An Outlet

This is a reset of my blog. I don't know what I'm intending with this just yet. It's been almost 6 years since my last post, which means it's time for a reset. A great deal has occurred in those 6 years it seems right to pick up and reposition this to something else. I believe it will become, as the title suggests a place of outlet for me. Either of the massive tangle of thoughts in my head, or allowing the part of me that enjoys writing to have a place to set forth practicing that art. We have all had a great deal occur in the over half a decade since I chose to use this platform. For those who don't have intimate details of my life in this time, allow me to name a few of the more major changes. I'm now married, a father, and I make things that go to space or to the edge of the atmosphere. Of course I went through Covid and all the things there, my wife and I got married in 2020, and were lucky enough to have gotten almost exactly what we wanted. However the mixture of the newness of our love and the fact our jobs never stopped working, though we were quarantined a few times for different illnesses, I feel that I sidestepped a great deal of the traumas it brought on. The following year we greeted our son for the first time, and that did end up giving me a good deal of trauma, which was unacknowledged until early this year. Then 2022 held a firing, a new, better job, and a surprise, rare hernia surgery all in about 3 months. And since then I have been trying to find the needed equilibrium of self to contend well for all these things. 

What a frightfully vague summation of the major events of the last 3 years. But it is all these things that added up to my pushing myself deeper into my faith because I cannot possibly do well under my own strength. It has become clear how much more of my life needs surrendered to God. I have been so grateful for finding the Wild at Heart Podcast. For all that I don't listen to it as it would be ideal, that is once a week. John Eldredge and his fellow hosts provide such a feast of topics I'm really finding necessary/lacking in my own walk. Using the litmus test they borrow often from Jesus, the fruit of their podcast, for me, is the desire to plunge deeper into my faith. I have begun learning about so many areas I can turn to God and just ask for more of him to be present in me. 

Because of experiences from the podcast and interacting with more of the writings of John, I have found more of God available in my life. I have also begun understanding, though not well or fully yet, that's the point. God has extravagant amounts of himself to offer his followers. That's the whole point of the book. He didn't give us a book of exceptions, but one of expectations. He has personal contact with the great and powerful, and the meekest and overlooked. Hagar called him the "God who sees even me." Jesus, in agony, promises a thief that they would be in paradise together that very night. A man called Ananias is told to go and free Saul from the curse placed on him on the Damascus road. Ananias does, and is never again a part of the story, but he is vital to the conversion of the greatest spreader of the faith to Gentiles, Saul who becomes Paul. Each of them is a story in which a relative nobody is shown that the Creator of the world is intimately in contact with them. How much of this do I miss thinking I'm not important enough to hear from God. Jesus, by the power of your work, break that agreement in me. Both that I'm not important enough, and that I cannot hear God.