Andrew Ticknor
Heading Off To Mission Year
Hi, my name is Andrew Ticknor. I just turned 24 and i graduated from Olivet Nazarene University with a degree in Youth Ministry. While i was at college and after graduating I have worked in the inner city and with youth, two of my biggest passions. I also like to play sports, read and hang out with people. I stumbled upon Mission Year while reading a blog on the Sojourners website. After reading the blog, i spent a few hours reading everything about Mission Year on their website. Mission Year seemed like the perfect fit for me. I felt like it was an opportunity to serve Christ and that the things I was most passionate about, they were most passionate about. I loved how much of the focus of Mission Year was on relationships as well as the community aspect, social justice and serving your neighbors. I want this year to be a year of listening and learning. A year where i listen and learn about how best to deal with poverty, work in the inner city, love and care about people and help to advance the kindgom of God here on earth. For the past few years, I have felt God calling me and drawing me to a deeper relationship with Him. I don’t want to trust in my own gifts, talents and abilities, I want to daily be relying on Christ and his working through me. I feel like Mission Year gives me this opportunity to stretch myself, to be challenged, and to grow in new ways. I look forward to this year, knowing it will have its ups and downs, that it won’t always be easy, but that it will be well worth it.
About Mission Year
Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of young people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor. Learn more about our first year program…
Andrew Ticknor's Blog
Blog / Sep 15, 03:16 PM
If anyone would like to keep up with me and my random musings, i will occasionally be blogging at
http://atick84.blogspot.com/
An Interesting Tolstory / Jul 9, 10:55 AM
I found the following story interesting and thought-provoking in a book of short stories I am reading written by Tolstoy:
Once upon a time the archangel Gabriel heard the voice of God speaking from paradise, blessing someone. Gabriel said “Surely this is some important servant of my Lord, God the Father. He must be a great saint, or hermit, or wise man.”
The archangel went down to earth looking for the man, but he could not find him, neither on earth nor in heaven. Then he addressed God and said “Oh Lord, my God, please show me how to find the object of your love.”
God answered him, “Go to this villiage. And there, in a little temple, you will see a fire.”
The angel went down to the temple, and he found a man praying before an idol. Then he went back to God and said “Lord, how can you look with love upon this idol worshiper?”
God said “It is true that he does not understand me properly. Not one living is capable of understanding me as I am. The wisest of the whole human race are just as far from really understanding me as this man is. I look not at his mind, but at his heart. The heart of this man searches for me, and therefore he is close to me.”
Comment [3]
Mind Bombs / Jun 24, 02:52 PM
For a good time read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton simultaneously with How (Not) to Speak of God by Peter Rollins.
Comment [1]
To clearly see we must look within / Jun 12, 03:02 PM
Three self-realizations:
1. I let very few people in. There are not a lot of people who I have mutually vulnerable relationships with.
2. Those people who I do let in, I have exacting standards of the love that I expect from them, the way I want them to love me.
3. I come nowhere close to loving anyone in the way that I want to be loved and never have.
Spiritual Growth / Jun 2, 11:24 AM
I have always been frustrated with the image of the spiritual life being a roller coaster, however I have often found it to be the most realistic way of describing my life. This year I have discovered new, richer, more fulfilling pictures of what the spiritual life is, or at least has been to me. I feel like my life has been so up and down, so cyclic. I feel like I struggle with so many of the same things that I have struggled with for so long and that no matter how long I seem to thrive or be in a “good” place that I always end up in similar lows. It is very frustrating to me and I long to reach some sort of continually upward growth or some heavenly plateau. Last week at Bible study at our church, Emily, who was leading, talked about how often times spiritually we take 2 steps forward and then 1 step back. She was telling us how this is often not even intentional, us knowingly taking steps backward or regressing, but that we just become aware of ways that we have been off course, ways that we are not as far along as we would like to think, ways that pride, greed, lust and envy have snuck into our lives. I was thinking about the ups and downs of my life, the different reasons that I am frustrated by setbacks. I think there are two different types of setbacks or steps back, one of those being good and even necessary and the other one being bad and the source of a lot of frustration with myself. The first type is what I just mentioned, the awareness of our unintentional regression, the awareness of new ways that our lives are off the mark, what I have found is the deeper I get in my faith, the more closer and deeper the issues come to my heart. Instead of just focusing on not being mean or releasing my anger on people, I am faced with the hidden bitterness and hatred in my heart which no one sees or knows of. The second type of setback, the one that annoys me is the mistakes that I continually make, when I don’t learn from things and I continue to do things, knowing what the end result will be, knowing that I don’t want to act a certain way or be a certain type of person. It frustrates me when I am this way and when I feel like I am going back in time and not growing and learning from my mistakes. I think that I am coming to a place where I am thankful for the way I have become the person I am because of many of the sins and mistakes of my past, not glad that I did certain things or that certain things happened in my life, but joyful for the way I have grown and learned from them. I know that as I live my life I will continually sin, make mistakes and take steps backward, however with each of these incidents I am faced with the opportunity to learn and grow and take steps forward or to revert back to ways I have been and to let those setbacks immobilize me. This year we had a Mission Year training in which Jimmy McGee brought a labyrinth and used it as an image of the spiritual life for us. I feel like this image is a much more useful image for me, compared to the roller coaster image. With a labyrinth, there is movement, there is journey, the path is path to the center and then back out from the center, at times you can be close to the center, yet in terms of the path, very far from actually being at the center. As I was contemplating this image, I thought a better image would be some sort of multi-level labyrinth. Instead of thinking merely of spiritual growth as something linear and 2D, it is so much deeper than that, something 3D or even beyond that. We often go in different directions, but all the time, it is a search, a journey, we are never stagnant, we are always either growing or dying, even if we are doing nothing, and as I have heard described, not only is our journey inward to find our center, we also journey outward back into the world. I love this concept and its correlation for us as Christians. As we grow spiritually, as our eyes are opened, as we deepen in our understanding of God and our faith, it cannot be separated from the world in which we find ourselves, from our praxis, the way our lives are lived and our involvement in the world often is a primary way in which we are formed spiritually. This new way of viewing spiritual growth has been helpful to me as I continue on this amazing, confusing, beautiful, heart-breaking and always interesting journey which is life.
