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Wounded heart
I accept loneliness
An easy habit
My own burden

We had something once
I breathed Your beauty
It wrapped me up
And made my joy free

Precious things
So very fragile
I let it slip away
The fault is mine

You are faithfulness
From my own death
You have saved me
No death too deep

Here I stand alive
But scars cut still
I walk the peripheral
Locked in mourning

A girl in love
Once the mention
Of Your holy name
Brought me a smile

Now I wait
Outside and cold
Uncomplaining
Unworthy

But in my heart
The deep ache
Of love I lost
Memory of what was

And I hunger
Keeping my silence
I've lost faith in love
The child is gone

The emptiness wins
Taunting my iron will
I will be faithful
And hope for nothing more

Could I hope?
I know Your heart
It aches more than mine
Can I love You again?

Will You awake
The dead love in me?
Bring me back into
The joy of my youth?

I remember dully
The joy that we had
The reality of You
A love beyond beauty

The broken cynic
That haunts my mind
Cries impossible
And hope is strangled

But You made the stars
Turned water to wine
And have raised the dead
Nothing is impossible

Oh God keep saving me!
Breathe life into my heart
Melt the hopeless dull
Build the fire again

Awake in me the love
That sleeps within
Capture my heart
Teach me to dream

singing in the rain

Immanuel Fellowship does not own a building. I've always appreciated this. It makes it easier to grasp the fact that church is not a building or a meeting on Sunday morning, it is people following Jesus together.

This is sometimes inconvenient, like when we have to set up for Sunday's meeting on Saturday night. Mostly though I like it. I like the feeling that people in the church are the church 24/7. I think this buildinglessness (I always feel childishly proud of myself when I invent a new word) also helps create the sense of community we have. I feel like I don't have to wait till Sunday to see someone.

We rent our Sunday space from the Senior Center and meet in homes during the week. This Sunday was their annual rummage sale and consequentially it's our annual Sunday in the park. This is one of the Sundays I really look forward to. I always like it when we meet outside, weather it's during the rummage sale or one of our camping trips. I guess it somehow makes me feel more connected to the early church fathers and the persecuted church. I know they didn't/don't always their gatherings outside. I suppose for me these outside Sundays remind me of the church's placelessness on earth. How the church cannot be confined and limited to a building or a time or a country. It's a clearer glimpse of what we really are.

Usually we are blessed with a perfect sunny day during the rummage sale. This year we got a different blessing. We got cold mountain rain. Fortunately we are all hearty mountain people so we were prepared with the appropriate clothing. I was especially glad for the rain. I am a recent addition to the worship team and this week all the other female vocalists were either gone, or too pregnant to sing. Being the only girl up there is the next best thing to singing a solo so I was fairly nervous. Logistical problems during the worship time make feel like I can relax and worship because no one is thinking about me, they are ether distracted or trying harder to focus on God. This may be a bad attitude. I don't know. As you can see the worship team had to stand close to the edge of the gazebo and we got a little wet. It was fun, I like Colorado weather.

contentment

Philippians 4 "...Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say rejoice...Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God...Not that I speak from want, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me."

This is one of those chapters I might be tempted to conveniently ignore - if Paul hadn't written it from the inside of a prison cell. However the whole writing about contentment while in prison thing forces me to take this passage seriously. I'm not a person who does blind faith very well. I have troubles living out the pieces of Christianity that are too deep for me to grasp with my mind. This can make for slow going in my walk with God sometimes. Things like always rejoicing, being content, and being thankful really don't make sense to me. How are we supposed to rejoice when things are going badly? How do we have a thankful heart for the things that suck in life? How can we be honestly content when our needs are not met? I want to obey God in these areas of my life but I don't want to fake it. God sees where my heart really is anyway so there isn't much point in trying to pretend I am thankful, joyful, or content when I'm not.

Lately I've been trying to study artistic composition. The little watercolor paintings I create can be rather uninspiring I think one of my problems is bad composition. One thing I keep seeing over and over is this talk about negative space. Negative space is the empty spaces around the subject of your painting. So say if you paint a vase of flowers the negative space is the blank, uninteresting wall behind that vase of flowers. Negative space is the void. The shapes and patterns created by the negative space, though easily over looked, can make or break a composition. The keep it simple and uncluttered, they help lead the viewer's eye through the painting, they create depth and balance and more. Basically the empty spaces in a painting are very important.

How does this relate to my long-standing dilemma over Philippians 4? Well, I have a problem rejoicing, giving thanks, or being content when the things in my life aren't going as I planned. I have my list of requests I make to God, and many of my requests are things I honestly think I need. I am a light packer, both literally and figuratively, I tend to think the needs on my list are quite basic. God provides but so often He doesn't give me most of what's on my list - He even withholds many of things I thought were very basic. Sometimes it feels like there are a lot of unfilled voids and empty negatives in my life. In response to this I stop rejoicing, being thankful or content. It just doesn't make sense to me how or why I should. I try to do what the Bible says, but blind obedience was never my strong point. However, Paul wrote this convicting passage while imprisoned, and the persecuted church continues to worship God with a sincerity that shames me.

It's so easy to get focused on the negative spaces in my live, the voids, and the places where God's idea of my basic needs turned out to be quite different from my own. I don't understand all the reasons why, and I never will; I'm too small for that. I'm thinking it all comes down to trust in God. Trust that His ways are higher and that Someone smart enough to create the universe is smart enough to run my life. I can obey Paul's words if I can wrap my mind around the fact that God is a master artist. Unlike my little paintings He knows how to use the negatives and voids that life brings and make something amazing out of them. I'm beginning to suspect that maybe the things that God doesn't give us are themselves gifts just as precious as those things we are given.

I've walked with God long enough that I can look back with this new perspective and actually see where and how he has used some of my negatives to weave profound threads of beauty into my life. In hind sight there isn't a rough time that I would go back and trade for an easy time. But I'm so quick to forget what God has done in the past whenever I'm faced with some new trial. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. One more thing to put in His hands and beg Him to change in me. Basically I can be thankful, content and rejoice because God knows what He's doing and He never makes mistakes.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

MDS

Sometimes the longer you put something off the harder and more awkward it is to actually begin. I am speaking of blogging. I really meant to blog more during my time in the MDS but until recently have never had a computer of my own. I seem to spend most of my borrowed computer time answering emails. Enough about that.

The MDS ended nearly a month ago and all my wonderful fellow students went home. I was able to stay here in Mexico an extra month and help out with all the guests we've had. For nearly a week we had six little kids in the house, and all but one of them were three or younger. It made me miss life with Marie's family. Her mom had a daycare and it was often noisy.

But before I attempt to rejoin the world of normal bloggers, it seems appropriate that I should pause and write a bit about the MDS. A sort of thanks and goodbye to a school that has been one of those life - changing bits of the journey.

When I first heard of the MDS (Missional Discipleship School) I had no intention of joining. Don't get me wrong, it was the thing I had been waiting for my church to do for ages. The problem was I didn't feel ready, I felt like I had messed up everything I'd touched for a long time (especially my relationships with people in the church), and I just wanted to leave for college and couldn't make that day come fast enough.

God had His own ideas and since He is God it is best to obey. It was one of those times where I attempt to respectfully pray something like, "Um, God, are You sure You know what You're doing?" I almost cried right in class the first few days because I was so scared of what the year would look like. As always, it turned out God did know what He was doing. (Duh.) As a result this year has really been life-changing. Not that I have become super-saint or anything, but I do feel like a somewhat dark chapter of my life has ended and this school has been the beginning of something new.

I think mostly what God has done is taken a lot of things He had taught me over the last few years and tied them together in a way that suddenly leaves me freer and more anchored. (I know that is somewhat a contradiction in terms. However, a leaf tossed by the waves is not free, but a captive of the sea. Meanwhile a boat with an anchor is free to stay or go by lifting or dropping the anchor.) I think God worked deeply in all our lives through this experience.

Our time living together in Mexico was definitely the most challenging. We are all more introverted personalities that need a little more space. The fact that God was really working in all of us seemed to make that more true. Living with ten people in one house was new for all of us. We had a lot of fun cooking together, praying every morning, and having crazy water fights. Usually these were started by Anissa or Joel, but I got the opportunity to help organize a group dousing of Mike, the pastor of the church in Colorado, when he visited on his birthday. Out of pure courtesy and politeness for his birthday I gave him the privilege of throwing a pitcher of watter on me in the battle that ensued. (Actually, Anissa pushed me in an effort to save herself, but that's a secret.) We also played many a game of Jungle Speed together, from which I still bear the scars of Claudia's nails.

Another important point about the MDS is that I killed my first scorpion.

I spent much of my time in Mexico wondering why God chose to send me and not someone else. He had to remind me over and over that I need to trust His choice. In the past I've made the mistake of not trusting God's choice, seeing someone I think is better for the job, and trying to be that person. It tends to be a disaster.

Despite us being a rather introverted group we all had the privilege of seeing a church birthed. Sometimes I would try to figure out how it was happening. None of us expected to see things happen as fast as they did. Just a week or two after we arrived another church donated all their stuff to us and joined themselves to us. Crazy and unexpected. The church here is not large at all but a bit bigger than we expected to see so soon.

Well that was long and a bit rambly and is about to come to one of my infamous sudden conclusions.

I miss all my fellow students of the MDS, hopefully it won't be too long before I can come visit Paris...

driving in mexico

The group of us that drove the cars joined the group that flew in Mexico City last night. It was a long three days of driving with all three of us. Sounded like the group that flew had a really hard time. Over half of them were sick and their flight was delayed due to mechanical difficulties.

I found the drive through the Mexican countryside lovely, however the part I really liked was the city. I ended up getting one of my turns behind the wheel for the last stretch of our trip. The part where we drive through the city. It was so much fun! I had to use all my driving skills, be constantly alert, and pull some moves just to keep up with the lead car. I have a special place in my heart for challenges that are intense enough to get my adrenaline going. There were a few times I felt like James Bond. Shawn was praying and honestly thought he was about to die. It was awesome! I am gonna like it here.

For the sake of my team you should probably all pray that I get smoother at this city driving. It would be sad if they all went home with gray hair at their age.

sent out

The last week has been busy. I'm trying to see most of my friends before I leave. This is pretty hard, I'm forgetting people.

There have been a lot of prayer for the team going to Mexico this week. A meeting where we prayed to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The housechurch we're all a part of prayed for us on Saturday night. Sunday the church all got around us and prayed for us.

Being sent out like this is not at all what I imagined it would be. It's all so new and different for all of us. I'm not really sure what it was I was expecting. Somehow this is entirely different. Sweeter, more solemn and happier. This last week has felt a little dream-like at moments. Maybe it's the mixture of being super excited at having a dream come true and also being super nervous and feeling all wrong for the honor of being sent.

I really thought I was not going to be a part of our first church plant. Two years ago I felt God very clearly ask me to surrender my desire to be a missionary outside of the U.S. I felt like God asked me to trust Him with the humiliation of not going when everyone knew it was what I had planned on since I was seven. So I surrenderd and began planning on not going anywhere anytime soon. Everyone else was planning the same I think. When I signed on with this school I didn't realize that we would be the first church planting team. I somehow thought we were doing something else. I would've been way more hesitant to come had I known. Crazy how God turns things upside down on you sometimes.

I'm driving to Mexico tomorrow or the day after so my next post will be from the city...

six days

The MDS is leaving for Mexico in six days. I am:

• scared
• not ready
• ready as i'm gonna get
• hoping to become more mexican
• needing to learn to give God more of me
• ready to have tamales for breakfast
• desperate to come back different
• challenging myself to pack light
• studying spanish
• excited

yea and the count down is well underway. I've written and rewritten my packing list, it's still in the works. ;)

goodbye 2007

Yeesh, this is not a year I'm going to miss. Due to something silly I did last January I seem to have spent a large chunk of it messing up relationships. So much drama, it was truly amazing.

I almost had my first boyfriend this year. (We practically were, I was just to freaked-out to call it that.) I took him five days to find a new girl after I decided it wasn't going to work and now they're pregnant. My roommate eloped and i helped her. I lived in three different places and one of my friends has been homeless most weeks since august when my sort-of-former-boyfriend got them evicted from their house. Drama.

However, the drama swings both ways. There was the bad but there was also a lot of really good things that happened this year. I think I learned grace, both for myself and for those around me. God did a lot in me this year that freed me in new ways from depression and some of it's effects. I had a huge jump in confidence with people because I worked as a waitress. (I now think that everyone should be a server for at least a few months because of all that you learn about people and yourself and generosity.) I did manage to reconcile every one of my relationships and learned the lessons on forgiveness, grace and humility that come with doing that. I also am part of the MDS which has been amazing and way better than I hoped.

I think I've grown much closer to God. He's reminded me we're still friends often through all the ups and downs. He also spoke clearly to me that He felt cheated because I was (early in the year) only attempting a relationship with Him because everyone expected it and I needed to be close to Him if I was going to pursue the things I felt He called me to. So God wants my friendship more than my usefulness. Like any other friendship it needs to be about love, not about getting something done.

Oh, and my friends threw me a surprise birthday party which I've always wanted! Such a good way to become twenty-four.

Well that was 2007, I grew a lot. I'm hoping this next year will see as much growth without all the crazy drama.

(I'm moving to Mexico in less than four weeks. Yay!)

blessed are.....

So we've been going through the Sermon on the Mount in the MDS. Very good study which I am much liking. (Are you allowed to say that in English? Oh, well.) After five weeks we have finally come to Matthew 5:6 which says, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied."

I have read and even memorized this passage in the past but I'm seeing it in a new light this time. One thing is that the Greek word for righteousness can be translated either justice or righteousness. It's the same word in Greek. This is also true in Spanish and French. The word carries both the meanings. So the verse could read, "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice/righteousness for they shall be satisfied."

Okay I know I'm more interested in linguistics than most people, but this is actually important because it gives the verse a deeper meaning than the English language allows. I usually take it as I need to be hungry to be righteous in my own heart and life. It also means I need to be hungry to see justice in the world around me, to see the oppressed freed and the hungry fed. Deeper no?

Now usually I just think about the first part of the verse and forget the second part. The second part is a promise. Those who hunger and thirst for justice/righteousness will be satisfied. They will be satisfied. Sometimes it's really easy for me to look at my heart and at the world around me and feel like I'll never see justice/righteousness. It's easy for me to feel like it's a lost cause today. Not only in my own heart but in the hearts of everyone in my generation. But here's a promise that those who really want it are going to be satisfied. That's big.

wearing thin

We live in the most opulent, glamorous society that has ever existed. Everything is easy, everything is instant, and everything is available. Why aren't we happy?

I think possibly we are one of the most unhappy societies that has ever paraded the earth. People are depressed in huge numbers. I have so many friends who've been suicidal or even attempted it. I've known a lot of people with eating disorders and a handful of people who've cut themselves. Too many. Why is it that my generation which has everything and more of it than any group of people ever before is the most depressed, most self-destructive, most suicidal ever?

I came up with this theory recently. It may be too simple but I'll give it a shot. What if humanity is nearing the top? Like we are all on this quest together and the things we're looking for are happiness, love, comfort, fulfilment, security, whatever. Maybe we're all looking for these things together. Maybe there's this internal list in all of us. Kinda like Maslow's hierarchy of needs we all learn about in Psychology class. Maybe humanity has advanced so much that we've scratched off most or nearly all of the needs on that internal list. We are coming to the end of the list and there's still this glaring... something. There's something beyond the list we all need.

But we've tried nearly every humanly possible option haven't we? We have security, everything we could ever need to want. We have connectivity and community. We are the most connected people ever. I have a blog, a facebook, a myspace, a cellphone, unlimited texts, email, snailmail, and too many friends to pay attention to. I can hardly get through a class without getting a text. What else are we desperate for?

If this little theory is true and we all as individuals and as a species have this internal list of needs, if we are nearing the end of that list, then maybe the state we are in today could be the results of an underling panic. We've tried just about everything and we are still incomplete somehow. What's going to happen to us if we can't find that thing we need? What happens if we remain needy and incomplete? What if when Jesus said that He is the way the truth and the life He really knew what He was talking about?

a mystery

So there's this mystery I've been trying to figure out this last week. It's really been driving me nuts. Why is it that we have the technology to map the human genome and walk on the moon but we can't figure out how to make NyQuil taste any better than awful?

david

Today was a sad day for the MDS. We have six students and today one of them, David, left for home. His little brother has been in a coma for over a year now and he feels like he needs to be with his family. Life is really impossible to understand sometimes.

I went to the church's highschool with David and he used to be in the housechurch I helped lead. He moved away about three years ago. It's been really good to have him around again this last month. The last three years have been super discouraging and in a lot of ways I don't live by the standards I used to or dream the things I once did. Having David around this last month has remimded me who I used to be, what I used to live for, and why. I had come to think a lot of that stuff back then was fake, just to please people, or me trying to be like somebody else because I thought I wasn't good enough. I was immature, but it wasn't all fake. Thanks David.

my life in the mds

Once again i neglect my blog. That's life, I don't currently own a computer. So much has happened since last I had the luxury of posting. The MDS (Missional Discipleship School) started on October fourth. It's been amazing so far. It was a little awkward at first. I think becase the shadows of everywhere I've been the last few years were hanging on. I wasn't too excited to be in anything that might cause me to be responsible for something of a spiritual nature. I used to be a houschurch leader and failed, and I frequently feel like I only make things worse. I came into this school sure God wanted me here but with no idea why.

Well, I'm LOVING being a full-time student again. (Yea, I know, I'm a nerd.) And the second week of school we went backpacking for six days. It was pretty awesome. I love all things camping (except the toilettes) so I was destined to have fun. We focused on holiness a lot. I think I've been kinda running from holiness, or just quit thinking of it as something that's very important. I did a lot of repenting for my bad attitude and for not really living for God and blaming Him for stuff that's happened in my life. Other than that this trip was the most challenging trip I've ever been on. It's the first trip I've been on where I wanted to be home. We had a day that resembled hell. You can see a video here. To sum up the backpacking trip was very worth it, super fun, and probably slightly life-changing.

After we got back from that trip we had one week to learn a drama for the retreat. Learning dramas and skits in very short amounts of time is quite typical of Immanuel Fellowship. (My church, which this missions school is a part of.) A video will be posted online shortly. I'll attempt to blog about it. I know I'm at risk of sounding a bit dramatic but this retreat was also slightly life-changing for me. A bit too personal for the internet though, sorry.

I really hate doing these I-haven't-posted-in-forever posts. They're always long and rambly. So I will sum up one more time and then say good night. God's been doing a lot in me through this school. It's great. Cheers.

nebraska, my favorite vacationland

Well I quit my job at my Mexican restaurant. I think the boss got confused (or possibly mad) when I gave my two-week notice and just didn't put me on the scedual for the next two weeks. This, in my eyes was a pretty awesome thing to do. I have been in some seirous need of a little vacation. So I've come to my grandparents' house in Nebraska. It's a really great place for me to calm-down, take a breather, and spend some time with God before I jump in with the school of missions I'm going to be a part of in about a week (is it really that soon?). My grandparents are pretty awesome.

rocks & trust

I took rock climbing this week with Scott, the same teacher who taught me to ice climb. He's a pretty good teacher. Last time I took his class I was the only girl. This time people joked that the class had more girls than any of them had ever seen together in one place in Summit County. Sad, but true. It's been awhile since I've gotten to hang with that many girls.

So last time, in Ice Climbing class, this big guy dropped me while I was climbing. It was on one of the first climbs of the second day. I didn't get hurt, but I was lucky that one of my ice picks held long enough for him to start paying attention and take up the slack in the rope or I might've been. This scared me a lot. I already didn't trust the rope or the belayer. After being dropped I climbed as if I didn't have a rope at all. I got so burned-out climbing that way and never got very far off the ground after this.

I realized my mistake and tried to correct it coming into this rock climbing class. Funny, I was only dropped once - every other time the person belaying me had done a wonderful job. Despite all my good experiences it was the one bad experience that has stuck with me over the past year and a half. (I haven't done any sort of climbing since then.) It was a lot harder to trust this time around. Did I mention I am also afraid of heights? Not terribly afraid. Just enough that see-through bridges and any kind of grill or screen that has to be walked over is a cheep thrill. (I fell through one of those once which makes them quite scary, but that's another story.) Those bad experiences just stick with us despite whatever good we've known.

One girl in my class had a much higher than average fear of heights. She also has a fear of ropes because her uncle hung himself a year ago. We started the day off with rappelling and she ended up crying and rocking back and forth with her face in her knees. I tried to encourage her but it didn't look good. Amazingly though, after Scott worked with her one-on-one she did end up climbing a couple of the faces we ended up climbing. She was never quite able to rappel or allow herself to be lowered in anyway opting instead to walk off the tops of what she climbed. I've got say I was pretty impressed. I think I'm going to remember her for the rest of my life. There are things that get me scared enough that I feel like curling in a ball and crying. I frequently back down. God's been speaking to me a lot about growing a backbone lately. There's a lot of areas in my life where I've been seeing I need more courage.

Her example actually proved helpful for me. I think after her I was definitely the most afraid of heights, and afraid that my belayer wouldn't catch me. Grrrrr.... Rappelling was cool and fun, though very, very hard - especially those first few steps. My real problems arose after I'd climbed whatever it was I needed to climb. At this point I had to let go of the rock, lean back into the rappelling position (For those of you who don't know when you rappel you lean back till you are nearly parallel to the ground, from this position it's impossible to make a mad grab for the safety of the rock if you get dropped.), and trust the person belaying me to lower me back to the ground. This not only scares me, it completely freaks me out. I'm not one who easily trusts the people around me to begin with. Embarrassingly, the teacher had to climb up beside me and gently talk me through this step.

This is very parallel to real life for me. You could say I've been dropped. I've been dropped a lot. I have a very hard time really trusting people. Often I have a very hard time trusting God. I'm always waiting to be let down, abandoned, dropped. I've tried very hard to be one of those people who is completely independent, or as independent as is possible. Even when I am open usually it's because I've been gossiped about enough that I really could care less. Last year in ice climbing class I noticed that those who made it to the top of the hard stuff did so because the trusted that if they fell they would be caught.

This is my second long post this week. My apologies. Almost done. Anyway I was determined to learn to trust the rope this weekend. At first I was pitiful. Then I learned a trick that eventually made me take great strides towards accomplishing my goal. Stupid as it sounds the only thing that made it tolerable for me to be lowered was to ask the person belaying me to just hold me for a minute while I leaned back, let go of the rope, let my arms fall back, and forced myself to relax for a moment. For some reason after this I was completely fine. After making people do this for me on every climb I did pretty well. I even managed to climb something people much better than me struggled with and not everyone could do it. Learning to trust the rope and belayer when I had no control allowed me to take the kind of risky moves that were necessary to take me to the top. It was one of those climbs that just didn't have safe, easy hand and foot holds. Sometimes it hardly had anything at all. Without trust I never could have taken the risks or jumped for hard-to-reach holds.

I've been praying a lot this summer for God to teach me a deeper trust. I hope somehow what I learned in rock class this weekend will get applied to the rest of my life. We'll see...