Unfortunately, I am sure many of you reading this know a different me. I used to be someone else. Much of my younger years were spent trying to fit in to whatever crowd I found myself and assuredly this led to a multi-faceted life. I fell into the pressures of what people wanted me to be as opposed to what I wanted to be.
It took me a while to come out of this. My first year of college I played soccer at the University of Montevallo, a small school only fifteen minutes from my home. I hated it and was miserable. I wanted to run from everything that I knew. Alabama, God, the Church, friends, and even my family. So I did. I transferred to a small school in Bristol, Tennessee to play soccer. Seven hours from home I thought that I would be safe from all that I was running from, especially God.
My first semester was a rough one. The soccer season was terrible. We sucked. Wow we were abysmal. I wanted to leave again but I did not know where to go or what to do. I hated soccer and I hated myself. Having grown up in the Church, I knew about God, evidently I just decided that I did not want him. However, one of my best friends at my new school was a Christian and there was just something about the way that he lived that I wanted.
I started going to Church and I started doing my own research. I did not want to be duped into some religion that seemed historically and socially intolerable. I began really praying for probably the first time in my life. There was not a moment of enlightenment that I can point to and say, “There! That is what changed everything!” No, I did not have that. It was gradual, as everything with me seems to be. I decided to take a theology class and was hooked. I declared my minor in Biblical Studies and plan to one day attend a theological seminary.
That was two years ago and since then I have been wholeheartedly pursuing my Creator. It has been the most difficult yet rewarding decision I have ever made, if it was my decision at all. In the years that I was running from myself I seemed to have lost track of who I was. That has been the hardest part of all of this I think. I do not recognize that Jarred that I was, in what feels like so long ago, and I hope that you would not either.
I was tired of living within the confines of lies. It was a burden to bear and it felt as if I was living in the shadows. I want you all to know who you are praying for and supporting. In running from everything I was pulled closer to it all.
The decision to go away for the remainder of my education was a hard one for my family but they seemed to find comfort in the words of my Grandfather, a lifelong friend of God. He told them I was searching for something and that I would find it. Little did I know that he was right. I was searching for things that I did not know in places that I had never been.
Now God is working in my life in ways that I cannot fathom. I never would have put myself where I am now. I still have $15,000 to raise. On a good day I believe that God will come through, most days I struggle though. I have just been offered a job and support slowly funnels in. So while much of my faith is riddled by doubt and struggle, these happenings are undoubtedly at the hands of my Creator. I am trying my best these days to look and listen for God. Much of me doubts as I fight to believe, as I fight to love.
Do please try to pray for both me and my squad. What a beautiful opportunity we have been called to, an opportunity to expand the Kingdom of God. In my stubbornness that I unquestionably inherit from my mother I struggle to accept grace. Again Frederick Buechner has the perfect words for times as those:
“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.”
So I ask that you consider both supporting us with prayer and finances. Help us invite more people to the party. The joy we experience on this planet is but a mere shadow of the love we are to know in Eternity. Help us to point others in the only direction that gives life, that gives joy.
–Amen
