a very good year...

Okay. My little break is over. But boy was it ever grand! Even more grand though is all the possibilities and promise that lie in the year ahead.

All the students came back last Thursday. It was so good to meet the new people and see the returning students again. I missed them so much. Already this year feels so much more different than last year. It's a difference that's palpable. I know I am going to love this coming year and this coming year is going to love me.

I am taking Art Appreciation. It's taking the place of Peace Studies, a Philosophy 300 level class that was cancelled due to lack of interest. We met for the first time tonight and I went in excited and I came out intimidated. I thought it was going to be mostly art theory and history. And it is that. But we will also be actually doing art. And that terrifies me. I was so close to walking out within the first 15 minutes after learning that we would actually be doing art. But a small part of me said "Stay. Learn. Stretch. Grow." And for once in my life the small part of me won over. I am actually a little bit looking forward to the class now. It's already changed my perspectives on some things, and that's only after a 2 hour lecture. And I am taking Intro to Paraprofessional Counseling and Film as Literature (aka Film Noir). These 3 classes I am taking at Kenai Peninsula College - a branch of University of Alaska-Anchorage. And I am taking Ministry Practicum here at Alaska Christian College. I am really looking forward to the lighter 12-hour load this semester compared to Spring's heavy 21 credits.

I have a new job. As of today I am the new Community Relations Assistant at Kenai Peninsula College. It's 20 hours/week and I think it will be an awesome opportunity to learn new skills and get connected to my new community outside of Alaska Christian College.

This year I plan to:

• have more fun than I did last year. I was so focused on studying and getting good grades and being on the SALT team that I missed out on a lot of fun stuff. This year will be different. It's okay to play. I have to remember that.
• focus more on relationships. The biggest thing that I missed out on last year was people and relationships. I want my relationships with people to be my most treasured possessions. Already the dynamic between others and me is different - in a very good, rich, and rewarding way.
• maybe even get in a little bit of trouble. Not big trouble Poppa, don't worry! But if I get written up for sneaking off campus to go to Sal's with the girls after lockup then that's one more memory that I will have made and who knows how many friendships solidified. Last year I was too legalistic. I was appalled at even the idea of breaking the rules.
• start tithing on a regular and consistent basis. It is something I have heard about my whole life but recently it seems like it's being driven in, you know? I have lived so selfishly in the past and that part of me is ugly like a cancer.
• become more of an artist - in the visual arts form. I have always been fairly self-conscious about my artistic abilities (my sister Lisa took the limelight in this area). In a way, I have been neglecting the artist that truly does live inside of me. We're all artists.
• live deeply and love well and live well and love deeply. 'nough said.
• continue to travel into uncharted territory in my relationship with my Lover, my Creator, and my Saviour.

Yes. It's going to be a very good year.

the whole of me...

Queasy from the rocking of the boat I get up from my perch on the bough and hang my head over the rail. I feel the wind of traveling at 16 nauts braise my skin. It will be chafed tomorrow with windburn but for now I don't care. It feels good and seems to blow the nausea right out of me. The blue-green of the ocean below stares back mockingly. Just beneath the surface I can see translucent blobs of jellyfish float past. Up ahead the sea otter that's in the water lifts his head from its liquid pillow to see us looming towards him. He languidly rolls over and dives deep into the blue to avoid being hit or being sucked into the ship's engines.

I look to my left and see thousands of puffins nesting in the hundreds of crevasses in the bluffs that have been carved out by nature over thousands of years. Just a few thousand years ago a glacier had been there and then when it melted it carved this beautiful landscape. I notice the deep recesses in the rock, almost like caves, and can see how they have formed by the way the water smashes against them in their farthest and darkest corners. The caves and rock formations seem to be my favorite parts of this cruise through Kenai Fjord National Park. While the eyes of the others on board with me scan the waters for orca whales or other sealife, I find my own eyes continually search the shoreline for an even more beautiful formation than the last and, to my delight, each time they do only get better.

From nowhere, or probably not from nowhere, I am struck with the realization that this entire landscape and those rocks especially are a lot like my life. Not so long ago, although it seems like it sometimes, a glacier had been in the place where my heart now beats. Due to the Son's light and nature the glacier melted leaving in its wake a constant stream of Living Water rushing through me. It was a stream of Water so forceful that over time it carved out ugly spots that were hard as rocks and left them nothing but open and cleansed, beautiful rooms in which the Water could ebb and flow and move about freely.

The Water still looks for and finds other spots that need carving out and immediately goes to work. The process is sometimes slow and painful but always necessary in order for the Water to feel as though it has free reign within the jagged walls of my life. There are deep caverns of which it is impossible to see the farthest wall and these are the places where the most work is needed. They are where ugliness and harshness have rooted their way deep into my core, or where the glacier hasn't completely thawed out yet and there are still hard frozen remnants of an ice age long ago, a time when there was no life, only merely survival. Slowly the Light reaches those places and together with the Water the ice recedes and new life begins. It is in the deepest parts of me where I and the Water are the most intimate, where we come and work together in a holy union. Me, so eager and willing to have more room to offer the Water in which to dwell; my hard surfaces and sharp edges so pliable and obedient to the Water's chiseling; always wanting more, never feeling satisfied with the amount of space that the Water already occupies. The Water, desiring deeply to inhabit every part of me, and waiting patiently knowing that someday I will break completely and offer to it the whole of me.

My head hangs over the rail, heavy and spinning. This time it's not the rocking of the boat; it's a combination of the rush of the Water within me cleansing out yet another part of me together with the life-giving knowledge that someday all the ice and ugly spots will be washed out completely that seem to knock my equilibrium off kilter. The Water is not done with me yet. It might take a while. But I am surprisingly okay with that as long as I know the Water is there to sustain me. I know the Water won't stop rushing because it whispered it to me.

the next couple weeks...

After tomorrow I am taking a break before school starts up again in just a couple weeks. I am housesitting (and pet-sitting) at a beautiful log cabin that's fairly secluded and sits on a lake and is surrounded by trees. The other day there were two moose chillin' out and eatin' in the backyard. Pip, one of the dogs, was barking at them. They would just look at him like, "Yeah, just watch me come over there and stomp you." It was funny.

So the next couple weeks will be full of:

• lots of rest
• daily walks
• reading several books: The Life of Pi (finishing it), So I Go Now (finishing it), and starting Velvet Elvis, to which I have been greatly looking forward
• music on the iPod
  
• doing lots of introspection, reflecting on the last year, the summer, thoughts for the coming year, where I am, where I am going, and motives; all this introspection will hopefully no doubt inspire lots of...
• journaling and writing in general
• devouring the Bible - I plan to start a one-year plan to read it in chronological order
• some movie- and tv-watching
• playing with the dogs
• just playing
• and if I have anything to do about it, it will hopefully be full of transparent fellowship - me doing life with others, others doing life with me.

It's gonna be an awesome couple of weeks. I don't know how often I will be posting so know that I haven't forgotten about anyone if you don't hear from me and know that I will be back in bloggerland shortly. Love you all!

ah, the good ol' days...

Yesterday was my friend Andrea's birthday. We were eating dinner last night and she started a sentence with, "Back when I was a teenager..." Yesterday was her 20th birthday.

some of my brokenness...

This week I have been helping a friend through a crisis in her life. Today as I was talking to her I teared up. I was telling her that her identity does not lie in that situation, that it in no way defines who she is. I told her that God knew she would face this one day and he still thought her valuable enough to send his son to die on a cross for her. I told her that this makes her no less valuable - to me or to God or to those that really love her. I cried because I was reminding myself of the same things. It was a reminder that I am not my mistakes, that I am deeply loved by lots of people despite them. That's something I seem to forget all too easily sometimes.

Last week I was hanging out with a friend that I had just met. It was Friday night and we'd had several conversations over the course of the week and he was leaving the next day. He told me, "I really admire you because you listen simply for the sake of listening and not to try to figure out what you're going to say next. That's so rare and I love it. At the beginning of this week when I met your friend Venessa I was interested in her. She's very attractive. But the more I talked to her, the more I realized that she had no substance to her. In the end, it's you that I have been so impressed by more and more every day this week. The more I talk to you the more I want to talk to you." I nodded and averted my eyes so that he wouldn't see them start to leak. And then he said, "I hope that doesn't offend you. I don't want to offend you." I shrugged it off and said something like, "No, not at all." But in my heart I was hurting. He was telling me that while I had substance, he didn't find me attractive even in a platonic way. (By the way, let me just add here that he wasn't someone that I was interested in romantically; he was just a friend, someone with whom I'd had some good conversations over the previous few days.) And he said that he was surprised by me, refreshed that he'd been able to spend so much time with someone that he didn't find attractive at all, and how much value he saw in me because I am such a good listener, etc...

All I really wanted to do was walk away but instead I listened to him, because after all that's who I am - a good listener. I let the lie sink in. I believed that I wasn't attractive, that I was only valuable because of who I am on the inside and not because I have external beauty to go with it. I am still thinking about it - almost a week later. And I think I am stuck on it. So much lately I have been frustrated that people don't look past external appearances to the person underneath. They don't look at people the way God sees them. "For man looks on the outward appearance, but Christ looks at the heart." Even though my friend said that he had found value in who I am inside, he negated it with the comments on my outward appearance. And he told me that he would call me Sunday or Monday when he got back home and that he hoped we would stay in touch. But he never called me; he's called my friend Venessa, the attractive one, a few times now. And this sent me another message: even if I do have substance, what good is it anyway? He still chose to pursue more of a romantic relationship with physical beauty instead of a friendship with inner beauty. I am broken right now. It seems I need someone to remind me of my worth, that my identity doesn't lie in outward appearances. You can tell me that all you want, but right now I am just really broken and I won't believe it. This is where I am.

Why do I seem to struggle with this issue so much?