The End

It feels crazy to be saying this, but today I am writing my last blog post while at Link Year. What a journey the last year has been! It’s hard to put into words all that I have learned and in all the areas I have grown. All that I know is that I am not the same person I was 9 months ago when I started the program. Looking back, I was so selfish and focused on myself. I thought I had my life pretty much all together. I was only coming to Link Year because I didn’t know what I wanted to major in at college, or that is what I kept telling myself. This attitude made me come in very prideful because I didn’t really think I needed Link Year. I was just here because I wasn’t sure what else to do. Because of this attitude, I was pretty miserable for the first part of my time here because it was not really what I was expecting it to be like and I had left such good friends back in Omaha where I went to college last year. I began questioning if it was even the right decision for me to come. It was not until God revealed how focused I was on myself that I finally began to enjoy Link Year. My thinking shifted from “how can I make Link Year better for me” to “how can I glorify God while at Link Year” that I actually started to enjoy it. That is why the verse that really sums up my biggest lesson learned while here is John 3:30, which states, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” When I started to do this – to make God huge and myself tiny – my whole perspective changed. I realized that I didn’t have everything together. I realized how broken and need of God I was. Now I am 100% sure that this is where I was supposed to be this last year and it is crazy to think it is already over. I’m sad to leave. I’m sad not to have Brian, my mentor, near by. I’m sad to leave the friendships that I have made. I’m sad not to have speakers from around the country come and share wisdom with me each week. However, I am beyond excited to see what God has in store for my future. I’m excited to start applying what I have spent the last year learning. I’m excited to go be a light wherever I am.

The last year has been quite a journey, but a journey well worth taking.

Thanks for reading!

Live a High Impact Life

Well… I finish Link Year in exactly 16 days. That is crazy to think about. The last year has honestly been a whirlwind and I can’t believe that it is almost over. This week we have had the opportunity to hear from Austin Ochs who, believe it or not, is the second to last speaker of the year. He has been an awesome speaker to have while we are coming down the homestretch. He actually is speaking on a topic that caused me to come to Link Year. He is a unique speaker for Link Year, because he works full time in business whereas most of our speakers work for a ministry of some sort. It has been really neat hearing him talk about how to run a business that honors God and is a light to its employees and clients. Last year, I went to the University of Nebraska for Architectural Engineering. However, I kept being bothered by the fact that if I went into Engineering, or any kind of business for that matter, I would not be able to impact the kingdom of God; and if it was possible to impact God’s kingdom in the work field, I had no idea how.... so I came to Link Year. Austin has been incredibly helpful in answering this question. His main focus was on, “How can we live high impact lives?” The verse he used as his thesis was Ezekiel 22:30 which states:

 "I looked for someone (Character) among them who would build up the wall (Competence) and stand before me in the gap (Connection) on behalf of the land (Commitment) so I would not have to destroy it, but I found no one.”

He explained that in this verse, God was looking for a person of Character who would honor God, a person of Competence who would pursue excellence, a person of Connection who would serve people, and a person of Commitment who steward resources.  If we live with those four virtues, we will be able to answer well the two greatest questions everyone has to answer before they die: 1) Did I become who God wanted me to be? 2) Did I do what God wanted me to do?

Austin also broke them down further like this:

Character: “Character is being.” To live with character and honor God we need truth, faith, and character.

Competence: “Competent managers bring Expertise, Innovation, and Discipline to a Coordinated effort.”

Connection: “Connected leaders bring Vision, Hope and Courage to a coordinated effort.”

Commitment: “Committed stewards bring Perspective, Integrity, and Generosity to the LIFE (Labor, Influence, Finance, Expertise).”

He went into all those in much more depth, but it would be difficult to share it all on a blog. Austin was an incredible speaker and really challenged me to live a life of impact. Not to settle or coast through life. More than any other speaker, he has shown me what it looks like to go impact the world through whatever platform I am given and gave practical ways of how to do it.

The Trap

This week I would like to talk about a chapter from the book the guys are reading for their Bible study. The book is called Jesus The King by Timothy Keller. In it he walks through the book of Mark, breaking down much of it verse by verse. Reading this book has greatly increased my understanding of Jesus and what he came to do. The chapter I will talk about is entitled “The Trap” and it breaks down the story of the Rich Young Ruler in Mark chapter 10. Keller starts off the chapter stating how a historian named Andrew Wells noticed that the core of all main religions other than Christianity have stayed in the same location. Islam started at Mecca and is still there today. Buddhism started in the Far East and that is where it remains. Hinduism started in India and remains a mainly Indian religion. But Christianity is different. Its core is always moving. The original center was Jerusalem. It then moved to Rome. A few centuries later it moved to Europe and through immigration to the North America. Why does Christianity do this? Wells believes “that when Christianity is in a place of power and wealth for a long period, the radical message of sin and grace and the cross can become muted or even lost. Then Christianity starts to transmute into a nice, safe religion, one that’s for respectable people who try to be good. And eventually it becomes virtually dormant in those places and the center moves somewhere else” So the problem for Christianity is wealth – that is “the trap” that Keller is talking about in this chapter. Not that wealth is bad, but when its put in a place of being our savior, there is a problem. How do we know if money is our savior? Here is what Keller says Jesus inferred in his conversation with the Rich Young Ruler: “Right now God is your boss; but God is not your Savior, and here’s how you can see it: I want you to imagine life without money. I want you to imagine all of it gone. No inheritance, no inventory, no servants, no mansions – all of that is gone. All you have is me. Can you live like that?” I thought the way Keller put that was so powerful. I have read this story so many times but never thought about it like that before. Can I live without the comfort that wealth brings? Will Jesus truly be enough for me? I would like to say yes but its much easier said than done. I love what Keller says a little later: “If you want to be a Christian, of course you’ll repent of your sins. But after you’ve repented of your sins you’ll have to repent of how you have used the good things in your life to fill the place where God should be.” So how do we avoid the trap that wealth places in our lives? In America especially, we are surround by wealth everywhere we look. Is it even possible for us to be 100% free from its grasp? Here is what Keller says about that: “Does it move you to think of what Jesus did for you? When that begins to really move you, amaze you, make you weep, you’ll have a fighting chance of avoiding the trap. Letting Jesus’ sacrifice melt you will drain money of its importance for you.” In other words, we need to make the Gospel real. We need to remind ourselves of it daily. If we are able to do that, then money will lose its hold on us and we will have, as Keller puts it, a fighting chance of avoiding the trap.

Thanks for reading!

Brady White

This week we heard from Brady White, who is the son of Joe White. Brady pastors a church at Disney World, which is pretty neat. The topic he spoke on was sexual brokenness. He did a lot of contrasting between what culture tells us is normal vs. what the Bible says. It is so interesting how what culture tells us is freedom - doing whatever you want - is actually slavery. It completely controls you and you become unable to get out of it. However, the church is in such a tricky situation because culture is so good at twisting the truth. They have made the church look like the bad guys. For example, culture says that true love is unconditional, blind acceptance. It doesn't matter what people are doing or what they believe because we love them no matter what. What is so hard is that culture makes that sound so good. I mean, to disagree with that definition of love, you must be judgmental and full of hate. Clearly, the church is in a tough spot. So what do we do? How does the church address those who are so deep in sexual brokenness or those who are gay? How do we show them the truth without coming off as hateful? The Bible says that Jesus was full of 100% grace AND 100% truth. Obviously these are incredibly difficult questions. However, for a start, we need to change our outlook.

Our current outlook seems to be:
-Us against the world
-judge those who struggle differently. If we are talking to someone with the same struggle as us, we can relate and are full of grace. However, if we run into someone with different struggles than us, we ask, "How can you do that? I would never do something like that." the best example of this was in class when a student mentioned that they knew someone who was a professing Christian but was gay. Brady responded by saying, "You want to hear something crazy? I know a bunch of professing Christians who gossip every day." You could hear a pin drop in the room after he said that because so many of us gossip. We see some sins as worse than others when in reality they are all the same.
-We think, lets change those broken people

Here is the Biblical outlook we need:
-Us for the world
-Accept those who struggle differently
-pointing our people to Jesus. We are all broken and therefore in the same boat.

Another way we can learn to love those who are hurting is to look at Jesus' example in scripture. In John 8:3-11 is the story of the woman who committed adultery. What Jesus does is so powerful and what we need to learn to do. He does not begin by telling her about all the people who she hurt in both her family and the family of the man she committed adultery with. He does not tell her how stupid her decision was. Here is what he does do:

1) He protects her from those who wanted to kill her, judge her, mock her, and condemn her.
2) He protects her from herself. He lets her know that she can move forward and not be torn apart by guilt and shame.
3) He does not condemn her.

If the church looked more like this, I think we would have a lot better reputation and would actually be place the broken came to for refuge. And if we do this, if we really care for them, then maybe they will be more interested in what we have to say. Because we do need to say something. We cannot let them continue in sin without saying anything. But how are we saying it and what is our motivation behind it?

That's all I've got.

Thanks for reading!

David Marvin

In my blog last week I talked a lot about my month long mission trip to the Bahamas. For this post I will talk a little about both this week and last week. Last week we had the opportunity to hear David Marvin come talk to us about apologetics. David leads the college ministry for Watermark Church in Dallas, Texas. Something that really stood out to me while he was talking had to do with Christianity being the only true religion and how we can know that. His main premise was that those who say all religions are ultimately the same, are in fact saying that they don't know anything about any religion, because all religions contradict each other. There is either one that is true, or they are all false. They cannot all be true. After making that point, he began to explain what makes Christianity different than all other religions, and it may have been how he said it, but that is what really hit me. He said in all other religions, good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. However, in Christianity, forgiven people go to heaven and those who are not forgiven go to hell. In other words, whether or not we go to heaven has nothing to do with how good we seem to be. So many religions teach that if your good outweighs the bad, you get to go to heaven. But, as David, explained, no amount of good can remove the bad. The only thing that can remove the bad we all have done it forgiveness.  The takeaway from that is so encouraging. It completely takes the pressure off our performance.

This week has also been really neat. We took a test to determine what majors we would be good at based on personality and high school classes. We also spent today talking about spiritual gifts. It has been really encouraging to see how the majors the test said I would be good at (Entrepreneurship) are coherent with my top five strengths (Belief, Competition, Deliberative, Responsibility, Achiever) which are coherent with what I am gifted with spiritually. All that information is really helpful while trying to figure out what to do with my future and I am glad Link Year walked us through it all. 

Bahamas!!!

This week is our first week back after being gone the entire month of February on international trips followed spring break for the first week in March. International trips were absolutely amazing. I chose to go the Bahamas, which was more of a mission-based trip. I was stretched and grown in lots of ways. Our focus while being there was at The Exceptional School for Learner – a school in a nearby town for students with learning disabilities. We helped teach both math and English classes every morning. Another really neat opportunity we had there was to build them a cement pad to play basketball on. Before we built the pad, they played on a rocky slope that was incredibly dangerous. It was fun for me because I love construction and I was able to help envision the whole project and figure out how to get it done. However, the most rewarding part was seeing the kids play on it once it was finished. The joy and gratitude they showed was really fun to see.

While in the Bahamas there were also some ways that God really challenged me that I hope to take away while back in the States. The first way was God revealed the idol of comfort in my life and showed me that I need to be content wherever I am or with whatever I have. For example, we ate oatmeal every morning for 28 days. We also only had cold showers, to name a few of the things I was not used to. What is sad is those things are so small. People obviously live with much less. We always had enough food and I should have been happy we even had showers. But that just goes to show how big the idol of comfort was in my life. I had a few of the things that I was used to (good breakfasts, hot showers, etc.) taken away and I struggled to be content. Now that I am back, I don’t want to sink into the lifestyle I had before. I want to live a little more simple life. Starting by making small changes, like not eating out as much, and hopefully continue to do more and more to take away unnecessary things.

The second area God challenged me in was my generosity, and he used a little boy at the school to do it. A young boy named Joshua, who was incredibly poor and whose shoes had countless holes in them, gave me part of his snack every day I was there. Here is a young boy, who has next to nothing, giving me, an American who has way more than I need, part of his already small snack. Why would he do that? I honestly don’t know, but I do know that if he can give out of the little he had, I sure can give a whole lot more than I do now.

Thanks for reading!