In September of 1998, I made a decision to invite Christ into my life.  Since then, I have seeking to keep Him as the Lord of my life.  God has done an incredible work in my life, changed me in many ways, and has used me to proclaim His love around the U.S. and in Russia.  He even had me to serve as a full-time campus minister for 6 years.

Through all this, I have mostly felt a battle inside.  Like there was something still missing or that my heart was divided.  No matter how much God showed me about his love and his provision for me, I just couldn’t seem to allow myself to embrace His gift, fully.

In July 2006, God started repeating a theme of Surrender, in my life.  I knew that He was calling me to move to a deeper level with him and that He wanted to move me from my initial place of salvation to a place where I was really fully surrendering and following.  The problem was that I wasn’t “READY.”  I still had too much fear, too much still messed up and too much pain to be willing to fully trust someone with all of me.  Plus, I had people break their word too much to want to make some commitment to surrender all, because I knew I couldn’t keep a commitment like that.

From that time on, things started to get harder.  Even though I had some of the most incredible intimate times with Christ, of my life and some amazing “TASTES” of God, the problem was that my heart was still divided.  The more I saw and tasted that the Lord is good and saw His love and provision, the more the internal battle seemed to grow.  I knew that I couldn’t live without continually tasting God, but I also knew that I wasn’t ready to give Him everything.  So, He patiently waited and loved on me. 

The more I tried to get my life ready to surrender everything, the more out of control things became.  I spiraled downward, deeper and deeper, into impurity, lust, compulsive spending and eating, distancing myself from my friends and my True Friend.  The more I tried to commit to Spiritual disciplines, the more I felt resentment growing toward them and what they stood for. Everything seemed to be okay on the outside, but I started to feel more and more gross as time went on.  You know when you get that feeling, right before a nasty flu…you can’t see symptoms but you feel like you just want to vomit…maybe that would make you feel better.

As this continued to grow, I felt this “need” to either “sell-out” or “get out.”  I really felt like I need to make a decision to either surrender everything, or I need to turn my back and walk away from my total belief system.  I just couldn’t do it anymore.  I felt so sick, like I was walking around covered in vomit and just trying to smile and hide it.

In the last two weeks, everything really started to come to a head.  I felt like I was standing on a precipice and a decision needed to be made, and I was so scared.  Scared that I couldn’t let God into the dark rooms of my heart, but more scared that I would turn from Him and dive into a world that would destroy me.

Monday, March 17, 2008, I went to the Tent of Meeting, at my church (Named after the place where Moses would go to meet face-to-face with God.)  It was just another effort to get some crumbs from God’s banquet table.  Instead, God had other plans.  He was here to call me to surrender, again.  I was still afraid of so many things, and was sure that I couldn’t keep the commitment.  I felt assured that He would and could deal with EVERYTHING if I would just be willing to surrender them into His hands and let His will be done.  I was tired of fighting, and through brokenness, I surrendered it all to Him.  And, He is taking it all and dealing with it all.

I see that there is long road to taking me where God has for me, but for the first time in my life, I truly have hope for the future and feel free to live, fully surrendered to God.  As the days go on, I truly feel more alive and more free.  No longer is my heart divided between fear/mistrust and wanting to be deeply intimate with God.