Why join the Student Leader Team?

I am coming up on being one year removed from college. One year removed from the most life-changing four years of my life. As I have been reflecting on what I miss and who I miss, I have begun to try and discern what was the most important thing that I participated in while I was a student.

On a broad scale, this is easy. God used the Navigators and people in it to help me see that there was so much more to what my relationship with God could be than what it was when I walked into Dieterich Hall that first time in August of 2015. However, more specifically it was joining the Student Leadership Team in my sophomore year because this moved me forward. This team cast a vision on my life that will drive me for the rest of my life. 

This post is going to be especially for any students at Northwest or anywhere else in the area that are trying to discern whether or not God wants them to join the Student Leader team. So, if you advise anyone in this area and trust what I have to say direct them to this particular blog post.

Here is a list of reasons why I think the Student Leader team has a greater impact than anything you could choose to participate in during your career as a college student.

1) The most balanced sense of community you will ever be around - There are few places where you are going to be so challenged and so encouraged by the same group of people. Hebrews 10:24-25 commands us to spur one another on towards love and good deeds, not that we would give up meeting together, but that we would continuously being encouraging each other. One of my favorite examples of this is my experience leading a Bible Study for freshmen on campus. As a sophomore I felt pretty under-qualified for such a job. Thankfully, I got to go through the experience at the same time as a couple of really close brothers and we met regularly to pray for each other's bible studies and just encourage each other. It was so refreshing for me to see God being faithful in men who were in a similar spiritual maturity level as me. I knew if he could use them, he could use me. 

2) The Bible Study will be deeper than any Bible Study you have participated in up to this point - I will illustrate this fact in a simple way, my knowledge about sports. This is true for anyone else that thinks they know quite a bit about sports. It is very difficult to be around people that know so little and say so much. They just do not understand the sport or the team at the same level that you do which makes the conversation dull and honestly pretty frustrating. Imagine constantly being in a Bible Study with people that just do not understand or do not want to understand the Bible beyond the basic concept. While the Bible may not become boring to you, that Bible Study certainly will. I learned so much from the things that God was doing in the minds and lives of the guys in my Bible Study. Eyes are opened in deeper, more practical ways. It goes beyond the evangelical and dives deep into applying the Gospel to every stage of life. My junior year we did a Bible Study that went through various stories of Jesus. One of the guys in my study noticed something as we studied how people reacted when presented with the Gospel by Jesus. When Jesus brought the Gospel to someone, EVERY TIME, it illicted some kind of response. It varied from running around screaming the Good News at the top of their lungs to a riot forming with the intent to stone Jesus. This was so profound for me at the time because I do not think I truly understood the power of the Gospel's message. Literally every time it is spoken it needs to initiate some kind of response. This is true whether myself or Billy Graham is speaking, the Gospel has that kind of power.

3) The Student Leader Team exists for your benefit - Believe it or not, the primary focus of the Navigators is not to make more Navigators. The Student Leader Team's primary focus is to develop laborers that will serve the Lord for the rest of their lives. The truth of Matthew 9:36-38 is very real. Jesus pleaded for laborers. The bottom line is you need a church, a body of believers that are going to hold you accountable to the things that you want to accomplish in life and more importantly, the things that God wants you to accomplish. Throughout history, successful laborers have had a team of people around them, even Jesus, God on Earth, had a group of 12 guys around him all the time. If you decide against the Student Leader Team, you better have a backup plan in place to ensure that you have a body of believers that are in your corner. Lone wolf ministry is not the ministry of the Lord.

4) The Student Leader Team serves no one but God - It is possible that you have been frustrated or are angry with someone on the team or in the ministry. I ask that you do two things. First, pray for the Lord to allow forgiveness to enter your heart for whoever that person is. If you think you can't, here is Matthew 6:14-15. "For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins." Second, remember who you are truly serving. If the Student Leader team would present you with the opportunity to know God in a deeper way and stretch your faith in Jesus Christ, isn't it worth it to work through a little healthy, spiritual conflict? Rebuke is biblical. In Galatians 2:11-21 Paul gets up Peter's grill about forcing Jewish custom upon Gentiles. Peter, one of the greatest spiritual leaders of the world, was wrong. It is possible, actually it is entirely expected, for men to sin. Don't let a person's sin define them. More importantly, don't let another person's sin define what you choose to involve your spiritual development in.

5) Faith Inspires Action - I believe this will be my last point. During my junior year, Brian Hopp and I did a word study on the word "faith." Essentially we searched through the Bible for like 30 different verses that used the word "faith." Our goal was to better understand the word and what it means for our lives. I think one of the most common people we think about when it comes to faith is Abraham. Throughout the Bible the phrase "his faith was credited to him as righteousness" is used to describe Abraham. After much study, Brian and I discovered that one of the most fascinating things about faith is that it SHOULD inspire action. Our belief in a powerful, loving God should inspire us to serve him. The Student Leader team will give you numerous opportunities to act out your faith in ways that you probably otherwise wouldn't. It could be leading a small group at Main Event and getting to shepherd someone as they come face-to-face with the Gospel. It could be leading a Bible Study of guys or girls that are just one year younger than you. Maybe you get to serve on the Evangelism team and its your responsibility to coordinate days where students on campus will get to hear the Gospel from members of your team sharing the Bridge. It could be that you get asked to do nothing when you expected more and God teaches you a lesson about humility. Maybe you are asked to coordinate rides to a retreat and you find you need to pray through a couple of passages on patience and forgiveness.

The bottom line is this. I did a lot of spiritual things during my time as a Bearcat. However, I never felt more loved, challenged, and in love with my creator than I did when I was serving with my brothers and sisters on the Student Leader team. You can fool yourself into believing that you will be able to accomplish a lot of these things without it, but unless you are joining another ministry you won't. I promise I say all of these things out of love, but like I said before, rebuke is Biblical and I felt like God was asking me to deliver this message.  

You thought you knew me until...

I have always been fascinated by information, and this fact multiplies when it is information about someone. The things that remain unseen or untold often reveal more about a person. I think it is one of the reasons I originally wanted to be a reporter. I got to ask questions and find things out, like an investigator. Therefore, I thought it would be fun to try and reveal things about me that very few people would ever know. That being said, this is going to be really difficult. I have always been a big time sharer, so it is unlikely that I post things that NO ONE knows, but I can hopefully find some stuff that not many people know. Here goes...

  9 Things You Probably Don't Know About Me

1) I used to really, really hate roller coasters. In fact, I was once forced/peer pressured into riding one that resulted in two things. 1) me bawling my eyes out for 75% of the ride and 2) my mom feeling extremely guilty for being a driving force behind the forcing/peer pressuring. (For those of you that know my mother, this is VERY out of character for her to do). The name of the ride was the Tornado at Adventureland. Thankfully, somewhere along the way I grew to love roller coasters. The greater the thrill, speed, drop, twist the better. Crazy I went from crying on the wimpy Tornado at Adventureland to loving the 120mph Dragster at Cedar Point Ohio.

2)In high school I went to a national journalism conference in Kansas City with some of our newspaper and yearbook class. I participated in a sports writing competition where we got to interview the owner of the KC Wizards before they became extinct. The story that I wrote placed Top 8 nationally.

3)When I was a junior in high school, I once got so sick that I threw up upwards of 20 times in a 24-hour period. The result? I popped blood vessels in my cheeks from the constant opening of my jaw and the blood filled the bottom of my eyeballs. I looked like something out of a horror film. I was actually allowed to wear sunglasses at school because it was that terrifying to look at.

4)The first job I ever had was writing for a newspaper when I was 12 years old. It was a small local paper called "The West 'O'" that came out once a month. My story was featured in a section called the "Kids Korner." It actually inspired the name for my first blog when I used to only write about sports. I called it the "Krafty Korner." I was paid $0.05 per word so you can bet the dickens that I did not use any contractions in that thing. The more useless words I threw in there the more money I got paid. Ultimately, it got super boring because I was not as creative back then, but still cool to say I wrote for a newspaper in middle school.

5)Every kid had a thing, something that defined them. This was especially true in school, whether it was music or math or getting in trouble or getting other kids in trouble. There was some big thing that defined you. For me, that was reading. I read everywhere I went. I read in the car, I read in bed, I read in the tub. Literally everywhere. In fact, during my third grade year I read over 1,000,000 words in various books throughout the year. After every book we read, we had to take a Reading Counts Test which tested our comprehension about the book and it totaled up the words in each book. I don't know why it did this, such a silly thing, but my teacher (Mrs. Bragg) noticed how high my word count was getting and she pushed me to get to the 1,000,000. I finished the book that took me over the edge in the bath tub of Great Wolf Lodge when my family was on vacation. I had woken up in the middle of the night and my dad was snoring super loud, so I couldn't get back to sleep. Instead I whipped out the book, ironically the book was about wolves, and sat down in the tub with a blanket and finished the book that sealed my accomplishment. To put this in perspective, I read A LOT of Magic Treehouse Books that year. Those books only have about 5-10 thousand words in them. Even if I average it out to be about 20K words per book I still read around 50 books as a third grader.

6)For those of you that have seen my knees you know I have some pretty nasty scars on them. They are about 2 inches long and 1/2 an inch thick. Cue Joker voice..."you wanna know how I got these scars..." Disclaimer, I only know this because my parents have told me how it happened. This story comes from when I was 2 years old and you don't remember things from that age. We had a traditional kitchen, it had wooden floors and being the do-first, think-later kid I still am today, I thought it would be fun to run into the kitchen and slide across the hardwood floor on my knees. I presume it was a lot of fun until I slide right over the air vent and it sliced open my knees. My parents didn't get me stitches and it resulted in some nasty, nasty scars.

7)I dated a girl for almost two years from 5th-7th grade. She was really the only girlfriend I ever had that wasn't the girl I ended up marrying. The fact that "shouldn't be known" isn't that I had a girlfriend at that time, but how we communicated. Don't ask me why because I have no idea, but for much of 6th grade we communicated via note writing, and by "much" I mean that we probably communicated more through notes than speaking. However, we wanted to hide our identity in case the notes were taken or confiscated so we each had a code name. Mine was "hamburger" and hers was "coca-cola." No lie we wrote things like "Dear, Coca-cola" and "love, hamburger." Don't worry, we had the fries. Her best friend was definitely french fries and often was used to deliver the notes.

8)In my life I have been pulled over close to 10 times. Only once have I received a ticket and only twice did the reason I get pulled over have to do with my speed. Every other time, the police officer has pulled me over to ensure that I was not driving drunk. For those that know me well, you know I don't particularly enjoy drinking and I certainly would never consider driving with alcohol affecting my body in any way. 

9)I need to finish with the most entertaining one. I once starred in a commercial. Definitely using the term "star" lightly. In reality, myself and a group of friends played lazer tag with vampire teeth in our mouths as a part of a promotion for "haunted lazer tag." at a place called Family Fun Center in Omaha, Nebraska. We got paid in free passes to do stuff at the Fun Center and free tokens. Don't worry, I am a proud enough person to post the link to the commercial. Laugh all you want, it was fun. Sorry to my friends that are exposed in the video.

The Madness of March (not just basketball edition)

I know, I know. It has been weeks since I blogged. Honestly, a majority of my free time was used up trying to learn about college basketball teams as I prepared for the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. Guess what? My bracket got shredded like it does every year. The downfall? I tried to overthink a very simple, simple truth. This Kansas team is killer and should have been the majority pick for everyone that filled out a bracket.

This was the first year that I participated in a money pool with some of my friends and family. Therefore, I tried to be a little more cautious and like I said, over thought things. I am married so Claire and I both participating in the pool makes it so that we technically had 2 chances at winning the $96. Therefore, knowing she would pick Kansas I chose to pick someone else even though I have thought that Kansas would win it all since like the beginning of February. In theory, my concept makes sense. Differentiate to give us a better chance.

Two things I didn’t consider. The first being that Michigan State losing to Middle Tennessee State or anyone else before the Final Four was even possible. They looked almost as unbeatable as Kansas for much of the season. The second thing I didn’t consider was that Claire’s bracket could fall apart outside of Kansas winning it all and she would get buried on the leaderboard. Well both of those things happened and now the best that I can hope for is second place and that only happens if Kansas, Oklahoma, and North Carolina make the Final Four (my remaining Final Four) and Syracuse or Iowa State emerge as the Final Four team out of the Midwest and go on to win the whole thing. Iowa State could make a run at it I guess, but I don’t think there is any way that they beat Kansas in the championship. The worst thing about the whole situation is that had I stuck with my Kansas pcik I would still have a pretty good shot at winning if Oklahoma beats A&M in the Sweet 16. Bummer. Maybe next year.

You want to know what’s been more maddening than March Madness this month? The things happening at our apartment complex. Two major things stick out. First, our upstairs neighbor has really taken to cleaning. Unfortunately for Claire and I is that the cleaning is happening late at night, like she is vacuuming at 10:30pm. The worst part? She somehow turns vacuuming her bedroom into a 45 minute event. Our bedroom size is a little over the size of the dorm room that I shared with Logan my freshman year of college. It should take at most 10 minutes to vacuum. Meanwhile, 20 feet below, Claire and I just sit there trying to figure out how in the world she is still vacuuming as we attempt to sleep. We consider grabbing a broom and just start banging on our ceiling/their floor in attempt to get her to figure out that what she is doing is ridiculous. The second maddening thing is not truly the complex’s fault, but I would have figured they be a little more prepared. Little important information. When it rains in Springfield, it monsoons. On top of that, the city is the most poorly draining place I have ever lived. I don’t know if the sewers are poorly placed or just don’t drain well, but every storm leaves standing water everywhere. This last particular storm we had was insane. The sidewalk outside of our apartment disappeared under a river of rain water that formed between apartment buildings. The result? Nearly every basement apartment in our complex flooded and filled the second floor apartments (aka where Claire and I live) with a horrendous, musty smell. Thankfully, they are gutting the suckers now, but for about a week we had to spray our entire apartment with febreeze or open the window just to sit in our apartment. I feel so bad for the people that lived in those apartments.

There is a little update on my life. Hope you are all doing well. I will try to be a little more consistent with this stuff. I have finally, got most of the big planning done for the summer group trip Claire and I planned, so that will free up some of my time as well.