Backpacker of Life

It has been a long time since I felt like blogging. Partly, I feel that I have been too busy to breath and actually allow myself to think about what to say. Now on the other hand, it's hard to blog having forgotten  my password for my OLD SCHOOL blog.  Oh, that Old School blog!

Let me give you a short history on my relationship with blogging. Way before myspace, facebook, blogspot, tumblr, and twitter were known , there was a site called xanga. In 2002 a girlfriend introduced me to the idea of blogging and since I liked her, I decided to get an account. To be honest, I didn't really like it. With time, I found myself really enjoying expressing ideas in that way, and started writing everything. The inevitable happened and she broke up with me; leaving Juanito  stuck thousands of miles away from home, learning a lot, yet feeling really lonely.  Blogging became a way in which God worked in my heart and helped me cope with my life alone in the U.S.  From wrestling on living out my faith on a real way,  breakups , being homesick, mistakes, joys,  being laid off, moving, traveling,... that blog became a great way to externalize in a healthy way what God was doing.  Through sitting down and writing the little mishaps of the ecuadorian kid, God taught me a lot and I experienced God on ways that I had never experienced before.  I grew in my faith rapidly and with my growth the blog also grew. I still remember traveling with www.onetruth.com and hearing from random people how they had found my blog and God somehow used it in their lives.  One of those visitors actually ended up key on me being able to pay my college years.. crazy heh?!

Anyways, why am I saying all of this? Because I have been praying for God to do something in my heart and the last week has found me wresstling and getting beat up (with love) by a God who is relentless on showing me that He has a beautiful plan ahead.

Yesterday, my wife and I were on the roof of the building shooting a video with our friends from http://www.halleproject.org/ and it hit me. The beautiful Quito skyline was reminded me that God has a beautiful horizon ahead.  A horizon that I have not been able to enjoy or think clearly because I have been reacting to not let go of what has happened before. Not just the situations and memories, but I see that I am holding to wanting to see God work on the same ways that He used to or he had done it in the past. I was convicted that I want to experience Him in the same ways that I did when I was sitting down alone in my apartment, late at night writing those blog entries and how that propelled me to the day to day life.

God was reminding me on that roof that the best is yet to come. To let go. To go back to enjoying Him for who HE is and not for who He has been. He has been faithful and true, yet there is much of God to experience and learn. To enjoy time with Him without thinking too much on what should be my correct, perfect response. To sit still and know that He is God.  So today, as I gave up on waiting for that response email to reset my password, I am closing that page convinced that I haven't seen anything yet. Convinced that God will work in beautiful ways. Convinced that I need to let God be God (for my own JOY). To be reminded of the principles, to go back to basics, to find my first love every day.  To live by Faith and how that looks like now as I lead my beautiful wife here in Quito... Ecuador here we come (again!)


Grace and Peace,
j

"Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.” Matthew 9:17