So it’s been nice over the past nine months or so to see that this time, God isn’t (for once) telling me that I’m wrong, but rather opening doors and suggesting add-ons to the plan for me. When I started seriously considering that music was what I wanted to do, I was probably a quarter of the musician that I am today. I’ve learned a lot about my own styles over the past few years, as well as growing far more than I should have given the amount of time I set aside for practice. The only thing that I can think is that God is working in me. One of my favourite quotes, and I can’t for the life of me remember where it comes from is, ‘God does not call the gifted, he gifts the called’, and I can only hope that this is what he is doing in my life right now.

As I reflect on that, and the power that is coming through into my voice that just wasn’t there before, I am ashamed of the little amount of time that I spend enjoying and working on the gift that he has given me. It also makes me think, if I took as much time out of my life as I spend on social media, or watching TV to work on music, where I would be. If I spent less time watching The Voice, and more time working on my voice, where would I be. I guess the only way to find out is to actually make those changes and spend more time living my own life and less time reading about other peoples.

This week is a Reading Week for College, which means that essentially I’m supposed to designate the times that I would be in class to reading and organising notes and assignments, and believe me, I really need to do that, because I’m feeling a little out of my depth with this whole in-depth study of the Bible thing. Instead, I’ve been using today to clean and reorganise bits of my room, as well as do a few things that I’ve been meaning to do for months; probably an equally productive use of my time.

Along with that cleaning, I’ve been reading quite a few blogs on organisation and simple/frugal living. The whole being a student and living on 3/5ths of my old salary, means that I’m feeling a little overwhelmed as I look at bills and try and have an actual social life. The benefits of this means that when I get to a point where I’m earning a full-time wage again, I’m hopefully going to be able to manage money better, something that I’m currently atrocious at. Well, that’s the plan anyway, and let’s face it, given how bad I can be at following through with plans, this may not happen.

Saying that, this is one of the few plans that I would really like to see through. I waste a lot of money on things that I don’t need, namely eating out. Add to that, the fact that it is actually pretty bad for me, and I could be spending that money on food that would probably nourish my body a lot better, it’s time to make a change. I feel like that’s all I write about on this blog, change. I should probably create a category for it, but then it would just end up featuring every post anyway. Returning to the point of this paragraph, as I look at where my life is headed over the next few years, it really is time that I started taking a bit more responsibility in my life, and rather than writing down endless plans and to-do lists that never get finished, now is the time to actually start ticking things off the list and it’s time to tick off the first one. Make the plan.

As I stood there listening, song by song, it was like the setlist had been built for how I’ve been feeling today. Mid afternoon I got really tired and just hadn’t been feeling really with it since then, but as the songs rolled on, I was more and more stirred by the content.

Then it hit a song called ‘This is your life’, the lyrics for the chorus go as below.

This is your life, are you who you want to be
This is your life, are you who you want to be
This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be
When the world was younger and you have everything to lose

As the song went on, it really hit me how much we sit around waiting for things to fall into our lap. That we sit in our homes and maybe pray about it, but not enough do I go out and just do anything about it. It seems contradictory to the ‘ask, seek, knock’ that Jesus preached. We have the Ask part down (sometimes) but do we Seek and Knock. It’s something I don’t do enough, and something I know I need to work on over the next weeks and months.

This morning was the commissioning service for the Engage interns for this year at City on a Hill. This meant that we were paraded in front of the Church and interviewed as to why we felt called to be doing this, and what we’re doing this year. I’m really, really excited for everything to keep kicking off, as it were, with my main classes all starting next week. It has been great to have an extra day off a week the past couple weeks to start reading and getting things organised, but it’s going to be even better to finally start getting into it, and developing a pattern for my week. At the moment I’m in that weird limbo, where I’m kind of just sailing along and taking it all in, but as soon as classes start, that’s when it’s time for me to step up and start organising myself better, though the thought of writing essays again does not really excite me.

Growing up I was fairly athletic, well, really, I was ridiculously athletic. At age 15/16, I was doing gymnastics 12 hours a week, playing soccer during winter and doing athletics during summer. Let’s just say, my body was in great shape. These days, not so much. To be honest, the idea of doing 10 push-ups freaks me out a little. But I know that it’s time to change that. I’m not going to try and schedule physical activity into my life, I’m going to just make it a part of my life. J’s Mum has this thing she’s got us, and his sister and her boyfriend, on that is about making an effort to do more exercise for 100 consecutive days. Whether it’s as little as getting off at an earlier tram stop or walking up the stairs instead of the lift, it’s about making the effort to be more active with your life, and doing it gradually.

The most important thing that I will get out of this, is that to make a change in my habits I need to do it gradually. I can’t just expect to wake up tomorrow and be a better person, but I also can’t just give up because after a week nothing has really changed. In today’s society where I can walk to the end of my street and get a fully prepared meal in about five minutes, we’re building a generation that expect everything now, and if it doesn’t come, well then there’s no point waiting for it. I don’t want to be one of those people, but I am, and I don’t like it, so I’m going to change it.

In other news, I have technically two days left of full-time at my job before I move into my new role. There’s still a couple weeks til my replacement starts, so I’ll still be doing some of my old job stuff, but I’m excited for the next few weeks and what this year will bring, so bring it!

In preparation for the year ahead, I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading, mostly on topics related to living a Christian life. The more that I read, the more that I realise how self-focused I am, and more so, the church in general.

I’ve just started reading Timothy Keller’s ‘The Reason for God’, I’m only part way through the first chapter and already he has outlined so many flaws of the modern Church, even though the chapter is on a completely different topic.

As I read through the different books, articles, etc I’ve been thinking about the areas of ministry that I want to head into. Anyone who knows me, knows that music is a passion of mine, and that being able to make music in Church is such a gift for me; but I also feel like this is not the only area that I should be looking at, and so I’m keeping my eyes and ears open as I read to see where my life may be headed.

The more that I explore the different ideas of ministry and the different roles there are to play in the Church, the more that I seem to be seeing the gaps that are there in the modern Church. These are generalisations and don’t necessarily apply to every Church, nor do they necessarily apply to mine; but as I work through the different ideas the world has of Christianity, the biggest problem I see is that so many of the negative ideas that non-Christians have of the Church are so widespread, that it is inhibiting people from really discovering Christ. I think as I think through these things I’ll add to this post or write a new one, but I find it hard to believe that those people that are meant to be so loving, are often the first to tear another down if they don’t fit into their mould of the world.

At this time of year, namely the first week and a half of a new year, everywhere you look someone has written a blog on New Years Resolutions. So I’m not going to do that; instead, I’m going to write down a list of three things I want to achieve this year, and how I plan to go about that.

1. Spend more time with others and less time in front of a computer/television screen.
I don’t want to end up one of those people that the only way they know how to relax is to sit in front of a TV and watch mindless crap. While I enjoy this, it’s not really beneficial to me in any way. I aim to find other ways to spend my time, like hanging with friends, gardening, reading, actually playing my guitar, if you have any other suggestions feel free to throw them my way.

2. Be a better steward of the money I’ve been given. (read: actually stick to a budget because I have no other choice this year!)
I’ll be going down to two days at work this year, which means my income will decrease substantially. I’ll hopefully be getting Austudy payments which will subsidise some of the funds I’m losing by studying, but I’ll still be down two days work worth of pay. With a little bit in savings, and a budget written to ensure I’ll have enough to survive on, I think I can do it, it just means no spending on pointless knick knacks for me this year (JB HiFi or Coles Myer gift vouchers are the perfect present for me just in case you want to buy me a birthday present in the coming months, haha).

3. Stop planning, start living.

I’m one of those people who spend a lot of time writing plans for their life and very little time actually doing that. My aim for this year is to actually start living by a. the plans I seem to have set for myself, and b. disregarding those plans and just seeing where life takes me. Every few months I write myself a list of things that I need to change about my habits; spend more time playing my guitar and doing proper vocal exercises, go for a run every day, start eating better. Every time I make these plans, I never follow through on them, life gets in the way. So now, I aim to try and combine all of these different plans, and both throw them out the window and start acting on them. I’m not going to get anywhere by writing a lot of things down. I am going to get somewhere by actually living life and seeing what it throws at me.

My thing for today was getting to see my ‘man’ for the first time in almost two weeks. I’ve been in Sydney and though I got back yesterday, he’s currently on Beach Mission down past Geelong and his day off was, thankfully, today. He drove up last night and I got to spend about 5 hours with him today, including two at lunch with close friends that move to France/Belgium tomorrow. I now don’t get to see him again until Sunday/Monday, so I’m going to have to survive through another six days without him. Lame, I know.

My other luxury for the day was buying myself a fan. It has been ridiculously hot in Melbourne this week and, as I discovered last night, there are no fans in my house. My offset of that is the massive bag of clothes and an old doona that went in a charity bin earlier this afternoon from cleaning out my room. I have a feeling that by the end of the weekend I’ll have more to add to that pile, but for now it’s a start of the total clean out and clean up of my life planned for this year.

And now, I’m enjoying my last couple hours of holidays before I’m back at work tomorrow.

Last year was a big year of change for me. I changed jobs, I started a relationship with my best friend, and a few months ago I moved into a new place after three years of living with one of my closest friends; but even with all the changes, I feel like 2011 has been more the end of one chapter, rather than the start of the next.

I am so excited for what is to come in 2012. I have four weeks left of full-time work at my current job, where I will then go down to two days a week in a different role. I will then start an internship at my Church and begin study at Bible College. It is a massive change in life plan for me, but one that I think will really benefit me and help me to experience life for what it really is.

Every year I make endless lists of goals to get fit, save money, eat better, do things more effectively and every year life passes me by with me saying I’ll do it next month. I think that next year is the perfect opportunity for me to actually make the changes in my life that I want to; to set myself weekly goals to work towards being healthier both physically and mentally. I don’t want to let life pass me by and wish that I’d spent the time getting to know people better, taking better care of myself and being as generous towards others as I can.

One of my biggest aims for this year is to start writing more. I don’t do enough of it and I enjoy putting pen to paper, or my fingers to a keyboard, so I want to use this year to improve my writing skills and re-expand my vocabulary to where it used to be. This means that I aim to write something every day, whether it be a verse of lyric or a thousand word piece on some random topic, I want to try and stick to this aim. I plan to start small, to try and by the end of January have written at least 10 things to post on this blog. Then I’ll increase it slowly so that by the end of June I will be writing every day. I waste so much of my life doing pointless things and it’s time to make a change.

I am also making other goals for this year to try and motivate myself to start making the changes in my life that I want to make, that and many other things is what I plan to outline through this blog. Whether anyone reads it or not, I don’t really mind, it’s time to start doing things for me.