things done.  My life needs to be a focus of relations rather than a to-do list. I wonder if some of it is just that I want to be a "radical" Christian more so than I want to love God.  I think it is a hard line to draw so I still want to live crazy, but I know that I need to challenge myself continually on who I am. If anyone who reads this would continually pray for my heart and spirit in these things, I would be greatly indebted.  God is still so good, and he is still working thankfully, but I want to see more.  I am not satisfied with how I am living, and I hope you all challenge yourselves to think about why you are who you are and why you do things really.  We all know the right answers, but is that really who we are?