knowing when to speak or stay silent...

This is something I am trying to be more conscious of lately:

Proverbs 12:23 says, "A prudent man keeps his knowledge to himself, but the heart of fools blurts out folly." And Ecclesiastes 3:1 and 7 say, "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: ...a time to be silent and a time to speak."

I, along with so many people probably, have a tendency to have to fill silence with something or offer advice when it's not wanted or needed. This is something that God had brought to the surface of my heart a couple weeks ago and then last week I was reading in Proverbs and found that verse. And then today in Leadership class we talked about the very same thing: how a good leader, a wise leader, knows when to just listen instead of speak. It kept coming up for me so I figured I had better pay more attention to it than I already had been.

I know that so many times if I am talking to someone about problems or my overwhelmedness, my listener automatically launches into a diatribe on how they think I should fix the situation. The truth is, I didn't really want that at all; I just needed someone to listen to me. I know this is a major point of contention between men and women. Women want to vent to their men; men want to fix their woman's problems. Why is this? Why do we all have this need to "blurt out folly" as Proverbs puts it?

Anyhow, you could just pray for me on this issue, that God would reveal to me when I need to be silent and when I need to speak. And I encourage you to examine your own motives when you speak.

Grace and peace to all of you friends. And I apologize for the larger span of time between my last post and this one. What was I thinking taking 21 credit hours of theology and high level courses? Why didn't anyone speak up and tell me I was insane?

I am off to Anchorage for the weekend to sing at Native Musicale tonight and at a fundraiser banquet tomorrow night. I will be back Saturday afternoon/evening. Please pray for us that we would have safe travels.

seasons of love...

Rent:the Movie came out on video last night and a bunch of us
stayed up 'til almost 2am watching it. And it was so worth it, as
controversial as it was. I had seen it live a few years back (I had
bought tickets for my boyfriend's birthday and our 6-month
anniversary combined-then we broke up and I went with a friend
instead) so I was prepared for the controversiality of it all. It is
very good and is based on the well-known opera La Boheme (also
very good) and the hit broadway musical Rent. Rent Rent, but
only if you feel you're prepared enough to handle controversial
issues. It stars Taye Diggs, Rosario Dawson, and Jesse Martin
from Law & Order.

Here's the lyrics to the movie's theme song:
525,600 minutes, 525,000 moments so dear.  525,600
minutes - how do you measure, measure a year? In
daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee.  In
inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife.  In 525,600 minutes
- how do you measure a year in the life? How about love?
How about love? How about love? Measure in love. 
Seasons of love.

525,600 minutes! 525,000 moments to plan.  525,600
minutes - how can you measure the life of a woman or
man?

In truths that she learned, or in times that he cried.  In
bridges he burned, or the way that she died.

It’s time now to sing out, although it’s not the end.  To
celebrate remember a year in the life of a friend. 
Remember the love! Remember the love! Remember
the love! Measure in love.  Seasons of love! Seasons of
love.

In diapers, report cards, in spoked wheels, in speeding
tickets.  In contracts, dollars, in funerals, in births, in
525,600 minutes - how do you figure a last year on
earth? Figure in love! Figure in love! Figure in love!
Figure in love.  Seasons of love, seasons of love.

you won't find him in seminary...

"'I couldn't have found God in seminary,' he thought, as he looked at the sunrise." The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

I am reading The Alchemist right now and it is a book that has already largely become a part of my life. I have scrawled notes all over the margins and consulted my Bible while reading this book more than any other book I have read for leisure.

After reading the above line, I went to my journal and wrote:

I love this. It reminded me that sometimes the place we most expect to find God - to experience him, to feel him, to meet him - is really not that place at all. God is in the sunrises. In the purple mountains' majesty. In the oceans' tides. In the turning leaves of October. In the smile of a friend or a hug. In between claspd fingers of two people in love. In prayers whispered in the desperate hour. He's not in church or seminary anymore than he's outside those places, in the magnifecence of the world around us. He's real and is sometimes most profoundly revealed in the simplest act of beauty, not in some complex theology lecture. We too often expect to find him where we think we should be looking and end up not noticing him in the places he really is and where he wants us to find him, where he is waiting for us to find him: in the midst of our everyday lives. Waiting to romance us with his senseless, supernatural miracles of the simplest things that we're often times too busy to notice. He's there. Watch for him.

And later, the author echoes this idea: "When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun rises."

It's become my favorite book of all time. I have just about filled an entire journal reflecting on it. It makes me want to go to the "old and wise" desert and be silenced by the elemental force of it. Or to God and be silenced by the awesomeness of him.

thankfulness

I am thankful for...

• the 3 beautiful kids I have the privilege of babysitting every Thursday afternoon and early evening
• my friend Laura (the Spanish pronunciation), who told me that she had a surprise for me and then presented me with a big bag of salt'n'vinegar chips
• my new comfy, cozy, warm and fuzzy Columbia gloves, and my dad for providing for them, I am thankful for him anyway - not just because he provided money for gloves
  
• photography
• 2 1/2 hours spent in a little local bookstore/coffeeshop drinking hot tea and having good and meaningful conversation while watching the rain
  
• my weaknesses
• blogging/writing
• books
• cards that say "I miss you" or "I love you" or "I am so proud of you"
• colored pens
• sweatshirts and jeans
• hugs
• really, REALLY great metaphors
• memories - both old and ones in the making
• sitting across from someone and feeling so overcome with joy, love and thankfulness for that person that it makes you want to just... I don't know... squeeze the pee outta them
  
• quiet time
• playing the game of Sorry! so much that an intervention might be needed
• new beginnings
• being picked up and dropped in a snowbank
• learning the measure of God's love and favor
• movies like Life as a House
  
• nature and the beauty of the Lord
• the various kinds of music from which I get pleasure out of listening
• Coldstone Creamery is coming to Soldotna and so is Wal-Mart
• the little Willow Tree angels even though I only have one of them
• grace and forgiveness
• my blog friends - ones I've met and ones I only know in heart and spirit
• Alaska and ACC
• homework because it means that I am exercising and stretching my mind
• wasabi chips
  
• sunlight and longer days
• living a life of simplicity
• peoples' stories
• the emergent/pomo church movement
• community
  
• worship as a way of life and not just something I do on Sundays
• practicing the Sabbath

What are you thankful for today? I would love to know.

dripping in love and favor...

Today has been vastly different than yesterday. God has used different people and experiences to minister to me in my particular point of pain and it's been incredible.

First, last night after I posted about becoming hippies together, I had about 3-4 people come up for no reason and hug me tightly. And then one of the guys who visits campus regularly chased me around outside, picked me up, threw me up over his shoulder, and dropped me in a very deep snowbank. I know it might seem ridiculously childish to you but to me it was a buffet of love.

Then today in Foundations of Faith we were talking about God's will and Scott, the prof, posed the question Does God have specifically designed wills for everyone? And then gave an illustration. He drew on the whiteboard a ride he used to ride as a kid at an amusement park. It's the one where you get in the car and you go around the track and there's the little "curb" in the middle of the road that runs between the tires to keep you on the track. Scott asked if that was a picture of life within God's will. One girl said that it was and I said that it wasn't. "If God has this specific will for each of us and we're driving around that track then we never venture from God's will. We never sin. We never know suffering and therefore, we never know joy because to know joy is to know suffering. God gave us his moral will that he's laid out for us and then free will in other areas of life. We can love God and do what we want." I went on to say that God called us to life and to have it more abundantly and that abundance doesn't mean all joy all the time. It means that God will allow things to happen to us to bring us to a point of brokenness and come before him. He will allow times of suffering so that we may find our joy in him alone. The world can't provide that for us. Life more abundant means giving God the opportunity to have his strength made perfect in our weaknesses like I talked about last week. It was a great discussion.

Then in Youth Ministry class this afternoon Curtis, the prof, gave an illustration. First he wrote on the board this statement: "I think I can't." and said that so many youth today live by this motto and give up on themselves. It's a picture of hopelessness and despair. We read Philippians 4:13, "I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength." And then we read the 23rd Psalm. It was the last part of this Psalm that we focused on. Verse 5: "You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows." He had a large mixing bowl and a large pitcher of water available. Curtis told us to imagine the water is the purest olive oil. He took the bowl and bent over it and had one of the students pour the "oil" over his head. All of it. He stood up and the water dripped from his hair and his face. He explained that when we are anointed today with oil, it's a very different picture from how it was in David's day. Back then they wouldn't have been bent over a bowl. Someone would have poured oil on their heads and it would soak their head, dripping down all over them from their hair and face, covering them completely in oil. Curtis then said, "This is God's favor for you. He wants to drip you in it and cover you completely in his delight for you." I cried again. They were powerful words for me. "When you stand in God's favor, this statement has no power in your life," he pointed at the whiteboard. I cried some more and felt God anoint me as his love and favor washed over me. I remember distinctly hearing these words: This is the measure of my love for you, Christina. Soak in it. Absorb it. Over the weekend and yesterday I had been living by the motto "I think I can't." I can't hear God. I can't feel God. I can't be loved. I can't be accepted... But today I am dripping in his favor and I can't has no power in my life. I imagine myself trying to catch his love and favor in my hands, the "overflow," so that I may store it up.

in the spirit of the hippies...

In the book Blue Like Jazz the author Donald Miller writes about an experience he had one summer. He lived with a friend and a couple hippies in the woods for a month or so. He says that the hippies weren't Christians but that for that month he lived the most authenticly he ever had in his life. Although they were pot-smoking, non-showering, dreadlock wearing hippies, they were real, authentic, and intentional in their friendships. Miller then talks about how we as Christians don't practice this in our lives. I think he's right. We live under this misconception that because we are Christians we have to appear that we have it all together because God and Jesus take care of all our problems if we give them up to him. Really we are called to be a community. The book of Acts depicts a very different picture of church as we know it. They shared everything: food, money, belongings, time, resources. Sadly we have gotten away from that.

So in the spirit of the hippies, I am going to pretend that you just asked me how I am doing. And I am going to respond, in the spirit of the hippies, very candidly. Today was not a good day for me. At all. I felt very lonely and for the first time in quite a few months I didn't feel like God was real to me.

I think it all started on Friday night in Anchorage. About 15 of us went up to do children's ministry at a church all weekend. We did our session Friday night and then went to the house where we would be staying all weekend. When we got there we were given instructions that the girls could have the upstairs and the boys would have the downstairs. So I hauled my heavy bag up the stairs and visited each bedroom to see which one might have space available for me. I soon discovered that everyone must have made rooming arrangements with each other on the way there. I was without a place to sleep. I slept alone in the loft outside the bedrooms all weekend and was not asked by anyone if I wanted to join them. There wasn't room anyway, even if they had asked me. Now, I know this might seem childish to you, like I am making a mountain out of a mole hill, but it was real to me and I took it personally. I know that it was dumb for me to take it so personally but I did. It was an attack on me spiritually and emotionally. It perpetuated my feelings of being "the outsider." My heart closed itself to others a little bit that night. And this morning in Camping Ministry class (a required class by the way and so much fun) it was exacerbated again through small little things that I won't get into here. I never cried though through any of this. Recently I have been struggling with the fact that I have been unable to have a good cry. I might shed a tear or two and then, without me even trying, it will just turn off like a faucet even though I want to just let it all out. I am not really sure why that is and I have been working to figure that out.

All day today I felt like an island in a sea of people. I would look out from my island and see "the mainland" where people didn't have distance between them but were close in body and in soul. I remember thinking today I wish I could somehow reach the mainland but how can islands close that gap? They can't unless someone builds a bridge to cross the great divide.

Once a month a team of 2-3 people come to campus and are available in hour and a half incrememts to pray with students and staff in individual sessions. They just arrived in town today and I had signed up last week for an evening session tonight. At dinner I was sitting across from Krystal, another student here and one of the girls who didn't ask me to room with them over the weekend. Without thinking I said to her, "I really don't want to go to prayer ministry tonight." She asked me why and I told her, "Because I know I need it." She asked me what I needed prayer for specifically and I just told her that I had been feeling lonely. I didn't give details, just left it at that. I told her I had tried calling a few friends from back home and wound up having to leave messages for all of them. And my dad was eating and couldn't talk. She just looked at me and said, "I believe that's God's way of telling you that you need to go to HIM and not other people right now." The truth she spoke went down deep into my core. It was something I needed to hear but at the same time didn't want to hear.

We talked for quite a while and it was nice. And then she had to be somewhere and I went to my room to wait for my dad to call me back like he said he would. My prayer session started at 8 and he said he would call me well before that. I put on my Metallica cd, climbed up on my bed, and soon fell asleep. At 8pm I awoke just as the last song was ending. It was time to go to prayer. My dad hadn't called and my heart sank. Just as I was walking out the phone rang. It was him. He apologized for having not called sooner and I forgave him and told him that I had to go. I know he didn't mean to do that, it wasn't his intention to hurt me. It just mirrored my life the last few days.

I went to the chapel to pray. They always start by asking what's going on in my life. So I told them. And we talked about it and figured out some deeper, underlying issues of which the feelings of rejection and loneliness are just symptoms. And then I prayed.

I prayed that: 1) God would remove all doubt and disbelief from within me; 2) God would remove all other voices and confusing spirits; 3) I would be open to him and his voice and that he would tune my ears only to him, I am so hungry for his voice in my life; 4) I would have faith like a child, I desperately want this; 5) I would grow as a tree grows toward the light, I received this image in the midst of my prayer (evidence that I was in fact hearing him, just in a different way than some people); 6) a comment one of my aunts made to me a couple years ago would no longer hold any power over me; 7) I would have the courage to go to him and ask for help when I need it or when I am feeling lonely; 8) he would send down a cleansing flood that would drown out all things not from him; and 9) he would fill me up with him.

And then I said these words: Make yourself so real to me that there is no room for doubt and disbelief. And I heard this from somewhere within the cavern of my heart: I want to and will do that for you if you let me. And then I cried. Real tears. Salty tears.

I tell you all this so that you might, in the spirit of the hippies, help me with this and ask me how I am doing on occasion. And that you might even, again in the spirit of the hippies, share some things that I could help you with. It is one of my greatest desires to become intentional with the people in my life and you all are included. Here's to the hippies and to becoming one of them. Will you become a hippie with me?

thoughts on heaven...

I got into a great discussion/debate today with my New Testament professor. The subject was heaven. He said that Satan was in heaven, before God, in Job and I, holding a conviction that heaven had not been tainted looked up the Scripture in my NIV. Chapter 1:6-7: "One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them. The Lord said to Satan, 'Where have you come from?'" The text does not say that Satan was in heaven, only that he went "before the Lord." I argued, "Can't we go before the Lord here on earth? Can't we come into his presence without being in heaven? In fact, isn't it true that in Exodus 33 God says that no one may see his glory and live?" He argued that Lucifer (Satan) had once been in heaven, before he fell, and that maybe because he had seen God once it didn't matter after that. And then I said, "But I have always believed firmly that God must be separate, he's the holiest of holies, the purest of pure. He cannot be in the presence of evil as it would contradict his very nature." And with that my professor professed that he had somewhere he needed to be and that I was late for "Story at Noon." I was on the verge of tears because my faith had been challenged in a way that I had never thought possible. I held firmly, all my life, to this belief that God has to remain separate in order to remain fully and Holy God. I mean, isn't that why he sent Jesus, the human part of the Triune God, to die on the cross for us so that we could again be with him like we were before the fall of man? I believe God would have done it himself if he was able.

After lunch a few of us were sitting around talking about this with one of the other faculty. After more discussion we decided to head to the library to compare commentaries on Job. The one I looked at didn't mention heaven at all. A couple others did. And one of them made the claim that perhaps that part of Job wasn't to be taken literally at all and that it was just there to describe for us God's nature and to discuss the issue of good (God) vs. evil and that good (God) always prevails. We decided to reconvene next Wednesday after lunch and discuss it more in depth after all gathering research on the subject.

Then we began a discussion on "Where is heaven anyway?" Someone brought up that we always assume that heaven is "up there somewhere the other side of space" but that space is supposedly infinite. "But," I said, "how can space be infinite if God is infinite and boundaryless? Could he have created something outside himself that is also infinite and boundaryless? Isn't everything outside God himself and the Triune, considered to be evil? And if so how could God and space both coexist in the same space and have God still remain pure and separate?" This seemed to make everyones' brains immediately cramp up and blank stares came at me from every direction. We talked about Revelation and how it says that in the last days earth, as we know it presently, will be destroyed and God will create a new heaven on earth.

I then brought up our loved ones that have already passed on. We always say, "My mom's up there in heaven looking down on me and watching me," or "He's in a better place," or something like that. We just assume that once they die they go to heaven to be with the Lord. But Sripture says that there will be one Judgment Day when God will judge us all together and separate the wheat from the chaff. So considering that we are to assume that my mom, and my grandparents and all the others who have passed on, are in a different state of sleep right now. They are not conscious of time, they are outside of it, like God. The Bible says that when one dies the next time they are conscious they will be in God's glory. I have always taken this to mean that the next time they are conscious is as they take their last breath; they go through this tunnel towards this bright light and into God's presence. Assuming that though there isn't just one Judgment Day like Scripture says. How would that work? Would they go to heaven and be with God and then when Judgment Day arrives come back to earth to be taken with the rest of us? And what about those who die that are not Christians? Are they already in hell? According to Scriptures they aren't because they have not yet been judged.

"Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever." 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17. They are waiting for the coming of the Lord but it will be like the blink of an eye for them. It will seem like no time has passed at all from when they passed away to that moment when he returns. So, we will all stand before God together, Adam, Moses, Abraham and Isaac, King David, all the believers down through the ages to us. Isn't that cool?

I am anxious to hear what any of you might think about this subject. Any feedback or thoughts on any of this? Would love to hear from you.