..alone

I believe that there is a distinct difference between being lonely and being alone. Right now I feel very alone. I feel like that there are people in my life that I love incredibly and experiencing the depth and breath of friendship this year has been incredible. I feel like there are so many more people in my life to pour into and my heart is overwhelmed with joy thinking about these possibilities. I love nothing more than to sit down with someone and peer into their soul, digging to the point where they know someone actually cares. It makes me slightly gitty. I am very grateful for these feelings and thank God for them daily, except I think that he is bringing along another longing. I have been faced with this idea of not being known this year. I have experienced it shallowly in my small group, but I have not dumped my load yet so I don't feel like there is much intimacy. I have become exceedingly frustrated with my parents and their apathy when it comes to developing an authentic relationship with me. I want to badly for someone to know who I really am, at the marrow of my soul and I have come to the realization that the only person who will ever be able to do that is Jesus. I am so thankful to him for making needs and passionate longings that only he can fill. Divine comedy. I however feel very alone in this time of my life. Perhaps God is revealing that I am alone to prepare me to not be in that state. I feel like the gradual exposure to marriage begins with an uneasiness about one's current situation. I don't know if that is actually the reason for this feeling and I feel very trite and cliche when I mention that concept. That said, I do want someone to walk through life with more than anything else right now. Someone who is willing to ask me how my day is without me asking first. Someone who will see pain on my face and ask me how I am doing, never thinking about when I will reciprocate the same question. I want someone who will care enough to take two hours out of their day, walk to gelato and experience a slice of life with me. I want someone who is willing to risk a little, trust a little, and have faith in the person I am, with all of my wounds and oddities. I long for someone to accept me how I am but push me into who I need to become, not a leader on a project site but as a co-laborer on this journey of life. The aloneness I feel can be tasted in large groups of people, hallow conversations, mock deep conversations, and empty phone calls. I want to loose this grip on a life of mediocrity and allow the passions of my heart and my longing for so much more take me higher and higher into the presence of Jesus. I want to experience this with someone else who is just a little bit crazy. I will be waiting...

..homeless

Two days from now it will be a month since my last post. What has the last month of my existence been like? Oh dear... I don't think that there is one singlular word to sum it up. It has been a delicate and strenuous balance of conviction, realization, frustration, elation, joy, peace, unsettledness, hurt, longing, desire, tension, and a deep longing for heaven. God has been bringing me to the end of myself, again and again. It is so easy for words of God to slip from my lips, heavy with the fire of conviction and passion, but seldom to I let them soak into the soil of my being, to make substantial changes in my life. I have been treading forward, diligently with my banner thrust in the air. My lofty ideals give me comfort. My knowledge of things I view as important let me sleep peacefully at night. And then there are those time where God quietly knocks on my heart and I let him in and we have tranquil conversations, sitting on the floorboards of my soul and I realize that I have been spitting on his face and cursing him the last week of my life. I say I am sorry, not really realizing how much I have hurt him, and say a sheepish thank you, never understanding how amazing it is just to be accepted by him. I don't get how I can kill my Jesus everyday with the things that I do and yet he is so willing to wrap his arms around me and just give me a hug and a warm meal when I come back in from the streets. I am homeless without him in my life. I am a new person, with my citizenship in the heavenly realm and yet I sleep on the streets of this planet so many nights, shivering, starving, and deeply alone. I am wandering the streets of this dark, decaying world, looking for beauty and peace and joy and then I feel so foolish because I remember that my dad has all of those realities waiting for me. I am so glad that his love does not depend on my ability to remember him.

..fleeting

The things that are fleeting are my thoughts, they are fleeting away from this place. I am wondering all over the world with my brain, and then coming back the the stancdard center of it all, me. There is nothing more disgusting in life than a self centered existence. Not only do you not include God in your life but you replace him with the most faulty thing, yourself. I long just to serve. I wonder what it would feel like to be on the other side of the globe right now, risking death and disease and just doing it. Waking up early, bathing your day in prayer and faith, and going to bed completely exhausted but fulfilled and overjoyed with the promise of doing it again. Tomorrow I have no such promise. I have the promise of 3 classes, plenty of food, comfortable social interaction, and selfish thoughts. Teach me how I am to live in the place that you have put me God. Teach me to be grateful for the circumstances, situations, and people you have brought into my life. Give me new breath where I need it and transform my eyes to see my world the way in which you do. You have a phenomenal plan for my life and I am too near sighted to see it. Give me your eyes God. Give me people who long after you. Make me your child.

..tension

The concept of tension has been one that has been consuming my life as of late. It seems that there is this divine tension in everything that happens to me and I embrace it and love it while simoteniously dreading its implications. It brings me to the place where I am not comfortable with certain things that I don't think that I should be okay with. Simple things such as where are my clothes coming from, and my food, and are the choices I am making with my financial blessings really glorifying God? I have the immense tension of being so incredibly blessed to be a Christian university and be experiencing the amazing things that I have but at the same time I feel as though an intimate relationship with Christ would be so incredibly real in a situation other than this. I long for peace about this situation but rejoice in the tension, because it pushes me to think and allows me to be okay with whatever circumstance I am in. I find tension in the way I desire to live and the life that I blooming before me. Perhaps that tension is simply there to drive me to my knees in my weakness and to cry my Abba father and beg for his presence in my life. It draws me closer to a Jesus that isn't always easy to understand but takes pleasure in his ambiguity at time, since you must rely on his power to know him. Benny asked me today if I knew that Jesus loved me. The answer is yes, but sometimes I wonder if my lifestyle choices reflect my love for my Jesus.

..revolution

The taste of the world revolution on my lips is a combination of excitement, confusion, and fear. I know that I am called to live in a way that directly opposes modern culture. I don't really know how to describe it but its as if this thing, currently called "the revolution", chose me. I was sitting in nice suburbia and then transferred in the same comfort to the city and then became irrated. I started to get angry with church. 'Christians', and my school and I didn't really know where that came from. Frustration with apathy, lukewarmness, and triggered for the teaching of Jesus. These feeling began to boil up inside of me and I didn't really know what to do and I saw glimpses of it in others around campus but it was just a glimpse. The crazy thing about it now though is that there are other people like me. Except they have translated their frustration into action and have begun to live a life that stands in direct contrast with our current culture.

I suppose I sit here and I read my Bible, the beautiful words of my crazy, homeless savior, Jesus and think that they were not just lofty ideal or only culturally relevant two thousand years ago. His words transcend the culture he was in and directly apply to the United States of America in the autumn of 2006. In fact they are more than applicable, they are truly revolutionary. How sad is it that to be a revolutionary all you must do is read your Bible and do it? God help the church and the people who make up the church.

As I sit here right now, I am approximately 9 days away from entering back into SPU land, a disenchanting combination of self gratifying good works and stale good news. I walk into this year different from the last. Last year I still had the beautiful, virgin ideals of an incoming freshman but after a year, they have lost their charm and have been broken against the rocks of white, wealthy, Christianity at its worst. I am very grateful that my awkward dance with mediocrity is over. I am very much will to start a new chapter in my life. Where I view the Bible as an instruction book, not just lofty ideas, but things that I must do if I claim the name of Christ.

I have always longed to be different. I think its a naturally selfish desire to be unique and different from the rest. How ever I long for me and a ton of people to be radically different. To stay in our situations and life callings but follow Jesus, and actually try to understand what that means. I want to meet the crazies that actually believe that following Jesus is possible. That heaven is not simply a destination in the sky, but a reality that Christians are called to develop on earth, despite the sin surrounding us and in us. It seems to me, that no matter what road we go down as Christians, whether we are accountants, artists, mathematicians, fighters, protesters, revolutionaries, soccer moms, doctors, missionaries, business people, or gas attendants.

I am ready for something different. Something that I have been waiting in anticipation for the last several months. God give me the faith to actually follow the words of your Son this next year and bring me into crazy, authentic fellowship with others that are crazy in love with you too.

..faithfulness

As I skip from June to the end of August I look back on the journey that God has taken me on and I stand in complete amazement. I don't even know how to describe the things that he has done for me and the ways that I have had an opprotunity to meet him this summer. His presence has become so tangible in my life and I don't think that I could think of living my life in any other way. People ask me how my summer was and I sit there, speachless and full of awe toward God that I cannot even express in words. How do I explain a whole summer of experiencing his face without breaking into simoteneous laughter because I am so over flowing with joy and tears because I am so incredibally thankful. His love towards me this summer has touched my heart in a way that is so intimate I don't know if there will ever be a way to express what it 'was like'. I tend to almost not want to talk about it with people in fear that I will butcher my experience and then remember something other than what reality was. I have been back for about a week and being back has been slightly surreal. Here I look at my plate and all I really have is myself. There are no responsiblities that I must take care of and that void of assignment leads to a selfish existance for me. At camp there were other people there. I looked into my day and I saw the faces of kids that needed love, comfort, acceptance, and grace and all I could do was look to the face of God, because his supply was endless when mine ran out after the first week. Experiencing the presence of God in my life was something that was different for me this summer because I needed him to survive, emotionally, mentally, and physically, and he was there, caring me through the entirety of the time. His faithfulness throughout the summer brings me to my knees and makes me long to trust him more. How great is our God that he rewards us immensly for just seeking his face? The irony in that is that there is nothing else that would ever satisfy me more than just being with him. He truely is with the broken hearted and the downcast. I suppose I am in an ackward possition now because in my life back home God is not really needed. I get my 10 hours of sleep nightly and there really aren't many difficult behavioral issuses to deal with. I don't like living like this. I really don't. When I look back at my day and I see that really, my life didn't make much of an impact, I can hardly enter into the presence of God without feeling slightly ashamed and emptyhanded. I would rather live a life of small, earthly meaning but need the presence of God for survival that exist in the absence of need and be forced to create it.

But where would that leave me?

Does that leave me at SPU? or does that lead me into the wilderness? or does that lead me into the land of the greatly unknown for a wild adventure with my creator?

Time will tell I suppose. God is good, all the time and I will be waiting and preparing for what he has in store for me.

I want to live for something great. I want to exist in the power of God and have my only other option be death, not a life that is lukewarm with apathy.

Create in me a consuming fire for yourself, God. Let me walk boldly into your trone room and declare your name in my life every minute of my day. Take all of who I am and place me in the fire. Comsume all that is not of you and strip it away. If that takes me to a place of painful, gashing wounds, I know that you are faithful to heal me. If that leads me into a land that I must walk through with only God, I will swallow hard and walk on in faith. No matter where Jesus will lead me, I will follow with all of who I am because when I am found in him I can do all things through his strength.

Lord, I ask you right now, in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, to bring forth a new chapter in my life of authentic faith. Bring me people that are passionatly in love with you and who will push me on towards the goal you have marked out for me. Let me seek your face and give up the things that do not please you and give up the things that I think please you but simply make me to busty to serve. Reveal to me your heart, so I may serve you in a way that brings you the most glory.

You are so worthy God, of all of my praise. Be with me and be my God.

..laziness

I have fallen back into my natural and comfortable cycle of doing pretty much nothing. I haven't really sat down and read my Bible for quite a while and honestly, don't really have a passion to. I haven't made much of an effort to talk to people and have felt slightly out of place in my own skin. I have mentally given myself a break, saying that camp will be exhausting mentally and emotionally and that I will give enough of myself there. I have also started to read the book, Chasing Daylight, and that has made me far more aware of the importance of every moment, the small and the large. I don't really have anything else to say, but I am tired of not doing anything and excited to turn over a new leaf, where the exciting and the mundane have the same value of importance and God doesn't take a raincheck because I will see him a lot later.

It was really good to see my family and it was really to realize that I have changed.
I miss my friends, but it is good to be my own person and I know that I will be stronger because of the absence.
God is good all the time, all the time God is good.