I Laughed...

Last night I sat on a love seat in my grandmas house in Eugene, Springfield and laughed with an awesome friend of mine. We laughed at growth and life and friendships and high school relationships. I couldn't sleep because I had just finished my last high school cross country race. I have raced the past four years of my high school career, run thousands of miles, developed hundreds of relationships, cried, laughed, and now it is done. Or at least it is finished for this stage of my life, and all I wanted to do was talk to someone. I couldn't sleep until I had someone to help me sort through my emotions or at least listen to some of the thoughts swirling around in my whirlpool heart. I finished something that I had invested a large portion of my life into, which means saying good bye to a lot of kids that I do not spend time with in any other venue. I told her, I feel strange! In two months I will know what colleges I am accepted to, only 4 months after that I will sign to one of them, 7 months from now I will finish high school track, high school ministry, and indeed high school it self, then in about 9 months I will leave Bend. (All of this pending on Gods leadership of coarse) Bend, the place I have been born, raised, and lived out the entireity of my life thus far. The place where I know every short cut, bike route, and running trail. Have 17 years worth of relationships and networks, my family, our home, our buisness, Westside Church, my best friend. LIFE! The reason I laughed is the thought of leaving in 9 months and then I took it further down the road. In 30 years I will meet an awesome woman of God and get married, 50 years and I will have some kids and have to get a real job and stop touring the world with my band. LIFE IS ENDING IN 7 MONTHS! Or at least life as I know it. I can't believe it. Completely new paradigms of thinking have entered my high school head and are tearing at my heart. What are you going to do Jordan? What happens after the races, the performances, the veggie tales parties! How am I going to live, with who, where? WHY? What out of the time that is rapidly being spent actually has worth? Actually is Life? From these past 17 years in Bend I have learned a few vary solid truths, and off of these I have discovered a few things that really matter and really bring fulfillment.

~First, God is. God can. God cares. (thank you Bo)
Basically God is real and I know it because he has carried my family through massive beatings, my sister through what should have been a devastating car wreck, and me through my many struggles. I have gone through three vary intense cycles of depression, in the past three years, ran away from home, and tried to run away from God. No matter what I did or how low I sank God was there and he loved on me. Which brings me the next point. God can, He is able to change mindsets, heal physical disabilities and trauma, lead us out of destructive and addictive behaviors, forgive our sins, and restore, rebuild and cause us to become men and women that are whole. I have been a witness to his healing power! My Older sister Whitney was blindsided by an excursion cruising at 55 miles an hour on the drivers door of her little Subaru. This inflicted amongst other things a concave skull fracture big enough to stick my fist in. It pierced the dura mater(the sack the protects the brain) and we where told, after she came out of surgery that she is not in the clear, that she most likely would have speach and motor issues, and should be in intensive care for around three weeks. a few hours later, I was talking with her, 18 hours later she was in the process of finding a room on the main floor of the hospital. God can. Then, God cares. This is the fact that God loves us! Me, he loves me! He wants to heal me and see me alive and flourishing. Truth: Life is hard, but God is good AND he loves me! This is the premise to real life. (thank you Lynden Evans.) It is easy to believe in God and his power because there is so much evidence of him through miracles and changed lives but it is not so easy to believe that he cares about us, individually. He wants to have relationship with us, use his power on our behalf, and even have us partner with him in that power. But it is true! Jesus endured the cross for the joy that was set before him. That joy was you. Relationship with me. Hence I have deduced that relationship with Jesus and with people is life! Living in his power and love and extending that to everyone around me is the stuff that lasts and fulfills. So I have begun to learn some answers to my questions. It is still so strange for me to think though that I am finishing this stage of my life. Cross country is done! It was a success, I grew in relationship with God and many people! Time to finish the rest.... with Gods love and power constantly at my side. And so begins my walk into my own life. Jesus!

Psyche of Me

4:45 am the alarm rings and I jump out of my bed, somedays i jump because of excitement other days I jump because I have to. The days I have to get up I am getting up to run with my team. This year I am captain and I get to lead my team both with my voice and with my times. I love and hate it, I love and hate running. I love beating the sun up the buttes around Bend, and sitting on swings watching the sun rise. I hate and love the pain of it, I hate and love the pounding. Pounding, it can either be an anoying dripping of water or the powerful beating of drums. Some days, I ask why I run. Other days I cannot understand why anyone would miss out on it. There is something about how raw it is. It is just you. No excuses, no gear except a pair of shoes. It is humbling, yet empowering. People that know running, know themselves. It poses new challenge and new inspiration with every passing season. I believe that the argument to run is greater than that to stay in bed but I know also the pull of laziness. The desire to be comfortable. Too often comfortable trumps comfronting the pain of growth and I stay in bed. Then there is the power of running on a team, when they are there with you they often inspire you to greater determination. With a team you are forced to get out and run for more than the love of crisp morning air, or fitness. It becomes about the other men and women that are out there with you, you hurt together, you fly together, you win and you lose together. You push hard to help them grow and they push back to make you do the same. There is tension between the competition for your place on the team and the friendships that build. That tension is powerful. The love and hate are a potential energy that if used correctly will cause a person to rise way beyond what they had believed was possible. "Love righteousness and hate evil". Do not be afraid of pain, nor timid in the tension. Go after the discomfort, it develops unstopable strength.
I encourage you to run. "Physical training has some value... Spiritual training has value for this life and the next." Train yourself and do not let your flesh stop your spirit from growth.
My friends and I have had arguments for years about whether morning or night is better, every argument confirms inside of me the love I have for the early hours of the day. There is something about the crisp air and the darkness that is broken by the faint light of the sun peircing through with its arms with warm embrace. The smell of coffee brewing, the silence. It is powerful. There is so much potential in each and everyday for great things to happen. Pray. Excorsize. Plan. Be ready to go, ready to be used, ready for the greatness that comes from being used by God. Exersize both your Body and your spirit. God cares about the physical. He created it, he spoke it into being and told us to stuard over it. Teach your body discaplin. "The spirit is willing and the flesh is weak." Become a three stranded cord. (Ecclesiastes 12:7-12) mind, body, and spirit. You will not be easy to break and powerful to use.
I am amazed at how much you can learn about your spirit when you train your body for endurence. The Bible talkes about the tresting of your faith that produces endurance. The principles are applicable in multiple realms. We are beings that have not only a body but a spirit. They are tied to each other and will not separate until we are home. When the enemy wants to take me down he often will first ware on my body and get me busy so that I am tired. Then when I am tired it becomes more of a challenge to train my spirit. When I get sick I find is when I am most vulnerable. Satin is not stupid, he knows he is no match for you when your Dad is involved. When you have great relationship with God and your body lines up with that in health it is easy to stand against the attacks of the enemy. When you get tired he comes after you. He waits for the opportune moment. Luke 4:1-13. Verse 13 ...he left him until an opportune time. Your enemies will come after you in your inopportune times. You can cut down on those by training you body along with your spirit. Just do not let training your body become your idle. Running is a simple way to it. Keep it simple and inline with your spirit. This is some of the psychy of me. Any questions? Comments? I want to know, what is the psychology behind you? Why do you love the things you love. What are your tensions?

best friends and music, maybe, it just might, it could work, but it's not a band, that sounds dumb.

He was born at St Charles medical center in the same room as I was only two weeks before I came into the world, we shared the same due date (which each of us missed by a exactly a week) and both of us where brought home to the same triplex in Bend , OR, 1991. His name is Stephen and me, you know me. We have been best friends now for our entire lives and now we are headed into a senior year together at Mountain View High School. We have not always been together though, he moved to Seatle, then Boise, then back. there might be one more city in there but anyhow, he was not living in Bend until they moved back about four years ago. When they moved back they where drawn by the worship paster position at Westside Church. Westside had been my families home church since I was born but for a four year period my family needed to get away. We were not at Westside when the Smiths came back but soon after I tagged along with Jay and Stephen to a oneighty tuesday night service. It was like, "AHH why did we leave? I love this place!" The presence of God was there and so were a bunch of kids with cool hair and crazy clothes! I came back and have been there since. My family soon followed suit about two months after I started coming. So now Steve and I are in the same place. One problem, it's kinda complicated but basically we realated with each other but never got together. Steve and I tried to get our families together but there was tension and division that crept in and just kept building for the past three years. I still said that he was my best friend and I believe I was still his, but we never talked, never hung, never did anything. It was so awekward. After three years of astrangement finally something broke and it was not a fun break. It broke the hearts of many and still hurts. But with the breaking of our hearts also came the reunion of brothers. The reunion of families. Appologies were given and we have begun growing and rebuiling our relationship. We still rarely see each other and are usually involved in completely different areas but some how are lives mirror each other almost strangely. We bagan writting and performing music a little bit this past year. We have begun to really become best friends again. Today I called him and told him, "I have a car with gas in it, lets go." We went downtown and got coffees, ran into a billion people that we have gotten to know, we went into On Track Ministries to say hi and ended up leading worship. Then we went to my dads shop where there is an upper room with our drum kits and guiters and bass and mics and we sang. We played for about two hours rehearsing the few songs we have writting and hashing out peices of new ones. We got back to my house around 9:30 and ate freshly baked Jessica brownies made some decalf and went out back where we spent the next hour swinging, drinking, and pouring out our hearts to each other. He ended singing, as we finished our last chorus the sprinklers shot on as if to shew us off to bed. He went home after a warm embrace and a long slow good bye. I have my best friend back, and we are writting music and dreaming and loving on God together. Both of us seventeen, both of us with strangly simular desires and struggles. We are going for it this last year in high school. We want to make noise that has some lingering echoes that will change the atmosphere of our school, our town, our generation. I think it's going to work. Be praying, I recorded two songs yesterday and we are entering the sisters folk festival song writting competition. If we get top five we will have a couple cool little gigs out there and some money to begin to invest in our sound. We have not decided for sure but We are thinking about nameing the "band" Eighteen Months. At eighteen months in development a child can solidly stand and begin to run. We are beggining to Run!

Journal, kinda.

I have now been home from steens mountain for 2 and a half days and I am feeling a little caught in routine, so I decided to journal on the blog. I read this morning in Psalms 103 and was having trouble making good contact points with life. I love the psalms for its poetry, its depth of emotion and passion, but this morning I was not seeming to get any revelation. I think it might have to do with some of the wording. You know, it is 6 in the morning I have a bit of a cold and I am trying to dig in to this psalm and it starts busting out words like iniquity, transgressions, redeeming, steadfastness, and on and on. O my soul, Praise the lord! I cant help but wonder what my friends who do not have a relationship with Jesus are thinking when they read this. It probably feels a little like English class reading a mid summer nights dream or Othello. So enough with that rant, there are a few rockin verses in this passage that are awesome. like verse 8-12, "The Lord is gracious and Merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love. HE will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." So powerful, yet I can read it and fall into the whole feeling of reading a classic work of literature. Some call a classic a work that has stood the test of time. My English teacher defined it as a book everyone holds in high regard and no one reads. How do we break free from this attitude especially when life is going crazy, maybe your sick, or maybe just bored. Well lets not treat our bibles like the mandatory reading that we are getting tested on next Tuesday. I find that I can get a really applicable revelation every time I go to the word with a heart that is hungry to hear and willing to be changed by what it reads. So often I just read the word and its like, "read my bible today! I can check that box off." That's not usually when it comes alive to me. We need to come expecting. It is a book held in high regard for a reason, lets read it with a high level of expectancy.

So I Have This Headband...

I am getting ready to take off on my sixth trip this summer, on the most hard core one thus far, Steens High Altitude Running Camp. We run around with 165 crazies from all over the world in short shorts at ten thousand feet for altitude training. It is a blast! You are required to do a couple of key things, eat a lot, drink a lot, run, and wear hats so that you don't get sunburned. I am not a hat guy, I can wear visors and look like tour guide man but normal ball caps make me look and feel like a either a gangsta or a trucker. I can't pull off either, and even though I can't pull it off I usually start acting the part and talk with a drawl or attempt to rhyme and walk the walk. To make it worse you should see my hair right now! I have a Mr T cut. Shaved tight down the sides and about a two inch wide, half inch long mo hawk, down the center. All I need is some bling bling, black paint, and another hundred pounds of muscle and I could pull it off. Anyways I went to REI to find what I call the turban head band. Only intense rock climbers, hard core distance running hippies or Jordan Daniel Wolfe would ever dare to wear one. It is this stretchy tube you can pull over your head like a dew rag or wear as a scarf or scrunch into a headband. The possibilities are endless with this thing! So now I have grown out a bit of a beard and started sporting my hippie head wear to add to my already ridiculous really really short shorts. It is wonderful! And That is my short story for tonight but there will be so much more to tell after the turban headband is put to the test next week. Please be praying for me as I am off and onceagain away from home, instead of being lonely or selfishly focussed on me and my experience to be focused on loving God and people. I love you my running friends your awesome. See you on the trails.

I am still here!

I know its been forever since I have updated this and I still have no pictures which if your like me is pretty much the reason I like blogs. A story is hardly complete without a picture but I have no camera so I might have incomplete stories for a while. So I have been gone all but four days of this summer so far traveling around this beautiful state of Oregon. I was chosen out my school to go to a political science/law program at U of O for week, the day after school got out. After that I went to camp crestview with the elementary schoolers of twelve different churches and got to lead some worship and be a co cabin leader. Then I can home washed clothes and headed back to Eugene to live with my grandpa and his girlfriend because they were awesome enough to host us for the Olympic trials. It has been crazy busy and crazy blessed. I left bend asking God for a clear word on a relationship I was desiring and he not only gave me the answer for that but also the vision for a new life. Life that's more alive, if that makes any sense. I am a visionary and I get so stoked about casting vision and running after it as fast as I can. There is one issue that has always killed me though, pacing. I usually go out to fast with out a clear directive, and then I see something cool and I add that to my cart and graft it onto my vision. I usually make it to the home stretch and then the piano falls on my back and I in the past have fallen short of the finish line. I get so tired and stressed with being pulled in so many directions that I get to the place were I want to quit everything and run away from practical life. It hurts and after you cop out once it is so easy to say "well I have already failed and have a blemished record. Why not cop out again." But God has given me the grace to grow. The truth is that when we come to the thrown grace and ask the lord for forgiveness we are washed clean, white as snow. My record is perfect because I am wearing Jesus! I can be righteous because he is righteous! Now I have learned that I not only can receive grace but I have begun to live in it, walk in it, talk in it, and give it to others. The word says if we do not forgive then our father in heaven will not be able to forgive us. forgive! give and receive grace. It has to flow through you, with no chance to stagnate in waters undisturbed. God has stirred my heart for this next year. Not for the the next five or for the ministry I will serve in "when I grow up." No, I am excited for today. I do not have a record label to sing with or a Nike contract to run for. I have life and life to the fullest, right here, right now. I noticed Jesus lead not from service to service, or concert to concert. He led by simply living with people. Talking and praying with people, teaching people, playing with peoples kids, walking with people. I dont know about you but I would love to be invited even just for one day to live some life with my leaders. Not per say to be taught by them but how about just watch and learn from how they live. to see what it means to run after God and prepare messages in the midst of real life. There has become such a gap in between practical life and ministry. The tension of finding time to serve at church and be involved at school. What if we just lived practle life out doing what needs to be done but going around and intently searching for places to love on those who are hurting. How about family? leadership starts in the home! If you cannot manage your house how can you manage Gods? Love extravagantly on those who are always around, always telling you what to do, always being annoying, always there! What a brilliant opportunity to live ministry! I dont get to walk around all day hangin with some disciples but my little bro is almost always available, my mom, she could always use a hand or a spontaneous I love you. Lets close the gap between practical life and the church. lets close the gap between vision and dreams and living today with passion. I am so tired of dreaming with passion and then just waiting around aimlessly for something "big." I dont have to live from test to test, event to event, service to service. I get to live today, right now, full of the holy spirit loving on people, and being loved by God! Yes I have dreams and would love to date and all that good stuff, but what about living the dream of acts living. Now! lets not wait to really run after God. Go to him get a clean record and lets run. To end the lyrics so on my heart, "I dare you to move, I dare you to move, I dare you to lift yourself up of the floor." I love you guys.

Distracted!

Hey, I am back and I made it before the end of march! It has been a crazy month, track, math, life skills mentoring, ballroom dance, and the rest of practical life. I have no profound post to give you except to tell you this; Gods grace is more than enough for me! He runs after us relentlessly no matter how many directions I am going. His love breaks through! Are family has been in constant warfare for almost four months and it has not been ware fare like the stuff you can fast and pray a couple days and feel it break. It has been as though line after line of the enemies forces come one right after the other, break though one and with no rest or time to celebrate its time to fight again. The first couple weeks you could feel the atmosphere of our house jacked up on the adrenaline from what seemed the first major attack of this series. Whits accident was an interesting one, it was filled with miracle after miracle, filled with outpouring of support and encouragement, yet at the same time there was confusion with my emotions and lack of sleep, pressure to keep up in school, pressure that I could sense from finance. I was loving it, I got to be with people almost twenty four hours away, I was a connecting point for friends and family, and got a whole lot of attention. There is something about the intensity that I loved, something in the being needed on an escalated level. When you are hit to the point of life and death there is a clarity that comes, the ability to see what really matters is sharpened and you can see the worth of family, friends, and more than anything the grace of the one who never sleeps. So that was a season which faded in a blurr and left my math grade in ruin and that was about it as far as I could tell. What I didn't see is that the effect of that collision my sister was in was only a start block for explosion after explosion in almost every area of our families life. I have 1200 math problems to do and it is easter today, we have some awesome friends over and I am feeling distracted. So there is my post, an excerpt from how I am feeling today. Please be praying over our family and I will update yall hopefully more consistantly then I have.