a bit raunchy... but genius!

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NEW VIDEO!


to see more, check out youtube.com/hopsispossible

so...

that thing about feeling better.

wishful thinking.

completely.

it's official... my 110th post.

feeling somewhat happy because of this.

maybe it shows how up-to-dayte i am with my generation...

or maybe, just maybe...

it shows how lazy and procrastinatory i am.

i tink i jsut amde up a word.


that makes me happy .

i like making up words.


like wonderish

wonderish: adj. not quite wonderful, but pretty cool all the same.

yay!

haha... k. food is good.

im feeling better today... i can feel my nose kinda burning right next to my eye... hopefully some pseudophed can help.

its actually cool today. high of 78... but i doubt it will get that hot.

now... off the the caf. i hope there are serving edible foods today. :D


happy THURSDAY!

"sometimes you're the windsheild, sometimes you're the bug"
-Q

sittin in research methods:

i want to be asleep.

like... right now.

looking at a bright projector that has a defective fan that is rattling and clicking like crazy, sending my head places that it shouldnt be rihgt now.

gaaaah.

so im sick...

who knew that hurling your body down a flight of stairs could do so much damage.

haha

just messin. no flight of stairs were hurtled down in the making of this feature.

but... i do have a sinus infection.

joy.


was thinking on my way here... if i were given one occupation that i would do for the rest of my life, it would be to write.

i love to write.

i love taking ideas and putting them on paper and seeing what happens. seeing where the paper takes them. seeing how life is turned on its ear with the simple stroke of a pen or the tap of a keystroke.

thinking aobut changing the url of this blog... kinda want space. kinda want... to be in a place where nobody knows my name or has seen my face. i wish the world were completely annonymous... i think it might correct a lot of the problems we face in our world today.

think about it: if nobody knew anybody, there would be no harm and no war. there would be no hate, because you wouldn't know someone to hate them.

but, then again, if there were no connections between people... you would forsake (or at least redefine) some of the greatest joys in life.

love, family, friendship, etc.

"take me back toward the sea,
amongst the tide, amongst the sky.
i never thought much of the city lights.

take me bck to where im from
show me the chorus of the sun
they're sneaking like a hideaway

take me back to where im from,
for me theres nothing more
take me back to where im rom.

take me back to where im from,
the sun, the sand, the shore,
take me back to where im from.

yes, im going home.
no other place for me."

was waiting for today... now im waiting for christmas...

just sayin...


yay TONIGHT though... going te see jeff in How To Succeed at RCC.

gonna be a BLAST!

also, on an unrelated story, just got told that there is a HUGE party tonight at stadium pizza: $25, all you can drink (literally) and you get to make your own pizza... this should be a fun night for travel!

Prayers and Luck...

"sometimes you're the windshield, sometimes you;re the bug"

ha
-J

8:46 am

there are people hammering outside my window... and there i heard a saw... i want to hurt people.

its FRIDAY!!!

long day filled with appeals to pity, more sawing and maybe even some work.

I CANT WAIT FOR TOMORROW!!!

...just sayin.

HAPPY FRIDAY!

this is all that i can say...

I'm Tired... really really tired.

It's weird, but you never quite prepare for those things that come at you like a left hook, when all the while you re focused on the right hand. i guess you cant, really. I mean, how can a person focus on all of the things in their life at one time? these past few days have been tough...

I saw this bumper sticker, and i thought it was incredible. what an image in your head, that because you have gone through that hard times, you know how to get through them... i've heard that before. I've heard that it is supposed to get easier to handle hard times when you have gone through so many of them... and I have gone through wuite a few hard times, so i'm stuck constantly shifting my head from looking back to looking foward, and i keep getting this fear... no, fear is the wrong word... i keep getting this sense of... once again... being in an ocean, with the water all around me getting bigger and bigger and colder and colder, and its getting harder and harder to convince myself to listen to the innate desire inside of me that says "keep swimming".


"father of Grace, I am your child of mercy"...

John came up ot me today, leaned against the wall and said "theres this old saying: 'the man who burns the candle at both ends isn't as bright as he thinks he is'"

point taken... point deserved.

I just want time to stop,
i want to be held in someones arms,
i want to feel the touch of loved one who loves me because of who I am...
not because of what im doing or what i am "capable" of doing... whatever that means.

I heard the story of Brennan MAnning going to a house of a womans father, who was dieing of cancer. He walks into teh room and sees teh man propped up on a pillow, an empty chair beside the bed. Brennan says "Hi. i guess you were expecting me."

"Actually, i have no idea who you are..." the mans said

"oh" replied brennan, "i just assumed because of the empty chair that you were expecting me..."

"oh, that" said the man, "brennan, close the door."

BRennan closed the door and sat with the man and after about a mintue of silence, the man said "i had never learned how to pray... i used ot sit and church and listen to the pastor speak and pray out loud and never knew how he was doing it... so i asked him one day how to pray, and he gave me a famous book about prayer, and within the first 4 pages I had to look up 8 words in the dictionary.

"I gave the book back the next week and said 'thanks', muttering under my breath '...for nothin' and went another year not knowing how to pray, until one day a friend of mine said 'al you have to do is put an empty chair in front of you, sit next to is and have a normal conversation as if you were talking to a good friend.'

"'thats all?' i asked. 'thats all' he told me.'

"now thats how i pray... and i always keep the door shut because i don't want my daughter to see me talking to an empty chiar.

"do you think thats prayer brennan?"

Brennan was astonished, and said "yes... its so simple and profound and rough and easy... that is true prayer"

well, brennan prayed with him and went back to his house, and a fe days later he got a knock on the door. it was the mans daughter again.

"my father dies last night" she said, "i just wanted to let you know that.

"but, brennan... there was something very odd about how he died. i went into his room before i left for the grocery store, and he gave me a kiss and told me another one of his corny jokes, and when i came back he was gone.

"but... when i walked into the room, i saw that just before he died he lifted himself off of his bed and rested his head on the empty chair next to him. it was so strange"

I thought this was an amazing story of a man who loved jesus so much, I want to love Jesus like that. I want to know Jesus in that much of a loving nature, that when i die i can lay my head upon his lap and be held in his arms like the skrewed up little child i am.

so, Abba, sow your seed... im a vessel for breaking under your grace...


i didn't notice you were standing here,
i didn't know that that was you holding me
i didn't notice you were crying, too
i didn't know that that was you washing my feet

and this is all that i can say right now,
and this is all that i can give,
thats my everything.

and now my life song sings...

reposted from Monday, April 16th 2007, and now my life song sings, a story of my senior year
-
man, its been a wierd year. so many things, some seemingly good, some seemingly bad. when i stop and look back at what has happened to me this year, it brings back a specific memmory that sets the stage for everything that follows.

att he end of last year, i was sooo excited. junior year was almost over, amor was coming up, summer was almost here! Everyhing was falling into place for the following year, everything was awesome. i was waling to class one morning outside when i ran into a friend and we started talking about church the following year. well, i was talking about the idea i had for the Middle School group, she was looking at me with a funky look on her face. that was odd. well, that night, Ben, my youth pastor, called me up and said "hey, i need to talk, can you some over?" i said "no i can't, but how about tomorrow?" he said sure. the next day i pulled up at his house, and we sat down and he told me that he had been fired and was no longer apart of our church. at that moment, everything that i had thought about the my future next year and everything i had planned at the church immediately got put on hold and i felt like a large piece of me had been ripped out of my heart without mercy or remorse and a giant whole was left in its place. my heart sank when i learned that Ben and his family would be moving away from Hemet. this, as i look back, was the begining of a long road of events that would unfold over the next few months.

in july, the heart of the summer, we went to my diabetes doctor and told him about a new problem i was having. i had just gotten back from a pission trip in Mexico and ever since i got back i had been having servere musce spasms on my arms and legs. my muscles would randomly flex and it would cause my arms to jerk drastically, which in turn freaked the heck out of my mom. along with the arm and leg-jerking, my bouts of hypoglycemia were becoming lower and more frequent. the doctor said that this is very probable evidence of me having an insulinoma, a tumor of insulin-producing cells on my pancreas. he ordered a ct scan to view the pancreas and hopefully get a glimpse of this insulinoma.

The CT scan came back inconclusive because the guy running the scan really didnt know what he was doing. with a lot of frustrating talk from my doctor (including a lengthy description of how this was evidence of the floundering helth-care system), he ordered me to have an endoscopy. This is a big word that means they stick a camera on a stick down my throat and look around. this was to come in october. apparently, speed is not a word in the health-care vocabulary.

in the beginning of august i had been running around at school one day during registration getting ready for my senior year at Hemet High. getting my t-shirt, getting my schedual, my parking pass, my books, all that fun stuff. after registration i went over to a friend of mines house to hang out. while i was there, She pulled me into her office and said "Josh, God as a message for you. i've been getting this message for you for the past couple of days but i didnt know how to telly ou, i still don't so, i guess i'll just say it. you are going to be put through the refiners fire this year. god is going to refine you into the person you are supposed to be. now, im not sure what that means, maybe you do... but that is the message that i have on my heart to tell you."

i was shocked. what did that mean? was it really from God? why a fire? is it going to be a fire? i was full of questons and confusion, but i did know one thing: when this year was over i was going to be different. but what did that mean?

well, after that my year started off pretty much like the previus years: chambers rehearsal before school started for 2 weeks, the first day of school, the school food, yada yada yada. BUT, this year was different... this year was SENIOR YEAR!!!!! i didnt come to school till 9am, i had a 2 hour break between 3 and 5th period... I only had 2 academic classes... IT WAS AWESOME!!!

then came the end of august, during seussical auditions. that wednesday there was a freak storm across the valley. hemet high flooded, the commons was under water, it was crazy! i didnt realise how crazy it really was untill i went home that night arond six o'clock and found out that the storm had ripped the eves off of the roof and flooded my entire house. within a day my room had become a breeding ground for mold, and the wals were litterally squishy to the touch. my life, for the next two months, had changed dramatically. My family had to move to a motel on the other side of town. I luckily was able to move to a friends house, but this still ended up being a difficult transition from what i had been used to. i forced myself to look at everything with a "could be worse" perspective, partly because there were some good things, but mainly because if i hadn't i probably would have killed something.

during this time i was preparing for Seussical the Musical, th musical Hemet high was putting on this year. I had managed (in utter astonishment) that i had gotten the leading role of Horton the Elephant, heroin of the books from which the musical mainly follows. this was an incredible amoutn of work for everybody in the production. there were over 180 people involved in the making of the show, including a cast of about 75 people. the incredible time involved in having a part in this show was astonishing. i was in the theatre about 5 hours a day after school, and practiced at home (a friends house, not my home) about an hour a night. Seuss songs were in my head all day, i started to relate the Shakespear tragedy Othello to Dr. Seuss. Life, as i knew it, had become brightly painted pictures and cheesy lyrical songs dancing through my head. then, one day in october, the dancers missed a step.

The endoscopy that my Edocrinologyst ordered was not really my idea of fun, but it wasn't terible either. they put me to sleep(ish) with drugs, shoved the tube down me (i woke up a few times and tapped the doctors face, and i heard him say "oops, nurse... more drugs!", then everything went dark again), pumped me up woth air and looked around. the procedure, which was anly supposed to take 45 minutes, took about 2 hours. it turned out that the doctors found a "Large white mass" at the tail end of my pancreas. they took ten biopses (all of which came back inconclusive) and sent me home. My Endocrinologyst said that this was probably the insulinoma that we had been looking for and he sent me to the Chief of Pediatric Surgery, Dr. Don Moores.

Seussical came of Unbelievably well! the book was amazing, the show was incredible... it was the perfect validation of all of our hard work paying off. i felt so special every night when i walked out onto the stage at curtain call and hear that applause, saw those faces when i went out to meet friends afterwords. even now i am still recieving praise for my performance. i couldnt believe it. i had become "THE GUY" of theatre. people around school were coming up to me and talking to me and i had NO idea who they were. it was really cool! people who were in my grade that never talked to me because i was the "wierd kid" were now coming up and accepting me! but the acceptance that i had gotten would be short-lived because of what was about to happpen next in my story...

in november i got to meet with the surgeon, Dr. Moores. he told me that they would be opening me up, gently moving aside my stomach, intestines, and a few other organs to get to where my pancreas was, and then tey were going to cut off half of it. the recovery time, he said, would be about 8 weeks, and ther were all these complicatons that could happen. well, by the end of the meeting we decided to go ahead with the surgery, and we schedualed it for december 15th.

During the months of August through November i had ran into a road-block with the new youth leadership at my church. we were not able to communicate, I had trouble accepting the changes they were making to the ministry, and i didnt appreciate the level of disrespect people were showing during youth group, but i really didnt know how to voice the issues i was facing. well, at the end of november i had to stop being a part of the Youth Band because of Gig season with Chambers. Gig season was a blast this year, expecially now that i had a car! traveling around with Anthony, Brad and eth was so much fun! Driving with the windows down, blasting Hawk Nelson as loud as we could... IT WAS AWESOME!!!



But halfway through gig season, on December 15th, the day of surgery had come upon us. We showed up at Loma Linda University Medical Center at about 5:45 am, I got dressed (well, technically I got mostly undressed. I went from wearing pjs and boxers and stuff to were nothing but a gown… yay), and got into the bed. My mom said I was freaking out. They gave me a few doses of versed and I was pretty doped up J. About 7:30 they wheeled me back into a room that was white and blue and that was it. Blue cabenets and sheets, white floors and countertops. The last thing I remember is them putting in my epideral… and then the next thing I remember is waking up in the post-op recovery room.



I was in the hospital for 9 days, got released 2 days before Christmas. Christmas sucked last year. I could hardly move, I didn't eat, and at the end of he day I took an antibiotic without eating enough food and I succumbed to projectile vomiting… YAY! Recovery was a long and drawn out process, I couldn't really do much other than sit in the house and maybe walk around a little bit.



During this time, at the hospital and afterward, I thought that God had abandoned me. That He was not there, and I was alone. I Got so angry at god that I was in the situation that I was in, and I got so MAD at Him for letting get into that situation, I felt so bad that I just knew God must have left me.



Then I started to get better… little by little, I got better… and I could walk a little more, and I could go out with friends, and I could go to school a few hours a day, and I could go out MORE with friends, and I could spend MORE time at school… and I could eat more… and I was doing SO MUCH BETTER!



I tried out for the play The Miracle Worker, I got the part of Captain Keller, one of the leads… and I felt like I was on top of the world, I felt like I was finally getting back to who I was before……. And this was the problem I think. I had not learned anything out of the situation I was in, and then came another curveball.



I had been doing good, so GOOD! The pain medication was going down, the pain was going down… I was almost done. We were almost done. The Doctors were talking about the last visit I would have to make. And then suddenly… the pain came back again… slowly, ever so slowly…I stated to get sharp shoots of pain, then a dull ache constantly, then BIG sharp pains. And I told God (ok, im listening). The pain kept getting bad, until I told my mom I had to go back into the doctor or he had to give me some type of medication to handle this pain.



Well… I had a CT scan done and I was sent directly to the ER, and from the ER to a 26-day stay at Loma Linda Medical Center. Through this time at the hospital, I finally had time to, for lack of a better word, shut up, and listen up. Finally, I stopped talking… I stopped trying to have everything figured out, I stopped trying to understand everything, stopped dictating my life, and MOST of all, I stopped telling myself what God was saying and actually listened to what He was saying.



And finally, I started hearing Hi whispers. They were really only that, whispers at first, whispers of humility, of circumstance. And then, one day I heard God as clearly as a shout. God was saying to me something that I had heard and preached many times before, but apparently it never stuck or never made an impact until now, but finally god shouted at me and I heard it. I actually heard it. God was saying "every situation is a possibility for you to Honor God. It doesn't matter what the situation is, good, bad, ugly, whatever, if you are a Christian it is your responsibility to use this situation to honor and glorify God, glorify He that is Worthy. It doesn't matter whether you are getting a new car, giving away food at a homeless shelter, taking a test, or sitting in the hospital in loads of pain and overcome in frustration, it is your responsibility to give Honor and Glory to God through the way you handle going through that situation and the manner in which to interact with others.



I know it sounds simple, and I had told this to people before, and I thout I knew it, but it didn't stick until god told it to me. And really, he didn't scream it, he just spoke… but it literally knocked the wind out of me. In every situation, no matter what the circumstance, Give Honor and Glory to God through your actions and your thoughts. See, God Is always around, and its hard to really acknowledge that he is there, but he is. And it is every Christians responsibility to honor Him with every second of our lives, no matter what situation we are in. for the situation is not what matters, it is God that matters. Situations come and go, emotions come and go. The only unchanging objects in every situation you have are you and God. Everything else is changing. And we are called to Honor god with every moment of our lives, and honoring Him means Trusting in His love and power yes… but it also means trusting in His will. His will is not easy to live in, but there is no more amazing place to be than with Him, doing His will for your life. Even if His will takes you to a circumstance that might hurt.

man, looking back on what I have gone through this year, I can see how I have gone from feeling likeall i needed was God, to thinking I didn't even need god, to times when I knew he was there and bad things were happening and times when bad things happened and I didn't feel his presence, and now I can see how God has used the circumstances of my past and has humbled me. He has taught me that without Him I am truly nothing, and that no matter what obstacle I face, what new great thing has happened to me, or something cool I have done, or applause that is given to me, all of that is nothing more that pure blessing. Rick warren once said "You never know that God is all you need until God is all you have got". I thought I knew what that meant before, but as I sit here, not sure what the future will bring, and not really having anyone around me that can help me, I look to God andi know that He is my only hope for Salvation and I look at Jesus Christ, and I see in Him my only hope for salvation, my only was to get to the Father, and my closest friend, without whom I am just dust, here one day, blown away the next. But with Jesus with me, I am significantly insignificant.



who am I to be loved this way?

Sometimes, i think im crazy.

honestly. Sometimes i sit on my bed, staring at my feet and thinking to myself: "am I crazy? I... I must be crazy. there is no other reason for who you are and what you do... you must be crazy."

and I begin to convince myself that everyone around me knows this but they're just not telling me.

and as i begin to go deeper into the implications of these things, i start to hyperventilate.

my breathing gets heavy, my thoughts begin to race, and my head starts to sway from side to side until I tip over, my head landing on my pillow and i have to consciously calm myself down in order to be able to stand up again.

And I hate that.

I feel as though I have become overwhelmed with this sense of hopelessness.

That my life, right now, is hopeless... that I am without hope.

And I don't know what to do with that. I hear all of these people around me talking about their hopes and reams and how God is working in them and around them, and I don't know how to compute these hopeless feelings into that worldview.

Today I was driving back to school and I noticed that I was wishing and hoping that I was sick... not because I want to hurt myself... im not a sudo-masachist, but because if I was sick, this idea of hopelessness would be a mute, and this stirring inside of me would go away.

I am in a class that is walking through the study of John, and we were looking at an obscure passage in john 17, where Jesus is praying for His desciples before He is arrested, and within that passage a verse just jumped off the page at me, nearly knocking me to the floor. Joshn 17:13 “"I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them.”.

As I read and re-read the verse, I began to think about this full measure of joy.

And I couldnt understand it. I couldn't understand what part joy played in my life, because at that moment all I could think about was the overwhelming blurr In front of me.

“Where is the joy in this?” I thought. What kind of person am I that is doing the work of God but cannot feel His joy?