My Lament(short version)

     Is there no one out there who I can relate to who doesn’t also love God? That’s the question that I’ve been having trouble answering. I also thought there was hope. But now I see none. I date, a lot. but in all these dates I have never once found a person who can appreciate me past my looks. I am not saying I’m model material or anything. But from feedback I’ve been getting. I’m hot.

     This bothers me and I attract the wrong types. i take care of my body and health because I like being healthy and being the best I can be, as a person. But people view me as any regular person who likes those cheap compliments. What I look for is a funny, smart and overall good person. I thought I could find this outside of jesus. But apparently I can’t.

     This has always been a problem; over-aggressive and clingy girls who are only attracted to me because of my looks. I personally hate it. especially since it’s never always been like this until a couple of years ago.

     I continually fail. But what happened on a date the other night really opened my eyes. And I’m giving up hope. I can’t find a girl who loves me until I know they love Jesus first.

     I’m done with dating, for a long time. Until I could get my head back together and spend a whole lot of time in my Bible. Or until someone i truly click with comes my way.

     I don’t know what will come first, but I have to trust in God on this one.

“Don’t mistake innocence for ignorance. Don’t mistake purity for inexperience. Don’t mistake humility for weakness.”                 -John Reuben

“…For the LORD does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”               – 1 Samuel 16:7

I apologize

     I have to apologize. I am not a blogger. I am an essayist. I just found that out today. I write a lot. I’ve been told I talk a lot. It’s true. I also always have a lot on my mind. And I like to formulate arguments. Also, I’m a bit lazy. I never type more than a rough draft, and I never really have an exact idea of what I’m going to write, just the general issue or topic I’m writing on.

     The way I write. It’s simple. One thought comes to mind, I write about it then expand on it. And write “freehand”, meaning: I just write. It’s very simple and therapeutic. So I naturally seem scattered when I write, it’s because i really don’t edit or think about the exact path i’m going. It’s like climbing a mountain. There are a lot of ridges and various physical features on the mountain, and every path is different going up. I’m like a mountain climber when formulating my essay, except I don’t plan the trip. I just know where I’m starting and where I’ll end, if I get off course, if I go off on a different tangent, it doesn’t matter, because for the most part, i hit the peak no matter the route.

     My apology is also includes the fact that i sometimes bring other topics in. Although they have to do with the main topic, they take focus away from it, and also make my blog post very long. So I will stray away from adding other issues or topics in. I’ll stick to the main points.

     I also have to apologize for being scattered. I will always write “freehand”, but I’ll try to make it more thought out in form. I will stay close to the topic and try not to be redundant or confusing.

     In the future, I’ll try to be a better blogger. Thank you.

My Lament

     I went out with a friend the other night. Last Tuesday. This is the second time she asked me out. This was someone I never spoke to in high school. But she found me over facebook. And the first date seemed nice. She seemed like a nice person. She said she wasn’t religious. And she asked me if I was. I said no, I just love Jesus. And I told her I get asked out a lot, but it never seems to work out because they thik I’m “too religious”. And I don’t believe there is such a thing. I just love Jesus.

     This is a problem. Girls I go out with think its something bad, like I have a disease or something. And I’ve been telling myself it’s something bad. But I’m not going to lose my faith over that. And when I say “This is a problem”. I don’t mean Jesus. I mean how people view my faith: as a liability or hinderance or something keeping me down. It’s a shame that people see it like that.

     When people see me, their first impression is that I am not “religious” and I am a person who has sex, does drugs, and so on. When they hear that I don’t, they are surprised and think I’m restraining myself from fun. But it isn’t really restraint. Just as I said when I was writing about dieting, it’s not about keeping from yourself, it’s about living a lifestyle. Sure, I’d be wrong if it were completely unrestraint, but it’s restrictions are restrictions from the bad. And it’s something I want to do. Because my values and mindset see it differently. I like living how I do. It’s not about being uptight, but about wanting to live the life I do. I feel I get more for it. It’s something non-christians don’t seem to understand when they question how I live.

     I’m not a hypocrite to how I present myself. I don’t present myself as a non-christian and I don’t hide the fact that I am, to anyone. When I said above, “At first impression, they don’t see me as a christian”. It’s not because I don’t act “Christian”. But because my personality, people say. I played football, basketball, ran track. I did a lot in high school, still do now. But I never once did anything I felt God didn’t want me to do. Never smoked, drank, or anything. My friends did, and I looked like a stereotypical high schooler who would do those kinds of thngs, was in the posiion where it was readily available to me. I looked like the person if you took God out the picture. Even though I didn’t do any of those things, I know the lifestyle what it brings. So I’m not really a hypocrite, I don’t front as anything but Jesus-loving. But people get the impression that I’m not because of what I “look like”.

     I was wrong in the above paragraph. It’s not the first impression, but the view of me even before people meet me, what I look like from a distance. Before they approach me they already are sizing me up. Don’t let appearances fool you.

     Well, on to my story. On the second date, where I thought I met a nice person, and she apparently didn’t know me well. She was really aggresive where it made me uncomfortable. She made a move on me, but I got to know her well enough to know I didn’t want to be involved with her. So I stopped it basically, for lack of a better term, broke up with her; whatever relationship that was, I told her I couldn’t see her anymore.

     This really disturbed me, because I thought I was a good judge of character, and I try to avoid people becoming so attached to me in the wrong way. But I was totally wrong i this case, and that scared me. Not because it never happened before, but because it caught me so off-guard. This has happened many times before, but this time was just all bad. So she dropped mke off home and that was it.

     But this little event, has really got me questioning my mind toward dating. I always thought I could have a relationship with someone who wasn’t really “religious”. I thought there were some girls with self-control and a good personality I could connect to, but I guess I was wrong. This has thrown me off dating for a really long time. I need to continue reading my Bible and let Him get me through this, and when the time has come, I’ll be ready, He’ll tell me when.

     And another thing that I tried to avoid, but didn’t find out till the second date, was that she didn’t like me until around my junior year of high school. And that made me really mad. Because if you know my testimony. That was when I really started to focus on my walk with God. And when he turned me around, changing me. That’s when I made fitness a hobby(I know, not the coolest thing), but also when I got style, got a nice body, a really grew as a person. Where he changed me from a pale skinny little kid who was really introverted, talked too much and thought he was better than people, who, by most accounts was annoying and cynical. I’m not trying to toot my own horn and talk about how great I am, because I’m really still not that great. And I don’t look down on who I was, because learning what I did when I truly found Jesus made it that much more sweeter to become the man I’m still becoming.

     God didn’t give me what I have, but he gave me the knowledge and will to become what I am. He gave me the ability and will to work hard.

     But before my junior year, I wanted the wrong things, but couldn’t get them. My junior year and after, I could the what I wanted but chose not to. And also, when girls didn’t pay me any attention(But back tyhen that really what I deserved), I always got mad. But now, they pay me too much attention with the wrong intentions. It makes me mad that now they pay attention to me, when I could care less if they did. The girl admitted on the second date that she likes me now because I “got hot”. This is something I come across a lot, and it makes me mad. My last girlfriend was like that, when I asked her what she liked about me, she said nothing about who I was, and all about what I looked like. But when she asked the same, All I could think about was personality(Which was still hard to find in her). So I broke up with her a couple adays later(and she asked me out to begin with, and I hestitantly said ok, because she seemed nice and willing to change).

     I know, I am very flawed. I don’t call myself perfect, and yes, as I was writing I do admit, it seems like a trend. So that’s why I am going to stop dating for a while until I could really think about it. Me and my friend Keyes were talking the other day, and he told me that he’s just attracting the wrong type. And I never thought about that. But I have to admit, I think I am. That’s in part to why I’m going to focus on other things right now in my life.

     My lament is that I tried to find a good girl outside of Jesus, but they just seem to like what they see, and what they see it all superficial. All fleeting is what’s on the outside. It doesn’t tell what’s in the heart. I try to look in the heart of them, but without Hesus in there, it’s hard for me to fins a good heart. And I’m finding it’s more difficult to look at the heart of a person. There’s just no loving me if you don’t love Jesus first.

     God has blessed me and the point to this update is to vent a little and to make sense of a small portion of my life. But I tried to write this in all humilty and in no way to uplift myself or bring down others. I am sorry if it seems like I did.

“Don’t mistake innocence for ignorance. Don’t mistake purity for inexperience. Don’t mistake humilty for weakness.”                 -John Reuben

“…For the LORD does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.”               – 1 Samuel 16:7