The Beginning

I have been absent for a long time and for that I am sorry. I have finished IBOLC, Ranger School and I am not in Airborne and will graduate on 10 Aug. I am about to finish all my training it has lasted 5 years and I am about to head to my unit and actually start doing what I was trained to do, lead. WOW I am actually going to go LEAD! A scary thought once you actually sit down and think about it. But I am ready and I can’t wait to get out to Fort Lewis....for more than one reason. I also met the woman of my dreams, which you will hear a lot more about in future. Her name is Jennie Brown.....or excuse me Dr. (CPT) Jennie Brown. I have to salute her which is really hot and she is so much smarter than me. More to follow on her....a lot more for a really long time.

Ranger school was an interesting school I am so glad it is over and done with. I can finally say, "I’ve got mine!" which is a phrase that I hate but I have my tab. but now the hard part starts. I am part of that small community and I am held to a very very high standard. So no pressure.

Glad to be back.......

WHY

I was talking to a friend last night and she said something that made me think and has altered my perspective. She something to the effect that when she is at school she is normally really stressed out, but when she is at school she is also stressed out even though she has much less going on. She said that it really did not matter what the situation was or what you were doing there will always be stress.

I was thinking that this battle that I am fighting will come to an end if I stop fighting but it will not. I will always be in this battle….so I have every reason to keep fighting. Because this battle will destroy my life so I have to overcome it and move on to the next battle. There will always be a battle to fight.

Why do I fight? Because I do not want this fight to interfere with my relationship with God, I want my relationships with others to be full and complete. I am fighting for people I do not even know yet or that I do not know that I know (that is confusing).

I fight because I have to I fight because that is why God has called me to do. He has not called me to live a life of peace but a life of war and of strife, A life of a warrior for him. That is who I am, that is what I will do.

Gladiators do not fight by choice they fight because they have to. They are placed in the arena and an enemy enters they have to fight but they do not fight just for themselves. They fight for others and that is where I draw my strength I am fighting this battle by choice I am fighting it because I have been thrust into the arena. So I will fight with all my might and no matter how many times I am knocked down and now many times I am cut and defeated. I will never surrender I will never give up while there is breath left in my body.

Fighting

Why is it that everything in life worth having you have to fight for? Sometimes I wish that the things that I wanted would just be handed to me so I would not have to go through the pain to get them.

I am in a battle right now that is so amazingly painful that I despair of ever over coming it. I know that others have won but for me I see no hope in sight. I know what I must do but I don’t do it. Why….. IT HURTS!!!!! I do not want to be in pain any more. I feel like I have been in pain for so long I just want to be at peace. I want to be live at peace for a period of time. I am not a fighter I am a guy who wants to live at peace. But my life is full of battles and struggles and I hate it. I do not want to fight, those around me do not fight and they seem to be doing all right but I know that I have been called to fight so I must go back into the battle. But I don’t want to at all. I want to surrender and ask both sides to leave me alone for a while I pull my life back together.

Have you ever been walking towards a cliff and known that you were about to walk off the edge and even seen it coming and STILL WALKED OFF ANYWAYS!!! What is that? I do that all the time. I see the cliff coming and what do I do I may slow down or I may not I may just speed up so that I can get the drop over with sooner.

What is the answer?

Well if you want to hear what the books says,

“Trust in the Lord and he will renew your strength,”

“Pray for the strength to overcome and Jesus will fill you with his power,”

“Memorize scripture and have it constantly running through your mind,”

“Read the word of God and he will encourage you,”

Well all of these are true and there are many more and much better ones. But all these short sencences are incredibly hard to actually do!!! Everything is pushing against me when I try or when I even think about do any of those thinks. And you are saying sitting there reading this in your chair well just go forward that is the only way you can go. But as you are arm chair quarter backing it i am actually here fighting and it is not that easy. I would like nothing better than to do all of this and to listen to all the advice that I have received and to get out of this battle but I cant. I am stuck in a circle because I give out just enough effort to start the momentum then I run out just in time to fall right back around to where I was creating a huge circle of bull s#*%!!!!!

I sound very discouraged and despondent right now which is not actually how my life is right now but it is how I feel right now. I feel this way and I don’t like it but I do know how to feel any other way right now.

Well I had to unload this or I was going to explode. Thank you whoever you are who is reading this for reading if you even got this far.

AUG 11 - Plebe year Part 3 - Academics

So to understand plebe year academics in my life fully you need to know what my academic career looked like before. I was homeschooled from the start to the end until I graduated from high school. I had some problems starting out. I did not learn to read until I was 11 years old. My mom tried everything she could think of, every curriculum and she and my dad even took me to several doctors and physiologists to make sure there was not something wrong with me. Instead of reading science and math were my friends. I could explain the principles of lift and aerodynamics before I was 8. I started and finished an entire algebra 2 course in a month and a half period.

When I was a junior in high school i was kicked out of the house in regards to math because I had out stripped the stuff my dad had time to teach me. So I started taking college algebra at a junior college and by the end of my senior year I had finished calculus 2. At the same time I was taking calculus 1 and 2 my senior year I was taking physics at a different junior college.

Being home schooled made my very self-motivated and self-driven. I wanted to excel and I understood that my focus at the academy was academics. That was why I was there. I was there to be a student and to learn about leadership on to have fun.

However all you need to do is call my mom to know how hard academics and academy life was on me. I called her every day with some problem some worry all of them were about reading and writing classes. Western civilization was the worst class plebe year. I could not do the reading to keep up and I could not remember what I needed to pass the tests. So my mom devised a plan to help me survive. She ordered my history books and had paid a friend of ours to read the lessons into a digital recorder and email them to me where I would religiously sit down and listen to him read the books to me taking notes and trying to make it all stick.

This was the story of all four years for me at the academy. I always had a class that was for me a matter of survival for me. Do not get me wrong I never settled for anything but my absolute best but sometimes my best was only passing.

That was something that defined my academic career at West Point. I never settled for anything but my best. My mom once told me when I called her about how nervous I was before a test she would say before you take the test sit down and ask yourself could I have done any more? Was there any wasted time; was there anything I could have done to improve my score? If the answer was I did all I could, I could be happy with whatever grade I received because it was my absolute best.

There is so much more to tell about plebe year academics. All the times God pulled me from the edge of absolute disaster. All the times I was able to help others. All the great experiences I had working on projects with partners. I know everyone hates group projects but maybe I was just luck or maybe I was smarter in picking my partners but I do not every remember having a bad partner in any class.

Well that is all for know about academics…however there may be a plebe year part 3.1 – academics

See you around the play ground

AUG 11 - Plebe year Part 2 - Beast

Plebe Year Part 2 – Beast

My family and I arrived in New York a couple days early for R-Day. The night before I went into Beast I watched Gladiator still one of the most motivating movies in the world right behind Man on Fire. The next day I walked down the steps into Ike hall in the big auditorium we were told we were to go through the huge double doors and we had 30 seconds to say goodbye my mom had been saying goodbye all morning and crying all the while. I walked through the doors and started on one of the greatest experience of my life to date. That first day was a blur but I do remember meeting my roommate and trying to make my bed as soon i got there and he told me slow down Turbo we have time for that, that name would stick with me for a long time and would be what I was known for in Foxtrot company during Beast.

There is little that stands out to me of my beast experience some highlight here and there. But mostly I remember it as an experience a set of emotions and feelings not as specific events. I remember one time huddling up with my squad out in the rain our squad leader called us in and we all got really close trying to stay warm. I remember one day playing ultimate Frisbee, the CO was on my team and he called for me to pass to him, “hey Turbo over here.” I remember Sunday morning and crying to the chaplain because I felt so alone and incapable to do what I was required. I remember the repel sight and talking crap to the repel master and racing him. I could not start as fast as him but once I got going I hit the ground literally inches behind him.

The biggest thing I remember from beast was on developing a name for myself as the loudest and most motivated person in the class of 2011. The feelings of fear, self-doubted and not measuring up were growing and continue through Beast and into Plebe year. Those feelings for doubt and fear where to become a driving force in my life over plebe year.

However God as always proved himself too good to me over Beast even with these feelings racing through me I was able to enjoy every minute of Beast and have nothing but fond memorize of it. God gave me success that I did not deserve during our activities during Beast.

This success would and the lies in my heart I believed would make my first couple years at the Academy very painful and a time of struggle and turmoil for me.

“FOXTROT!!!!!!!!!!”

AUG 11 - Am I the One Part 2

In the book, “am I the one” they lay out some steps to look at in becoming the right person to marry.

Step #1: Become passionate about God – This means making God the center of your live not a thing you do on Sundays and another day of the week. If God is not the center of your live it could become someone and that would be terrible.

[Note – a great analogy for this one is: a women’s heart should be so entwined with the heart of God that a man has to become one with God to get to the women’s heart. (I think I can turn this around for me? Well I am going to look at it like that any ways)]

Step #2: Know the truth – babies do not know the truth it takes time to see life through God’s lens do you like the truth. Most people do not really want to know the truth unless it is pleasant. If you know the truth—really know it and love it and believe it—“you will become free” (John 8:32).

Step #3: Live in Freedom – are you living in freedom—free of the power and plague of sin, free to say “no” to temptation, free to think for yourself, free of the always-lurking Christian Pharisees and their petty rules? You weren’t put here to place people in Bondage of a bad relationship. You were put here “to proclaim freedom for the captives” (Isaiah 61:1).

Step #4: Become passionate about others – are you spending yourself on others? Are you investing on others? Is the world around you—at home, at work, at school, at church, in the community—at least a little better because of your drive to make it so? If you don’t have the humility to “consider other better than yourselves,” you’re not ready for serious relationship. Most people who get married don’t have that humility, so their relationships are all about rights and resentment. You can do a lot better than that.

Step #5: Become passionate about your responsibilities –are you looking for the work and career that will resonate with your soul? Have you refused to absorb the lies, like the idea about “full-time Christian work” (if you’re a Christian, all work is), and “I’m just working to get money so I can serve God” (the work is the big part of your service: see Colossians 3:17), and “it’s not all supposed to be enjoyable—that’s why they call it work” (joy is a choice, not just an emotion).

[Note – attitude that is the one thing that you decide every day. To have a good attitude to be joyful in the situation you are in or not to be.]

Step #6: Find a greater cause – have you found something bigger than yourself that you can devote yourself to? Have you at least made a stab at the question about impact (“what am I here to change?”), significance (“what am I here to build?”), and legacy (“what do I want to leave behind—when I graduate? When I leave my first job? When I die?”). if you don’t have something outstanding reason to be here, your life will be too insignificant to have any outstanding relationships.

[Note – this is a great question one when answered by God shows a direction for course of your life]

Step #7: Learn the power of redemption – Have you learned how to make a comeback? Have you learned that mistakes aren’t fatal, that you can learn and grow and improve, that failure comes from quitting rather than from making mistakes? Do you know forgiveness—how to experience it and how to grant it? Do you cut people slack when they foul up? Have you learned how to meet in the middle?

These are good steps and it is interesting to look at these and see where I fall short and need to work and which ones I can look at and say I got that one.

Side thought – I find this whole series I am starting to be very funny actually because I am learning how to be content and joyful being single but I am going through a relationship book looking at if I am ready for a relationship? Well these will not only get me ready for a relationship but will make me a better person. Healthy and well-rounded aware of my emotions and feelings. WOW an emotionally aware guy, can the world handle that J

Later all

gone for a while

hi everyone, well all 1 one you that read this. i have been gone for a while and now i am back. i am going to post the blogs that i finished while i was away. i will be putting the dates on top of them.

enjoy