God’s Plan

Controlling What You Can, Leaving the Rest to God

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

Hello again there! How has your year been so far? Keeping up with the goals and words to focus on? I know for me; the year has already begun to throw challenges our way. From the job searching that feels like I’m hitting walls, to our apartment complex that won’t contact us about our deposit (Yikes!), and my second semester of my Master’s Degree kicked off. There is a lot going on, it feels like my head is constantly spinning and thinking. In these moments, I find it difficult to focus on what I can control when so much of what I can’t control is all around me.

The thing is, I know God has me, I just have to trust him.

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in the midst of rain

/ Joshua Thomas / 1 Comment

I love rainstorms. There’s just something about the feeling of sitting inside and looking out of a window while rain is pouring that gives me a cozy feeling. It’s currently raining here, as it often does in the summers, and it’s giving me moments to think. I actually have a lot of time to think, just like most of you, in the midst of this wild ride of a year. What I love about rain is that during the storm, things can get crazy. Lightning, thunder, wind; it all goes from zero to ten quickly. The best part is, is that after the rain, the sun comes out and new life springs up.

The rhythms of life often move in the same way. We find ourselves in the midst of trouble, conflicts ranging all over the place and it can get pretty disheartening. What always amazes me though, is that after these moments of chaos, peace comes in, and growth is evident.

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Never Give Up

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

Life gets really tough sometimes. There are days were you just can’t take it anymore. I’ve had a lot of time to think, just like many of you have during this time of social distancing, and I’ve thought about the events that have led me to where I am now. Looking back, I’ll be honest, there have been a ton of times where I wanted to quit. To just give up and let go. In high school, I knew God was calling me to be a pastor, it’s the clearest voice I have heard. I had a passion to help people and a passion to help young people especially step into who God made them to be. From that moment I felt very weird, I am still so passionate about it, but when I have pursued it, I get push back.

Maybe you have been met with similar pushbacks, you might not have enough experience, might be too young or too old in the eyes of the person in charge, or maybe you’ve been told you don’t have the right x-factor or cool enough. I’ve faced these exact same challenges, but in it, god has been with me. He always reminds me:

Never give up.

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Journey Update: Transitions & Trust

/ Joshua Thomas / 1 Comment

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these journey updates. The flow of these is pretty much just me taking some time to share about what’s been happening to me personally and what God has showed me through it all. It has been an insane ride. I got married, moved in with my amazing wife, got fired, wandered in a state of unknown, we decided to move, had a few panic attacks in there, and are on the job search as we move to Orlando, Florida.

Yeah, a lot has happened.

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Your Story is Powerful

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

Good story makes all the difference. Have you ever gone to a movie where it just felt off? One of my favorite things is to watch really bad movies, or “b-movies,” and laugh at the ridiculous nature of it. We love good story. It’s the reason why we watch movies and read books, and find ourselves heartbroken, exhilarated, and connected to characters who aren’t even real. This past week, my wife, Danielle and I had a chance to go on our official honeymoon to Harry Potter World and Walt Disney World. It was absolutely incredible. Throughout the trip I kept wondering why I was connecting to the environment on a deep level. Yes, it was fun and a great experience, but there was something more. Something I was quite getting, then it hit me.

Story.

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Spiritual Victory: Abide

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.”

John 15:4

I’ve been feeling angry recently. Not at a person or a certain event, just a general anger that has been bubbling underneath the surface. I’ve been frustrated with my plan, and that’s the root of it, my plan. It might be easy to miss what I mean, but it’s the truth. I sometimes fall back onto my plan, what I think is best for the current state of my life and my life moving forward. Things aren’t unfolding the way I would want it to, and that’s frustrating, but I need to redirect my focus. I’ve been focusing on the things that have or have not yet happened to me, and how that doesn’t fit in with the way I wanted my story to play out. The truth is, there is a mad titan messing with my head, telling me it’s all about me, I need to know the battle plan of the enemy, and I need to remember that there is a God bigger than my faults who knows my name. What I just referenced was what I have been writing on for the past month. I’ve been writing it because I believed it’s what you, dear reader, needed to hear. What I have come to realize is that it wasn’t simply just for you, but for me as well.

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All Things

/ Joshua Thomas / Leave a comment

In May of 2014, I started this blog. I recently looked back at my first official post talking about what this blog was going to be all about. It’s pretty simple, lots of spelling and grammatical errors, but it was the start of something I would continue to do every week. From that point, a lot of crazy life events happened. Sometimes I wish I could go back and let that kid know about the battles that would be fought and the heartache that would come. I love being able to look back at the past. I never want to linger too much, but it always amazes me at how God has continued to move in my life in all things. I wrote a post in 2015, right at the start of the roller coaster God was going to bring me on. I had faced bullies, church hurt, and feeling un-wanted; but I could not have seen the next chapter in my life. In that same year I would lose two friends, have a family member suffer from addiction, and feel an overwhelming sense of fear about my next steps in life. I started that crazy season with a post about a verse that stuck out to me. I look back not and see just how God moved in the midst of all things.

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Birthday Musings

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Wow, it’s been one incredible year! Today I turn 23, my Michael Jordan year, hopefully no Looney Tunes need my help to play basketball. It’s not gonna end well for them (Shouts out to “Space Jam”). This isn’t like one of my normal posts, I simply wanted to reflect on some of the amazing things from this year. God has done incredible works in my life and the lives to the people who are close to me. This past year I basically graduated from UNCG (wrote a post about the one class I have to complete), which was an awesome picture of how God helped me through my studies. That was always a stumbling block for me, and can you believe it, I even want to get a master in divinity over the next couple of years!

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Embracing Change

/ Joshua Thomas / 1 Comment

Change is a scary thing. Whenever we endeavor into the unknown, there is a trepidation that goes along with it. Meaning that there is a level of anxiety and fear that comes with any change. This is mainly referring to big changes, the change of toothpaste you use or how you want to wear your hair today doesn’t really fill us with much fear (unless of course you go from minty to fruity in your toothpaste selection, yuck!). There are big changes we all have in life. New jobs, next steps in relationships, going to a new school, and of course, when God calls us into something unknown. Many times, we have our lives going in one direction and then God shifts us into new territory. Currently, I am going through this, I was wanting to get away from Greensboro but God called me to this city to help usher in a youth awakening (in the coming weeks I can speak more into what part I’ll play into that). The thing that can be so difficult is that change is scary, and often, it is easier for us to ignore it. Today I don’t want to ignore change, I don’t want you to ignore it either, I want us all to embrace change.

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Misfit: Learning the Power of Never Fitting in

/ Joshua Thomas / 2 Comments

I think many of us at one time or another have felt like an outsider. We find ourselves in seasons where we feel like we’re on our own, that we don’t have that community that we all so desperately need. We want to be the main character of our story, yet we feel like we fade into the background. That’s the feelings we get as a misfit, a person set apart from others. Lately, I’ve been feeling like a misfit. Recently graduated from university, on the hunt for ministry positions, and making it by working with an after-school program. I find myself in a transition period, and that can be hard. I feel God calling me to something more, and more and more I feel that Greensboro is not my end destination. It becomes a not very fun cycle to get into, to feel like you are called for more and that God has a plan, yet it doesn’t seem similar to those around you. In an age of social media, we see updates from those around us, giving us the idea that everyone has it all together and that you become the outsider because you don’t have your goals realized yet. As I have been feeling these feelings and thinking about what it means, God has reminded me of misfits from the bible. God used people who didn’t fit in to do a great work. I think he wants to use you too.

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