The Winds of a Dream

This is an essay I wrote on February 4th, 2011 for my Honors English class.
The topic was anything having to do with 3 goals we want to accomplish within the next decade or so.






The Winds of a Dream




There was a point in time when I would wake up, and go to bed feeling as if I’d just shoved my way through another day of living. I would get up, go to my small middle school with only about 15 kids in each class, get made fun of along the way, mocked, shoved down and emotionally tormented, and I would come home. I felt like a zombie, walking around lifeless, day after day with the same things happening over and over again. I often wondered what my future beheld, and most of all, I would question God, who I’ve always looked to for help. “God, why am I even here?” I would cry. “What purpose do I serve by being on this earth? I’m a Nobody; there is nobody here who likes me or even accepts me for who I am… Why can’t I hear you speaking to me?”
I may not have been able to hear God’s voice speaking directly to me… but through all of my distress, a still small voice deep within me told me that there was more to live for.

There came a day when I began slowly waking up to life and realizing its true meaning- what we were made for. I began seeing that there was just more than just pushing through life and coming home feeling unwanted and out of place. No matter how hard I had tried to fit in, even at a young age, I wouldn’t. And it was because I didn’t belong fitting in. I didn’t belong in the box marked “Normal” by society. It wasn’t my calling, and it certainly isn’t anyone else’s calling to look like everyone else and be the same and “fit in”, either… I found that I belonged standing up and running with the breath of life greater than any other living on the inside of me. I became a dreamer, dreaming of the changes I would see in my generation as we rose up together- a generation realizing that we don’t have to be the same, living the same thing every day, struggling with the cares and challenges by ourselves. I began dreaming of my generation discovering through the testimonies of others and from God himself that there is so much more we can strive for if we just press harder and have a real passion…
Most of all, I began dreaming of change.
This dream that I’ve now set as a goal to be attained in life is to live this life God has in store for me- to live out the plan he’s laid down and run this race set before me with passion. While running this race of life, I want to run as light and a fire. I want the people around me- my friends, peers, and people I don’t even know to see that it isn’t me as a person that’s different- if I didn’t have God, I wouldn’t be anything. I want them to see that difference that God has put in me- that thing that separates real, passionate, true running followers of Jesus. I’m even willing to say that I want glory of God himself on me as go throughout my life so that when people see me, they will see him and want him. I want to be someone who, when people see me, there will be a passion sparked within them to live the God-walk and chase him. That’s a pretty big demand, some would say. “I don’t know about that, you’re just a person, you know. Who says you can be a Christian and have God all over you and not other Christians?” Well, are those Christians pursuing God, or are they living their comfortable average Christian life, being completely satisfied with spending time with God for two hours or less a week and going home and living the same week that they’ve lived for the past twenty years?
We can’t be afraid to press on, step up, and be who we are. It’s so important that we press on, and I want to be that person that inspires people to do so.

I walked into the doors of Oakland high school on my first day. I walked aabout the campus and observed the different people and different things that were going on. As I constantly prayed for my school, asking God what kind of ministry he wanted me to do there, I realized something so vital toward what is soon to happen. Beneath all of the chaos, the drama, the sin, the façade everyone attempts to put up to hide who they are, there is something big that lies dormant beneath the campus of this school and this city- a blazing passion for God that resembles fire, and what does fire do when it starts?
It spreads.
My goal is to be one out of many students who initiate that movement, that awakening of revival and passion for Jesus in our school and this city. It’s so important not only to me, but also to this generation and to our future. Why are we driven toward our college dream? Why are girls so focused on dreaming of their future husband and children? What drives a teenage boy to show up at every single football practice for his high school team to get dirty, tackled, and bruised?
Passion.
Passion is what drives us toward something… and in this case, something with meaning. While here at this school, I want to hook up with other students with the same passion for Jesus. Even if there were no other students here who had a heart to reach their school for God, because of the passion I have to pursue the kingdom of God, I would continue praying and initiating a movement anyway, mostly out of follow what God wants me to do. Before I set foot on this campus I was praying for the students and faculty and for the love to be shown to them by the way true Christian students live. We’re living in a generation that is tired of being lied to, and that is sick of playing religious games. They want the truth, but they’ve been blinded by so many lies and so much ordinary, patterned, traditional religion that they don’t even know what’s real, and they’re afraid to test what they believe... It's time for us as Christian campus students to step up and do what we were called to do, and out of this, be the leaders of an awakening that is soon to spread throughout our city and eventually the world.

For the past year I've met up with a core prayer group at my church, and we've met every Sunday evening as a small group of four with some of our youth leaders. It all was founded upon the desire to pray for our schools, college campuses, awakening, our city, our body, and mainly the plan God has for each of us as individuals. Knowing the plan God has for us and our future is so important, because when we pray it out he plants it in our heart. After this past year, something began stirring inside of me for even further into the future for after I graduate high school. I'd always wanted to go to a college and study journalism and something of that sort, and I still strongly believe that one day as an adult I will come to that road. But after I graduate high school, I've realized quite recently that my heart is drawn to not attend college in the town I live in which I'd originally thought about, but to go somewhere quite far. I feel so drawn to another place I've known about for not very long. This university college is more of a mission base known as The International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri, or otherwise known as IHOP University, KC.
It's strange to think that after I graduate from high school I won't be jumping into an immediate college in pursuit of a career like most people, and like I've always seen myself doing. I'm not exactly sure what all I will be studying at IHOPU; it's a mission base that focuses on raising up college students to go out into their cities as prayers, missionaries, and people in absolute pursuit of God. At the same time they have job-training and different school areas for students to choose- for example, they have the Fore-Runner's Missionary School in which they teach students the principles, costs, and deep studies of being a missionary no matter where they may go, while another school, called the Fore-Runner Music Academy, gather students that have a heart for music and teach them to play instruments and sing together (though this isn't your average Sunday worship group). This music falls deeper into connecting with God during the worship and learning to flow with music. In small schools like these they have more narrow groups, and my desire is to seek out a place in the Music Academy and in a writing and journalism school. I'm really looking forward to pursuing this college; and however things turn out after I get out, they will turn out. In the mean-time, I am setting myself up to follow God's voice and the plan he has for me. Honestly, I'm excited to go to IHOP KC- I couldn't have picked a better place by myself, and I didn't even realize it until after I got a heart to pray after God's plan!

Thinking about the future ahead and all of the possibilities it has to bring is exciting to me. It makes me excited to see the good things that will turn out, and it may not be an easy trip, but in the end I know it’s going to turn out the way it’s meant to. I absolutely cannot wait to see these things come to pass. Perhaps they'll happen a bit differently than I expect, but I am still looking forward to these goals and I'm pressing after them with all of my heart.









Criticism is welcome, just let me know what you think. It wasn't a strict 3-paragraph-One-topic essay as they would usually strap on us. The point of it was to expand our writing, imagination and creativity because in the past years we were shoved in a small, limited box of what we could and couldn't write about that had to be perfect and black and white (As Mrs. Walker claims... I personally agree.)

As for the last paragraph of the essay, I know it's short but I was running out of time so I just jotted down what I could.

Ps. Ignore the paragraph format, the computer I'm using is an ancient IBM from school.