SoM: Father-Heart Week

Okay, the last six days have been intense. I’m not going to be able to sum up everything in the teachings, plus all the extraneous stuff that happened in my heart…

Father-Heart Week.  The week that every intern and second-year student says messed them up the most, the week where almost everyone cries their eyes out at least twice.  We basically spend five days seeking revelation of the love of God as a Father.  Because this pretty heavily involves Him filling in the gaps in areas where our own parents might have failed us, it tends to hit some pretty deep wounds.  I heard a lot of crazy stories.  I kind of was a crazy story.  For obvious reasons, I’m not going to go into many of those details on this blog.  Coming into the school, I already knew I had some serious issues with both my parents that I’ve been working through. So God acknowledged those.

And then He was like, “Look at these other hang-ups you didn’t even know you had!”  And subverted all my expectation for the week.

I had one really good cry, on Monday.   I actually spent a lot more time laughing.  Joy was a definite theme of the week for me—I think God’s trying to get it through to me that He isn’t passive about me.  He delights in me.  There was one fantastic activation we did yesterday (normally I dread activations, because they usually involve uncomfortable prophetic encounters with people you don’t know well):  the speaker told us we were going to invite childlikeness.  So we did it really literally—we blew up balloons, and blew party horns, and had a dance party to songs that were popular in the ‘90s.  It was crazy awesome, definitely one of my highlights of the week.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though.  There was one message, on Thursday, that was really hard to hear:  it was about having a spirit of sonship (or daughterhood, as it were)—especially towards your natural parents.  Part of me was listening to the message going, “Oh!  This is really relevant!  Hurray!” and another (bigger) part of me was going “WHOA, I’m not ready to hear this; I can’t do this.”  I think the events of my family life in the last two years have so changed the way I relate to both of my parents that I don’t even have a frame of reference right now for how to apply this message.  Intentionally being God’s daughter?  Okay, that sounds awesome.  Intentionally being a daughter to my parents?  That idea really threw me for a loop, and I wasn’t expecting it.  I didn’t even know it was an issue.  So that’s going to take some time to unravel.

We also had ministry team training—basically, practical instructions on how to (and especially how not to) pray over people.  Now, I’ve actually had similar training for my young adult group’s prayer team back home (which I never really served on), but it’s still incredibly intimidating.  For me, coming to the SoM was largely about overcoming fear and being equipped to do just this sort of thing without freaking out, so I’m trying to just say “yes” and listen to the Holy Spirit.  Whew.

A nutshell version of what God’s been telling me this week:

• He is my defender and deliverer.  
• He just loves it when I try; He doesn’t push me to do better than my best, even if my “best” seems to me to be not very good.  
• He wants to protect my heart so I don’t have to do it all myself.
• He’ll keep His word, and/therefore I can/should take Him really seriously.
• Spending time with me is tons of fun for Him.  His investment in me is always 100%.
• I can be as fanciful in my imaginations of heaven as I want, and I won’t be wrong or disappointed.  (I had a crazy hour-long vision about this one, guys.  It involved part of Revelation 19 and took me seven pages to journal about.  It was amazing.)
• This time at the school isn’t about whether I have what it takes, it’s whether He does…and yes, He does.

It’s a lot, right?  It’s a lot.  And next week is about “Healing Life’s Hurts.”  Ooh boy.

I’d be happy to talk to anybody about anything more in-depth, by the way! Or just to catch up with Kalamazoo! Totally feel free to message me on Facebook (or Skype me! I have Skype now!) sometime.  My schedule’s not super full until the end of September, so sometime in the next week and a half would be an especially good time.  

* A note to my fabulous commenters:  If you do leave a comment and are not signed into your Google account, please sign your name in the comment so I know it’s you—I had three anonymous comments on my last post that were very lovely, but one was unsigned and I couldn't tell who it was from!  :)  Thanks so much for keeping up with me!

In Which I Grouse About the Worldsuck Currently Taking Up Residence In My Life

Having a fever/upset stomach/constant headache/sore throat/no energy at all was vaguely frustrating when I was sleeping for 22 straight hours, absolutely horrible for four-ish more hours when I wasn't sleeping, a little bit fun when I spent a day and a half doing absolutely nothing but watching television, irritating when I realized I was getting teary-eyed over a show I have contempt for when I'm sane, slightly eerie when I figured out I lost seven pounds in two days, and rather panic-inducing now that I have to get back into the swing of things and my sleep schedule is erratic/currently at least six hours off and I have a whole weekend's worth of homework to do in half a Sunday.  It's more homework than the usual weekend's homework, too, because my English professor assigned us two papers instead of one, on top of the usual two math assignments, Economist summary-response paper, sociology readings, and the physics homework that was actually due last Thursday but didn't get done because I was alternately sleeping/throwing up at the time, and studying for the makeup physics test I will hopefully be able to take since I missed taking the actual exam at the same time I missed turning in the homework, for the same reasons.

I'm trying to vent my frustrations without devolving into a virtual quivering, loquacious wad of self-pity.  It's extremely difficult.   I might be failing, but am not in a very edit-friendly mood, for once.

Possibly-at-least-partially-wasn't-that-a-pretentiously-run-on-opener-because it's five-thirty in the morning and I have not gotten one wink of sleep, and I have to leave the house again in three hours, and I'm scheduled for art and connection counter at church this morning, meaning I have to function with both capable hand-eye coordination and extroverted social skills, and be present and accounted for in both services.  And I'm still sick enough to feel totally justified in being exhausted and grumpy, but not quite the stay-home-scot-free level of sick anymore.

Oh, help.

I hate what happened to my life in the last three days.

I'm also trying really hard not to look ahead to the month of double-time homestretch-of-the-semester academic fun I'm stepping into on Monday (e.g, trying not to curl up into a literal sobbing and terrified wad of very-not-loquacious self-pity).  And I'm also trying really hard not to revert back to dwelling endlessly on all those giant bigger-than-me issues happening in the world around me that really and truly outrage me (I'm refraining.  I'm refraining…)

I'm seriously whining.  Yes.  Sorry.  IAMJUSTVERYUNHAPPYRIGHTNOW.

Lots of sentences that start with grumpy "I want"s. …Sorry.

So, it's only nine days into the semester and I already want it to be over.
I want to take classes that I like with professors that don't intimidate me out of my skin.  I want more sleep (right this minute).  I want to not be stressed out all the time.  I really want to not be such a procrastinator.  I want to be a better studier.  I want to be articulate in conversations with people I respect but don't know well.  I want to really buckle down this weekend and NFTBA.  I want to have healthy eating habits.  I want to not get sick to my stomach.  I want to be better at replying to people's messages in a timely fashion.  I want to learn to take experienced people's advice (e.g., implement it, not just say, "What a good idea!" and forget about it).  I want French to make as much sense when I'm doing the homework as it did in class.  I want to know how to use a graphing calculator.  I want my woefully limited time to not be running away from me faster than I can figure out how to keep up.  I want to not feel guilty for opting not to murder myself with a ridiculously packed workload like some other honors students I know.  I want to not have to rely on the Internet for a third of my GPA.  I want to sit down somewhere and have a good cry and a cup of tea and then go accomplish Things.  I want my friends all to live nearby and be tangibly huggable.  I want to not have overdue library books that I didn't even get to finish.  I want to be motivated to seek God, every day, above all else.  I want to be consistent about praying for the people I promised to.

(I want to find better ways to get my point across when I'm depressed than using the semi-dubious syntax of most of the above sentences.)

I want to have ONE GOOD DAY (at minimum.)  instead of days that are purely drab, or days that start well and go sour, or days that start sour and take until evening to cheer up, or days that are just awkward as heck. I'm still waiting for one.  I haven't had one in some time (meaning, months.  I'm pretty sure.  I think there's a Switchfoot song about this).

Je vais retourner à l'école…

So, yesterday was the first day of school and it was not a fun day.   I woke up with a nasty headache, couldn't load my email, almost missed my bus, had trouble with getting my financial aid to go through, and spent all day stressing out over whether I could take intermediate French (which needs to be taken, but for which I had no backup plan if it turned out to be too much for my slightly rusty français.  I think it'll be okay, though.  If a lo of work, but hey.  I didn't really expect anything less in any case).  I also somehow happened to lose my brother's $90 graphing calculator. …Brilliant.
I actually think the highlight of the day might have been sitting in math class, and maybe running into a student I knew from last winter who visited his in-laws in England over summer break.   And maybe this:
Older guy on the bus, after complimenting me on my fedora:  "I love fedoras.  It's so great that you can buy them 2/$20 at Wal-Mart, because they're great to have on hand.  Especially the pinstripe ones, because I like to match my hats with my clothes—it's classy, you know—and you never know when someone's gonna die and you'll have to wear a suit to their funeral."
Oh man.  Will the bus never get old?  I forgot how much "fun" it was riding it in the fall.  I got so spoiled in the summer when there were only fifteen or twenty people on it at a time, instead of thirty-five or forty.  And I haven't even ridden it in the morning yet.  That'll really be fun.

Today's outlook is much sunnier than yesterday's, so far.  I get to start my TA for English 110 today, and go to psych 270 (which actually sounds horrendously boring, and it's taught by Mr. Louisell, who directs the honors program and chairs the psych department and is rather…intimidating), but I get to see all my honors homies from last year, so i'm looking forward to that.  ("Homies"? Did I just say that?)  I also purchased all my textbooks yesterday, so hopefully I'm done having to stand in 40-minute lines (I had to stand in three of them yesterday.  Buying textbooks online was definitely one of those things I meant to do weeks ago that got lost in the shuffle).

So, it's off into the wild yonder of breakfast and a shower and triple-checking the stuff I packed…adieu.
(I really hope this semester doesn't culminate in my posting frequent and gloomy posts about stress. Oy vey.)

Group presentation in nine and a half hours.  Really praying I don't freeze up (like I did in our practice run-through) or go over the time limit (which I am historically prone to do) or that our PowerPoint doesn't screw up (which also happened in our practice run-through, and has happened to me in past presentations).  Also praying my groupmates do great as well.
Because, by golly, we worked hard on this.

Prayer and practice and sleep.  —Serve me well.

I will be so relieved to have this class over with after tomorrow.

Sunday night blues

I promise to get a post up about Ignition and awesome God-stuff soon.  I poured a slew of stuff into a draft last night, but it's not really publishable in its current state.  It's long and rambly and redundant and I would feel like a terrible writer if I let it loose on the Internet right now.  I didn't have time to edit it today, because I went to church ten minutes after hauling myself out of bed and since then have been simultaneously trying to do homework and catnap all day, because I basically have felt exhausted, headachey, and ponderous (in the physical and mental senses).  I've spent almost twelve consecutive hours now laboring over what should have been six hours' worth of homework at most.  I missed out on testimony night at youth group, and missed going to Dwell (second week in a row—bah) and now it's almost midnight and I'm lonely…if there is one thing that makes me outright miserable lately, it's being the only one awake in the house, not of choice, but because of homework I didn't do.  Maybe it's ridiculous, but it makes me feel sort of abandoned.  Faugh, this character analysis essay is letting me down (I love doing character analyses, but doing them on a deadline sucks), and I'm dog tired, and Jesus is my lifeline (believing that).  Anyway, I'll post about Ignition (hopefully) tomorrow.  School this week is going to need a healthy dose of optimism.  In addition to my normal homework load, I also have to do a six-page literature analysis of this 1980s movie and I have this ludicrously humongous International Relations exam on Thursday, which I'm getting more stressed about by the hour.

I do not want this week to happen.
Maybe it will look better after I've actually gotten some SLEEP.

Hannah, I should get those notes for you typed up soon! Hopefully tomorrow!
…Also, I got you and Gwen wristbands from Ignition, so (both of you, if you still read this, Gwen) remind me when you come to Kalamazoo!

Perambulations on stress

I've only been out of bed for twenty minutes and already this is not shaping up to be a good day.  I was going to see Harry Potter with Emily today, but due to problems in obtaining a ride and a realization that I had a lot more homework than I thought I did, HP sadly had to be expelled in favor of less fun pursuits for the day.

And now my nervous system is a bit overtaxed.  Because I have math homework, and essays to read for English, and thirty pages to read for Modern Culture & the Arts.  And Career Decision-Making is the worst still, because I have to finish a paper for that class but I don't have enough material to fulfill the page requirement yet; I have to interview a publisher author/editor about their career and write a paper on that, but the person I thought I could interview fell through and now I don't know who I'm going to interview; and only one of my mates for the group project has followed through so far, so now I have to call up two guys I barely know and nag them (in a friendly manner) about sending their parts of the paper to me so I can put them together. 

Yes, you're probably all tired of hearing me list off all the things I have to do that're stressing me out, but that's pretty much taking up the bulk of my active prosencephalon right now. I'm kind of just venting to get this all out somewhere. I freaking don't know how I'm going to manage this (mostly the interview, since that's the one thing I absolutely cannot afford to not get done, except the group project, but I can still turn in my part even if no one else does, so I'll get at least partial credit.  But if I don't turn in my interview questions and the paper I have to write on it, I fail the whole class.  No joke.)

And I'm going to New Day today for the "community worship night" hosted by WorshipArts.  Under normal circumstances I would be at least fairly excited, but since this is cutting four hours out of my loaded day, I am not.   Help!