Okay...

...So this isn't the most eloquent, the longest, or the most profound blog post ever written, but I figured that I really should post here more often. So, this is what you get. I wrote this a couple weeks back after youth group one night...just some stuff that God told me/showed me that I really needed.

1 Kings 19:11-12 (New International Version)
The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that when I’m listening to my iPod, I turn it up way louder than I used to. Of course, my first reaction was “Oh, shoot, I AM going deaf.” Which I’m not. I hear everything else just fine, I just have to have my music really loud. (Also, the louder you turn Skillet up, the more live they sound.) So I just blew it off. It didn’t really seem important.
On a different (and slightly random) note, I LOVE youth retreats. They’re amazing. 3-5 days of worshipping God, learning more about God, having Him speak to you without any distractions, all with some of the most amazing people on the planet? Awesome. Sign me up.
But then you get back home, and realize that everything is exactly the same way that you left it. Nothing’s changed. You can deal with that for a week or two. You read your Bible everyday, pray several times a day, worship God in your bedroom, etc. And then you miss a day. You say “Oh, I can skip, I’m too busy to read my Bible today. I’ll catch up tomorrow.” But you don’t catch up the next day, or the next day, and eventually you’ve stopped completely. You’re exactly the same as you were before the retreat. You know you should read your Bible, and try to have a closer relationship with God, but it’s easier to just turn up the noise and wait till the next retreat. Which is a huge problem. If you’re so caught up in the noise, (your thoughts, schedule, what you think is important, and all the little details that no one really cares about) you might just miss God’s voice. HUGE problem. If there’s one thing that you really don’t want to miss, it’s that.
But lately, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been hiding behind the loud music, saying that God’s not speaking to me. But He has been the whole time, I was just too caught up in the noise to hear it. But then I realized that I can’t listen to everything at once. I have to pick God’s voice out of the crowd and listen specifically to that. God won’t change for me. He’s un-changeable. That’s one of the things that makes him God. He won’t shout over all of my noise, I have to listen for the little whisper.
Which is really hard sometimes. We have our minds so full of what he have to do next, what’s happening right now, if we’re going to make it through, that we forget to slow down and listen for God to tell us what He wants us to do. Our way of doing things may not necessarily be the wrong way, but it may not be the best way. We have to find out what God wants us to do, and do that. He might not tell us for years, but until then it’s up to us to listen for it.