I hope to never stop learning, and it will be a sad day if I do.
Learning is a wonderful thing, but it's not always easy. When I speak of learning, I mean everything everything from learning facts, methods, ways of thinking, or even growing in character, in faith, etc. With things like facts, it's pretty quick and painless. With things like faith, it often takes time, effort, intentionality, and can even be painful. Painful because to grow, it requires failure. It requires us to realize that left to our natural desires and instincts, we will fail. We will fall short of the standard set before us by Jesus, without whom we would have no means of this growth. And that's the point of the gospel, without Jesus, we aren't good enough! The point I'm trying to make is that learning takes many forms.
The past three weeks here in MN have been training weeks for myself and the other CTI fulltime members. I certainly knew that there would be a lot to learn: music, a team role, probably a drama. I did not realize how intense it would be! Sure, I've been learning a lot of music, but plenty more as well. I have two team jobs, am playing a role in two dramas, and for the past week I've been staying late with the other sound tech for more training. Those extra training sessions were definitely an eye opener. I had no idea how little I knew about sound things! I consider myself a curious guy, and I thought I'd collected a fair bit of sound knowledge over time, but I've certainly been learning how much I have left to learn!
With all of these things I've been learning, I've been getting a little stressed. Thinking things like, "Didn't I just graduate? And now I'm spending up to 13 hrs a day learning more things?" or more seriously, "I'm not sure if I can handle this". There's so much I have been learning and still have to learn, and I feel I have a lot of responsibility on my team. And if I'm going to be honest, I've been a little scared lately.
I had been telling myself that it will all be alright once our team finishes learning. But we won't ever stop learning! Sure we'll know the music and dramas, but we will continue learning about God and His character. We will continue to learn about each other and how to communicate with, respect, and love each other. We will keep learning so many of these things. But bigger than all of that, I hope that we will all learn to not attempt all of this on our own.
This year will be quite challenging as I've been learning (even during training), and I don't think we'll be able to do it on our own. My prayer is that we would not attempt to. That we would stop striving to be better, to meet the impossible standard set by God. That we would not try to become intrinsically righteous, but surrender ourselves to instead be clothed in the righteousness offered by our God. I hope you will join me in this prayer - for the CTI teams, and for you as well.
Like I was saying before, learning can be difficult, but I hope to never stop learning.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
As All Things Must Have A Beginning ... + The AYNmO Prequal
I've now been here in MN since friday night. We've done a lot of orientation things, lots of team bonding, and lots of learning about how the ministry works as well as our role as fulltime team members. Yesterday, round 2 summer teams had their final concert. The purpose (besides rocking out one last time as a team of course) was to pass the metaphorical torch that is CTI on to us incoming fulltimers. Also, they used this as a time to share wisdom with us and encourage us as we begin training for a long and crazy year!
So now they've gone home, to hopefully live out all that God has showed them overseas in their home lives. And following their departure, we finally began our music training! Which is of course very exciting, but comes with it's share of difficulties as well. Professional musicians playing professional concerts make it so easy for us to live in ignorance of all the complexities that go into creating those wonderful collections of sound! Since I've been asked to run the sound board from stage as well as play bass (now the easier part of my musical duties), I have a lot of work ahead of me. On top of learning songs, chords, kick patterns, etc, I have quite a bit of learning to do as far as sound teching goes. Even after learning how that fancy sound board (which looks like the 80's' idea of what futuristic tech. looks like) works, there's so much that needs to be fine tuned, and even altered from venue to venue! While potentially overwhelming, I'm excited for the challenge!
Today we were sharing how we all ended up at CTI, and it was awesome! To hear 16 different life stories, taking wildly different paths, and all ending with the present, all ending with something like "and that's how I came to devote an entire year of my life to serving God by praising his name and sharing all he's done with the world". How cool is that!? During this experience, I realized how few people I'd told the full story of how I chose to do a second year of CTI. In light of that, this ends the "keeping up with CTI" section of the blog, and the rest will be the story of how I ended up on this yearlong journey. So if you don't care to read on, I certainly won't hold it against you!
We'll start with last summer. I heard about CTI through a college friend, and ended up going to Taiwan with CTI for about a month. It was the best month of my life! Every fiber of my being was screaming "more, more!" ... almost. There was one thing that was holding me back. As my time in Taiwan went on, I began to get more and more frustrated that we (my team and I) rarely, if ever, got to see the fruits of our labor. The ministry is often very "touch and go", so we don't spend a lot of time in one place. And when we did, I still felt like we didn't see any life change in others. I never saw or heard someone changed by God through us. How could I even consider spending more time, energy, and resources (my own and the resources of my wonderful supporters!) if the most important reason I was there in the first place didn't seem to be working! It drove me nuts!
About halfway through the trip, it was bothering me so much that I figured I should just dump my thoughts out on paper. While writing about my frustrations, the team gathered around the common room where I was and began spouting all these stories back and forth about how some one was impacted by what we were doing! Are you kidding me!! I've certainly heard "God's timing is perfect" before, but I'd always shrugged it off as a vague nicety that we sort of tell ourselves. How foolish of me to question his faithfulness, love, and mastery of time. And from that point on it was just a matter of time, and I think I knew that.
Taiwan came to an end, and I went home and quickly let me parents know that I wanted to do CTI again for a year after graduating. They had reservations, but I applied anyway, y'know, "just in case". They had typical parental worries, all of which I very much expected. Job, future, money, all those worries we focus on when the safety of the person we care about is a top priority. All valid concerns no doubt, but when God is involved, directly involved, these worries become almost laughable. "You need to raise $12,000? hahaha, I made everything! What's money in comparison?" (I like to imagine God with a sense of humor). So after the initial shock, they agreed to support me in my trip. And now, a year later, I'm here!! Ready and anxious to make disciples of all nations! That means you too USA! Watch out!
So now they've gone home, to hopefully live out all that God has showed them overseas in their home lives. And following their departure, we finally began our music training! Which is of course very exciting, but comes with it's share of difficulties as well. Professional musicians playing professional concerts make it so easy for us to live in ignorance of all the complexities that go into creating those wonderful collections of sound! Since I've been asked to run the sound board from stage as well as play bass (now the easier part of my musical duties), I have a lot of work ahead of me. On top of learning songs, chords, kick patterns, etc, I have quite a bit of learning to do as far as sound teching goes. Even after learning how that fancy sound board (which looks like the 80's' idea of what futuristic tech. looks like) works, there's so much that needs to be fine tuned, and even altered from venue to venue! While potentially overwhelming, I'm excited for the challenge!
Today we were sharing how we all ended up at CTI, and it was awesome! To hear 16 different life stories, taking wildly different paths, and all ending with the present, all ending with something like "and that's how I came to devote an entire year of my life to serving God by praising his name and sharing all he's done with the world". How cool is that!? During this experience, I realized how few people I'd told the full story of how I chose to do a second year of CTI. In light of that, this ends the "keeping up with CTI" section of the blog, and the rest will be the story of how I ended up on this yearlong journey. So if you don't care to read on, I certainly won't hold it against you!
We'll start with last summer. I heard about CTI through a college friend, and ended up going to Taiwan with CTI for about a month. It was the best month of my life! Every fiber of my being was screaming "more, more!" ... almost. There was one thing that was holding me back. As my time in Taiwan went on, I began to get more and more frustrated that we (my team and I) rarely, if ever, got to see the fruits of our labor. The ministry is often very "touch and go", so we don't spend a lot of time in one place. And when we did, I still felt like we didn't see any life change in others. I never saw or heard someone changed by God through us. How could I even consider spending more time, energy, and resources (my own and the resources of my wonderful supporters!) if the most important reason I was there in the first place didn't seem to be working! It drove me nuts!
About halfway through the trip, it was bothering me so much that I figured I should just dump my thoughts out on paper. While writing about my frustrations, the team gathered around the common room where I was and began spouting all these stories back and forth about how some one was impacted by what we were doing! Are you kidding me!! I've certainly heard "God's timing is perfect" before, but I'd always shrugged it off as a vague nicety that we sort of tell ourselves. How foolish of me to question his faithfulness, love, and mastery of time. And from that point on it was just a matter of time, and I think I knew that.
Taiwan came to an end, and I went home and quickly let me parents know that I wanted to do CTI again for a year after graduating. They had reservations, but I applied anyway, y'know, "just in case". They had typical parental worries, all of which I very much expected. Job, future, money, all those worries we focus on when the safety of the person we care about is a top priority. All valid concerns no doubt, but when God is involved, directly involved, these worries become almost laughable. "You need to raise $12,000? hahaha, I made everything! What's money in comparison?" (I like to imagine God with a sense of humor). So after the initial shock, they agreed to support me in my trip. And now, a year later, I'm here!! Ready and anxious to make disciples of all nations! That means you too USA! Watch out!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)