SoM: the dreadfully overdue update, part one

Hello friends!  Apologies for going three weeks without a post.  Oy vey.  Our schedule has been turning on its axis rather faster than normal the last couple weeks, but I’ll get into that in a bit.

We wrapped up Core Values month in the last week of September with five sessions of prophetic training from the famed, the mighty, the two-and-only Ivan and Isabel Allum!  That was crazy, let-me-tell-you.  Not only were we supplied generously from their fount of wisdom, advice, and admonition, but they also made us do lots of activations (a word that used to give me goosebumps.  Seriously).  (If you’d told me a month ago that I was going to prophesy over half the school in the space of two hours, I would have completely flipped my lid.  Now prophesying and blessing people seems like sort of a regular thing…we’ve done it in the hallways a few times as well as being requisitioned into it at church.) I also got a prophetic word from Ivan, in which he used the word “visionary” five times in two minutes.  So that was super exciting!

We followed that up with a four-day shift as ministry volunteers at the Catch the Fire conference on Sept. 25th-28th.  All the students were on the prayer team in the evenings, in addition to having another duty in the morning or afternoon.  I was on Welcome, which basically boiled down to standing by the front door for four hours giving out “good morning”s and directions (and occasional hugs).  I was a bit amazed by how many people were genuinely excited to be greeted at the door, by someone who wasn’t just checking for registration wristbands!

The conference was full of great highlights, by the way.  David Ruis led the first worship set and I was basically transported back to my childhood.  Two measures into the opening piano of “We Will Dance” and I was literally crying.  We also did this song on the third night, which was one of the most powerful corporate worship experiences I’ve had.  A guy I’ve never heard of named Duncan Smith gave a great message on “Jesus as our magnificent obsession” (it especially appealed to me because he opened it with a literary analogy [about Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, which isn’t one of my favorite stories, but I’m not going to argue with the Holy Spirit’s artistic revelations]).  The very last session was led by none other than Heidi Baker (I’ll pause if you need a moment to fangirl like most of us did) and it was amazing. She just shared about how she got into her current mission field and some of her very early testimony, in addition to a few stories about the lowdown in Mozambique.  She is a passionate, hilarious, fiery, humble, very blessed lady.

God’s still getting down to the basics with me.  Right now we’re working through some forgiveness and honor stuff—which is simultaneously really refreshing and really hard—and He’s also still making sure I’m taking HIm at His word.  Both prophetic word, and Bible word.  We did a fire tunnel at the conference, and because it was following the Heidi Baker session, i was sort of expecting it to be explosive, expecting to get some great revelation or anointing.  I thought that was what i needed—some direction, some clarity, some vision, eh?…
Nope.  I was feeling some stirrings of joy and love and general manifestations of Holy Spirit goodness, but not hearing much from God.  No visions…nothing.  I was physically manifesting pretty intensely, so much so that I had to just lie on the carpet for awhile. So here I am:  the sanctuary is full of shouting and laughing and whooping and people generally having a really great time in the Spirit, and then…quiet.  It’s just me and God.  I try to ask him questions, try to ask for revelation, and I’m still not getting anything at all.  So I gave up.
And then it’s that tickling voice, that quiet, heavy voice, and He says:  “Say you believe Me.”
“Okay—I believe you.”
“Keep saying that.”
“I’ll say it as many times as it takes for me to really believe You, at a heart level—“
“No.  Never stop saying that.  Never stop believing in My pursuit of you.”
So i said it a lot.  I even shouted it out loud—which is really not a thing that I do, not that anyone was going to notice it in the midst of the Holy Ghost party.
And I’m going to keep saying it.  God, Your yes means yes and Your no means no.  I believe You.

I've another post in the works about this past week and what’s coming up – but I don’t want to burden you with my entire autobiography just yet, so I’ll wait a day or two before posting.  Thanks so much for reading!  <3

Right now, I'm really frustrated at myself for:

     a) accidentally emailing the only professor of the University of Michigan's MEMS 350 course who teaches a Tuesday/Thursday section instead of a Friday section.
     b) wanting to go to a prestigious university that happens to be a hundred miles away from Kalamazoo, so that visiting it on a Tuesday or Thursday guarantees missing three of my regular classes.

*headdesk*
It's times like this when I wonder…why am I an honors student again?  (i.e., "is free tuition really worth all the stress the requirements for this scholarship puts me through?!")
(…Aaaand the answer to that is probably a rhetorical "yes."  Augh.)

Okay, I know I'm not the only one who's frightened of the future.  I know I'm not the only college student wandering around wondering what the heck I'm supposed to be doing, or what I'm doing right now for that matter.  But it definitely looks to me like everyone around me either 1) has everything neatly, confidently planned out, or 2) doesn't give two beans about their college career, so long as they graduate and have a halfway decent chance of making six figures.

But, oh God, I'm scared to death.  I feel like everything rests on me, you know?  I have to keep up my grades and plan out all this community service and make sure I'm not wasting time and money on classes I don't need to take (basically, I don't get to take any electives, because my stupid honors courses ate up all my electives.  Sucks.  — That's another thing.  I feel like like a crappy honors student.  I can do the coursework, for sure, but I'm not exactly the most confident or responsible 18-year-old out there. All I do is write good essays!)  I can make so many wrong choices.  I could do so many things wrong. There are so many ways to just mess up.  I feel so pressured to make the most of my time (I feel like I wasted a lot of it already.); to do something with myself.  

And I'm so scared, because I don't know what I'm doing.  I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.  And I don't have the self-motivation to take time to listen to God.  [expletive deleted] self-motivation that I don't have.  Being a spontaneous person instead of a goal-oriented one sucks so much right now.  I know I need to change, because, face it, I tend to be a rather irresponsible person and I can't afford to stay that way.  But I don't feel an urgent, desperate need to change, except in crunch time, and by then it's too late; and then I get through it, and on the other side it never looks so bad.  So I just keep doing the same stupid things over and over and never change.

And then there are things I'm terrified of—like taking a required physical education class.  I would, in all seriousness, do almost anything to get out of taking one.  Just thinking about it, just looking at the gym, makes me want to run, literally.  And I have no idea why I dread it in any form so much.  Even classes that seem like they'd be lots of fun, like karate or yoga or scuba diving, still scare the daylights out of me.  But I have to pick one eventually [eventually meaning "SOON!"].

Still, I'm scared to death.  I can't graduate in two years without either taking seventeen credits both semesters next year (impossible, unless I undergo some really drastic personality changes), or taking at least ten credits over the summer (am I capable of going to school full-time for twenty-one straight months without going insane?  I doubt it.)  I'm so frightened that my GPA will drift just a bit too low, or I'll procrastinate one day too far or on one project too many, or I'll get one night too little of sleep, or I'll fall in love with somebody and screw up my whole life, or I'll just plain lose my mind and go crazy.  Literally.  And I can't even listen to God, who I've been desperately asking for help.  I can't even bring myself to do that much.  I feel so desperately out of touch, out of time, out of anything but emotion.

Five days, nineteen hours, twenty-seven minutes.

I start college in five days, nineteen hours, and twenty-seven minutes.

That's when I start my first class, anyway.  I feel like college actually began months ago, with orientation, registration counseling, financial aid stuff, tests, interviews...I admit, this looming future scares me.  A lot.  I've been in a state vacillating between panicky avoidance and mild terror about it all summer.    There are some days I feel almost sick to my stomach thinking about it.  I feel massively unprepared—emotionally and practically.  I feel fairly confident I'm capable of the academia; it's everything else involved that worries me.  I can't shake off the compulsion to brood over everything that could go wrong (and I am not usually a pessimistic person).  My high school career was a train wreck for a while due to the chronic procrastination that I sometimes feel has me in a stranglehold; and I'm sure a lot of people who know me could tell you how much I despise schedules and time management.  There is so much I could do wrong, so many abd habits I could regress back into at the drop of a hat.  I'm not expecting to be perfect, but I don't want to walk around with a lit bundle of dynamite in my shoes.

I went to God today via my Bible, and found Philippians 4:6-7:  "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (NIV).  

The Amplified Bible says "[peace] shall garrison and mount guard over your hearts and minds".  I like that—it conjures an image of a miniature army, sentient, with a careful strategy to vanquish whatever might come against it, from any angle.  God's peace isn't only a shield; it's a living thing there to protect me.

I've heard that verse I don't even know how many times.  It's one of the not-very-many I actually have memorized—but today i noticed the "with thanksgiving" line.  Of course I've seen that before, too—but somehow, when i'm trying to apply this verse to my own life, that line always gets omitted.  I have the prayer and petition down pat—not so well the thanksgiving.  Thus, I thought today when I took note of this, what am I thankful for in this uber-stressful future?

1. It's an entire galaxy of opportunity on so many levels:

2. I can meet new people and maybe have the chance to bend my lopsided/nonexistent social skills into shape.

3. I really like learning.  I want to better myself as a writer.  Where better to do that than college?

4. I have some solid incentive to beat down my obnoxious, horrible, late-blooming adolescent rebellious-and-irresponsible alter ego.

5. I get to get out of the house.

6. I'll be in an environment where people will no longer automatically assume the short person can still order off the kids' menu.

7. Maybe I will garner a sense of long-term purpose.

8. It's an adventure I haven't tried yet that probably isn't life-threatening.

9. I could use a lesson is dependency on God...yet again.

Yes.  I'm freaked out—really, really freaked out—by this prospect of being an honest-to-goodness college student.  For my entire high school career, I looked at college students with something like actual awe.  It's hard to believe I am one now.  Yes, I have practical things I need to do, things to which I need to apply myself and on which I need to take initiative—but I'm not all by myself in trying to buffet back stress.  God knows what He's doing.  I can actually get excited about some of this.  I can be thankful that it's not just a massive, dreaded chore.  

And, even though it's hard to believe sometimes because everyone looks like they have it all together, I have a lot of friends going through this exact phase right now, feeling similar fears—

We can do this.