Go Die Already

So I post a lot about just “doing something” and I think I have put myself in a position to say what I mean by that. What am I expecting of myself and other Christians on this campus?

I guess I was a bit vague in how a person should “love others.” How can we step out and die to Christ every day?

1. Get out of your comfort zone. Everyone has their own comfort zone, seriously, you know what yours is. Whatever it is that you can’t imagine yourself doing, that’s your box. Don’t deny it, you’re scared of doing whatever it is you just thought of.

2. Make some friends. I mean, hopefully you guys are living and breathing right? You guys probably live with some people. Maybe in a house, a dorm, an apartment, with roommates, hallmates, some mice, imaginary monkeys…whatever. You hopefully go to class and don’t sit all the way in the back of the room on the floor where no one can see you but you can hear the professor talk. Go make some friends please. Go talk to them, actually be their friend. Don’t pull some “I’ll introduce myself and say hi whenever they pass by me” out of your buttocks. Just don’t. Go say hi, ask them where they’re from, what’s their family like, what are their interests, how’re classes, girlfriend/boyfriend (for the sake of conversation hopefully), what don’t they like about you…yea, actually spend more than 2 minutes in conversation with a person, you know you can, you have conversations with yourself all the time in your head, probably for hours on end. Be sane and talk to an actual person, it’ll be good for you, I promise. You never know, maybe, just maybe, you’ll actually like them.

3. Pray for your friends. Hopefully you like these people that you’re making friends with enough to pray for them. You believe in the most high and ultimate power in the universe. You know, maybe you could pray that God will help them out in their hard time of trouble. Maybe they’re having some family problems at home, or just having a hard week in school. Or even if nothing bad’s happening in their life, you can pray that God will bless their day and that they’ll have an amazing day and praise God for it. You can pray that the Holy Spirit will move through their heart to open it to the beautiful good news of this relationship with God that we always talk about. You never know, maybe God’s listening (of course He’s listening, just in case you weren’t clear on that).

4. Go spend some time and chill with your friends. It’s okay, no one will yell at you. You can go watch movies and play ultimate on a good day with your friends. No one’s going to be mad at you for trying to love people. Try to find ways to love your friends, show them how much you care about them. Write them a love song, serenade your fellow bro and show some good wholesome bromance, buy your gal friends a gift card to a steak house, all girls secretly love meat, and lots of it. Trust me on that one. Talk about life, talk about school, parents, music, get to know people. Go tip some cows or something. Friendships are built through doing stuff together. Girls, probably just sitting around drinking tea and having girl talk, ewwww, but i guess it’s effective. I introduce two girls to each other and the next time I see them they’re best friends constantly talking about that girl talk they had the other night….whatevvss. Dudes, anything with some violence, good wholesome pain. My community group can only think of dodgeball for our bonding activity…pain is the only way guys bond apparently. haha. You don’t have to spend time with the entire world, you don’t. seriously. God’s placed a few certain people in your life within good proximity to you. Open your eyes, take a couple of minutes to figure out who they are. It could be as many as 10 people, 5 people, or even just 1 or 2. It’s all good, seriously, it’s cool. Some people are more social than others. But hopefully you have more than one friend. If you don’t…you can email me, I’ll pray for you.

5. Share what you love with them. If you profess yourself to be a Christian, hopefully you see Christ as precious in your life. Not only is He precious, but He’s the Lord and Savior of your life. He’s the one who opened your eyes to truth. He’s the one who brought you out of darkness into His wonderful life. He’s the one who brought you back into God’s wonderful arms. If He’s actually that important to you, hopefully you want other people to know about Him too. It’s okay to be a girl fangirl of Jesus, He’s just God, you know, the creator of the universe. If you love bacon, like a lot of people do, you’ll probably tell people about how good it is just out of your pure excitement about it. No one’s paying you to talk about it, you just kinda do, it’s natural. Same thing with video games, when you encounter an awesome game, you probably tell people about it so they can play with you too and share in the experience. Music too, you want to be able to talk with people about good music, and you can’t do that without sharing with them the music you like. It’s kinda common sense, share what you love. And for the Christian, hopefully it’s Jesus.

6. Die to yourself everyday. How do you do that? Do you have to stab yourself everyday? no, probably not. well, hopefully not, anyways. lol, please don’t. Wake up in the morning and just pray to God saying, “Jesus, you are my master, what is my mission for the day?” Just pray it throughout the day. You know that weird feeling in your stomach when you encounter a situation where you know what you should do but you don’t want to do it? Yea, those are great places to start. Like when an opportunity comes up to share Jesus with a friend in a conversation. You kinda cringe thinking that they’ll label you as a weirdo, but you know you should do it. So you “kill” your “instinct” and go with what God’s telling you to do, what you should be doing. Like maybe you feel for some weird reason that you should just talk to and make friends with someone in your class. You’re kinda like, “I don’t want to be a creeper.” That’s an opportunity to die to yourself right there. Step out of your comfort box and go talk to him/her. It’s okay to be weird, everyone’s a creeper inside, doing the creep dance, holding their hands up like a dinosaur and stalking ppl. You can probably make friends just trying to convince them that they’re weird too. It works all the time for me, and we just end up laughing about how weird we are haha. Or maybe that’s your comfort box, making friends. You like to be alone, but take that opportunity to die to yourself and glorify God by stepping out and making friends. There’s opportunities everyday for us to die to ourselves and see God glorified. They come in many ways, some small, some large. God could be telling you to go to some random country that you’ve never heard of. God could be calling you to die to yourself in that decision too. Keep your eyes open.

Yea, those are just some things that you can do. Everybody’s at a different place, and everyone’s different. I know that. But you can’t use that as your excuse anymore. Take a step from where you are and do something, homie.