This year has been amazing, enlightening and filled with so much joy already. The funny part is it hasn't fully started quite yet. I have only been here for trainings and other such things which have caused me to have some serious lack of sleep but I absolutely love it. Well I should say something about myself at this point. I am a youth ministry major here at Simpson University so that alone should give a look into the kind of personality and levels of weirdness I have.

Another significant part of my life here is the fact that I am at a completely different place in my life from this time a year ago when I was a freshman. At that time, leaving home was not easy in any way shape or form. I was excited and sad to leave home. I had no idea what to really expect from Simpson or for my journey. There were many areas of my own life that I had thought were well prepared to make the break from home but were in fact not. The biggest one was I had what I thought to be a solid relationship with God. I believed that God and I were really close and didn't think anything was wrong.

My beliefs and relationship were tested immediately when I walked into my first class. See the thing is, I had based my relationship with God on doing works not on actually loving Him. I loved learning and talking about Him but didn't put in the effort to make a real relationship. Obviously this is dumb. A person deciding to be a youth pastor but not actually being close to God while pursuing that, it really can't get any dumber than that.

It took me an entire year at Simpson and a summer for me to realize that though. I can be slow sometimes. During that time it took to figure that out I got to see what kind of pain, loss of direction, and loneliness is caused (at least for me personally) through lacking a relationship with God. My source of the problem was me and only me. I lacked the discipline to make God a priority in my life. I just chose to not make Him a priority but the path of youth ministry one instead. I thought the pursuit the work of ministry would get me the relationship I desired. Wrong.

Last week I took the time to read C.S. Lewis' "The Great Divorce." In those pages I lost myself in seeing how Lewis described the way to get to heaven. It wasn't an easy three step plan or anything like that. It was a difficult process that often hurts and takes everything in us to do. It took insane amounts of discipline and effort to do it but in the end it would be so worth it. Even if this effort is done in baby steps it's still great. There can't be an expectation to be perfect instantly. I was metaphorically hit with a sack of bricks at this.

I realized something that should've been very obvious. Relationships with anyone take effort on both parts. This includes the one with God. He has already put effort and waits for it to be received and returned. That's what I have decided to do one baby step at a time. Thank you for reading.