Imperishable Inheritance

I have been think­ing intently about what my life will look like after June 10th. That day is the day of my grad­u­a­tion from The Wright State Uni­ver­sity. I am cer­tainly excited to embark on a new time in my life. My time in col­lege has been such a life chang­ing expe­ri­ence that I am com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the start. I came in a recov­er­ing drug addict, anorexic, lost, uncon­tent soul. I’m leav­ing over three years sober, recov­er­ing every daily from my eat­ing strug­gles, found, and com­pletely joy­ful in Christ. My idea of what this time would look like has also changed dras­ti­cally since I started due to all of the intense changes.

I thought start­ing that I would leave a MIS major going into a good full-time job, mar­ried, and get­ting ready to have chil­dren (I’m not kid­ding, I thought I would be mar­ried by 22). My min­istry is surely at the top of my list, and before I make any kind of pro­fes­sional deci­sion I will be decided spir­i­tu­ally. Think­ing of being mar­ried at 22 makes me laugh. I promised Trinh we would marry each other if we weren’t mar­ried by 32; so I have to get going (just kid­ding Trinh)!

I have met and start­ing meet­ing with a man by the name of Andy Miller who I am excited about. He has a seri­ous heart for inter­na­tional min­istry, and he also has the abil­ity to dream big. Trinh and I met with Ben Thomas who is our unof­fi­cial advi­sor (he leads the min­istry for Ath­letes in Action for all of South­east Asia), and we dis­cussed about the future of the min­istry. We talked most about a part­ner­ship with Apex Com­mu­nity Church. While none of us go there, we real­ize how strate­gic of a part­ner­ship it can be, but I have the­o­log­i­cal con­cerns over their house church move­ment and how they see Bridges fit­ting into that. We are in dis­cus­sion now over what this will look like. I am writ­ing a strate­gic plan for Bridges, and I will post it soon. We have decided to become an orga­ni­za­tion at WSU however.

The next five years ten­ta­tively look like this. Before I start I know not to worry about tomor­row (Mat 6:33–34), but I also want to be dili­gent and strate­gic in how I approach my min­istry. Matt Mar­tin talked to me about liv­ing together after grad­u­a­tion, and I think that I will excer­cise that option for a year for a few rea­sons. First, I don’t want to leave Bridges as it is right now. It is right on the pin­na­cle of being an extremely pow­er­ful force in the Day­ton area for reach­ing inter­na­tional stu­dents, and I just can’t sim­ply leave at this cru­cial time. Sec­ondly, I don’t want to just drop my job at the base, and I will explain why.

In five years, I have estab­lished that I want to be over­seas in an unreached peo­ple group. I put a map of the Mid­dle East on my wall so I have to look at it every­time I leave my room. I have started to pray for Sudan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.

While I work all that out, I would like to work with The Trav­el­ing Team mobi­liz­ing col­lege stu­dents. I e-mailed the leader Claude Hick­man, and hope­fully we can work out a sit­u­a­tion where I can speak but not have to drop the job. I don’t want to drop the job, because I know I’ll need it to get into a coun­try such as Saudi Ara­bia. I hope I can work with them in some regard.

Well, I feel lazy for not post­ing an intense the­o­log­i­cal essay on this blog in a while. I need to get on that.