Clean up aisle 3

Salvation is not earned, its free, just sitting on the shelf, we just have to ask for it.

Its already paid for, Jesus took care of that. So what do we owe in return? Nothing. God just desires a relationship with us, the way it was meant to be.

So why is it so hard to handle that truth? I think its because we live in a world were there is always a catch, something in the fine print that will probably suck. So we weight the pros and cons and decide if it is worth the risk.

God has offered us a gift with no strings attached and no fine print. Hard to believe? Join the club. No one has it figured out and no one will. So what do we do? LOVE. Unconditionally.

In Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller he says that we are guilty of using our Love as currency, and we dish it out to the people we want and keep it from the people who we think are not worth it. That’s not how God meant it to be. If someone is hurting you, love them. If someone is annoying you, love them. If someone is against you in any way, Love them!

Jesus lead by example to the extreme, loving sinners and saints alike and not being greedy with his love. God loves so much that He gave His one and only Son to DIE for US (the broken greedy loveless sinners).

So what are you waiting for? Love!

Christmas List

In case anyone wants to get me a Christmas gift, here is my Christmas list:
MONEY FOR ADVENT CONSPIRACY!!
http://www.adventconspiracy.com

OR:
Jeans/shirts and such
Gift Cards to Best Buy/ American Eagle/ Target/ iTunes
Amp repaired
Blue Ray DVD player
DVDs or CDs
TIM pedal
Acoustic/Electric Guitar
Fender Highway one Strat
Bad Cat Panther amplifier
Bad Cat “The Leash” attenuator
Shure 57 microphone for recording
ProCo Turbo Rat pedal
Guitar cables
Playstation 3
Full body massage
GPS for my car
HTC hero
iPod Shuffle

Happy Holidays!

As November winds down and December bombards us with ridiculous sales I am left wondering, “What am I gonna do next?” Well I wanted to fill everyone in on a few important details of my life.

First of all, after tomorrow night I will no longer be working at any restaurant! Ever again! (at least thats the plan) I am gonna be working extra shifts at the credit union to make up for that.

Thing 2, I have moved! Long story short is that I had a need and it got fulfilled by the grace of God!

Thing 3, the plan right now is to start taking classes at StLCC in January. However, I still need to pay for school and so far I have gotten zero help from financial aid and scholarships and I am waiting to hear back from the college if I even have a chance to get student loans. So if I cant get any money I may not be able to go to school. 😦 But we will worry about that if that happens.

Thing 4, I am incredibly greatful of the things I have been given and the way that God has provided for me and I trust Him and will continue to trust in Him.

Last thing, it is no new story that many of us are in financial hardship right now. I am planning on doing my part this Christmas season by volunteering at my church and participating in Advent Conspiracy. If you dont know what that is about just check out this http://www.adventconspiracy.org

God IS All I Need. That is my prayer and exclamation for this season of life where we all seem to focus on things that we “need”. Just put God at the top of your Christmas list and He will give you what you truely need, Grace.

Greater things!

I am excited about new opportunities! I can’t really talk about them right now, but they are exciting!

Well I can talk about one of them…

I recently got accepted at St Louis Community College! I plan on taking classes starting this Spring and I will be studying Electrical Engineering! I want to learn how to build/fix circuit boards and eventually learn how to repair/build my own tube amps!

We’ll see how this goes…

I <3 Fall

I just wanted to express that I absolutely LOVE the Fall season, and here are some reasons why! (in no particular order)

1. Sweatshirts/ hoodies!
2. Warm Apple Cider!
3. Thanksgiving!
4. Leaves changing color and falling off!
5. The smell of those leaves burning!
6. FOOTBALL!
7. Chili cook-offs!
8. Dressing up for Halloween! Megan and I are gonna have a great costume this year!
9. Pumpkin Pie! Yumm!
10. The new NBC lineup! aka The Office, Heroes, 30 Rock.

The Fall season alway makes me miss High School, but only a little bit. High School was just ok for me, nothing special.

So that’s it! I was just thinking about sleeping with like 5 blankets and I wanted to let everyone know that I ❤ Fall!

I Need Jesus

I was reading a book that my brother gave me a long time ago called “Letters to My Daughters” by Paul Friesen and I read something he said and it blew my mindgrapes!

“We don’t follow Jesus so our lives will be better, we follow Him because He is Lord.”

I truely spend too much of my time trying to make my life better when I should be focusing on loving and following Jesus. Because what difference does it make if you have the nicest stuff or the biggest house if you don’t have Jesus?

My prayer today is to be content in my world but to continue endlessly praising and chasing my Saviour!

Who I used to be

This is who I used to be:

I grew up in a church going family and have always known Jesus and called my self a Christian, but I would say all of that has new meaning to me now! When I was a baby, my family was looking for a church to call home and we landed in a Lutheran Church for a time and while there I was “baptized”. The reason for the “quotation” is because I was sprinkled with water before I had a chance to figure out who Jesus was, which according to what I have read in the bible does not qualify as “baptism”.

So throughout my adolescence I was under the impression that since I was sprinkled that I had done my part and had my ticket into heaven! It wasn’t until the summer before high school that I felt like that was not enough. So that summer in July of ’99 I chose to proclaim that I wanted Jesus to be #1 in my life! This was GREAT going into the difficult years of high school. I was a volunteer in my youth group worship band all throughout high school and did my best to behave. I tended to hang out with the older kids, for instance my brother Nick was a senior while I was a freshman and I would try to squeeze into his group of friends quite often! I also had a few close friends who were just one year ahead of me. One friend in particular was someone named Adam Butts, or as we called him “Booty”. Booty was a tall lanky bass player and I (at the beginning of HS) was a tall scrawny rollerblader who was attempting to be a guitar player. So of course we were the best of friends, constantly playing music together with our friend Aaron. Booty and I regularly played music and worship sets together at church and we were friends all the way up till my senior year.

One time we had taken a trip from Lincoln, IL all the way to Boston to check out Berkeley. We left on a Sunday at 1 in the morning and drove till we couldn’t stay awake any more, pulled over and slept for a minute, and continued to Boston were we stayed in a Bed and Breakfast! If you ever wanna go crazy, just take a 16 hour road trip!

So here I am, it’s senior year and ALL of the people I hung out with have graduated and are in schools all over the US. There were these group of ruffians that I had always wanted to hang out with but I thought for shore that I was too goodie-2-shoes to fit in, one of these guys was a longtime friend of mine, Jeff. Through out my HS career I would attempt to socialize with these people but always felt awkward and scared that I wouldn’t fit in. When I finally manned up and put myself out there I actually DID fit in! Half of this group I was familiar with, since they had been in the same schools as me growing up, and the other half were from other elementary and junior highs so I knew OF them but didn’t know them.

My senior year was a year of rebellion from social events and programs. I had injured my shoulder the year before while playing on the football team and decided not to go back to football for the fourth year, also I had dropped the HS choir from my list of classes (my director PQ was not happy about that one) and with that I decided NOT to audition for that years Musical in which PQ had requested I do. However, I did stay involved with my youth group and church choir. This lack of after school programs left me with all the time in the world to hang out with my new group of friends! I LOVE these guys and gals and they are still the core group of people that I call when I am visiting home, and I would not be the person I am today with out them.

It wasn’t until after Christmas that I finally started to get invited to some of the risqué things that my friends indulged in. I remember one night, my friends grandparents were out of town and we had access to their home! So what else would a bunch of rebellious teens do in that situation? We packed up our Playstations and playing cards and moved in for the night! One friend of ours was a little older and was able to “hook us up”, so began the first night I got drunk. Dr Pepper has never tasted the same since. I could go into details about the many drinking games I played since that night but I won’t.

Not long after that night I also began buying my own Swisher Sweets and we would “go fishing” as we told our parents which was code for go smoke and drink! It also didn’t take long for little cigars to become cigarettes and so on. So there it is! I was a “good kid” most of my youth but turned to the dark side my senior year. I still say that summer was the best I’ve had… so far.

OK. Going on. Now I have graduated and am arriving at Milligan College to “start over”. But by now I was completely addicted to cigarettes and still didn’t have much grief about drinking either. From the get go I got involved in the worship crowd at Milligan, playing my guitar as much as possible.
– I attempted, like many do, to live a double life. I wanted to do all the fun things like smoking cigarettes and chugging beers, but I wanted to play my guitar in the worship band. Back then I thought I could have both.
Picture this if you will, I am sitting in my dorm room with my Epiphone Les Paul plugged into a V-Amp2 into an old busted Yamaha Keyboard Amp, playing along to Usher. Someone down the hall hears me and thinks, “Is that guy playing Usher?” BOOM! Josiah Potter walks into my dorm room. “Are you playing Usher?”, “Yep”, “Cool” and just like that we became best friends! Josiah was a few years older and already established as a musician at Milligan, if that matters. Well it wasn’t long before we were roommates and causing all kinds of trouble, for legal purposes I’ll leave the details out.

End of year 1 at Milligan. I moved back home to Lincoln and got a job at a factory and hung out with my friends at night. We played a lot of cards and drank a lot of beer! I had bought a new guitar amp and had taken some advice from Josiah, “Get better or you and I won’t play together anymore.” So that summer I lost a bit of weight from the sweating and working and had learned some new licks thanks to some threats from JP!

Back to Milligan! Year 2. First up, Sophomore Summit! So here I am sitting here at this lame retreat and I keep noticing this girl that I hadn’t seen before… The speaker says “OK. We are gonna play a game now. When I call out a number you have to gather that many people together and huddle up until I call the next number.” So of course the first number he calls is “2”. Me being the brave person I am, I walked right up to this girl and said, “Hi, I’m Alex.” to which she said, “Hi, I’m Bell.” *her name is not “Bell” but for the sake of privacy I’m calling her that.* we continued to talk through out the rest of the game, ignoring the rules. Needless to say, we hit it off. Turns out she was from IL too! That semester was full of mixed feelings and conversations about forgiveness. This girl had told me about all of the “baggage” she had and I had treated her how I believed Jesus would have treated her, with forgiveness and openness. She was blown away by the fact that I wasn’t disgusted and turned off by what she had been through but I kept telling her, “Jesus doesn’t judge you so why should I?” Throughout the semester we spent a lot of time together but every time I brought up “defining our relationship” she would say “I don’t know”. Turns out that she had a boyfriend back home that she didn’t tell me about and eventually said that they were on a “break” while she was in TN. That being said, she had also already agreed to go to a formal dance with this guy while the two of us were “together”; at least I thought we were “together”. So here I am in my dorm room and my phone rings, I look and it is Bell! I answer to a very angry, very drunk boy cursing me out… A very drunk Bell finally got on the phone and tried to reconcile. Luckily I had my friend Josiah there to be on my side, we went out side and I smoke about a half a pack of cigarettes while I vented to Josiah and we took turns throwing the patio furniture down a hill. Good times.

My Last story about this girl is this, one night she and I and two others were having a get together that involved a bit of booze and the two girls got VERY drunk VERY quickly and long story short here I am, sober, trying to calm down a drunken girl babbling about an old boyfriend who used to beat her and in my attempts to comfort her I mentioned that I would never do that and I let a four letter word slip out… love. Now I was not IN love with this girl, I was simply trying to comfort her. Upon hearing this word LOVE, she FLIPS! “NO! I don’t want you to Love me!!” She goes on about how she is afraid that I am in love with her. I am crushed by this reaction, and I don’t know what to do. Finally after some puking, things settle down and we awoke to a new day!

The semester finally comes to an end, Bell moves back to IL, I have officially been used… I felt like a piece of bubble gum that she chewed up and then spit out.

Now we are heading into the summer after Year 2 of Milligan, by this time I have managed to get the cold shoulder from most people at Milligan for being an “against the rules” kind of guy, especially the worship team. Summer is approaching and Josiah and I find an apartment and a job and we are set for the Glorious summer!

Man I LOVE Tennessee! I had a job at Cheddars and the family of employees there were amazing!!! That summer all I had was work, rent, and a phone bill. An average night consisted of sleeping till 1, working till 10 and spending all the money I just made at Vito’s which was the favorite hang out spot for the Cheddars crew! At the time I was 20 and worked with the door guy at Vito’s so I was a regular. If we weren’t at Vito’s we were at Gatsby’s or Poor Richards! Lots of drinks that summer… lots! Now Josiah and I are living together in APT 5 paying rent to someone named Karen who we don’t think really existed. We had some good times and some bad times, but mostly good! I traded my big amp in for a smaller one and a new guitar! Not much else to say about that summer, just lots of partying.

Year 3 at Milligan. Actually it was only half a year. Josiah had taken a semester to go to a music school in Boston and I lived in a room by myself. This semester I joined up with a group of guys and played bass in the band called The Crossing! I Hated it. But it was something to do. I also kept working at Cheddars and tried to do school work as well. After a bunch of shows here and there that semester came to a close.

NO MORE MILLIGAN! I failed the same writing class 3 times and decided that I did not need to go to school any more. That spring I worked at Cheddars and Josiah had come back from Boston and we lived in the Apt #5 yet again!

Ok summarize time I am 20 years old, living and working in Johnson City TN and my birthday is coming up! Here we go! I am living care free! I’m not really involved in church at the moment and it’s the day before my 21st birthday! I’m working that night and as soon as I get off I’m going out! MIDNIGHT! Start the Drinkin!

I drank till I couldn’t remember that night! This is pretty much how the rest of spring went. The Band I was in had played a couple of shows in New York City and we were trying to decide whether or not to move there! At the same time, Josiah was going to move to Atlanta. I chose Atlanta!

This is were I began to turn my life around a bit! Joey Potter had made me a deal, I had to do a few things like quit smoking, cut back to a limited amount of beers a week, etc. and he would sell me this big green Chevy conversion van for a dollar! So I did those things long enough to earn a van! But that didn’t last long. I eventually picked up smoking again and the more friends I made in GA the more I would go out drinking.

While living in ATL I got involved in the church where Joey was working and made friends with the worship pastor and played regularly on Sunday mornings. Now if you compare the lifestyle I had in TN to the one in GA I’d say I partied about 1/2 as much as I used to and tried to keep it in my own brand of limitation. Josiah was living in his parent’s basement and I had found a room for rent in a man’s house and we just lived life for a while. Met a lot of great people and got involved in a church called South Side where I met who would be my newest closest friend Christopher Rook!

Here I am at a 20 something’s group with Josiah and I see this Bad Ass lookin dude with all kinds of tattoos and biker jeans on! We eventually cross paths and realize that we are almost like brothers! I love this guy!

I start working at a place called Smokey Bones which houses as great a family of employees as Cheddars did! Same story but less partying. Winter time came and Josiah has decided to take a job as a worship pastor in Florida! Josiah moves and Christopher and I hang out all the time until April when I decide that I need to move closer to home.

So April comes and I have moved to St. Louis MO and into an apartment with a college friend Chris Horton and his buddy Nick Hall! Those two had lived in StL for their whole lives so they knew a LOT of people and I knew no one. I just kinda went with the flow for a while and tried to make new friends.

If you haven’t picked up on this yet, I tend to move around.

We do our thing partying here and there; I got a job at a bar called Houlihans. The thing about working in a bar is that it makes it very difficult to stop things like smoking and drinking. I tried many times to quit smoking and drinking but failed over and over again. By this time in my life I knew there was something that had to change but I guess I didn’t want it bad enough. After that summer I had finally said I’ve had enough and decided to quit smoking! It was working for a while and November came along and me and Josiah and Chris had made a pact to not drink in November in an effort to change things. We made it all the way up until Thanksgiving when I went home to visit family and friends! Everyone knows that the night before Thanksgiving is the biggest “drinking” night of the year! So I slip and say to myself “just this one last time”. That seems to be the tag line to my destruction.

Last thing I remember is taking a shot with one of my buddies at the bar, then my mom waking me up because I had passed out on the toilet at home… I can not explain to you the embarrassment I felt.

This was a turning point in my life. If you didn’t figure it out already, in order to have ended up on the toilet at home, I would have needed to DRIVE home… From that day on I have never driven intoxicated again! My entire attitude towards getting drunk was totally different. I would love to say that this time was the last time I got drunk but it is not.

My drinking began to slow down from then on. After that spring our lease was up at the apartment and Chris had decided that he was going to move to Florida after the summer so I had to find a new place to live. I had met a guy at Houlihans that I got a long with and so he and I got an apartment for that year. Jon and I spent most of the free time we had hanging out and listening to Thrice and playing PS3 while we smoked his hookah. (This was used for smoking tobacco not weed) At the beginning of that summer Jon and I took a trip to Chicago to see Thrice! We drove up there and stayed with one of my high school buddies who lived in Wrigley Ville. It was a blast! The local bars up there are a lot of fun and Thrice played two nights in a row!

That summer I had decided to try out online dating, just to see if it was legit. I signed up for the free stuff and would search for girls that I might be interested in until one day I got a message from someone! At the same time this was going on I was working at Houlihans and this group of girls had been coming in every Tuesday and I had taken a liking to one of these girls, her name was Megan. Anyways, the girl online and I had been emailing back and forth for a couple of months and I was enjoying it enough to were I was gonna ask to meet this girl. Well about that time I had emailed her and not gotten a response for a while and after waiting and waiting I decided that I was giving up, mostly because I wanted to ask this other girl out.

So it’s a Wednesday and I am sitting at my computer and this message pops up, “I’m bored, entertain me!” It’s Megan! We had exchanged screen names the day before and had talked online for a bit. I asked if she wanted to go to the movies with me and she said yes! So we got to the theater and were deciding what movie to go see. We decided on Journey to the Center of The Earth in 3D. We were the only two people in the room so we had fun laughing at the crappiness of the movie and just talking. Afterwards I wasn’t ready to call it a night yet so I recommended getting some cheesecake at the Cheesecake Factory. We ate some cheesecake and sat outside and talked until they closed and kicked us out. It only took me 3 dates and some spaghetti to know that I was in love with this girl.

By this time I had tried several times to quit smoking and failed every time, it was more difficult since I worked at a bar every other night. When Megan and I had started dating I would smoke at work but that had to stop. Finally in September of ’08 I officially quit smoking!

Megan and I hit it off really well and we trying our best not to rush our relationship. In the past year we have gotten to know each other and become best friends as well as dug deeper into the Bible and I have gotten involved in the church I had been attending for the last year or so, Windsor Crossing. I have finally managed to phase out the binge drinking and have set limits to my self which I set as a New Years resolution.

Windsor has been a HUGE part of my life in the last year or so. Everyone who I have met there is so friendly and encouraging it’s like a home away from home! I volunteer as a musician as often as I can and take as many classes as I have time for. The scripture based teachings have opened my eyes to actually living out Gods word and having a personal relationship with my Savior!

I am a completely different person than I was 13 months go! Life is no less stressful but is way more enjoyable! I realize that there is no easy quick fix to life but a constant struggle to follow the commands that God has given us through his son Jesus Christ!

Why have I rambled on about the struggles of my life in the last 10 years? I don’t know how to explain it but I felt convicted to openly share what I have been through and where I am going. Almost like an invisible push from the Holy Spirit if you will. I have made many mistakes in the past but God has allowed me to learn valuable lessons from them and grow.

This is who I am NOW:
“Dear God,
Thank you for loving me so unconditionally. Thank you for the blessings you give me. Thank you for your never ending grace and forgiveness. Never in a million years will I do anything to deserve the sacrifice you made for me and yet I have trouble waking up 30 minutes early so I can spend time with you. I am sorry. Sorry for my failures. Sorry for the times when I have ignored you. I am so glad to finally be enjoying the time I spend with you instead of feeling like if I don’t pray that bad things will happen, because that’s not how a relationship with you works. I pray that you will open doors for me as I try to do what ever it is that you want me to do, and I pray that it is your will be done, not mine. I am so thankful for the people in my life. Lord let me be a light that shines for you and will help lead others to a loving, caring relationship with you God. Jesus, be the CENTER of my life! “

Beggars

So I found out today that my favorite band Thrice’s new album entitled “Beggars”, which is scheduled for release on Oct 13th this year, was illegally leaked and is all over the internet!

Wow… I have a new found DISrespect for bootleg copies of anything! I used to not care but I follow Thrice pretty closely and I actually felt a little hurt by this news.

Luckily, Thrice fans are the best people ever! So I know that we will ALL be buying Beggars the second it comes out!

I will resist the urge to find and listen to this illegal download and will continue to be REALLY excited for October 13th!!

SUPPORT MUSICIANS!!!! BUY MUSIC, DONT STEAL IT!!!!

CHOO-CHOO!! Here comes the Night Train!

LOOK OUT!!!  Here is an amp that will blow your mind grapes!

Introducing the Vox Night Train

Ok so I played through this amp at the store and BOOYA! It is awesome!  It has the great Vox clean tone! Then turn up the gain and flip to “Thick” mode and rock the pants off your grandma! I played through a strat with single coils and one with humbuckers and both were equally pleasing.

I usually look for an amp with an effects loop since i like to use some analog/digital delay effects, however, this amp takes to pedals very well if your are in the “Bright” mode.  Once you switch over to “Thick” mode for some real crunch, the delay effects are crap. But thats how it is any time you put a delay before overdrive/distortion.

While I was there I A/B’d it to an Egnater Rebel 20. Both were plugged into a Mesa 4×12 and the Vox BLEW the Egnater away!  I could not find a good sound out of the Egnater and I couldn’t find a “bad” sound out of the Vox! Havent A/B’d it to the Tiny Terror yet but I have played on a Terror before and I can find a better clean tone on the Night Train and I enjoy the amount of gain on both.

Wish there were a foot switch to change between Bright and Thick modes, but I’m sure that will come if its not already out there.

Overall: 10 out of 10 by my standards!  Great Sound at a Greater Price! Run this baby through a nice cab and you can forget about expensive combos… at least for a little while ;).

I need God.

I have been focusing too much on waiting for God to deliver some sort of “Get Out Of Jail Free” card and the fact is, it’s probably not gonna happen.  Through many MANY conversations I have come to the conclusion that I just need to spend more time with God and not “expect” anything from Him, which we are all guilty of doing from time to time.

 

“Dear God,  I am sorry for neglecting you.  I talk about you all the time but we never spend time together unless I “need” something.  I love you and I want to spend more time with you.”

 

That is my story, what is yours?