..... But He is Good

The past few weeks my mind has been wandering back to Turkey. It was almost exactly two years ago that I boarded a plane in Calgary Alberta headed for Turkey. I had no idea what to expect. None of us on my team did. We went with the intent of putting into practice all that we had learned in the past three months during the lecture phase of our YWAM discipleship training school and seeing the Kingdom of God come in a foreign country. Our purpose was to be Christ in this predominately Muslim nation. We didn't know how we were going to do this, and even more so, we had no idea what God was going to do in us.

He Is Not Safe..... (pt2)

I have discovered over the past few years that journeying with God is never boring and sometimes painful. We tend to have this idea that God never causes us pain but I know this is not true. He most definitely brings pain into our lives but it is not without purpose and beauty of it's own.

I remember asking my mom when I was about four or five why God made pain. I wondered why things hurt. The way she explained it me has forever becoming cemented in my memory. She asked me to imagine walking barefoot on a sandy beach. In the sand there are shards of glass. As you walk your feet are being continually cut open by the glass. If we did not feel pain, we would have no idea that we are being cut and could end up bleeding to death. Because of pain, we know that something is wrong. I love what C.S. Lewis has to say about pain in his book The Problem of Pain. He says, "We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

He's Not Safe......

(Part one of my musings on the Goodness of God)

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you. - from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis.

This is one of my absolute favorite quotes. For those of you reading this who many not know, C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia books as an allegory about Jesus. Aslan represents Jesus. (Random fact, aslan means lion in Turkish).  What a beautiful and true thing to say about Jesus/God. Of course He isn't safe. But He is good!!! 

When Heaven Doesn't Answer

The past few months have been intensely difficult for me. I've been sick and in quite a lot of pain a large majority of the time. I have been feeling very disconnected from people and unable to build any real significant relationships. Rumors and lies have gone around my church about me and the situation was not dealt with well and left me feeling quite hurt and confused. But the most difficult thing about the past few months is not the situations I have been dealing with but rather the fact that God has been completely silent in the midst of all this.

Because I Have Forgotten How to Speak

It seems that I have forgotten how to really share my heart with people. There has been so much going on in my life and my heart and mind lately, things that I DESPERATELY want to talk to someone about, but for some reason, I can't. Not can't because it's not appropriate to share but can't because I have no idea how. So, once again, I turn to writing it out because my voice is failing me.

I am so horrible at this vulnerability and intimacy thing. I know many of the reasons why this is a struggle for me and this post is not going to be about what I need to share but why I am struggling so much to do so.

Relationships pt2

When you are 27 and single and most of your friends are in serious relationships, you tend to think about relationships a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unhappy in my singleness. I am very comfortable being single and I don't spend much time at all wishing to be in a relationship. I know that it will happen all in good time, but until them, I am, for the most part, content with where I am. There are days I wish I were not single, but those days are less frequent than the days in which I am perfectly happy with my relationship status.

Relationships pt.1

The past few months I have been thinking about relationships a lot. It seems that almost everyone I know is in a serious romantic relationship. Now, I guess that's not all that unusual given my age, but this is the first time since I can remember that every single one of my closest girl friends have boyfriends/fiances. At the 20 somethings group at my church I am one of only three single girls. That can make things a little awkward when there are 10+ single guys.

Rescue is Coming

If there is one thing that growing up in the church taught me, it's how to pretend that everything is okay. I've gotten so good at it that I can even deceive myself into thinking that I'm fine. I honestly don't intentionally lie to people about how I'm doing, it's just second nature to say that everything is fine with a smile on my face. o

Over the past few years I've gotten better about this with the little things but I'm coming to see that is still a problem for me with the big things. I think a part of it is that I get so overwhelmed by whatever it is that I'm going through that I just push it down deep and refuse to think about it. And it works... for a while. But then it comes creeping out around the edges until I break.

The Last Year and Where I am Now

I staffed the lecture phase of the DTS and what a summer it was!  I won't go into much detail because I've already written about it in a previous post. Towards the end of the school I found myself facing another decision. I had been asked to come on staff with the local church I had been attending and help with the coffee shop they were opening downtown and also work as the pastor's assistant. After much prayer and many conversations and prayer times with my YWAM leader, I decided that God was leading me in that direction. And so at the end of the lecture phase I ended my time on staff with YWAM Madison and joined the church staff. 

Working with the church was hands down one of the most challenging work experiences I have ever faced. I won't go into too much detail but two months in I found myself asking God why on earth he had called me to work with them. Nothing was going the way I thought it would or how we had discussed when I first agreed to do work for them. I made up my mind to stick it out with the hope things would get better. 

A Bit of a Recap

Once again it has been a while since I've sat down to write and, once again, it is mostly because there is so much going on inside of me that I have no idea where to start.  Even now and I am staring at these few lines and the cursor on the page wondering how I am going to distill and condense all these thoughts into something understandable and cohesive.

This past year has been a whirlwind of crazy! As usual, I found myself moving multiple times on very short notice but always going where I was sure God was leading me. January of 2011 found me packing up and moving to Kona Hawaii to attend the first ever Church Pioneering School with Youth With a Mission. Those three months were some of the most rewarding, challenging, informative months of my life! When the lecture phase of the school wrapped up, I found myself not going on outreach and not having a clue as to what my  next step would be. At the prompting of some of my friends and leaders I applied to join the cafe staff there. I did not understand why God was leading me to do this because not only did I have no desire to remain in Hawaii for a second longer, I also did not see much value in staying to work in a coffee shop whose customers were all believers and YWAMers. Thankfully God knows more than what we do!

Focused Obedience

Over the past few months I have been slowly working my way through a book by Floyd McClung titled "You See Bones, I See an Army: Changing the way we do church." I purchased the book during my DTS and for some reason it had been shelved for later reading. I don't think I have ever in my life taken so much time to read a book but this is not one for me to just breeze through. There is so much good stuff in here and I've been really taking the time to digest it and reflect upon it.

Just the other day I started part three: Focused Obedience. The first chapter in this section is titled Watch out for the Camels and oh my! God has been speaking to me through this chapter so much.  A lot of it is stuff that I already knew about myself but it's put in such a way that I feel like for the first time instead of just seeing that I have problem in this area, I actually feel like I see ways to make a change.