One Hill, One Life, One Journey

It’s one hill, one life, one journey.
It’s up to you to live well.

We all have struggles, temptations, let downs, and setbacks. We have good days, bad days, horrible days, and perfect days.

           The biggest thing we face is what a lot of people like to call the spiritual rollercoaster, when you feel so spiritually alive and closer to God than ever and suddenly you get in a mood or something happens and it feels like you’ve been extradited to a lonely island in the middle of nowhere. It seems like there is no reception and you feel like the old Verizon commercials where the guy goes from place to place saying “can you hear me now?” but instead of saying “good” we say nothing, cause it’s like we hear… nothing, we feel nothing but emptiness, and loneliness. You go through your life but even that losses its excitement, you no longer have the drive you used to have to go change the world, you let the lies of your flesh and the lies of the enemy drag you down so deep that you begin to question why this all matters. It seems so much easier to experiment with what everyone says, what everyone watches on TV, what everyone does even though at the end of the day when you crawl into bed you just feel empty…
         You cry out to God inside and your mind is flooded with thoughts of the past, you’re reminded of everything you did, or didn’t do. To escape the depression you try to surround yourself with people, you love to be around people! But you catch weird glances, maybe that girl didn’t smile when you smiled at her, or that guy didn’t say hello back to you when you tried to reach out. All you want to do is return to that place of happiness that you once were in, but even when you pick up your Bible, even that doesn’t seem to do the trick and it once again looks like dead words on a page instead of life in a book.

           In reality it’s not a conventional rollercoaster like we’re used to seeing. It’s a single climb, you either climb to the top, or live in the beginning. Each problem in your life can be brought back to the same issue, to the same beginning. It’s an old style rollercoaster with a chain that pulls you up, it starts to build up with grease and it slips off and rolls back down to where you began. You don’t want to live in the beginning, so you start to scrub yourself off, change things you were doing and you hook back up to the chain. Every day is an option to slip off the chain, and every day there is an opportunity to daily cleanse and clean to keep the grease from building up and loosing height.

           This is the first time I’ve sat down and write something since March, why? I let the grease build up, and I let the chain slip from my car and I started to slide. I’m recognizing the slip, and cleaning up the mess and making the change. So what changed, why did this happen? And how can I keep from slipping again? Good question, and if you have the answer I would love to hear it. The only thing I can say is what I’m doing. I’m going through every teaching, message, and verses I can that I knew fired me up. I’m stocking up my life with everything that could possibly fill me up spiritually, including prayer. You might be thinking of how someone like a Bible college graduate could be going through something like this, it’s easy. Just like your physical body gets weak when we don’t eat, our spiritual walk gets weak when we withhold spiritual food. It’s an every day, every minute feeding. Neglect is the underlying cause for most of the things you struggle with concerning your spiritual walk and it’s up to you to make sure you get fed.