Monday, June 30, 2008
mobile like the wind
Today I finished moving into the house of my pastor and his wife. This would be the sixth place I have lived since this time last year. My parents were nomads growing up but I think this is a record even for me. I've come to appreciate my singleness a lot more these last twelve months. I know this new appreciation is because, as a single I am very mobile and very flexible. I can move wherever the wind of God's call takes me - and do on very little notice. It's exciting and unpredictable and I love it!
Sunday, June 22, 2008
heros
I just read a very interesting article on Focus on the Family's websight PluggedIn. This is my first time looking at this sight; I wanted to check on a movie for my littlest sister. While looking up the movie I needed to check on I found this article. It is some thoughts on our postmodern culture and the rising popularity of superhero movies. It seems like a relativist culture would not enjoy superhero movies because they are full of absolutes; right and wrong, good and evil, heros and villains. Yet superhero movies do very well in the box office.
Deep in our hearts I think that humanity knows truth, we just get mixed up sometimes. I wonder, like the writer of this article, if the rise of hero movies could be tied to something deeper. Are people longing to know what is right and to give their lives - even sacrifice to be a hero, do right, and make the world a better place? I think so. I see a lot of apathy in my generation, yet I also see this side that wants to be a hero, that is extreme and thrill - seeking. I'm praying that we embrace our extreme side before age and life settle in and we forget our dreams of making a difference in the world around us.
Deep in our hearts I think that humanity knows truth, we just get mixed up sometimes. I wonder, like the writer of this article, if the rise of hero movies could be tied to something deeper. Are people longing to know what is right and to give their lives - even sacrifice to be a hero, do right, and make the world a better place? I think so. I see a lot of apathy in my generation, yet I also see this side that wants to be a hero, that is extreme and thrill - seeking. I'm praying that we embrace our extreme side before age and life settle in and we forget our dreams of making a difference in the world around us.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
pain
There used to be this policy in my family that we were never allowed to throw old schoolwork away. As a result of this policy I had a box of old school work dating all the way back to sixth grade. Being an adult I was recently informed that I now have the right to go through and get rid of any old homework I no longer need. I did so this morning. It was a very interesting job.
I noticed a drastic change about ninth grade. In middle school I was absolutely convinced that I was the stupidest, shallowest person in my class. Feeling that there was nothing I could do about it, I usually lived up to my own expectations. Then, in the middle of my eighth grade year, the private school relocated and I couldn't go anymore. Basically I lost my social life and saw my closest friend from the school only on rare occasions. I homeschooled (read: no classmates) I was very lonely and got pretty depressed. Then God began to pull on my heart in a new way and became my only Friend. My freshman year of highschool arrived and it seemed like big things just kept going wrong in my life. Too big for a fifteen-year-old to handle kinds of things. Stuff I couldn't do anything about. On top of it all I was shy and friendless. The next year, at sixteen I began going to a new private school. I no longer believed I was shallow with nothing to say. Looking through my old school assignments I see a seemingly sudden depth. I went into the new school still believing I was not very smart, and that I would be the kid who struggles to maintain a C average. This time though, rather than give in to a mediocre school performance I determined to try my best anyway. Turns out I had a straight A student hiding in there.
Why am I talking about this? I've been thinking about pain the last few months. Pain seems senseless. This is true no mater what kind of pain it is. A young toddler who bumps his head and cries probably doesn't understand or appreciate his pain any more than the man who loses his family in a car accident.
Not that I'm saying all pains and tragedies are equal; they are not. Only that in our own private little hearts our pain can seem so huge and overwhelming and impossible to understand. We ask why these things are happening. Usually it seems there is no answer to our most heart-wrenching questions. Only silence seems to meet these types of prayers echoing back our own pain. In the bigger struggles of just a few years ago I was guilty of crumbling under the weight of such unanswered pain. It's so hard to believe that God is still with me loving me when the whole world seems to be falling apart around me. When He doesn't stop it from happening.
Pain changes us in ways that we could never predict or appreciate while we are in it. At least in my times of greatest pain I can only see how it's ruining me. How I am weaker, more insecure, less capable than before. Often I have gotten angry feeling like God allowed pain into my life and then didn't even use it for good.
I'm starting to think of pain as a cruel shovel digging my soul deeper. Something that is made deeper can do two things. It can just be a bigger empty space and in that way merely highlight every past pain and the injustice of it all. Or something that is made deeper can be a bigger empty space that has a greater capacity to hold more of God's life. I've found the second to be true in my life. When I am honest with God about where I am and how I hurt, even how unfair I think it is; when I pray and seek to find God in the pain and know He is with me even when silent; when I trust Him as far as I can praying that He will build in me the capacity for trust I lack; when, to sum up, I focus on following Him however struggling that following may be then I begin to see my pains redeemed.
It is not anything I do. I am quite UNsaintly when it comes to enduring suffering. I can fall into despair and self-pity quite easily. Yet somehow God doesn't let us fall out of His hands - even when in our self-destructiveness we would jump out of His hands. Somehow despite all my anger and inability to understand pain, God uses it all to empty me further. Then, to pile grace on top of grace, once emptied God helps me choose to allow Him to fill me rather than focus on self-pity. Often in the middle of pain I feel like God isn't there, but it has been through that same pain that I have been allowed to glimpse His loving grace most fully.
I noticed a drastic change about ninth grade. In middle school I was absolutely convinced that I was the stupidest, shallowest person in my class. Feeling that there was nothing I could do about it, I usually lived up to my own expectations. Then, in the middle of my eighth grade year, the private school relocated and I couldn't go anymore. Basically I lost my social life and saw my closest friend from the school only on rare occasions. I homeschooled (read: no classmates) I was very lonely and got pretty depressed. Then God began to pull on my heart in a new way and became my only Friend. My freshman year of highschool arrived and it seemed like big things just kept going wrong in my life. Too big for a fifteen-year-old to handle kinds of things. Stuff I couldn't do anything about. On top of it all I was shy and friendless. The next year, at sixteen I began going to a new private school. I no longer believed I was shallow with nothing to say. Looking through my old school assignments I see a seemingly sudden depth. I went into the new school still believing I was not very smart, and that I would be the kid who struggles to maintain a C average. This time though, rather than give in to a mediocre school performance I determined to try my best anyway. Turns out I had a straight A student hiding in there.
Why am I talking about this? I've been thinking about pain the last few months. Pain seems senseless. This is true no mater what kind of pain it is. A young toddler who bumps his head and cries probably doesn't understand or appreciate his pain any more than the man who loses his family in a car accident.
Not that I'm saying all pains and tragedies are equal; they are not. Only that in our own private little hearts our pain can seem so huge and overwhelming and impossible to understand. We ask why these things are happening. Usually it seems there is no answer to our most heart-wrenching questions. Only silence seems to meet these types of prayers echoing back our own pain. In the bigger struggles of just a few years ago I was guilty of crumbling under the weight of such unanswered pain. It's so hard to believe that God is still with me loving me when the whole world seems to be falling apart around me. When He doesn't stop it from happening.
Pain changes us in ways that we could never predict or appreciate while we are in it. At least in my times of greatest pain I can only see how it's ruining me. How I am weaker, more insecure, less capable than before. Often I have gotten angry feeling like God allowed pain into my life and then didn't even use it for good.
I'm starting to think of pain as a cruel shovel digging my soul deeper. Something that is made deeper can do two things. It can just be a bigger empty space and in that way merely highlight every past pain and the injustice of it all. Or something that is made deeper can be a bigger empty space that has a greater capacity to hold more of God's life. I've found the second to be true in my life. When I am honest with God about where I am and how I hurt, even how unfair I think it is; when I pray and seek to find God in the pain and know He is with me even when silent; when I trust Him as far as I can praying that He will build in me the capacity for trust I lack; when, to sum up, I focus on following Him however struggling that following may be then I begin to see my pains redeemed.
It is not anything I do. I am quite UNsaintly when it comes to enduring suffering. I can fall into despair and self-pity quite easily. Yet somehow God doesn't let us fall out of His hands - even when in our self-destructiveness we would jump out of His hands. Somehow despite all my anger and inability to understand pain, God uses it all to empty me further. Then, to pile grace on top of grace, once emptied God helps me choose to allow Him to fill me rather than focus on self-pity. Often in the middle of pain I feel like God isn't there, but it has been through that same pain that I have been allowed to glimpse His loving grace most fully.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
pause
I feel like someone hit the pause button on my life. Since coming back from Mexico I've hardly left my parents' house. I have no friends in their little town, no school, no job. Nothing. I'm going through my stuff and throwing out old clothes. Other than that there is absolutely nothing for me to do in this town but go on walks. I'm not really frustrated yet, but I know if this lasts much longer I will be.
Friday, June 06, 2008
a world away
I am sitting in my parents' basement in a small ranch town in Colorado. As Joel described it while driving me to the airport on Wednesday, a world away from Mexico City. I've moved nearly once for every year I've been alive. Usually I'm quite excited about the coming change. Leaving Mexico would be my first time not being excited to move.
The past four months that I have spent living in Mexico have been a confusing mixture. As I have prepared to leave I've been asked many times why I like Mexico so much. Usually my answers come out sounding incredibly shallow and lame. I just can't seem to quite describe what it is I love so much. I'm going to try anyway. I think I just can't get over Mexican culture. There is such an open kindness that seems to be so normal there. The culture has this electric mix of the ancient and the cutting edge that never gets boring. Mexico is shamelessly as full of color as a garden in full bloom. And there is this element of mystery and a little danger that I find irresistible. I have definitely fallen head-over-heels for this country.
On the other hand it was very difficult for me to live with so many people. I can get kind of weird with roommate situations. Something inside my head tells me that things will be better if I am as invisible as possible. I have been called the ghost roommate. All my former roommates have made comments about how I'm never around. I have felt that if I'm gone all the time or very quiet and invisible when home that my roommates will take longer to get tired of me and want me to leave. Nonsense, but the thing in my head that says it is really loud. During my time in Mexico God has been working on my fear of people. It's not been easy. I often found myself crying at night on our roof and wondering why God had put me on a church-planting team knowing I had these fears.
Mexico was a really good place to be as God began to ask me to surrender these things. There is a gentleness and a kindness in the way people treat each other that I found getting past my barriers even on my most frustrating days. My goodbye to this place was a teary one, but hopefully short. I'm hoping to be back sometime in the next year. Even if I'm not I felt strangely encouraged as I walked the dusty streets of Kremmling with my dog today. It's hard to nail it down with words but I really think God changed a lot in me through my time in Mexico. Seeing this evidence of God's hand in my life makes the future, uncertain though it may be, seem very full of hope.
The past four months that I have spent living in Mexico have been a confusing mixture. As I have prepared to leave I've been asked many times why I like Mexico so much. Usually my answers come out sounding incredibly shallow and lame. I just can't seem to quite describe what it is I love so much. I'm going to try anyway. I think I just can't get over Mexican culture. There is such an open kindness that seems to be so normal there. The culture has this electric mix of the ancient and the cutting edge that never gets boring. Mexico is shamelessly as full of color as a garden in full bloom. And there is this element of mystery and a little danger that I find irresistible. I have definitely fallen head-over-heels for this country.
On the other hand it was very difficult for me to live with so many people. I can get kind of weird with roommate situations. Something inside my head tells me that things will be better if I am as invisible as possible. I have been called the ghost roommate. All my former roommates have made comments about how I'm never around. I have felt that if I'm gone all the time or very quiet and invisible when home that my roommates will take longer to get tired of me and want me to leave. Nonsense, but the thing in my head that says it is really loud. During my time in Mexico God has been working on my fear of people. It's not been easy. I often found myself crying at night on our roof and wondering why God had put me on a church-planting team knowing I had these fears.
Mexico was a really good place to be as God began to ask me to surrender these things. There is a gentleness and a kindness in the way people treat each other that I found getting past my barriers even on my most frustrating days. My goodbye to this place was a teary one, but hopefully short. I'm hoping to be back sometime in the next year. Even if I'm not I felt strangely encouraged as I walked the dusty streets of Kremmling with my dog today. It's hard to nail it down with words but I really think God changed a lot in me through my time in Mexico. Seeing this evidence of God's hand in my life makes the future, uncertain though it may be, seem very full of hope.
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