Big issue when it comes to really know who you are, and thin line when it comes to difference between what you like doing and who you are. For me, myself discovery has been going on for now, uhmm.. Let me think… Pretty much my whole life. What do I mean?, I’ve been living life just going throughout it not really thinking about who I was, I guess because for the most part I thought I didn’t need to know but not really though. I guess the need is always there although wasn’t important to know during the different stages of my life.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to figure myself out. The lack of self identity even affected myself perception of my own self to the point where I tried to find who I was because the need became stronger and started bugging me out. Besides I really believed it was time fr me to define myself.

So there I was, trying to figure myself out but I made a mistake, many mistakes to be exact. I searched in the wrong places and for the wrong reasons. This has to do with my spirituality because; well god has always been a part of my life even when not really important before. At least I thought so. But knowing what is wrong according to god helped me in myself discovery path. It helped because I was taught values of life by my parents as I grew up, so I was conscious of what was required from me by god. But like I said I dint pay much attention to that.
Confused I lived my life doing things that I knew were wrong and I became REAL good at fooling myself and I believed my own lies. I guess that was normal for me considering I wasn’t following Jesus. But I always knew deep inside of me, that most of what I was doing was wrong. The feeling was always there ignored. Until I decided to follow Jesus I realized the feeling was because I always knew I wanted to live a good life and the one that Jesus offers me was it. I didn’t have identity during all my life long.

Identity for me is how you feel doing the things you do, for me they felt wrong and it turned emptiness of my soul and even became a self destroy behavior pattern. Someone asked me why i followed Jesus, was it for the "free heaven ticket" or for the life he offered me. That got me thinking. Really thinking about it.
Finally got it. I realized FINALLY i have an identity. I have a Christian identity. even when I decided to follow Jesus I think I didn’t know what that really meant, to be honest I didn’t pay attention to it, now that I experienced it, is how I get to figure it out.
Although Jesus found me, and I found Jesus, I never found myself until now.

That feeling is what I’ve heard them call as "the holy spirit that lives in you". And I find this very true. Only god could have been there even when I didn’t know. Now I do know he was there. Christian identity I call, to the fact that you know when something is wrong according to god. Someone who has not accepted Jesus and decided (truly) to follow and live for him can't realize about this because obviously they don’t know. Maybe people know wrong for the values they were taught to but not wrong according to god if they don’t know what it is "required" from you by god.

. I have a Christian identity because I know what god wants from me and wants me to do.
I want to follow Christ. For the life he offers me. It’s a good life. Better than many other things that I could do and have joy doing. A life with Christ is the best life I could have.
is not what you do but who you are. How you feel about the things you do. That is identity for me.
The things I’ve done, now I know they were wrong. I know because they didn’t fill my soul. Didn’t satisfy my emotional needs because they felt wrong. They were wrong. And i regret them.
Decisions made with Christ. a lifestyle with Christ doesn’t feel wrong to me. so I’m denying myself because I know I can lead myself to a dark hole. I can destroy myself.

I want to live a good life.
I want to have good feelings.
I want to love.
I feel I want to.
That is Christ.

So my identity is that Christ is my life. The only one that's worth of making him what completes and complements your life.
good things to rely on.
The complement I needed.


Identity becomes Part of surrendering. Is it possible then to completely surrender can that just be called that to the willingness of letting god use you?

It hit me today, little by little i turned apart from the presence of God thinking just a little was ok. bu it was more and more the distance between me and my savior.
this morning i was feeling such a deep sadness in my soul. the kind that feels like you want to fall to the floor and cry. but i didn't.

i feel broken, in sin, away from the presence of god. so i talked it out with one of my friends and he said; "... well it seems like you need to really pray and surrender completely to god. down on your knees and cry it out with him he will comfort you". The moment he said it it became completely real and not just a thought in my head. so this night im definitely doing that.

i felt today like i wasn't a christian because of my behavior. the things i say and the things i do. it is true that once you surrender to God there's no turning back, he will take you back if you get lost somewhere in the way. i never experienced this feeling that made me realize i am doing wrong things and i have to stop.

it is true and now i know it is, what they say about you have to literally run away from the things that tempt you or else you'll fall. so now im literally going in the other direction. because of the w ive been these past weeks, i felt this morning like god, embracing me, i let go and went away and then whenever i was going trying to get closer to god he was also moving to the other direction getting away from me as i tried to reach. i can totally understand what this means.

This makes me happy somehow though, realize that God has truly accepted me and that is why i get this feelings. i need to discipline.

I Wrote this about a year ago but as time went by i changed it and this is what it ended up being like after recent stuff that happened to me. I Also posted this in my facebook and a lot of my friends reacted to it letting me know im doing good so far :) which makes me happy. alright here it goes:

well, I’ve been thinking about how my life has changed recently, I’ve been meeting tons of new people that I already consider my friends, I’ve been also having so much growth not only as a young man but also as a person and a human. I’ve been also experiencing new things like sharing love to people and finally leaving behind a lot of ghosts and thoughts. Many things have changed and I didn’t see when it happened exactly. Now I know they’re true all those things you hear about life changes in just a moment and you realize when it already happened.

i remember when I used to be confused about a lot of things that now are clear, I use to think " when am i going to be ready to overcome all this or that", or "everyone keeps saying there is always a light at the end of the tunnel but I just can’t see the end of it or ultimately maybe there’s no such at the end", and then I lied to myself believing I would never be ready and i would never be happy. And used to wonder why if I’m a good person, bad things just keep happening to me?.
That, and dealing with either personal, financial or family issues I reached the point where I isolated myself from people and personal relationships in a self-protecting attempt to not get hurt again. As a consequence became numb, lonely, bitter and out of touch..

That is how life is, it’s not easy but it is a fulfilling proof of god in many different ways that can be raw and painful as much as great and wonderful. and even when it's been "tough"...making the assumption that I know what tough is... now I’m happy to know and feel that I wouldn't change a single thing from everything that's happened "for bad or good" because now I know I am the young man that I am because of all that. See? Same old story, somebody who has problems that ends up realizing its all good but this is another thing I’ve been noticing over the past few days: all Christians live the same spiritual experiences that include our feelings but with different situations but all paths lead to the father.
Bad things are hard to understand when they happen, and I usually question the good that happens to me because I’m used to sudden-turned out-painful experiences, but that is just because of the way my life has been like, but I guess what I wanted to say is, life is a luxury we can't afford to waste. I finally feel like I have nothing left to say about it, nothing to complain about and nothing left unsaid because I got out of my system all that saddened me.

for me, I have discovered, that the first step to start overcoming things is being completely honest with god and tell him how i feel about the bad and good in my life and heart and how I believe I should feel, also pray for god to answer and let me know my path. All is a test in this life and there's nothing wrong in falling to the floor or feel bad when things don’t go the way we want. Like they say, the real challenge is how you get yourself up. we feel like that because by nature or unconsciously we want to be in control and when something turns out different than we want we usually think that something must be wrong, but gods will is always done.

Yeah ive read once on one of my friends wall the following which was written byt a man who i had come to admire even though ive been around him for just a little while. my friend Joe Packard. he wrote this:

"When your soul is sick, one of the symptoms is blindness. Bitterness, for instance, is like a cancer that makes you blind. I had allowed hurt to make my soul toxic. From my end, I was sure that I was just becoming a realist. In fact, I was desensitizing myself. Why risk being hurt more? I didn't realize I was becoming blind to love. I couldn't see the people around me who really cared. Their sincere efforts went unnoticed. If you had asked me then, I would have said they weren't there. I look back now and realize I just couldn't see them, but they were right in front of me the entire time. Bitterness turned to skepticism, which turned to cynicism, which turned to emptiness of my soul. Bitterness is the enemy of love because it makes you unforgiving and unwilling to give love unconditionally.It is the enemy of hope because you keep living in the past and become incapable of seeing a better future. It is the enemy of faith because you stop trusting in anyone but yourself."

and i find this very true. i lost control at some point of my life, but now im trying to get it back, maybe it wont happen in the few next days or weeks but what matters now is that i have god with me now and that is the real important thing. so for the first time i would say im moving forward. im not stuck or numb-frozen anymore nor hitting dead ends.

Reading Matthew 1-5 I was thinking about that people who had faith and was healed by Jesus, And I couldn't help to wonder what it would be like to hug Jesus. Couldn’t get that question out of my mind For a few days and well I finally understood that physically maybe I would’ve felt just like any other person, But I’m not completely sure since it was Jesus after all, but what I would expect from hugging Jesus would be Only spiritual things. Which makes me realize that we can hug Jesus everyday since he is always with us, by having faith we can hug our father and experience the true peace and love when he hugs us also.
having a living and growing everyday relationship with him we can experience the spiritual hug and embrace.
BUT I WOULD HAVE LOVED TO HUG PHYSICALLY JESUS, I LOVE HUGS. IN FACT Im a hug freak! so that would have rocked my world ;)

Well, well, I want to start this blog by writing about what has brought me here to the place I am right now in my life.

Up until a couple years ago I would call my life as miserable. I was living a hard situation dealing with personal and family issues that unfortunately for me I had to be in charge of. no matter how many different situations happened in my life, at the end, it all came down to me losing my faith. thinking that good things are supposed to happen to good people and since I was being a good son, brother and friend bad things were still happening to me.
I was born and grew up in a christian family but for many reason we were all distracted and we fell into a faith roller coaster. We didn't have discipline praising god the way we should have done it.

One night my sister Ali came back home from the soccer park near my house and She told me She had met with a christian group of people coming from the united states for mission trips every 6 months or so, They were back in town that night and They were playing at the soccer park because They all liked that park.
My sister invited me to meet Rachel, Her friend, of who she had been talking about over the last 5 months, so I decided to go to the park, a place where I hardly used to go because of how much it reminded me of a friend who was killed there few years before.
When I got to the park, I stranded inside the little kiosko because some members of the American missionary group were gathered in that place, and I didn't really know how to start a conversation with any of them, but I remember they were giving water bottles.
Steve christen was the first person from that group who spoke to me, who would have thought we would become such good friends during the next couple years and up until now.
anyways; Steve asked if i wanted a water bottle since it appeared everybody would get close just to get one no matter what they were trying to do, whenever an American person comes to Mexico, becomes the center of attention, and i don't really know if its due to our "Mexican willingness to welcome people" or the shiny blond-white color hard to hide. (laughs...). when i said no with a some kind of English accent, he seemed to be a little surprised. After that, we got along pretty good chatting about where i learnt English and what the group was doing in Jtown asking each other as many questions as we wanted answers to.

It was a little while after that when they left that night so we didn't have a long conversation at all, at least it didn't seemed to me like it was. 6 months after that they were back and Steve and i had the chance to finally get to know each other better. we also had the chance to talk about church and he explained to me some stuff that i was confused about including the topic i mentioned before. how come bad things happen to good people. He cleared out my thoughts and doubts of course. i don't remember much of our first conversation even though it was really soul fulfilling and relieving, i remember that.
Sadly for me we didn't see each other for one entire year, but we had a couple of brief phone calls just to know how we were and stuff. when Steve came back in august one entire year after our last meeting, we did have a long conversation in which i shared for him a part of my life and some of the situations that led me to lose my faith. After he once again cleared out my doubts he spoke to me about making the decision of living in god and so i took the decision . I remember i wasn't that sure but after Steve said there was no reason to keep waiting, i realized i had spent one year thinking about the things that man said to me. i didn't know if i was ready but i was so desperate to change my life that all i could think about was to give it a try. after all i had been trying to change my circumstances and all that "stuff" seemed to make sense in my head. since one year had passed by already, the message got into my head finally, right there and then was when i knew that i had to make my description and be constant and disciplinary. Lets say i was ready to be a Cristian because i wanted to be, not because that was the religion that Ive always known.

Even though Ive made some bad mistakes since im not perfect, i do my best everyday. in January of the 2008, i had the chance to spend one afternoon with the group at Aztecan, the church the group stays at when they visit. They had this carnival for kinds to come and play and win cady, but the purpose was to share gospel with people. Rachel christen with who i had been chatting and became a good friend of, ever since i met her at the kisoko the night i met Steve, we had a nice chatting in which we got to know each other a little better :)
In march that year i found out by an email sent by Steve that Rachel had died in an accident, in the mail there was a cross of wood and the headline was "Rachel christen memorial site", my first reaction was that Rach might have done something and they put some kind of monument in her honor, or maybe it was her idea to place that cross to somehow share gods message with the drivers that may pass by that street, because Rachel was that kind of girl. but at the same time i feared for the worst.
so i decided to reply Steve's message and the only thing i typed was: "i don't understand whats this about?..."
about 2 hrs later i received severs answer: "my daughter Rachel died in an accident 2 weeks ago and she died, this is her memorial site". i froze immediately.

Rachel, who i had spoken on the phone with 3 weeks before at that time, and the most unexpected person from all the people in the world had died.
of course i sent Steve another message telling him i was sorry for his loss and that i didn't know what to say, and i meant it. I mean what can you tell someone who besides just lost a true god servant, had also lost one of the most loved person i had ever known and a daughter?. So i didn't know what to say and just said i was sorry.
Still in shock trying to understand in my heart what had happened, came to my mind my sister Ali. what can i tell her and how could i tell her?, i had to be very careful with the words i used. After thinking the best way to tell her, i decided to get courage and go tell my sister that her best friend had died. obviously that wasn't easy.
When i stranded at the door of her room and saw her face, standing at me, i ran out of words, and the many different ways to tell her the horrible new that i had prepared just were instantly deleted by her look piercing me in the eyes.
She immediately knew something was wrong and i don't know if, that was due to the face i had and the silence in the room or im that transparent, maybe she knows well my reactions. I told her, there was no time for suspense anyways. I felt really guilty because she fainted suddenly, but as the days went by the shock we both had disappeared and understood what happened.

Many other things happened during the Rachel memorial trip summer 2008 like we all called it, but that will have to be a different blog.
this is a very general story of how i met one of my best friends, and the person that i look up to Steve Cristen, the missionary group that changed my life. Many many great people to admire and that i already call all my friends. I will write about these people that god used to call me back to him again very soon.