I’ll be leaving for Asia in early September. Once abroad I plan on writing a blog post every 2 weeks (2 per country). This post lets you know where I am now, my goals for the trip, and what you can pray for as I prepare for this journey.
The goal of this trip
I want to grow close with God. To be brutally honest, I doubt the existence of God on a daily basis. I have never seen, heard, felt, or experienced something that I can point to and clearly say was supernatural. Everything I have encountered thus far in life has two plausible explanations in my opinion. One with the underlying foundation that there is a God and the other asserting that there is no God. For instance, why do some people show more faith in their life? Perhaps faith is a supernatural gift given to us by God. Research shows a trend that people who act and believe with great faith have areas of their brain light up significantly more with a special MRI scan when compared to people with little faith. Maybe God’s way of allotting faith is through defining that part of your brain chemistry. Or maybe people with faith believe in God not because there is a God but because their brain chemistry developed differently and it is in their nature to believe with little concrete evidence. They believe because their brain chemistry allows them to fabricate a relationship with a supreme being, because their parents believed and taught them to believe, maybe some need to believe that there is something greater than them selves.
Let me be clear, I do believe in God. I’m just not confident about that belief. Some days 60% some days 90%, but never 100%. I want to be 100% confident in my belief that God exists every day. And not only do I want to KNOW that God is real, I want to have some sort of CONNECTION with him. Something more than just intellectual knowledge of his existence. I want a relationship with him. A relationship by definition is 2-way, if God does not communicate back in a way that I can understand when I call out with all my heart then a relationship does no exist.
So how do I get to 100% confidence that God is real? Maybe seeing miracles or hearing an audible voice. But really what would that do for me? If God only showed himself to me in that one moment, then later on I could decide that it wasn’t God, it was me imagining things. I think that for me at least, belief in God and relationship with God are codependent. I can’t truly have one without the other.
So what do I need to be in relationship with God? Here is where I’m really stumped. I feel like I’ve tried everything. Read scripture, prayed relentlessly, cried, screamed, confessed, prayed more, prayed for faith, but nothing has worked. I’ve been at it for about 5 years. And the only thing I haven’t tried is a year long mission trip abroad.
Prayer Request
Pray for my faith, pray that it grows boundlessly. Pray that God will reveal himself to me somehow. Not necessarily through an audible voice or a miracle, but that he would speak to my soul. Pray that I will understand how broken I am so that I will understand how much I need God. Keep it simple and keep it real, pray that God works in me.
