For over a year now the idea of pursuing something has been on my mind. I've thought about it in regards to relationships mostly, both human and spiritual, and I've come to two main conclusions: there are things that are worth pursuing, and those pursuits are going to be difficult.
About a year ago I started pursuing a girl. If I'm honest, this was the first time I have done this. My divorce had been finalized for months, my marriage had been over for years, and I found someone who had caught my eye. For a while I was interested, but then she wrote some stuff that really caught my attention and made me realize that I wanted to pursue her. Then the hard part began. I had to put myself out there by sending messages, I forgot to mention that within two weeks of deciding I wanted to pursue her she left the country for five months, but I began praying about it, and as I felt led I would reach out to her. When she got back, I waited a few weeks, then asked her to get coffee, and then I kept asking her to hang out.
It was scary, she could have said no after all, and it was new, again, I never really pursued anyone before and so this was all new territory for me. But I'd say it's going well. Now the thing I'm trying to remind myself of is that the pursuit isn't over, it's never over. I don't always do a good job of pursuing her, and that isn't where I want to be.
This past summer I felt like it was time to enter the next stage of my journey, the passion stage. When I first sat in my hammock, trying to process thoughts, my mind was blank. After a few months of reading, personal reflection, and mentoring, I began to realize that the passion stage is about a relationship with God, and chasing after deeper intimacy with Him. I haven't done the best job of this in the past few months.
When you start to pursue something that's really worth pursuing things come up to hinder you. My life has been nuts for the past six months. School has been insanely busy. I took four classes in the fall so that I could graduate in this spring, commencement is May 11 and I'm registered to graduate and my cap and gown are in the bag next to me. I thought that the fall was going to be my last crazy semester, but it wasn't. My current course is the most difficult class I've taken in 22 years of formal education. On top of that, I'm preparing to do an 8 week intensive independent study on the Minor Prophets in order to do some preliminary work on my PhD. School has been busy.
To top it all off, the legal issues have yet to be resolved. Some new things have popped up, all of them completely untrue and ungrounded, but they added several months of headaches, as well as several really inconvenient obligations that had to be done.
My life has been busy, yet I still feel the need to pursue these things that I believe are essential for me to go after. I don't want to make excuses for why I can't purse a deeper relationship with God, I want to sacrifice for that the way I've sacrificed for the human relationship I've pursued. I don't want to grow complacent, thinking that I'm ever done, but I want to continue to pursue more.
I want to cut out everything that I don't have to do in order to focus on pursuing what is best.
Fight the lion, 1 Peter 5.1-11
TO GOD ALONE BE THE GLORY!
