Twenty-Ten

Twenty-ten, I really wanted the mob mentality to adopt "oh-ten" because it's different.

Different is the word I want to embrace for this year. This year is going to be different. This year we have a baby for the entire year. This year we're going to sell our house and live some where different. I hopefully will have a different job! I want to be challenged in a different way spiritually. I want to be different in the way I impact people.

I, like many people, have chosen to live life among people who don't have a relationship with Christ in hopes that they see Christ in me by the way I live my life. I didn't want to be weird enough to turn them off to Christ but the idea was to impact them by showing them Christ's love. What ended up happening is, I wasn't different enough to make them realize I wasn't just a "nice guy." I didn't impact them enough to show them Christ has something bigger than being an American or voting Republican or Democrat.

This next part is going to sound weird but I can't stop it and as hard as I've tried, have never been able to stop it. I have grown up knowing I was designed to make an impact in the world. If you say that to people, they instantly think you want to be rich, famous, a celebrity, or crazy and some people think you're immature and vain. All my life I've listened to people tell me some of those things. I believed the ones I wanted to believe and decided to seek after them. When I accepted Christ, I realized that impacting the world had nothing to do with impacting the world the way most people think. I figured out that I could be those things or not be those things yet still make an impact in the world.

I have been involved in things big and small that make an impact, but right now I go to work, I go to church, I go home and do it over and over and over again. I might make an impact occasionally but not how I was designed. My job does not fit my personality but it does fit my skill-set. My job does not let me impact the world for Christ that fills the desire of my heart. In the church, I'm not involved in a way that makes a real impact in myself or others that meets the needs of my soul. My home, my stuff, my hobbies keep the money I have been allotted from impacting others they way my heart desires. The weight of this pressure from not doing what I was designed to do keeps me from being the person, husband and father I desire to be.

So this year is going to be different. I want a different job, one that allows me to impact people daily. Impact them in a way that makes them ask, "WHY?!" Church, job, prayer, reading, worship, money, things and relationships are going to change. Twenty-ten is going to be different, it has to be different because we're not on the right track. We're not doing what we were called to do; impact the world for Christ is my desire.