Author Archives: Joshua Menter

My vision flashes from color to blackness. 

My mind races, pictures wheel, and voices yell.

I toss and turn, shivering as sweat pours down my face.

My head swells as the pressure builds, pain throbbing…throbbing.

Events flash with vague familiarity; I’ve been there before.

I hear three voices, each a different persona of my being.

Their shouts make my throbbing pain worse.

“Remember how you handled this in the past?”

One voice declares.

“It didn’t fail you then and nothing’s changed.”

With a past I largely can’t remember, I don’t understand.

I’ve never experienced this before

Though my mind constantly tells me I have.

I recall places I’ve never been

And forget what happened yesterday.

One of the three voices I can’t afford to hear.

It speaks only of death and its greedy desires.

It plots openly the destruction of its host.

Virus-like, yet killed long ago

It just doesn’t seem to ever let go.

The third speaks righteousness to me, soft words of truth

If I take heed, it promises life and preservation.

“I will rid you of the virus and its deeds.

All I ask in return is a life without religious adultery.”

Yet too often, I just listen to the first voice.

JA Menter

Faith is taking seriously what God obligated Himself to do, to take you from where you are to where He wants you to be.

My second week of this fall semester has come to a close.  Homework and assignments are already piling up and I’m struggling to get back in the routine of sitting in boring lectures and waiting on campus for the next thing to start.  Some days are packed with things to run to and others, like today, finish early in the day and leave me time to do things. 

One thing I’ve had time to do so far is eat a lot.  Over the summer, I didn’t really notice how much I ate because the sandwich I ate for lunch was incredibly filling, but already these past two weeks, I’ve noticed that I have eaten a lot of food.  It really started on Saturday when I went up to my aunt’s birthday party.  Parties with my extended family are always like Christmas and Thanksgiving rolled into one.  There’s enough food to feed an army, all of the half million men.  This, of course, is split a limited number of ways and the big-eaters (No, not the former nickname of the Cornhuskers–They are the BUG-eaters) are encouraged to eat even after they really can’t.  We always come away from these shindigs wishing we hadn’t eaten so much, but enjoying the company while we did.

 Sunday, we had my mom’s tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches after church.  i most certainly ate two sandwiches made from mom’s homemade bread (larger than store bought loaves) and several bowls of the soup.  The afternoon’s project was roofing the house and I spent perhaps five hours on the roof.  I was graciously served supper from up there, which was an incredibly delicious chicken and pasta concoction my sister cooked up and a large portion of leftover lasagna.  When I got down off the roof, I went on a run and ate the rest of the leftover lasagna when I got home, another portion silimar to what I ate for supper.

Monday, We did more work on the roof and went to Valentino’s for lunch as a reward. Again, I ate quite a bit, perhaps eight pieces of pizza, a plate of salad, and four glasses of wild cherry coke.  Tuesday, I ate at the campus dining centers twice.   Each plate was loaded with food and I ate my fill. Wednesday was more the same, only I went to Selleck dining only once.  This time, I had a full breakfast and lunch at the same time.  Thursday, I again ate lunch at the dining hall, this time with my dad. Again, I filled the space on my tray with plates and bowls loaded with food.

All this may seem strange to everyone, but it reminds me of a period of my younger years.  From the time I can remember until I was about sixteen, my metabolism was such that I could eat four helpings of food at each meal and it would only maintain my weight. For a few years, my activity level slowed down which, in turn, caused my metabolism to slow down. I gained a little weight while I lived on campus when my activity level dropped to an all time low. No biking to school, no extra-curricular sports, no running just to run. At the very end of that span, my basal metabolic rate, or the amount of energy my body needed just to function, was almost 2000 Calories. Imagine what it must be when I’m running regularly, biking to school everyday and sometimes even twice a day, and walking about an hour every morning.  I think it’s safe to assume I need more than 2000 Calories each day, but I think I’ve gotten that this past week.

I suppose I should use this energy to write the three essays and read the several hundred pages due next week.  I’ve added two paragraphs to my story so far this semester. YEAh!!!

JA Menter

After a long absense, all I can say is that I am dying. This death is physical but not medical. I am dying to my desires, dying to my interests, dying to my fears, dying to myself. While it hurts in some ways, it is a necessary thing if I am to be selfless. I must die! It is hard, because it is the one thing that holds me back from truly fulfilling God’s plan, and is therefore feared by the enemy and my flesh, but it (my flesh) must die. If my body is dead, I live with a numbness unexplanable. Yet I also live with a passion for Christ that I can’t feel in my physical body, but see in my heart, the part of me that can’t die. If I seem distant, know that this is my flesh dying and my mind unable to grasp what there is in the physical to live for. I live with no apparent regard for myself, but I want to show how much I truly care about you and the people around me. I want to reflect Christ’s love without the barrier of your understanding of my motives. Sometimes that means saying hard things, but I would not say them unless I knew you needed to hear them, or I knew that you heard them the way God speaks and not the insufficient ways I communicate. I want to be like Jesus!!

Amalek->Who Am I?

106…107…108! Ready or not, here I come!  Gotcha!

And what is the significance of 108, you may ask?  There are 107 days between May 9th and August 25th, the period of time for a college student that is considered “summer”.  I’ve played “hide and seek” many times in my life, but this time, I feel like the counter was counting by 54’s, and I’ve had only enough time to take three half-hearted steps before I hear the famous words, “Ready of not, here I come.” At times, the counter seemed to be taking a break between each individual number between 1-108 to take a three month tour of Europe or something, yet now the numbers pile up and ring in the air clattering to indistinction.

So what did I do with day 106, one might ask?  I spent it sleeping in til 8 (even on a Saturday) and biking to campus to get books. I compared prices at the two bookstores and finally found what I needed for $350, an amount I would usually have winced as I charged it to my Ncard, but this time I wrote out a check. Lunchtime crept upon me quickly and I discarded my heavy books at the Rec center and ate an overpriced meal at Amigos.

After watching about an hour of high school football on ESPN, I bought a ticket to “The Dark Knight” and took in the movie my friends and family had raved so much about. It was good, but not as good as they said for reasons they won’t understand. (If you what to try, just email me:)) I biked home unable to see the left side of faces of the people I met along the way. I think it had something to do with the lingering effects of a mild concussion I may or may not have suffered at the hands of evil cabinet doors at work the day before. Home brought a headache that throbbed in the front of my head and wouldn’t go away. I slept, or tried to sleep until my siblings got home at 9.

Today (day 107) I woke at 7 to do my morning routine and, about 7:50, went on a walk to talk to God and think. It was refreshing and church later continued the renewal. It’s amazing what God does when we listen to His voice and obey.

Day 108 is coming quickly and whether I’m ready of not, school is about to begin. Pray for me that the transition would be smooth and that I would be able to find a time to rest. Pray especially that I would continue to press in to God and follow His lead as He matures me into the image of His son in this new season of my life.

JA Menter

“In order to lift high the One who is above all things (Phil 2:9-11), I must bow down that He might become bigger in my estimation.”

These phenomenon have fascinated me of late. I haven’t been diligent enough to view many sunrises, but the sunsets from the past three weeks have captivated my interest.  I went on a short 6 mile run on Sunday evening and caught the sunset that night. It was amazingly gorgeous. I had been lefting up requests to God, first from Sunday school, then ongoing things from my friends and family, like Bekah returning from Mexico and my younger siblings starting another year of high school. At 8:43, I paused in my praying to thank God for making such a beautiful scene before my eyes. He shows His creativity and power in the way all the colors blend at just the right time to create a picture. I tell Him how much I love Him and how worthy He is of my praise, a theme in my conversations with Him. It flows out of me in an outburst of emotion founded on facts about God and the truth of His working in my life. I continue with my run and interceeding for my friends until my pace doesn’t allow me to speak (this usually happens around miles 4 and 5)

As I think more and more about both sunrises and sunsets, I see that a sunset signals the end of a day. It is a reminder of God’s care for me and His power over all things, but it is also a warning that I am coming to the end of the day and I mustn’t have unfinished business. It prods me to examine what I did and who I interacted with. Is there anything I regret? Are there things I left unsaid that I need to say? Has the sun gone down on my anger and do I have someone to forgive? (Eph 4:26) Tomorrow hasn’t been promised to me and I must do everything I can while it is still today. I am not guaranteed the next sunrise.

That same sunrise tells me that God has blessed me with another day and expects me to do His work in it. I should rejoice and be glad in it. How often do I take the next day for granted and then complain about what I have to do in it? Each day is a gift, yet so often I view it as a day like any day in my past that must be suffered through to get to a day perhaps more enjoyable, like the weekend.

I think I should be cherishing my daily gift, which is why I’m going to try to catch as many sunrises as I can from now on, starting with the next one, Lord willing. If anyone cares to join me wherever you are, feel free to…

JA Menter

“See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” Eph 5:15-16

BTW, instead of telling me this is a good thought, (if it is, in fact, a good thought?!) shall we follow it up with action. (James 1:22)

Last week, I spent 17 hours at church scrapping cracks and mudding them in, sanding, priming, and painting. That entire week, I listened to worship CDs over the church’s sound system, since I was working in the santuary. For the past two weeks, at least, I had had the sond “Savior King” stuck in my head. It’s a very good song to have captured my brain, as opposed to the bad conotations we have when we think of a song “stuck” in our heads. In fact, I really didn’t have any desire to dislodge it.
The youth worship team did this song for their Sunday and made a CD of all the songs they’d chosen. On Monday and Wednesday of last week and all the week before, I listened to that CD over and over, but Wednesday night I “stole” “Facedown” from Anna (I’ll return it when I finish my work at church on Wednesday) and listened to it on Friday and Saturday.
By Saturday morning, I’d spent 10 hours at church and 43 hours at work. The Valient Men had a prayer meeting at 7:30 that morning and I had been told by God the Sunday before that I needed to go, so off I went.
I prayed with the four other men that came until 9 and set up to finish painting the santuary. I popped “Facedown” into the player and went to work, ocassionally singing along with the annointed Matt Redmann. My heart already soft and malleable from an hour and a half of prayer, whenever I’d start to sing along, the words of the songs and the impomptu praise from Matt would take deeper meaning and tears would well up in my eyes. I stopped painting at least three times because my tears of awe and joy blocked my vision of the physical world and I couldn’t see where I was supposed to paint. At least once, I set down my brush or roller and declared praise to God in my own words.
I didn’t get done at church until 4pm (Ie I worked nonstop on painting for 7 hours) but I never felt the pains of hunger except for God to be praised as He deserved, both in my life and in the life of the people I knew. For those seven hours, God was incredibly real and acutely worthy of my praise.
The night before I had complained to everybody about how I was going to struggle through the work I needed to do Saturday, but when it came time to do it, the work wasn’t an obligation for me but a service that I was happily willing to do. It is truly amazing what God has done in my life so far this summer to mature me into His likeness, but the summer’s still got a week left. There’s still much more He can do in me and through me.

JA Menter

“And He who began a good work in me is faithful to carry it out to completion until the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Maturity, by its very nature, can only be seen in others, not declared to be possessed in one’s self.  Humility is the foundation on which all other characteristics of maturity build. Humility can’t draw attention to itself without being false.  Proverbs 27:2 says, “Let another man praise you, and not your own tongue; a stranger and not your own lips.” (Prov. 27:21)

Humility is defined, according to Webster, as a deep sense of one’s own unworthiness in the sight of God.  In my own words, humility is seeing yourself in light of God’s holiness through the lens of His mercy.

Bond-Service stems from an understanding of the price God paid to love us. (John 15:13)  Jesus gave His life as a bride price for the church, His bride (Eph 5:25-27).  In ancient times, the bride price was a payment given in public to show the value the bridegroom placed on his bride.  Jesus chose us and considered our worth to be enough that He would die to have us (John 15:16; Rom 5:8).  That knowledge, coupled with humility, leads to gratefulness and love, demonstrated in obeying Christ as it says in John 14:15;  “If you love Me, keep My commandments.”

Obedience to Christ is an ongoing thing.  A bondservant must choose each day to obey his master, a Master he sold himself to of his own choice. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 says, “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?  For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.”

Obedience and serving are not always the same thing, because serving is a matter of the heart.  It is the difference between service and servitude in a purely worldly sense.  Servitude has a motive of duty behind every action, whether the actor wants to do the action or not, he must. Serving, on the other hand, doesn’t have that same duty driving it. It can, but the motive for serving (Service) is to be a help to the one being served. This comes back to Paul’s admonishment of the church in Philippians 2:3-4;  “Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.  Let each of you look not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean that doing what you’re told to help someone out isn’t serving them, but it is all about the heart and your attitude about doing it.  If you obey because it’s your duty, are you really serving? I believe that in this situation you have become a slave and not a bondservant, a servant who wants to serve his Master.

Selflessness is the regard of a person for others’ interests before one’s own (Phil 2:4).  This takes humility because it is human nature to think of themselves first and often times neglect to think about the people around them.  Really, John 3:30 is a necessary prayer: “He must increase and I must decrease.”

This maturity is not only for one person to enjoy. It must be acted out in interactions with others. Service to others is only meaningful by 1 Cor 13 when selflessness is involved in obedience to Christ. It is a vital part of us that was taken from us at the fall, when we were deceived into thinking that we could be like God. Only God could be God perfectly.  I can’t truly be myself until I am truly selfless.  As Psalm 17:15 says, “As for me, I will see Your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake in Your likeness.”

My prayer has become:  “Lord, I choose to be your bondservant. Make me selfless as I humbly obey you. Mold me into the image of Your Son that I might reflect Christ.

~JA Menter

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I hope one day I’ll be able, like Paul, to say, “Imitate me, just as I also imitate Christ.” (1 Cor 11:1)

Burdened, I am with the weight of my thoughts.

A restless struggle within me stealing my strength.

The mask I wear no longer able to conceal me.

A mask I used to hide my ugliness.

In this battle I’m losing, I can’t see Moses’ arms.

Will someone join my fight and help me stand?

I am called Joshua but who am I?

Apparently, I can write a screenplay that will make everyone think, but I believe I’ll just give everyone a sample set of word oddities.

~<>~

“Virtues cave!  Slaves crave and knaves brave.”

~<>~

Many things foreseen yet doesn’t see

Ageless and timeless though it be.

Experiences and knowledge together

Shows itself in colors of salt and pepper

A guardian of the heart and hand,

Wisdom preserves us to the sand.

As a young man journeys the paths of life,

He sees but a poor reflection, like looking into silver.

Many obstacles lay before him and decisions to win.

He has a chance to do something great,

But knows only his sovereign could really achieve it.

The passion is so connected to the man that he wouldn’t relent.

Again, this is just a free sample.  I have some more stuff but there is a price on it. If anyone is interested, just holler. <-~_~->

JA Menter

“I can’t truly be myself until I am truly selfless.”

I have done a lot of nothings since my last post, not because I wanted to do nothing or I had nothing to do, but because nothing had a lot to do with me. I have written that and now don’t know what I mean; I guess that tells you I have nothing in my brain. I really should give you all what you want, a narative of my past week.

The week started out alright. I don’t remember what happened on Saturday, not for any questionable reasons, so it must have been good. Sunday, everyone left to tube the Niobrara or go on the youth trip. To be honest, I was incredibly depressed. It’s weird how much you miss interactions with people, even when interaction on an acquaintance level is difficult for you. I found myself wishing I had the foreknowledge to take a few days off work so I could go tubing, but realizing quite early that, in God’s sovereignty, He knew I needed to stay behind. This depressing overtone clouded the entire day when restlessness, in the sense that you feel like you could never be at rest, and boredom mingled strangely with a desire to do something, if only to take my thoughts away from being by myself.

In that state, nothing (there’s that word again) seemed able to throw me out of it. I tried to walk but all I could think of was what I could do now that it was just me. Running was out of the question, still recovering from 13+ miles of sweat pouring from me at every step. I ended up running errands and picking up some war movies like “Gladiator” and “The Great Raid”. Dan and Deb called me up wanting to watch a movie and we watched “Sentinel”, The jury is still deliberating about that one.

Monday was like any other monday, except that there was no one to text about random silly things, because they were all “off the grid”. I worked my eight hours and bought a new tire rim for my bicycle. After glancing fleetingly at the refridgerator, I sped off to church to scrape cracks in drywall, before returning an hour later to make hashbrowns and meat burritos and watch “Gladiator”.

Tuesday was another monday, though not in the sense of my other post, but rather most of the things I did on monday, I also did on Tuesday. I mudded, both at work and church, put the new rim on my bike, and watched “The Great Raid”, or part of it. I almost fell asleep because I started the movie around 11 o’clock and was already exhausted from working.

Wednesday, more the same. Nothing (That word again) really to distinguish it from any other day this week. I biked to work, perhaps a week after the initial flat tire made me use a motor, sanded and primed the mud at church for 2 hours in the middle of a meeting and raced home to gas up the car before the vacationers returned. I finished watching “The Great Raid”

Today, I finished all the projects I’d been doing at work and was given more, of course. I’ve been so tired that I seem to be just going through the motions when I know that I should be living out Colosians 3:17.  Pray for me that I would take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor 10:5)

JA Menter

“I can’t truly be myself until I am truly selfless.”