So I am home from UVA for Christmas break, and it's a little bitter sweet. I love UVA and the people there. Those people have become my family. Home can be a little tough because I am a totally different person now than I was when I left for college a little more than a year ago. Since my time at UVA, I really found God and that has entirely changed the way I live my life, view the world, and spend my time. That is why break can be a dangerous time. I have so much more time, but it is very easy to waste that time and end up in a spiritual valley.
Last year think I did a fairly good job at avoiding that by going through the Live Dead Journal. I made sure that I completely tithed my time everyday, so I spent 2.5 hours of time per day in the Word, prayer, or worship. While I know some of that time was spent just to get my time in and wasn't really fruitful, it helped to instill within me the discipline to have my quiet time everyday. That was hugely important for me since that was pretty much my introduction to quiet time and reading the Bible. That laid my foundation. This year I am going to go through it again, but this time I won't be as much of a stickler on time. I will use it more as a guide to spending time with God and as a source of reflection on my faith journey throughout the past year.
On top of that I have a few more things planned for this year to keep me on track and to ensure that this break is a moment of growth and not decay. My man Alex filled me in on what he was doing and invited me to join him, so I will be reading through Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. For example, we will be reading Galatians once per day, everyday for a week and then so on with the other three books. It's been really cool and a totally different way of reading the Bible than I've done before. I've always heard to read through the entire book at a time but have never done it. These are a great one to start with since they are so short. I will try to blog about each book after the week is over to kind of reflect on it.
On top of that, I have a goal of reading a lot more than I ever had before. I just got a number of books from Amazon that my man Alex recommended as well as a couple I just haven't read yet. I will not be able to read them all, but I want to read like 5 or so. I never have been a big reader, but I know that reading is the best way to gain wisdom. That's the only reason I read. Because I hate reading, theological books are the only books I find worth reading. I actually forgot my laptop charger, which should make it easier to commit time to reading since I can't mindlessly surf the web. My goal is to also blog on each of the books that I read too. My computer will pretty much be reserved for blogging over break to save the battery. I read one of the shorter books today and will try to blog on it tomorrow.
In a week's time, I will be heading down to Fort Worth, Texas for the World Missions Summit. This is a convention (I guess that's what you would call it) that Chi Alpha holds every four years. It is devoted to world missions, and they bring in hundreds of missionaries to share and to speak with. That will be an awesome experience I am sure of it!
Also as a core group leader now I am going to make an effort to call some of my guys up to see how they are doing in general and with their devotional life. I'm also going to have my Richmond Chi Alpha family to hang out with unlike last year. With all that said, I am excited about what this Christmas break has in store for me!
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