"Christ" was all I could muster to speak this morning as I sat in Crescent City Coffee looking around wondering what was weighing so heavily on my heart. It was Him. He, the Creator God, the Almighty, the Beginning and End, the Alpha and Omega, Love, the fullness of Joy, the all surpassing Peace, and beyond all Patience, the greatest Kindness, and highest Goodness, the only One that is always Faithful, the One showing the purest gentleness, and the One never losing Self Control. This beyond unsatisfactory list of attributes of Him is just an overflow of what He is doing in my life right now. I call it - The Overwhelming. Or I should just call it an answer to prayer...
Over the past last few years I have been praying for God to overwhelm me. To consume me like in Hebrews 12:29 - "For our God is a consuming fire." And now He is answering that prayer. Through pain, disbelief, anger, chastisement, and obedience He is overwhelming me and I am amazed by it.
I would like to take the time now to tell a story of how this overwhelming has taken the form in the sovereignty of God. But to do this I will need to take it back a couple of years, around 5, and set up this amazing series of events in order for you to understand how absolutely incredible this is. Also I would love, you the reader, to see how God had a disgusting situation work perfectly into The Overwhelming that is happening now.
We begin our story in the summer of 2007 on a church van with some 15 youth headed to Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina for a Student Life Mission Camp. Everyone in the van is excited because we get to be away from parents for a week, act crazy without anyone judging us, and hit on hot Christian girls without any regard. At least that last one was something I was looking forward to. We arrive to the sound of college age Student Life workers yelling at us about how excited they are to see us and how happy they are we are here. I return the favor by saying that I am happy to be here but I am not sure if I am happy to see them because I have never met them before. Why would I be happy to see someone I have never met or spoken of before, it just doesn't make sense. Anyway, that night we all file in to the big auditorium and our speaker takes the stage. He opens with this line, which on looking back at the situation may have been one of the most sovereign events to ever happen to me, "Hi my name is David Nasser, I know I am not the speaker ya'll were supposed to have but that guy had some stuff come up so he will not be with you."
Let me dissect this statement for you. Our speaker for the camp was supposed to be another pastor that was apparently pretty ligit. I forget his name, but that is irrelevant. What is important was that he was caught in an extramarital affair that had his ministry ripped to shreds and needless to say all his speaking arrangements at camps throughout the summer were cancelled. Now I was left with some guy named David Nasser whom I, nor my paster who was with us, had ever heard of, so we were apprehensive at best. Now I return to the story.
David Nasser ended up being one of the best speakers I have ever heard in my life. He was funny, sarcastic, blunt, and scripturally based. He was also a writer. A Call to Die was the name of his book. It was a 40 day fast from the most important thing in your life that was holding you back from Christ. Whether that be TV, the computer, sports, nothing was out of play. Needless to say, as a 17 year old male, the computer and TV were my two biggest distractions from Christ. So upon leaving the camp I made a decision that has changed my life forever; I started the fast. 40 days without TV and computer were going to be tough, but I believed I could do it and I was determined to finish. The only problem was that the day after I returned from my youth trip I would be embarking on a 30 something day baseball trip from Atlanta to Jupiter, Florida. Which would be consisted on watching TV and looking at the computer everyday in the hotels we would be staying in. So I couldn't have asked for a tougher time to begin this fast.
This is where everything gets crazy. I played on a summer league baseball team called the Louisiana Allstars. We were a group of guys from around Louisiana or the surrounding states that traveled around the nation playing in baseball tournaments. The crazyness is there were actually two travel teams for the Allstars, the A and the B team. During this summer, which was my senior summer, I was on the A team. And although both teams were under the same name, we rarely ever hung out with anyone from the B team or vic-versa. This could probably be attributed to the fact that we always played at different times during tournaments so we were always leaving as the B team was finishing a game or the other way around. Well, one day during a tournament in Atlanta both teams were in the hotel sitting and waiting for our games later in the afternoon. While we were waiting I was out in the hallway reading the Word and studying the book A Call to Die when a guy from the B team walked by and we began to talk about what I was reading.
He explained to me that he was a Christian too and was struggling to stay in the Word while we were on these long road trips around many guys who didn't care about Christianity at all. This interested me because it was right where I was in my life with Christianity and baseball. This sparked an immediate friendship between us and we began to hang out day in and day out when we could to talk about our lives, what we struggled with, and where our lives were heading. This friendship is what I wanted to ultimately discuss today. Had God not been perfectly sovereign then I would have never been at that Student Life camp with a speaker who wasn't supposed to be there in order to begin a fast that I could not have ever heard of in order to sit in a hallway reading, which doesn't make sense in order to meet this guy who I would have never met otherwise. The importance of these moments is that this relationship and friendship I developed with this guy has shaped me and defined me in some of the most important decisions in my life. He has been with me in through pain and failure and sorrow and happiness and I with him. In less than five years he has gone from a person I played baseball against once to my dearest friend. And the best part about it is that God's sovereignty is all over it. Like David and Jonathan's relationship. Now to end all of the mystery to who this is I will tell you. It is Dan Breazeale. And no matter how long I have known this guy I still don't know how to spell his last name.
To end this blog on something only he and I will know, "You may not have changed me for the better, but because I knew you I have been changed."
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