Abide in me

" If you abide in me and my words abide in you, ask watever you wish, and it will be given you" John 15:4 (Asbury Authorized Version).

This has been what I have been living in for this last week.  It has been hectic.  I guess you can say it started last Wednesday.  I knew that I had a serious greek midterm this tuesday and a exegesis paper due tomorrow at 8am.  I had a great little plan worked out that would allow me to get every thing together on time and give me the time to spend on everything this week that I would need to spend on it.  I was in the library running over greek vocab when I got a call from my Pastor.  He was real bad sick and needed some time to recover.  So I ended up throwing together a quick bible study for the entire church in about 2 hours.  I usually just teach the youth on Wednesday night by normally letting them just talk about God and I try to lead them down a direction that will let them leave knowing that God was with them and that he cares about their life.

So I brought the Youth into "Big Church" that night and I talked to the whole church about what God will not do.  People had been asking alot of questions dealing with suffering lately and I thought it would be good to go through a real quick introduction into the Doctrine of God (yeah...quick...that is what I thought to, I mainly just talked about the Trinity and Gods redeeming design for mankind).  I talked to Dr. Allan (my pastor) Thursday and found out I needed to preach Sunday night.  Well I ended up moving my exegesis research up a few days and went through Colossians 1:24-29 with the church on Sunday night.

I took my greek mid-term tuesday with about 80% of the preparation that I would have liked to have done, but it went fine.  I crashed for the rest of Tuesday because I think I had about 7 hours of sleep spread across 2 nights by that point in time. 

I really started hitting the exegesis paper hard today, but I still had to spend about 7 hours at the church tonight working our Fall Festival.  It was great seeing so many (around 500) of the community come up to the church to eat free chili and have their kids play games and get TONS of candy.  I loved it.

So here I am, at midnight, on page 2 of an 8 page exegesis paper.  I am not worried...I guess you could say out of 1 through 10 my chaos level is about a 7.  But my peace is about 8. 

I have been praying through the idea of abiding in Christ over the last few days, taking around 30 minutes before I go to bed really focusing on it.  I am not worried at all.  I found out tonight that I am preaching again on Sunday night for sure, and maybe Sunday morning.  God is with us.

Break Silence
quick to speak
but never finishing the words

Jesus House,
anchored strong
resisting all thoughts of doubt.

Comments

[Dan]

Glad you're able to abide through all this! I'll pray for you anyway and ask God to work in and through you. (get some sleep)