Moving Out
What I learned by living alone in a cockroach infested apartment.
My wonderful mom, shoutout mom, happy mothers day, asked me as I moved my stuff out of my apartment, what I learned here, what God taught me, and how I have changed.
I am REALLY bad at answering deep questions about myself on the spot. So you can count this as a reflection and an answer to this question.
I probably killed a cockroach per week.
I was in an endless war with the grease in my apartment from cooking hella beef.
The doors into the complex didn’t work and were propped open by a stray piece of brick.
My neighbor Katie had two dogs who barked every time my floors creaked.
The apartment complex smelled like cat urine, cigarettes, and mold. The mold was most likely coming from the fact that the washer in the basement flooded half the time you used it.
It is a unique paradigm shift, going from living with some of your best friends in the universe to living alone in a dirty apartment that would make a New York City rat blush.
But hey, it was the cheapest option I had.
My time here was less than I thought. I had expected to live here until next February, but life happened, my theology shifted to the point where it felt sinful to stay at my church, and I realized this—I did not feel like Jordan.
I have talked about this before, but part of becoming a saint is that you become more You.
“The glory of God is man fully alive.”
Sanctity is not about being a dead religious person. Rather, it is about becoming fully alive in God and yourself.
Theosis is that God became man to divinize man. From the inside, Christ sanctifies human nature. All Christians are the result of a virgin birth of the Spirit, which sanctifies us from the inside out.
God desires us to be fully alive. As we immerse ourselves in the life of God, we not only become more like Christ, but we become more ourselves as we ought to be.
God does not seek to remove our uniqueness in an attempt to make us holy.
God seeks to redeem it and use it as a distinct tool in God’s arsenal of saints.
Peter Kreeft talks about how saints are antibodies in the culture war. God raises specific kinds of saints as the antidote to the godless culture.
St. Padre Pio was raised up as a mystical saint in order to fight back the post-enlightenment religion of scientism.
St. Mother Teresa was raised to fight for the sanctity of life and as an embodiment of love for the poor and disenfranchised in a time of great wars and political trials. She embodied that we may not be able to make a difference in stopping wars, but we can meet the needs of those around us and love Christ in “the least of these.”
For all of us on the spiritual journey, God has allowed the narrative of our lives to ebb and flow in a variety of events, be it good, bad, or just plain random.
In these good, bad, and random events, we are to dive deep into these and see how God is sculpting us to be and how we can use this for the redemption of the world.
Behind the paywall is my reflections on how these events in OKC sculpted my spiritual life, my ministry, and how I see others.
Here are the three main reflections.
Prayer is less about petitioning and more about union.
You have no idea the impact you have on people until you leave a place.
Incarnational compassion.
