Trust

It’s never really all that easy to write about the core of who you are. But nonetheless to write about anything else would be of a lesser or more inconsequential point, God is dealing with the core of me and healing a few things along the way.

And it’s complicated to say the least.

At my core I am an architect and designer. To be doing anything else doesn’t do all that much to give me joy or isn’t really something I can dive into fully. I half-ass it because I can’t really get into it. Which is on par with most employees, sadly. But its because I have known what it is to dive into something so deep, something that sings and is in concert with who I am. And to be doing anything else just feels as if something is missing, as if I have lost my love.

My buddy Landon posted this in his blog:

“If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not ‘studying a profession,’ for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

I think it puts rather well what I have been feeling. And I think from it we can take that the hundred chances are better than the one. As a Christian knowing that God is mightily for us we can be guaranteed he is in our 100’s chances and is in that first enterprise too! But he may have other things to do within that man( in me)in the 100 before he leads him back to the first.

In many respects I am the first man who has miscarried thus far in my enterprise not being installed into an architecture position in New York City as the time approaches the end of within a year. I believe that time will come as God continues to lay the ground work for such a thing. I am confident that my God is for me in giving me to a profession which makes my heart sing and can be an act of worship.

But he does have things to do inbetween that future reality.

I have said before I do not claim to know all that God is doing in this really awkward strange season. But I know the other day He spoke for the first time in a while and said to me.

"THIS IS IMPORTANT JOHN!!!”

…and it is. I can't deny that or logically say this is stupid...As much as I would like to at times! Every moment of this winding path every miniscule detail is important! So I must

Trust in the LORD with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding; in all my ways acknowledging Him, and Him alone making my paths straight through that obedience and trust in WHO HE IS.

-Proverbs 3:5-6 ( loosely translated)

I am learning to acknowledge him. Who he is, trusting in Him and am not leaning on my expectations or my understanding of how it will work out. I am acknowledging Him our great and awesome God. He is in this. I look forward to the day I can look back as I can look back now and say my FATHER in heaven is great and look how he fought for me with a jealous love even against my best ( still faulty and failing) thoughts.

JG

Needs

Blogs are funny thing because they can become soapboxes by which to profess our frail and often shortsighted opinions. Or they can be used to bless people. It is always my hope that this will bless. What I've found though is for that to happen truthfulness, straightforwardness, and honesty are the catalysts that tend to bless in the later case. By simply telling what is going on in our lives how we are coping in it and who we are clinging to in it. This can provide a depth of insight that gives blogging its purpose and blessing in this strange world we inhabit.

With that in mind in being honest and straightforward, this is going to be a longer that normal one: the issue I am going to try and tackle is less a blog and more a summary of the past 3 years or so... So I will try to highlight important parts only...

...

My last year of college, I paid my way through. I was engaged to a beautiful and wonderful woman. And in that first year in a sense of being financially on my own I began and saw what I wanted my life to look like. What I deemed as important. And in that I began praying for where the Lord might send my future wife and I together as we began our lives together after college. And the Lord started planting this crazy idea of moving to NYC. And the idea stuck...and hasn't gone away.

I saw the detriment of what a long car commute can do to a marriage and didn't want any part of that in mine I wanted public transportation options where I could use the transit time productively. I knew the realities of architecture and that when I do get a full time job in it it would occupy a majority of my time. I saw what suburban living did to further divide an already splintered world and frankly didn't want any part of it. I wanted a diversity of people poverty and wealth in my face day in and day out. I didn't want to ignore it by doing the garage freeway office freeway garage option.

And in looking back God started laying a ground work long before I even began considering NYC : this jump to the other side of the country:

See, I have never had an architecture job and God seems to have bitterly opposed it up to this point. I have done design-build construction but never worked in an architecture office, because frankly God didn't want me to for I imagine the NYC reason. Most people would agree with me in this statement that if a firm were to have me intern with them they would have offered me a full time job and I would have accepted and that would not have been in NYC. So instead God for whatever reason during the years I could have interned or chose to try to get a job as an intern orchestrated the biggest financial collapse and worst architectural hiring crisis since the profession began in the late 1800s. I instead during the past two summers designed and built a 2200 sf "house" for Elise and I to survive one of the most crazy winters on record for a lot of the country in a rather warm Colorado while working two management positions on my end and several graphic design jobs on my wife's end to save enough money to have us line up with this movement of God.

But it hasn't been all about saving because we really have has a year off from the craziness that is the working world reality. We have been able to bless our family. I have been able to serve my wife in ways I couldn't as an architecture student who also worked part time and had a social life and it has been a joy. We have been able to help out my brother in law who tore his ACL and LCL in a skiing accident and just bought a fixer-upper which he can't do certain things due to his accident working, physical therapy, and being the youth director at the church etc.. and me with all my design build knowledge can help out... . We were able to spend time with and see off my other brother in law who recently moved to Florida. We became part of the respective in-laws family and now know how to fit in quite comfortably.

And now that the world is on its way to recovery and we feel a great need to get our lives started for our own sanity we are going to step into what we have felt God orchestrating for a long while. I'm sure it won't pan out exactly like we think but God is still most certainly in it.

So in light of that and many other things and what we feel and see the Spirit doing Elise and I have decided to move sometime in July to NYC. We have planned a housing trip to NYC June 22nd-28th which will hopefully be enough time to secure an apartment. We will be celebrating our one year anniversary on the 27th there and beginning our journey shortly after!

Pray for us to both secure jobs or to have enough coming in to survive so hopefully we do not run out of savings in the most expensive city in the world. I have a firm that is interested in me and is very likely to hire me on a contract basis if enough work comes in, pray for that. Pray for my wife's job prospects. She is wicked talented and has many contacts she will meet with when we move. Excited for what God has for us there that week and beyond! and the six weeks we will be in Colorado two weeks in California before that!

JG

8 months

I imagine I hardly grasp what God has done in my heart over this time. 2/3 of a year has passed since Elise and I have been back in Colorado. I am now on my third job and to be honest there's been a lot of hard lessons along the way . I believe however maturity has been developed within it...and God has been glorified because of it and I am deeply thankful due to that single fact.

Lately and in part with our past few jobs here in Colorado Elise and I have been learning how to wrestle and not get pinned down by the realities of the working world and trying to grab onto the reigns of married life and the realities of day to day . I have come to the conclusion that no one can really prepare you for this and the intensity and amount of effort you must put into such a thing and the realities of I imagine seeing your selfishness and humanity due to it are something you can't prepare for. Architecture school helped because current life is a downplay from that but it will ramp up again soon! And many a sleepless selfless night will have not prepared me for that

But the reason for this blog isn't to say that, although it does run parallel to that thought; it is simple to say and sort through the fact that there's something happening in my heart in this time that is immensely new that needs to be sorted through and written down.

Perhaps its easiest to say it this way, the weight of the world has a way of showing Christ as the antithesis to what the world is and the realities of the world hinder Christ coming into it and you really have to learn how to make inroads for Christ in the world and choose whom you will serve or you will simply get bowled over by it.

Seeing God for who He is is so much clearer in a world unsheltered by family support or places in society where we have deemed by age to be places of rest and shelter from the outside world simply put, it changes your perspective. I don't think many are comfortable with this but it is a truer picture of God.

Personally it has been shaping desires for strange things and has been giving me strength to work towards long held ambitions that lie deep within my heart knowing that those are the ones that really matter.

But by choosing that it means life isn't gonna look like what I thought it would look like, and due to that my heart is both fickle and redeemed and is immensely torn in times like these.

Needless to say its been an unpredictable 8 months but it has been good. I have plans but we'll see if they pan out.

How much can one man do?
To change the world
The answer is not that you are to become that man
But their is one man who already did
And the changing goes like nothing before it has
imperceptible until you know its way
infinite complexity undoing you
to find what was deeper within
the deeper you
To show what was already done
by a father who loved you

JG