grace & small revelations

Today was what I would usually understatedly call “not the best day ever”.

I had nightmares last night (which is an extremely rare occurrence in my life) and woke up feeling really gross.  I was tired all day.  We had an activation in the morning session where we had to tell people why we loved them, but I wasn’t able to find most of the people I wanted to talk to.  When we did treasure hunting in the afternoon, nobody wanted to talk to us and we couldn’t match any of our words of knowledge.  We had chicken for dinner.  I napped by mistake and missed a meeting of my outreach team.  We went to House of Prayer (two hours of intercessory worship) in the evening, and I was feeling really sick, with no recourse.  Then, just as I was ready to go home and crash, one of my outreach team leaders came up to me and filled me in on what I missed at the meeting…

…we’re sharing testimonies tomorrow night.  Not in the school—in front of the church.  Having had no prior practice.  And because most of our team is leaving for the holiday weekend (Thanksgiving in Canada is inexplicably in mid-October), it’s only going to be me and two other people.  There was also somebody that I was feeling a little bit judged by in the evening, which is not something you encounter a lot of here, so even a little bit of condemnation (real or perceived) feels like a ton of bricks.

I was literally on the verge of bursting into tears.  The whole way back to the dorms, I was just like I can’t do this.  There’s no way.  I don’t want to do any of this. 

In lieu of having any comfort food (I haven’t been able to buy chocolate because I’m poor), I took a hot shower and God and I had some space to talk.  I poured out what i was feeling, and ended it with “…it just has not been a good day.”  and suddenly, I was reminded of a quote I heard a couple of weeks ago from a guy called Graham Cooke:

“[God] is faithful.  From this day on, for you there is no such thing as a good day or bad day.  There is only a day of grace.  And some days the grace of God allows you to enjoy what is happening.  And some days the grace of God allows you to endure what is happening.  But don’t think about good and bad anymore – just enjoy the grace that is present.”

So I started thinking about what grace showed up in my life.  obviously I endured, or I would be dead right now.  So how was God showing up in my “bad day”?

Although I was really tired this morning, I was still able to immerse in the storytelling glory of the marvelous Chris DuPre (our speaker for the week; more on that in another post).  Even though I hated the chicken at dinner, the sweet potato fries we also had were fantastically good.  I was able to reach out to people this morning that I might not normally talk to a lot.  Even if it felt like our treasure hunt was a failure, we still stepped out despite feeling incredibly awkward, and that’s a stinking big deal.  We finally got our shower head replaced this week, so I actually had water pressure for a decent shower (glory, glory hallelujah!).  Emily lent me use of her hot chocolate mix.  I was able to participate in the rapid-fire prayer at the House of Prayer and actually feel like I was connecting with God even though I felt sick.  Somebody randomly turned out to have a book I’ve been wanting to read and offered to lend it to me.  One of my roommates gauged that I was in a weird mood (she became alarmed because I wasn’t talking to myself) and asked if I was okay, which meant a lot to me.

I still am feeling really not-okay with testimony-sharing tomorrow, but there will be grace. There has been grace for every time I’ve had to get up and babble in front of people before.  I actually have a testimony to share, and I have a friend or two that will let me practice on them in the hallway tomorrow.  So that’s a good start.

There’s always grace.  Ask for it, and you’ll find it.

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!

Deeps

So, while I was soaking the other day, I had this experience.  I'm not sure if it was much more intensely sensory version of the "pictures" I normally get when soaking, of if I dozed and it was a dream, but either way I have the unshakeable impression that it was definitely a God-thing.

I'm diving into the ocean, the warm-and-gorgeous-eye-popping-wildlife-teeming-coral-reef kind of ocean you see in commercials for the Caribbean (or shark attack movies, or volcano disaster movies, or whatever), only it isn't water—it's honey.  Not viscous and sticky and (frankly) absolutely gross like swimming through honey would really be, but sweet and faintly amber-colored and just a little thicker than water.  It was more the impression of honey than the actual experience of honey, sort of like a painting.  (Also, it was breathable.)  So I'm swimming through this honey, diving deeper and deeper.  The light isn't coming from above like sunlight; below me there's this bright—not really a light, but a vaguely white sense of something beautiful that attracts you, like you would naturally swim towards the light if you were actually underwater.  And as I'm swimming down towards this light, immersed in this honey ocean, I just have this overwhelming sense of bliss.  It's not an emotion I can seem to recreate by will.  It's like a combination of joy, electric excitement, peace, and contentment.  I'm absolutely, gloriously elated to be here in this ocean, but I also know that if I go deeper, it will just get better.  I could stop at any point and just rest int he euphoria, but I could swim deeper and discover even more joy.  It's perfect happiness, and yet anticipation.  It's bliss, and yet adventure.  And it's a sense of adventure like I've always imagined adventure really ought to be, like I imagine people who actually go looking for adventure feel—the fairy-tale kind of adventure, that involves mortal danger and darkness and potentially unwanted yet vital personal growth, but the knowledge that there's always help when I need it and there's something better waiting at the end than I could have even imagined when I first set out.  For the first time, I felt really equipped.  Not of my own accord, because it was still just me, but just a solid recognition that (however invisible) God was right there, always aware of what I needed and ready to answer even my slightest cry for help.

This is how God sees my journey with Him—I don't know quite if I've already dived in and this is where I am, or if this is where He means me to be—but it was so beautiful.  I want to be there.

Ignition is this weekend.  I want to go into this expectant, looking for expansion, like I never have before.

{Also, I'm wondering about the symbolism (Biblical or literary?) of honey.  I might come back to this, blogwise.}

Many titles exist here, none of which linger long enough to be read.

      I.
I'm not there.
This, an obvious fact, I know, is.
Yet now it seems to present within its ubiquitously clarified lines
An epiphany:
(In the form of a question:)
How can I make comparisons
As if I were?
How can the handshaped hearts
Pretend machine-manufactured sameness
Of operation?

     II.
We cannot, yet
If we did not
No one would call us human.
So we say white (or invisible,
even to us) lies,
And it makes us
Good.
Because the handshaped hearts
Beat, and have aches
And growling stomachs and growing pains,
And if they had hands, we would need
To hold them once in a while.
(Or more often.)
For an even keel.

     III.
All of us know how it goes.
[Click here for personalized translation of this stanza.]

     IV.
And it is only when we need the lies most
(In context)
That we call them out.
How defeatist, how suicidally tangled
Are our inner workings
In themselves
In the best and worst of ways.
And humanity is this –

I often have doubts about things.

And every now and again, just when I'm not expecting it, God shows up and says, "Your life would be better if you didn't have this doubt, and I'm going to prove it to you."  The form of this proof is sometimes spectacular and mind-blowing, and sometimes it's tiny and warm and fluffy and still amazing.

HE is so great.  In every sense of the word.

Cloudburst

This season of my life has been all about rain, in so many forms.  I drafted another post a couple of months ago detailing all the specific incidents that have been befalling my life having to do with rain, but I don't think I'm going to post it now.  (Though, as you fine readers of mine perhaps noticed, the current background of my blog is a photograph of rain, which I changed a few weeks before writing that post.)  Suffice it to say that rain has been very much an overarching theme in my life the last few months—astoundingly so, when I really stop and look at it all.  Rain in songs, rain in art, rain in real-time weather, rain in Bible study, rain in prophetic words.  And not just mine, but other people's, too, that they share.  I keep meaning to research it, pray about it, that sort of thing.  It's so crazy.  It's got my attention, and if it's God—and I assume it is, considering all the contexts in which it keeps cropping up—I am extremely curious to know what He's trying to say before it's past.

*Amidst the stressful scholastic wrath of the mid-semester point, I do plan to write a follow-up to this post, within the next month or so at the latest.*

Excerpt from "Crazy Love" by Francis Chan

When I am consumed by my problems—stressed out about my life, my family, and my job—I actually convey the belief that I think the circumstances are more important than God's command to always rejoice.  In other words, that I have a "right" to disobey God because of the magnitude of my responsibilities.

WORRY implies that we don't quite trust that God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what's happening in our lives.

STRESS says that the things we are involved in are enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace towards others, or our tight grip of control.

Basically, these two behaviors communicate that it's okay to sin and not trust God because the stuff in my life is somehow exceptional.  Both worry and stress reek of arrogance.  They declare our tendency to forget that we've been forgiven, that our lives here ate brief, that we are headed to a place where we won't be lonely, afraid, or hurt ever again, and that in the context of God's strength, our problems are small, indeed.

Why are we so quick to forget God?  Who do we think we are?

…

Frankly, you need to get over yourself. It might sound harsh, but that's seriously what [God being the center of everything] means.

…

To be brutally honest, it doesn't really matter what place you find yourself in right now.  Your part is to bring Him glory…The point of your life is to point to Him.  Whatever you are doing, God wants to be glorified, because this whole thing is His.  It is His movie, His world, His gift.

(pp. 41-42, 44-45)

On the Coexistence of Awesome and Suck

(With both "awesome" and "suck" being nouns in this context.)

So often we tend to think of "my life is good" and "this is the dregs of my coffee cup of life right now" to be a dichotomy—two states of being that are diametrically opposed.  You're either in mostly good circumstances or you're in mostly bad circumstances.  Or at least I often think that way, probably because a lot of artists tend to juxtapose them in popular worship songs.  But I've been thinking today—there are some circumstances in my life right now which are definitely adding to World Suck, in both minor and major ways.  But there are also ways in which God just keeps showing up, proving that He's good, loving, faithful, a good listener, sovereign…yes, all the time.  For example, my home life is on a roller coaster with a very high nausea rating right now, but I'm getting two years of free college tuition.…I'm stressed beyond reason about these intermediate French classes I have to take, but I've suddenly started sleeping better than I have all year.… I might not have any idea how I'm going to finish a novel by the end of the year, but I'm no longer catatonically depressed about it.…Facing the labyrinth of choices I'm going to have to make in the next two-ish years literally makes me sick to my stomach, but I'm getting it really hammered into my head for the first time that I can trust my friends to love me even if I'm not perfect.  My life has nadirs and zeniths dwelling side by side, and it always will (if not to this degree all the time).
…Yes, my second thought after all this was, "Well, duh."  But I think we can tend to dwell on one or the other most of the time, so it's nice to have it out of my blind spot for a few hours.

I tend to be an optimist in the short term and a pessimist in the long term (e.g., I think human culture as a whole is undergoing steady entropy, but I tend to be hopeful and "look on the bright side" regarding things that happen in my life and the lives of people I know).  Comes with the Christianity, I suppose. (Fallen world / sovereign God.  Also not really a dichotomy.)

…I have no succinct or revelatory ending for this post.  That's pretty much all I have to say.

End result

Humans throughout history have had varied and notoriously weird takes on death.  Today's been rather full of it, in ways.  This morning I was reading C. S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, which is the published edition of the journals he wrote after the early death of his wife from cancer.   And then one of our hamsters died this afternoon (Requiescat in pace, Charley Pattertwig) and we held a funeral, and we watched an episode of the Cosby Show in which Rudy's goldfish dies, and my anthropology professor was talking about these royal tombs he helped excavate a few years ago in South America.

So it got me to wondering (as if my day wasn't already morbid enough) why people do the things they do to dead bodies.  I mean, physically disposing of remains makes sense.  But then people hold funerals.  And I don't see anything wrong with funerals at all, but they are kind of curious phenomena to me.  What real purpose do they serve?  It's strange that everyone has something for which they want to be remembered, as if the being remembered was the important thing.  It's odd that people imagine a graveside is the somehow the best or the most appropriate place to do that remembering.

And why do people wish to be buried with things?  Especially all of those ancient royal families.  Clearly they believed in an afterlife, or else they wouldn't have taken civilizations' worth of wealth and thousand of fellow human beings literally to their graves with them.  It's odd that everyone thought the afterlife, whatever it be, would be stratified the same way as this life.  Nobody ever wondered if they might come into the afterlife the same way as this life—that is, out of a womb and absolutely penniless?  That somehow material objects transcended some cosmic boundary, even though obviously people's bodies didn't.  If I were dying, and I believed I was going to an afterlife very similar to the present, would I be afraid to die alone?  Probably.  So, why did they slaughter hundreds of servants and cattle to take with them, instead of a family member (that probably would have gone over poorly) or a lover (that might not have been the reputation they wanted to wake up with, I suppose)?  And if I were a servant in this life and my dying king had me executed five minutes post his death, so I could share his large and dank and expensive tomb, what would I do if I did wake up "on the other side"?  I would run, that's what.

It boggles me, frankly, to think about how very different people's minds actually worked pre-Renaissance, in societies where independence wasn't taught and pursued as a crucial goal of someone's life.  "The divine right of kings" really meant something transcendent to people, and people used it in ways that weren't necessarily meant to get people to respect "the Lord's anointed".

Death is something people have never understood, and do not understand, and never will.  Obviously, I have beliefs about death, but I still "know" next to nothing about it, aside from the purely corporeal aspects, and even modern science has raging debates over that.  Death is a bizarre phenomenon, which makes sense, considering it wasn't meant to be at all.  I don't know where this post is going/has gone.  It's just something I've been thinking about today.  Eh.

"I took from me pocket ten sovereigns bright…"

God is sovereign.  All the time.

And I had kind of a revelation about that tonight (while at WorshipArts camp worship night, you guys rock, by the way).

When things are really hard, and it feels like half of my life is completely falling apart, I've always been fairly capable of saying (most of the time, at least) that God is sovereign—that He sees me, that He knows where this is going.  It's easier to trust when I can't see a week ahead of me.  But He's not just sovereign in the lows, He is sovereign in the highs, too.

Whoa.  Way to overlook the flip side of the shiny coin, Kiersten.

 

When things are going fantastically, when all the pieces fit together, when the sun is shining and I'm getting at least seven hours of sleep every night, God is still in control.  He still knows where things are going.  I don't have to carry the torch alone.  My effort isn't going to necessarily win or lose me the day.  God is in control, even then.  And frankly, I don't think about that much.  When it's out of my hands, it's relatively easy to put it all into His hands.  But when I've worked hard and things are going swell?  Then it's all on my shoulders.  Then it's all my responsibility to keep it going.  But that's just not true.  God demands just as much of my trust when I'm on solid ground as when it feels like I'm falling.  

God is sovereign.  All the time.  It is never, ever out of His hands.  He can juggle most anything, good as well as bad.

(Unrelated aside: the title is from Irish folk song "The Wild Rover."  First thing that popped into my head for a title. Also, it was featured in one of the Bloody Jack books.  I freaked out when I saw it:  "I OWN THAT SONG! HA!")

I am so blessed.

I'm not exactly sure how many readers of this blog know what's going on in my life right now.  To those who do, this might seem like a weird sentiment.  Aside form all the normal stresses of shyness and school and uncertainty and major decisions, my home life has gotten fairly screwed over in the last couple of weeks.

But I have never felt so loved in my whole life.  I mean it.

In the last week I've gotten three Facebook messages out of the blue from people whom I know don't know what's going on with me, just saying "Hey, I've been thinking about you and praying for you, and you're amazing and I love you".  And I've gotten several calls and emails—and hugs and prayers—from people who do know what's going on.  

People are taking time for me.  Even just a few minutes, but they're taking time for me.  And for once, I don't feel guilty about it.  I feel utterly awed.  God's reshaping the weird mentalities I've had about myself and my relationships with others for as long as I remember—like He promised me He would.

I am so goshdarned blessed.  God loves me so much.  It literally floored me earlier—I couldn't even stand upright, I was so amazed and humbled by all the ways He keeps finding to show me I'm loved and favored, even though a lot of things are emotionally and circumstantially really sucky right now.

So—I love you guys.  Thanks for being my friends, and sticking by me, and taking time for me.  You're awesome, and I wouldn't be here without you. 

"Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow." – James 1:17

Psalm 136

Wonder I

  Sister, cast a shadow (Brother, tell me why)
  You're holding back the sun (No, it can't be done)
  We're towering to these spiders (But I feel so small)
  Is it all right (Is it okay)?
  It's okay; I feel small too
       Wonder, wonder I
       If I stood on your shoulders
       Could I touch the sky?

————————————————————————————————


There are (sort of) three kinds of people in the world:  the Lack-Awesomes, the Contagious-Awesomes, and the Intimidating-Awesomes.  Lack-Awesomes are self-explanatory and not the subject of this post.  Many of the people I know are Contagious-Awesomes, which means they're so awesome they're just lots of fun to be friends with, and proximity to them helps draw out your innate awesome.  I know a lot of these people.  I love them a lot.  But I also know several Intimidating-Awesomes.  These are people who are just as—maybe even more—awesome as/than the Contagious-Awesomes, but instead of spurring on your awesome with their awesome, they unwittingly scare your awesome into a cowering in the corner, condensing it into a forgotten little puffball of tangled deoxyribonucleic acid.  It's like one of those stacked bar graphs:  there's a set amount of awesome to be split between two people, so the more awesome the Intimidating-Awesome displays, the less awesome you can show.  The heat of their awesome evaporates your awesome (or at least that's what it feels like).  I know a couple of people like that.  I feel miserably inarticulate and and juvenile and boring around them (even if they're younger than me), which is ridiculous, especially since they're all uber nice folks.  I've always wanted to be friends with the Intimidating-Awesomes, but it's kind of hard to do.  I always get a tad bit starstruck, and starstrickenness makes it decidedly difficult to be (feel) awesome.  

[EDIT, approx. 12:27 a.m.]
…I just had a realization (I think with some help from God; late-night prayer rocks)—I think a lot of the cause of Intimidating-Awesomes is that they tend to be either 
1. really extroverted, or 
2. just like me. (That is not meant to be a brag on myself at all, by the way.)  
  ~  Extroverts tend to either be great for holding up a conversation with an introvert, or terrifying to to an introvert, because they naturally tend to emit awesomeness in their interactions with people instead of bottling it all up and quietly channeling it into things, like introverts tend to do.  Thus, it can feel like a standard I have to measure up to in my side of the conversation/interaction.  And I'm usually incapable of doing so (or feeling as if I am) because I usually have a completely different mode of self-expression than those sorts of Awesomes.  
  ~  People who are just like me (in terms of personality and often hobbies and talents) are people I'm really attracted to (friend-wise) but also feel a natural sort of competition with because we're so alike.  I REALLY feel pressure to measure up to (or over) their portion of awesome, but it's quite difficult due to the fact that's our types of awesome are usually very similar, or at least similarly expressed.  Thus, it's hard not to subconsciously view this sort of person as a rival, even while really wanting to befriend them.

[Wow, I wasn't expecting all of that.]

[ From the retrospective semi-objective viewpoint, it's an interesting phenomenon. ]

Now I have to figure out what to do with all of that.  (I apologize; this is a hazard of impulsive real-time blogging.  My "deep" posts are not neatly packaged.)

Celebrate the Day

It's Christmas again!  It's a tiptoeing holiday; I never remember it until it's here.  Though this year, I literally completely forgot about it until about three days ago.  I'm kind of ludicrously excited and yet, at the same time, feeling disappointed-in-advance, like a niggling wormhole of paranoia that Christmas isn't going to be all that i'm hoping for.

This is my traditional Christmas Eve song.* (This year, instead of just listening to it, I actually found a chordsheet and played it on the piano.)  It always gets my brain in the right place right around now.  It sort of oddly imparts a sense of peace, a sense of closeness, a sense of relief that i'm not the only one who arrives at Christmas Day realizing I've barely given "the Reason for the season" five minutes of thought, let alone personal attention.  I can take some time to reflect, and talk, and go to bed truly feeling that there's really a bigger reason for this grandiose, astonishing holiday besides merely me.

One of the lines in that song I linked to says "And here is where you're finding me in the exact same place as New Year's Eve"…I feel like that every year.  My resolve to spend more time with Jesus never quite makes it past a wobbly trial run.  But even though I still lacked effort in doing devotions or whatnot this year, I feel like God did a lot in me.  I'm more confident, I've started feeling a compassion for people I've certainly never had before, I've experienced freedom from a couple of really chronic issues I was dealing with, and I've discovered that being thankful for lots of little arbitrary things is actually a really enjoyable pastime.  My prayer life, at least, has seen some improvement.  I've discovered that Jesus is much better at cheering me up than wallowing in self-pity is.  And today's his birthday!    Whatever does or doesn't happen, I want to feel him smiling at me.  It makes me giddy just thinking about that.  Even if falling in love with a fellow human being ends up being absent on the roster of my life events for the next year, I really hope that truly falling in love with Jesus finally is.

Look at that, two "deep" posts in under twelve hours.  Lucky you, blogosphere.  I send concisely-wrapped wishes your way for an uber happy, joyous, jolly, convivial, cheery, very-merry Christmas.

  * [This is my "serious" Christmas Eve song.  My traditional goofy Facebook-status-material Christmas Eve song, also by Relient K, can be found here. ]

A post made of sapience.

Depth is not something to be measured.  It is not calculated in inches or miles, but the fragments of eternity we choose to invest in something valuable.  It is ten percent shadows and dark words, but ninety percent honesty and the warm glow of the most commonplace sunlight imaginable, with a scattering of clouds and a drizzling of rain and the lightest touch of the year's first snow flurry.  Depth is not wrought by distance, but a tilting of the world so that what once was a shallow, pale pool gradually seeps into cool, fertile black earth and grows a tree or two, with cherry blossoms and usually a season of fruit.  It isn't lack of compatibility that dams the pool; it's lack of a shovel with which to dig out the mud.  It's neglect.  It's fear that keeps us cowering in the dying red sunlight, never knowing that if we could just muster on through the night that the ever-changing sunrise is more beautiful than the neverendingneverendingneverendingneverending sunset, that depth breathes more wonder than the mere prettiness of faint surface chatter.  Investment comes back with interest, while buried treasure just attracts parasites.  No plumb line can fit through the soul.  Depth is not a recipe, but a sure and steady madness…or so it seems, even to the most illogical of observers (like me?  Sometimes?).  It is the electric light in a land without power outages—no candle to flicker, to dim, to burn out into nothing, leaving only dim smoke of memory behind.  It's the fuzzy socks that are so cozy you want to keep them forever even once they're wearing thin.  It's an analogy in Kiersten's plumbed-out brain this Christmas Eve…

Free will versus predestination

(Funny, that this came up up right after Emily decides to start researching different faiths and viewpoints.  *Time Lord.*)

So, I was having this interesting discussion today with Abby (a girl from my honors classes.  She's super nice and really smart—in the math geek sort of way—and I like her a lot).  Recently we've started hanging out together during our breaks in the afternoon Tuesday and Thursday, between our Honors English and respective math classes.  Today we were talking about school, grades, stress (normalcy), and the discussion of stress sort of naturally drifted into the topic of prayer —>  God —> the Bible, and then we started talking about different denominations of Christianity.  This then led into the revelation that I'm neo-charismatic nondenominational, and she's Reformed—thus meaning, for the two of us at least, that I believe in free will and she believes in predestination.  This prefaced a forty-minute, somewhat intense, mutually respectful, highly engaging debate.  

I believe that Christ died for everyone, and that every individual is, during the course of their life here on earth, presented with the choice to accept that salvation, and thus enter a personal relationship with Jesus and eventually go to heaven.  Abby believes that at creation, God chose certain people to be saved and others to not be saved, and that Christ died for only those God predestined.  As she explained it to me, this means that every "chosen" individual "accepts" Christ because they're already saved, like an outward expression of gratitude.  (Am I making sense?  I think this is it in a nutshell.  I had to ask her to explain it a couple of times.)  She also said that she believes someone who is chosen has to accept Christ, no two ways about it, and someone who isn't predestined can never accept Christ.  

After a long exchange (cut short—at least for the time being, depending on whether she wants to take it up agin later—by her departure to Calculus), we established that what it basically came down to is this:  we both believe that man is created in God's image; the difference lies in that I believe the Fall distorted or corrupted that image, but that there is still a part of every human that longs for God whether they know it or not; and she believes that god's image was erased form humankind in the Fall, and thus that humans are incapable of choosing God over sin without divine intervention ("being forced into it" by predestination, as she put it).

I guess where I get hung up is that it definitely states in the Bible that God doesn't want anyone to perish (2 Peter 3:9; I'm not absolutely positive of the context, but still, I think that verse states God's love pretty explicitly).  If that's true, why would He only choose some people to be saved?  If salvation is irresistible for the chosen, why wouldn't He force salvation on everyone?  Abby specifically said that she doesn't believe the Father's love extends to every human being; I don't understand this either.  If God is love, how can he create something and not love it?

Anyhow, I don't know if we'll continue this discourse later or not.  Definitely neither of us were convincing the other, which is okay.  We were friends having a conversation (even if it did get a bit...lively, haha.).  But I, at least, found it a fascinating discussion.  I've never actually talked to a live Calvinist about their beliefs before.  i've read about it, certainly, but it always sounded pretty far out.  When Abby laid it out, I could sort of see where she's coming from (it doesn't sound as good in print); I just can't agree with it.  I totally see why people take courses on theology.  Even if you can't agree with everything—and even if nobody can know all of the answers for sure this side of heaven—I still think it's one of the most thought-provoking things on the planet.

Proportions of Love

"It is probably impossible to love any human being simply too much.  We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for man, that constitutes the inordinacy."
       – C. S. Lewis

Funny, that.  Everything we have of value is limited—time, money, space, words, things—even generosity is practically limited—save for love.  

Love is infinite; in its very existence it breeds itself.  

No matter where we are or what we're doing, regardless how many people we know, we can just go on loving them and loving them right on into ridiculousness.  What would be an destructive amount of love for a human being on its own is righted if our love for God is bigger than even our crazy love for that person.  If God is the source and primary focus of our love, we can love infinitely, and far from being excessive or unhealthy, it is a form of growth and definitely a thing of beauty ("a joy forever").  

If we understand what healthy love is, we cannot love man too much; only love God too little.  

If the Creator of love is not the source of love, than our love is not love but something else entirely.
If the Inspiration of love is not beloved, than any earthly beloved is not truly loved.

Can we give unconditional love without first receiving it?  Can we interpret something when we cannot even speak its native language?  Can we know how to love others without learning to love the One who loved us first?  Can any human this side of heaven know how to love the invisible God more than the visible earth, more than the visible man, more than the tangible self?

If love is the greatest, the most indestructible, the most infinite thing of all, the highest glory of human existence, how dare we reduce it to a mere emotion?

How do we understand and experience the amazing impossibility of loving God too much?

I don't really NEED a duck...snuggly or otherwise.

Deepness, I spurn you. 
I am going to write something utterly shallow and futile.  
Such as, "I like grapes."
Except — can you say anything shallow these days?  Can you say anything without having it overanalyzed?  Without an ulterior agenda?  Without accidentally saying something profound about God or about yourself or about the universe?

Modesty (What's Going On Up There?)

Earlier today I was on Wikipedia—I don't even recall what I originally looking up; I tend to spend time just surfing Wikipedia, as geeky as that might sound—and I came across the article about The Rebelution, a Christian youth ministry self-described as "a teenage rebellion against the low expectations of ungodly culture."  this caught my eye in particular because I heard the founders, twins Alex and Brett Harris, featured on Focus on the Family not long ago, when they were about my age, and I'd thought their story was a pretty cool one.    In any case, I saw that a couple of years ago they did a modesty survey:  300-some hundred girls submitted questions about what in their behavior or dress provoked a guy's...masculine hormones, and during a 20-day period, over 1600 guys of all ages wrote in to give their opinions.  Yes-or-no statements were presented, and each guy rated how strongly they agreed with a statement, with the option for them to provide additional text responses.  Over about two hours, I surfed through the entire survey and read most of the text responses.  It was admittedly rather eye-opening.

As a Christian girl, I usually strive to dress and behave in a fashion I believe is modest and honoring to God.  Though, i must admit that throughout my more recent teen years at least some of that has been out of insecurity about my appearance, rather than a conscious desire to be modest.  
While I wasn't overtly surprised at a lot of guys' responses about how specific clothing items were or weren't stimulating to the imagination, I was startled at a lot of their reactions towards girls' intentional immodesty.  A lot of them said they feel insulted or degraded when a girl flaunts herself.  While I know a lot of guys want to keep their imaginations elsewhere and their minds pure, it hadn't occurred to me that guys would feel disrespected by girls' attempts to control or allure them by dressing provocatively as girls often feel disrespected when guys objectify them.  Just as not all girls want to be eye candy, not all guys are comfortable with seeing or imagining it.  It was actually surprisingly encouraging.  While it is obvious to me that upstanding Christian guys do exist who actually want to see less skin from a girl, it was awesome to see it from so many.  There were a few open questions at the end (e.g., "If you could say one thing to your sisters in Christ about modesty, what would it be?")  that were free text responses instead of multiple-choice scale, and that was the most encouraging of all.  I read a lot of informative and encouraging responses.  Most of them clearly expressed that in no way were they trying to shift all the blame for their lustful thoughts onto the way a girl dresses, but they expressed sincere appreciation over a girl's attempt to dress in way that wouldn't act as a "stumbling block" and actually said they find a modestly dressed girl "refreshing", especially in friendships.  A lot of them expressed that when a girl shows too much, it's actually really awkward.  

Last year I read Relient K's book The Complex Infrastructure Known as the Female Mind, where they "categorized" all the stereotypes of girls they'd observed over the years. (Quite humorous.  I recommend it, if you don't plan to take it too seriously.)  In the back they broke all guys down into a mere two categories: "The Ape" and "Mr. Wonderful".  "Each guy on the planet is The Ape and Mr. Wonderful...but each only on a part-time basis", they said.  The Ape is the utterly mannerless, more vulgar side that neglects personal hygiene, revolves around macho aggressiveness, laughs at horrifically dumb jokes, and tends to focus on girls in the more "unwholesome", hormonal-driven ways.  Mr. Wonderful, on the other hand, has "staggering good looks", adores and respects his family, is hardworking and driven (but not ruthless),intelligent, polite, humorous, trustworthy, considerate, the most outstandingly upstanding citizen around, has no annoying bad habits, and an undying romantic who treats his lady like a princess in absolutely every way.  "Each guy is a strange and beautiful mix of self-centered slob and selfless gentleman."  It is so bizarre (and, I confess, really funny) to me that they broke down girls into a dozen-plus basic categories and even then had to add a disclaimer saying, "This doesn't cover everyone", and then said, "All guys are a mix of THIS and THIS"—and it just baffles me. Girls don't even make that much sense to me some of the time—and I think I have a pretty femininely-wired brain, cognitively speaking.  How much more baffled can guys get?

But, I digress.  It was really refreshing to me to see, in plain black-and-white, so much desire in so many guys to be the "Mr. Wonderful", who wants to be driven by a focus on God and a desire to like a girl for her personality and spirit instead of driven by libido.  Even though I have seen those same desires and principles lived out in the lives of guys I know (and for whom I have a very hefty dose of respect and appreciation) it was pretty darn awesome to see so much in words.  I admit, occasionally it weirded me out to see the extent of detail guys could give in their answers, but it was kind of eye opening as well.  I—along with most girls, I think—really don't have a good understanding of just how visual the male brain is wired to be. And I'm like, if guys' minds conjure up this much even when they don't want to mentally undress us, how far does a guy who doesn't check his thoughts let his imagination wander?  To me, personally, it was a bit of a wakeup call, and definitely an inspiration.  

Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight.  For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful.  1 Peter 3:1-5 (NIV)

Security and Prince Charming

Hey!  So, the retreat at Beechpoint was fantastic.  I had an amazing time with the planet's most awesome youth group and youth pastors!  Human foosball was wagonloads of fun: mud, bruises, friendly-but-violent alter egos, bloody toes and all.  Card games (Mafia!  Dutch Blitz!) and insanity abounded.  The food provided by our hardworking hosts was homemade and quite yummy.  We did enforce our 2 AM bedtime, and I got prayer for my ear (which has been feeling better since.  It just couldn't stand up to God's awesomeness!), and we were actually all functional the next day despite the rain (and I'm still awake to post this!  Yay!  Though I won't be for much longer after I'm done here).

But the best part of the whole 24 hours was definitely God.  The worship—even if it was just nineteen sweaty people & nineteen patient angels packed into a room with a guitar—was amazingosity embodied.  Special thanks to Aaron Mueller, graduate of our youth group and killer dodgeball player, who came and gave two awesome messages.  My spiritual tummy is packed with lots of food for thought.  He talked about surrendering goals and desires to God, and giving our lives over to His "authorship".  God met me with a couple of things there, one that I'd been wrangling with for a while, and one issue I hadn't even realized was an issue.  It was good.  But there was one revelation He bowled me over with when we were having a soaking time that I'd like to share.  (This is the condensed version, because the transcription in my journal is very multifaceted and descriptive and emotionally messy and over a page long.)

I saw myself in this beautiful white dress, slow-dancing with a strong figure in a tuxedo that I couldn't quite see clearly, and I was hit with this overwhelming, powerful, actually tangible sense of security, far stronger than I have ever felt before.  Not just security in a physical sense, but emotionally (I knew I was unconditionally cherished and supported), emotionally in a different sense (I was completely confident in my identity; I felt and knew I looked totally gorgeous) and even monetarily/financially (my beau not only provided for all my needs, but lavished me with gifts like the expensive dress I was wearing).

Obviously, the first question that occurred to me was, "Who is this fantastically perfect amazing guy who makes me feel completely safe, completely loved, completely gorgeous, and completely confident all at once?  And who is also apparently quite rich and a wonderful dancer?"  And Jesus got around to the answer in a rather roundabout way, first deciding to correct a misconception I didn't know I had (of course).  He said,

"You see this picture as your future.  People, especially on the cusp of adulthood, constantly look to their future—their career, their education, their dream home, or (as in my case, apparently, whomever this may be) their future spouse—as their security.  But what you forget is that you are already My bride.  You are already in My arms, secure in My love, clothed in My beauty.  Dance with Me, rest in Me, seek everything you need in Me, and you will possess that security and confidence you so long for.  When you come to be fulfilled in Me, knowing and feeling how much I love you, I will begin to fill your life with blessings beyond even your dreams."

So, now I challenge you (Ooo, this feels ambitious for only my third blog post):  where are you seeking security and fulfillment besides Jesus?  He has everything—is everything—you need.  Seek Him first, and then you might start finding what you were looking for in other places too.  (So maybe somewhere down the road I'll have not only a fantastic Prince Jesus but a Prince Charming too ...one with a better haircut and a less-cardboard personality than the Disney version... then I'd be a really lucky princess!)