Moving on Out

New Happenings

[from an e-mail I just sent out...]

Friends!
 
It's been a while since I sent out an update about the going's on in my life.  This is a long one, but it's an update from my heart, with some exciting news! (no, I'm not engaged) <grin>.  I am looking forward to some significant changes, however.  Keep reading!
 
Things have been going well here in Indianapolis, Indiana.  I graduated from Taylor University two years ago now, and life has been full.  I started work at Eli Lilly and Co. in August 2004 after graduation and have been able to do well in my job, working in IT with a really great team.  I've been a part of a church plant downtown that started in earnest around the same time, and it's been a blessing to be committed to our fledgling community here.  God has given me some great friends over the past couple years and I'm so thankful!  My family also moved back to the States and they now live 15 minutes away from me.
 
One of the greatest blessings I've experienced over the past couple years is God's tangible healing of my soul and emotions.  You may remember when I sent out an e-mail near the end of my senior year at Taylor in which I asked for your prayers as I dealt with some intense anxiety that threatened to debilitate me.  I took the summer off after I graduated and was able to get some much needed rest, including a trip out to California to visit my uncle.  Through the encouragement of men like my uncle and a great Christian counselor here in Indy that God provided, through books like Neil Anderson's Victory over the Darkness, through friends and family who reminded me how to have fun, through medication that helps me not to think in circles, and through time -- God's good time -- I have seen God's hand at work in my heart and soul to bring real healing to me.  I used to find anxiety grip me over the smallest things, but now I can say that I have not known that overriding anxiety in quite a while.  Hallelujah!  Praise to you, Lord Christ!  While I still struggle a lot, I have learned to trust God and his love for me in new ways, and I am so thankful.  Thank you for your prayers!
 
While working at Lilly has gone well, I recently acknowledged to myself and to God that I would like to be doing something else.  The prospect of working in a large, slow-moving corporation long-term has made me feel stuck, and so back in March I started keeping my ears out for something else.  At the end of March an opportunity landed in my lap.  I was visiting a good friend from high school in California, and he invited me to join him in San Jose working on some software that he had developed.  I’ve had the entrepreneurial itch before and was looking for something more risky, and this just seemed right.  After spending the week in California, I had made up my mind.  I’ve felt drawn to the West Coast before – even feeling a couple years before that I might end up in the Bay Area – and now I had an opportunity to come live there close to good friends and to do something a lot more exciting.  I also felt God’s hand in it, given my earlier prayer and the wonderful discovery that my friend and his wife were pursuing God wholeheartedly.  Since then I have received nothing but encouragement from dear friends and family and now am seeing God’s provision of a roommate and other old friends in the area with whom I can reconnect.
 
That said, even with all the joy and excitement of a new stage of life, it will be hard to leave friends and family here in Indiana.  I have developed some wonderful friendships through the churches I have been a part of since college.  I value the community I have here dearly.  But while leaving will be hard, I know those friendships will not go away, and I’ve found over the years that God has a funny way of bringing people back together.  Hardest of all will be leaving my family.  The main reason they returned to the U.S. was so that we could be together as a family while my sister and I went through difficult times.  But God has brought us through those times, and he is reestablishing my family here in amazing ways.  They are supportive of my move, even though it will mean living apart again.  I think I will miss them more than I realize at the moment, and if I can at all help it, I will be looking for business clients in Indiana so that I can visit as often as possible.
 
I have many new prayer requests now.  Everything that’s familiar to me at the moment will be changing starting in September.  I have already submitted my resignation to Lilly.  I’ll be trimming down my belongings, packing up my car and my cats, and driving to California.  My routine will change completely.  Initially I plan on working at Starbucks so I can pay the rent.  I’ll be putting in more hours than now at Lilly, most likely, to get this business off the ground (though fortunately my friend has already developed a working product!).  I’ll be putting on a lot of new hats as I take on aspects of a business like marketing, sales, and accounting for the first time.  I’ll be living in a new community, and I’ll have to start over making friends (though thankfully I have a head start!).  I’ll have to find a new church.  These are all significant stressors, and I ask for your prayers as I step into them.  I believe that my life is in God’s hands, that he is in control, and that he is good and trustworthy.  He has promised to be faithful to me.  If I try and manage on my own and try and be in control, I’ll self-destruct in anxiety.  No, in this I am flinging myself upon God, because the only way I’ll make it is if he provides.  I am taking this risk as a step of faith.
 
So, if you were ever wishing for a reason to visit the San Francisco area, now you have it!  Come visit me!  I’m so thankful that I have gotten to know so many wonderful people over the last few years, and I would love to continue to be involved in your lives.  Thank you for your friendship and for making me feel very loved.  In that way you have been Christ to me, and God has redeemed parts of me that were controlled by fear.  Please send me any updates you send out!  I will try to send these out every once and a while, like when I do get engaged – ok, that might be a while; maybe I’ll write sooner.  I’m going to be married to my job for a while.  <grin>.  I also plan on keeping up my blog more faithfully once things settle down, so I’ll let you know about that.  Please do stay in touch.
 
With all my love,
Dan

Currently Reading Cat's Cradle By Kurt Vonnegut see related

"'Maturity, the way I understand it,' he told me, 'is knowing what your limitations are.'

"He wasn't far from Bokonon in defining maturity.  'Maturity,' Bokonon tells us, 'is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.'"

p. 198

Today was a frustrating day.  I was praying and journaling this evening about it all, and found myself dealing again with the conflict between the flesh and God, my way vs. his way.  So often I try and go my own way, thinking I know what's best.  Or I depend on myself to make it through all the struggles I face.  Tonight I was done.  Tired of resisting, tired of depending on myself, tired of trying to be strong on my own.  I had this sense that that this was the appropriate time to submit to God, to give up and allow him to carry me and be God, bringing glory to himself in his strength.  It's ok for me to be weak.  I need to admit and accept that I'm weak.  That's hard for me.

As I was thinking about this, God gave me a couple different pictures in my mind.  I'm a very visually-oriented person, so pictures help me a lot.  The first was of a glove, like the rubber kind you use to clean house or mix paint or something.  If you put on gloves covered with dried paint, they'll be stiff and hard to use.  You have to manipulate them a while and break up the dried paint before they'll be flexible enough to be useful.  But if the glove was cleaned after last use, there's none of that.  It's limp on its own, but as soon as you slip your hand into it, it's alive, flexible and ready to use.  In the same way God wants to express himself through us, wants to paint his picture, but if we're stiff, covered with all the stuff we'd rather do, it's hard for God to really express himself through us freely.  If we're allowing him to take care of us, though, so that we're clean -- and weak on our own -- God is able to give life to us and express himself freely through us.

The second picture was easy to draw, so I did.  Here it is:

If I try to go my own way, while God's going another, I'll wipe out.  I'll get dragged along or lose my grip and get left behind -- then God comes back and gets me and off we go again.  If I keep trying to go my own way, I'm going to get pretty beat up.  If I relax and allow myself to be pulled by God along his way, it'll be an exciting ride, and I won't biff as much.  But I better hold on to him, or I'll fall flat on my face.  That's where I have to be strong and keep on hanging on to him.  I have to practice and study how.

I guess the best part of all this for me is that I can give up trying to make it on my own.  My tendency is to try and manage everything about my life.  I try and be responsible about everything, and I completely stress out.  But God's in control.  He's my father, and he's taking care of me.  I can be a kid on skis being pulled along, trusting that he knows where he's going.

"Cast your cares on the LORD and he will sustain you; he will never let the righteous fall." Ps 55:22

Currently Listening
Over Oceans
by Josh Garrels

"This is what the LORD says: 'When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my gracious promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,' declares the LORD, 'plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,' declares the LORD, 'and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,' declares the LORD, 'and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.'" (Jeremiah 29:10-14, bold mine)

Beautiful verses, though the context is sobering.  Does God still operate this way?