Beyond the Infinite

For some reason, this scene is an accurate description of my life right now:

I feel like I'm just hurtling through space, never sure of where I'm going. Not sure whats going to be on the other side. Just without the sickingly flashing lights.

Lets just hope I dont come out looking like this:


~Jared

I'm On My Way

Well, it is official. Next year, I am going to Costa Rica. After much prayer (and prayers from others) God has finally shown me, out of all the other projects, where to go. And it feels good to finally know I'm on my way.

Now comes filling out applications and praying that I get accepted into the college I want. I haven't heard back from any of them yet, unfortunately, but I guess it takes faith to know that God will put me in the right place.

I guess that is the defining thing in my life right now: faith. Recently I've discovered that faith takes a lot of sacrifice. While praying about whether I was supposed to go with Score International (the program I'm going with), all I could think of were a billion problems and doubts I had about going, and tons of reasons I shouldn't go. Despite all the reasons I shouldn't go, God kept giving me one single verse: Matthew 4:22, which reads as follows.

"and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him."

For some reason, it reminds me of something my ex-youth leader Daniel Gilland once said about counting the cost. That sometimes following God requires more of you than you are initially willing to give. Following God sometimes requires leaving people you won't ever see again, leaving the places you love, or, in my case, leaving Georgia and living 10 months in a foreign country that doesn't speak my language. At the same time, i'm also reminded of what the Apostles had to do to follow Jesus. Essentially, they subjected themselves to a life of ridicule, and, for most of them, martyrdom. My predicament is a little smaller in that respect.

All I know right now is that I am on my way out of here. It makes me kind of sad, but at the same time it really doesn't. I've been in a sort of pensive mood lately because of it. There is constantly a discrepancy between me wanting to run away to some country and never be seen again and me wanting to live a somewhat typical life in the United States (only to a degree though. See two posts prior for an explanation). I'm constantly wondering where I belong: in the field, or in the forest. As I have said to some people, reevaluating the line between sanity and calling.

I don't know the answer yet. All I know right now is that I'm on my way.

~Jared

I Fought Facebook and Facebook Won

Well, they finnally got me. For those of you who did not know already, Facebook has been warning me for several months that they were going to kick me off Facebook because I didnt go to the school I said I did, since my school isnt even listed. To stick it to the man, I wrote a letter.

Dear Facebook,

You kicked me off yesterday because I did not get identified by a fellow student at the high school I said I attended, despite that I have been friends with someone who was already in that network. You have been threatening to kick me off at the end of the month, which was nearly six months ago, but it seems that "terminate conniving non-student" was at the bottom of your to-do list. Indeed, you are correct in assuming that I am not part of the network I chose, and let me tell you why I decided to commit this heinous crime.

I joined the high school network closest to me because the school I currently attend, Fideles Christian School, is not on your school list. Despite my and fellow students' attempts at entering our school name into your enormous bureaucracy of a website in hopes that we might get a network of our own, you have ignored us for more than six months. Since you have shattered our hopes of recognition, you have forced me and so many other unrepresented students to go into a life of crime, maliciously joining networks that we do not actually belong to.

Heinous as our crime is, I want to suggest a compromise: If I get enough people at my small school that are already on Facebook to sign a petition, you give us our own network. Its simple isnt it? Nothing that a multi-million dollar corporation cannot take care of.

But be warned, Facebook. If you continue to squash our rights as students, you will become something that all grassroots corporations fear: THE MAN. A company that ignores the voice of the people and kills our rights. Now you dont want to be the MAN do you?

Anyways, please take time out of your extremely busy schedules to consider my proposal, in the spirit of democracy.

Sincerely,

Jared Hutchins

Well, I guess we'll have to wait and see how that sits with them. In the meantime, it looks apparent that I will probably never be on Facebook again, so this blog site is my only solace for blogging. Now I am truly a rebel.

Viva la revolucion.

~Jared

Thought of the Day

At school, one of the parents drove up in their car with a small, annoying, barking, rat.

I mean, forget deporting the immigrants. If anything needs to go back to Mexico its these things:



~Jared

The Game of Life

In this post, I am going to address probobly my greatest fear in life (no, its not heights even though they do make me nervous)

You ready?

Here it is.



I'm not sure how many people have played the Game of Life, but it's a board game where you have a spinner and move around the board, doing things like getting a job, getting married, having kids, and getting a raise. In most cases, the Game of Life is the typical suburban lifestyle: you go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, and then you retire and die.

I played this game alot when I was a kid and I remember always getting really angry because of the stop signs. In the game, you could spin around the board until you hit a stop sign. Even though you might have only moved one space and you spinned a 10, you have to stop and do what the sign said. The stop signs always say things like get a job, get married, or buy a house, and you had to do what it said, regardless of your feelings about it. Being a typical 7 year old boy, I always got really angry when I had to stop and get married (since girls are yucky).

That wasnt even the worst part. The end of the game bothered me the most. On the way, you got a job and made money. At the end, you have to count up your money and see which retirement home you get to go into: the pitiful log cabin or the giant mansion. It's then that you realize that all the game was about was money. It didnt matter that you had kids or a wife. All they did was cost you money. Money you could have used to get into the giant mansion.

Now, that game scares me. I am often terrified that my life will be like that. Just a one way road to retirement and death, with a few stop signs along the way, forcing me to live some idiot's idea of "life." Then, you would look back and realize what you lived wasnt life at all. It was just a pointless existence based on getting money and being forced into jobs, marriages, and houses you never wanted. What kind of twisted person could call that "life?"

Probobly the same twisted person that wants to brainwash you into a suburban lifestyle. It even says it on the box. "Hi! We're a stereotypical consumer whore family! Now go get a house in the suburbs and have two kids so you can waste your life being a cubicle slave!" What family even looks that happy while playing a board game? I dont know about anyone else, but playing board games with my siblings usually meant that one of us was going to be telling on someone by the time we were through.

I guess what i'm getting at is that our culture needs a better definition of "life." I am terrified of living the game of life, but so many of us are living it because we think that's all we have. A wise man once said "If you're awesome, be awesome." Our whole world needs to stop thinking in the mold that society has said we should live in. We need to start realizing our full potential as God's children. I dont think that God have every wanted our lives to be limited to houses, jobs, and getting married. To quote an annoyingly popular song, "We were meant to live for so much more, but we lost ourselves."

One last thing to add. If you ever see me, twenty years from now, living in the suburbs with a wife and two kids playing stupid board games,

Please punch me in the stomach

~Jared