On Thursday, I attend the local Officer’s Christian Fellowship (OCF) Bible Study here in Pensacola. OCF is an organization whose mission is to raise up a group of “Christian officers exercising biblical leadership to raise up a godly military.” Here in Pensacola our bible study consist of sharing a meal together, worship God in song, and teaching of God’s Word. I have really enjoy the time I spend Thursday nights at OCF for several reasons. One reason is that I love the people at OCF. The other reason is that I have really enjoyed sitting under the teachings of Ken Vechik. Ken is a very insightful teacher of God’s Word and he always has something to say that applies to me and what I am struggling with or what God wants to teach me.

This evenings lesson came out of a problem Ken saw in the dynamics of the group. The problem he saw was that there are groups inside the group and that often times we do not make new people feel welcome in the group. Which causes the new people to never return and causes the group to miss opportunities to minister to them. I can attest that I am as guilt as everyone else in this area. I feel very uncomfortable getting to know new people and often have no idea what to say to them when getting to know them. Part of this is because I am wired as an introverted person, I am extremely uncomfortable around large groups of people and that feeling of uncomfortableness goes up exponentially when it is a group of people I don’t know. On top of that some other reasons I do not interact with people I do not know include not feeling as though I have anything in common with them. Othertimes I feel as though I am just trying to make conversation and the other person sees right through my attempts and sees that I might not really care. Other reasons include not knowing how to walk the fine line between professionalism and fraternization with officers and enlisted. How do I get over these fears of social interaction? I guess the biggest thing is that God needs to play a bigger role in my life for two reasons. First reason He is the one who is greater than all my fears and second I need his love to heal me.

Ken also mentioned something that made me think last night and I am still chewing on even as I write this. He said that God brings people into a group for me to minister to them. I believe this is a true statement. God brought me to this OCF group to have Ken and others in the group minister to me individually. However, if God brings people to the group for me to minister to them, how and what am I supposed to minister to them? I do not know what makes me so special that I can minister to others; I have realized that at the moment I have several issues that I am working through to better my relationship with God. Yet, I probably am not the only one wrestling with these issues of relationships and faith but my question is how am I to minister to someone when I am wrestling with the very same issues. Maybe by partnering together with another and wrestling together in these issues of faith I am ministering to them and they in turn are ministering to me. Maybe just by listening and being honest with the other person you are ministering with them. I do not truly know but maybe we are never meant to truly know every spiritual thing.
This is probably off topic but Ken keeps mentioning a verse. He keeps mentioning John 10:10, “The thief [aka Satan] comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” The more he mentions it, the more I think about this verse and the more I find it to be true. Satan is good at what he does, his mission in life is to keep us from God. He has an incredible arsenal at his disposal to do this. Every negative thought we have about ourself; Satan will use as ammo against us in his war against God. In my life when I have lived by a performance based Christianity. Every time I broke a commandment and thought that I was no good and God could never love me. I unknowingly was giving the enemy a weapon against me, another foothold to stop me from growing more intimate with God. Satan wants to steal us from God, kill us spiritually and destroy us. Christ has come to give us life, not just a mediocre life but life to the fullest. I can not even fathom what a full life in my life would look like but I want it. Sorry about the small tangent but according to Ken and I think I can agree is that by not interacting with people is giving Satan more ammo both in your life and in the life of the person who you did not interact with. Let us join together to reach out to others outside of our social group and our own comfort zone, first because we are commanded to do so and second to defeat Satan and stop him from stealing what we deserve a life lived to the fullest.

I am DONE with religion!! I am tired of living under a set of rules. I am tired of not doing such and such and do such and such. I am tired of living under the law. The original intent of the law was to provide rules in which to live a life pleasing to God. But, no matter how hard I try the sin nature in me causes me to fail. The law was given to show us our sin, the law was not meant to get us to God. No matter how many rules I try to live under, I will never be able to live a perfect sinless life. I am not capable of living a sinless life on my own. I AM A SINNER, I AM A ROTTEN BEING RIGHT DOWN TO THE CORE. The law screams this truth to me everyday. All religion really is a set of rules that one is supposed to live but one can not live by. The solution to my problem, our problem, in not more religion or more rules but a relationship. What I truly need and desire is a relationship with God through the righteousness of Christ. I am done trying to please God by living under the law; I am going to start living the Christian life as a relationship between God and I and not by rules.

Out of this desire for a relationship with God through his Son, emerges a deep desire to be intimate with God. Look at Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. They were naked before God and each other and they felt no shame. However, because of the fall we lost the intimacy Adam and Eve had with God and on top of that we feel shame towards one other and God because of our sin. In my life this shame about sin prevents me from being honest with God and with other believers. This shame, my sin, the lies the devil puts in my heart all rob me of a personal intimacy with God. I truly desire to be intimate with God, I want to be his child, I want to be loved by him. Love so deeply and perfectly that I am not afraid of anything. I want to be intimate with God, so much more intimate with God than a husband and wife could ever dream to be. The only problem I have is I don’t know how to be intimate with God. Yet, I know of at least one barrier in my life that is hindering my intimacy with God and that is not trusting him like I should. I have a trust issue with God. Pray for me to learn how to trust God.

On Friday the 12th of October, I had a very busy day. My day involved taking the GRE, a flight for IFS and going to see the Newsboys in concert. It was a long day but I managed to get everything accomplished. I did well on the GRE, I am waiting for my official scores but overall it went well. The flight for IFS went well but I still have somethings that I need to work on. After, my IFS flight I meet with some of the other members of OCF at McGuire’s before we went to go and see the Newsboys in concert. Dinner at McGuire’s is always good, but I was not impressed with the Prime Rib, but everything else I have had from McGuire’s has been awesome. I highly recommend the New Your Strip Steaks, Yummm. After dinner, we went to the Civic Center to see the concert. Let me say the Newsboys were AWESOME!! They played some of my favorite songs by them and just being with other Christians singing songs to the LORD was simply moving. Some of the highlights of the show included the old school Newsboys songs on a vocal synthesizer, the dueling drummers and the vertical spinning drum set. After the concert a group of us went out to get ice cream from Sonic and then came over to my house to play Halo 3.

On Saturday, I went to a bonfire hosted by Ken Viechik, the leader of OCF. It was a great time of fellowship with the people in OCF. We all brought our own food to grill on the grills and it was interesting to see what each person brought and how the prepared their food. After eating our dinner and sharing fellowship around the table, we took the party outside and started the bonfire. It was great to just interact with other people around the fire and there were some great inside jokes shared around the fire such as “The sun is hot” and “Like the sun, fire is hot.” Additionally, some of the members took a vote and said, jokingly, they were not satisfied with the bonfire party and that I should jump off the dock. So I jumped off the dock. It was a great night full of fellowship with other believers.

On Sunday, I went to church and then went to a sports bar to meet up with Ken and his wife to cheer the Minnesota Vikings to victory over the Chicago Bears. Afterwards, I came home and relaxed and went to the new church service at the base chapel. Additionally, Ken continued his message at the service about trusting and being intimate with God which made me think and I will make a post about that in the near future. After the service I tried to socialize with the enlisted who came to the service and talked with them. After, the service one friend from OCF and I got together to play the campaign for Halo 3.

Yesterday, I have another flight for IFS and lets just say that it was not a great flight. For one reason or another I was having the hardest time flying around the traffic pattern of the airport and gently landing the airplane. I got a chance to ask some questions about landing to my instructor and they helped me figure out what I need to do to improve landing. Please pray for me that I can improve in my piloting skills. I know I have only begun but the expectations are high and I feel that I am not able to accomplish them at the moment. I have to be safe to do my first solo flight in a couple of days and at the moment I feel that I am a long way from being able to safely land the plane much less solo. The other thing I could use some pray for is that I stop trying to assign my self worth based on how I am doing in IFS. I know that my self worth comes from the fact that I am a child of God and that he sent his Son to die for my sin so that I might be able to spend the rest of eternity with him. Yet, I forget this and try and assign myself self worth based on my performance at a task. In the evening, I started preparing for the FAA Private Pilot Written Exam, hung out with some OCFers and played Halo 3 some more and watched Evan Almighty. I highly recommend renting Evan Almighty, it was a semi-clean movie with a good message. Also, Morgan Freeman plays a convincing God.

Today, I continued studying for the FAA Private Pilot Written Exam and prepared for my flight late this afternoon. I also got a chance to do some reading and play some more XBOX.

Hopefully, I will get an update later this evening about some thoughts on what the Lord is teaching me about the Christian walk.

For those of you who don’t know I was commissioned in May as an Ensign in the US Navy and transfered to Pensacola to begin training as a Naval Aviator. After five months of waiting to begin my training I finally started IFS last Monday, 1 OCT 2007. IFS is a program in which the Navy sends me to a local airport to complete civilian private pilot ground school and log 25 flight hours in a Cessna 172. There are five airports in the Pensacola area in which one can complete IFS and the airport I got was Destin, FL. The school is pretty small and the instructors are really cool. The only problem is I have to drive about an hour and half each way to get to the school for my flight training. Somedays the drive really bothers me but it also gives me a lot of time to think and listen to sermons on my radio.

Last week Monday to Friday, I completed the required 35 hours of civilian ground school needed for IFS. Let me say that cramming all of civilian ground school in a week long course is like drinking water from a fire hydrant. It was intense, luckily for me I had a background of Aeronautical Engineering to fall back on and had already went through ground school once in college. But, I survived and passed all the exams with flying colors and started flying the next week.

Monday was my first flight in IFS and to put in mildly it went pretty well. At my school they have you jump into flying both feet first. From my first flight I taxied the aircraft, took off the aircraft, flew the aircraft and landed the aircraft. I did not expect that they would make us do these things from the get go. I thought my instructor would take care of the taxing, takeoff and landing; I was wrong. However, I did these things and we managed to taxi, takeoff and land safely but it was far from pretty.

Tuesday was my second flight and it went better than Monday’s flight. Tuesday we did a lot of touch and goes and it seemed that my taxing, takeoffs and landings were improving. Yesterday was my third flight and again it went better than the previous two days flights. We also did slow and dirty flight, power on and off stalls and then did a touch and go and landing. Todays flight went alright in my opinion. Again we did slow and dirty flight, power on and off stalls. My instructor then demonstrated steep banked turns and power off emergency landings. We returned and did a touch and go that went pretty well, however the winds were direct crosswind and I was fighting the winds all the way down. Then we went back around the pattern and did a power off simulated emergency landing that was by far a bad landing. I felt like I had no clue what I was doing, trying to maintain airspeed for best glide, fight the winds, and manage to line up with the runway. I fly tomorrow so maybe tomorrow will be better than today.

Here are some pictures I took during Tuesdays flight.

Standing in Front of Cessna 172 N53456

Self Portrait from Backseat of the Airplane

Destin Airport after Takeoff

Destin Area from Airplane

Destin Airport Coming in for a Landing

Sunset from the Airplane

Another Sunset from the Airplane

I have been thinking a lot lately about the church and have realized that I am tired of the majority of churches in America. I have been faithful to regularly attend Sunday morning church services and Sunday school all my life. I may have missed a week or two occasionally here and there but I usually had a good reason for doing so. I also have attended a variety of churches over my 22 years of life; I have attended small church services, big church services, church services in a church building, church services in school buildings. At the moment in my walk with Christ, I have concluded that I am tired of the church in America.

You might be wondering why I am tired of the church. I am tired of the church because we all go to church and pretend to be something we are not. I am just as guilty as everyone else. We go to church every Sunday and shake hands with our neighbors in our pews and say “Good Morning! How are you doing?” And because we are afraid of what people might think about us, we respond with “I am doing good (or fine or O.K.)” and then we go on and greet the other people in the church. Yet, in all reality deep down inside of us we most likely are not doing good at all. Deep down inside of ourselves we are lost and confused, we are desperately searching for answers to problems that we can’t answer ourselves. Yet, we are to afraid to let anyone know that we are struggling with something. I assume that we do this either because of our pride or shame of what we are struggling with or fear that if we truly open ourselves up to others they will stop loving us.

I think we as the people of God need to go back and look at the New Testament leaders of the early church. The twelve apostles were men who, if we are to be honest with ourselves, no better than we are today. The disciples were fisherman, tax collectors, zealots, accusers of the early church. These were men who were sinners, yet Jesus Christ and God still loved these men and used these men to do great things in the early church. God knew these men struggled with sin but he still loved them with every fiber in his being. God knows we are sinners and we struggle in living like Christ yet no matter what we have done or said he still loves us just like he loved the people in the Bible. Look at all the letters to the early churches the writers of these letters knew these people were struggling with being a sinner and issues of Christianity. But the writers of these letters loved and cared enough for their fellow believers they would take time out of there schedule to help each other out. Here we are 2000 years later still all sinners and still loved by God but yet we don’t allow others to get close enough to realize that we are struggling with something. I for one am so tired of pretending I have it all together. There are days in which my heart is lost and in turmoil and I just need someone to talk to and someone who will love me for who I am not who I pretend to be.

The next time someone ask you how you are doing, especially a Christian, be honest with them and with yourself. If you are not doing well let them know, if you need pray ask them for it. If you don’t know the person well or you don’t trust them, just ask for pray you don’t have to tell them every thing you are struggling with. But if it is someone you know well and you trust them, tell them what you are struggling with and ask them if they can help you or point you in the direction of someone who can help you.

From this moment forward, I will stop pretending I have it all together and acknowledge that I am a sinner in need of a Savior and that I need his help 24/7/365 till the day I die. I also will try and be more honest with my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ and let someone know if I am struggling with something and I need help. I pray that you will do the same thing and be honest with your fellow believers about what you as a Christian are struggling with because you are most likely not the only one struggling with it.

The following song is called Stained Glass Masquerade by Casting Crowns. I included the lyrics to this song because I feel it summarized my thoughts in this post well.

Stained Glass Masquerade

Is there anyone that fails
Is there anyone that falls
Am I the only one in church today feelin’ so small

Cause when I take a look around
Everybody seems so strong
I know they’ll soon discover
That I don’t belong

So I tuck it all away, like everything’s okay
If I make them all believe it, maybe I’ll believe it too
So with a painted grin, I play the part again
So everyone will see me the way that I see them

(Chorus) Are we happy plastic people
Under shiny plastic steeples
With walls around our weakness
And smiles to hide our pain
But if the invitation’s open
To every heart that has been broken
Maybe then we close the curtain
On our stained glass masquerade

Is there anyone who’s been there
Are there any hands to raise
Am I the only one who’s traded
In the altar for a stage

The performance is convincing
And we know every line by heart
Only when no one is watching
Can we really fall apart

But would it set me free
If I dared to let you see
The truth behind the person
That you imagine me to be

Would your arms be open
Or would you walk away
Would the love of Jesus
Be enough to make you stay

Chorus (x2)

Well if the invitation’s open
To every heart that has been broken
Maybe then we close the curtain
On our stained glass masquerade

Is there anyone that fails
Is there anyone that falls
Am I the only one in church today feelin’ so small

The following song is called My Jesus by Todd Agnew. In the song Todd Agnew is basically asking us do we really follow Jesus or do we just pretend to be followers of Jesus. I look at the church in America and agree with Todd Agnew that the majority of Christians in America just pretend to be followers of Jesus. We don’t really follow Christ especially the part about imitating Christ; most believers in my opinion don’t reach out to the lost in the world. Most believers just go to church on Sunday and then go home and live like the rest of the world until the next Sunday. Which Jesus do I follow? I am the Christian who believes in Christ, but goes to church on Sunday and then lives like the rest of the world the rest of the week. But I desire to truly imitate Christ and one day with help from God and fellow believers I might get there. Which Jesus do you follow?

My Jesus by Todd Agnew

Which Jesus do you follow?
Which Jesus do you serve?
If Ephesians says to imitate Christ
Then why do you look so much like the world?

Cause my Jesus bled and died
He spent His time with thieves and liars
He loved the poor and accosted the arrogant
So which one do you want to be?

Blessed are the poor in spirit
Or do we pray to be blessed with the wealth of this land
Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness
Or do we ache for another taste of this world of shifting sand

Cause my Jesus bled and died for my sins
He spent His time with thieves and sluts and liars
He loved the poor and accosted the rich
So which one do you want to be?

Who is this that you follow
This picture of the American dream
If Jesus was here would you walk right by on the other side or fall down and worship at His holy feet

Pretty blue eyes and curly brown hair and a clear complexion
Is how you see Him as He dies for Your sins
But the Word says He was battered and scarred
Or did you miss that part
Sometimes I doubt we’d recognize Him

Cause my Jesus bled and died
He spent His time with thieves and the least of these
He loved the poor and accosted the comfortable
So which one do you want to be?

Cause my Jesus would never be accepted in my church
The blood and dirt on His feet might stain the carpet
But He reaches for the hurting and despises the proud
I think He’d prefer Beale St. to the stained glass crowd
And I know that He can hear me if I cry out loud

I want to be like my Jesus!
I want to be like my Jesus!
I want to be like my Jesus!
I want to be like my Jesus!

Not a posterchild for American prosperity, but like my Jesus
You see I’m tired of living for success and popularity
I want to be like my Jesus but I’m not sure what that means to be like You Jesus
Cause You said to live like You, love like You but then You died for me
Can I be like You Jesus?
I want to be like my Jesus!
I want to be like my Jesus!

Hello! Hi! G’day! Hola! Bonjour! My name is Matthew Gray. I am currently an Ensign in the US Navy and in training to be a Naval Aviator. I currently reside in Pensacola, Florida. At the moment, I am doing Introductory Flight Screening (IFS) at Destin Airport. IFS is one of the prerequisite for starting Aviation Preflight Indoctrination (API). In IFS I am sent to a civilian flight school to complete the ground course for a civilian private pilots license and log 25 hours of flight time in a civilian aircraft. I graduated from Purdue University in May of 2007 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Aerospace Engineering. At the moment I am applying to begin work on my Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering hopefully starting this coming term (Spring 2008).

I decided to start my own blog out of the desire to start a journal about my life and specifically what God is teaching me and what I am learning about myself. I have never tried to keep a journal in my life unless you count those times that were required by school work. The problem I have with journaling on paper is that I hate to write things out by hand and when I am done writing them out when I go back to reread them I will not be able to because of my horrible penmanship. The purpose of my blog will be used to discuss a variety of things mainly what God is teaching me in my life and my thoughts on spiritual matters. This blog will also be used to keep people informed of what is going on in my life and other random things such as thoughts on books I am reading, songs that make me think and my thoughts on the songs, and movie, video game and TV reviews.

As I start my blog I am laying down a few ground rules:

1) I will attempt to be completely honest with you on what is going on in my life and especially in regards to what God is teaching me and in return I hope if you leave comments you will be honest to yourself on your comments.

2) This blog will be as G-rated as possible and will honor all ideas and opinions. I am willing to hear your side of an issue but there will be times in which we have to agree to disagree.

3) My views in no way shape or form are representative of either the views of the US Navy or my church or Officer Christian Fellowship (OCF).

Again, I welcome you to my blog and hope it will be as beneficial to you in your life as it will be to me.