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!

Catch the Fire SoM – week one!

So I’ve been in Canada for just about a full week!  In some ways it feels like I’ve only just arrived, and in other ways it feels like I’ve been here for ages.

I won’t spend too much time detailing my arrival.  My and Emily Wright’s drive up from Kalamazoo last Monday was mostly uneventful, save for a three-hour delay at the border because the customs officer didn’t like our immigration letters and almost didn’t let us through (thank you Jesus for favor!  Getting turned back would have been so awful).   We arrived at registration for the School of Ministry on Tuesday bright and early (half past noon, a.k.a. too early:  I spent an hour and a half milling around the parking lot feeling awkward while all of last year’s returning students and interns were gleefully reunited).  

This is my American-ness showing, but I’m a bit geeked out by how international this place is.  There are about 60 students total, plus 20 interns and staff, in the building.  Only (I think) 6 are from the U.S.  There are a lot of Canadians, several Brits (a few Englanders, two Welsh folk, a Scot, and an Irishwoman), quite a few Germans, several Scandinavians, and one guy from Singapore. One of the interns is a New Zealander. There’s also an American woman living long-term as a missionary in Uganda.  I love hearing all the accents and comparing cultures.  It’s great fun, and it’s so amazing to see all the diverse people bond as one mini church body.  We had a social on Thursday night at which we all dressed up in costumes, played competitive trivia games, and had a dance party – all of which agitated my social anxiety much less than I feared it would.

We got settled into our rooms without a hitch (especially since we started off by setting up a communal stash of chocolate and tea)!  I have three lovely roommates:  Linda and Kelsey from Canada, and Christina “Teeny” from Germany.  They’re super fun.  :D  Community living is less fun, at least for an introvert like me.  The hallway right outside my room is proving a popular place for late-night card game tournaments and guitar practice.

Last week we heard teachings from Mark Virkler on hearing God’s voice.  In a nutshell, he gave us four keys:

1. Still yourself (remove distractions).
2. Fix your eyes on Jesus.
3. Tune to spontaneity (realize that God speaks through thoughts that may seem to come from nowhere).
4. Write down what you hear as you go!

Most of it was familiar to me – my home church teaches pretty much the same methodology – but Mark Virkler was very detailed and full of super practical advice (and charts.  He liked charts).  He made us practice multiple times in the middle of the teaching, though, and then share our journaling with another student.  This was really intimidating, but since we also have to do this on a weekly basis with our small group (yikes!), it was good practice.  It’s a good way to kick off the school – foundational, but really encouraging.  You know you’re starting off on the right foot.

So here you have it – my first official update from the School of Ministry!  I will blog more in-depth posts about the teachings and other awesome goings-on as the days go on.  I also plan to blog more often than once a week, so I can write shorter posts on more focused topics.  Yay!  Thanks so much for keeping up with me. 

* If anyone wants to subscribe to these posts, you can do so in the left sidebar, either with Google Connect, or by submitting your email address.  Please, if you feel so led, leave me a comment! Even just to let me know you’re reading.  :)

Part Two: Fear and Other Things You Shouldn’t Let Run Your Life

The blog post with this title has been sitting in my drafts folder for three months, untouched and untyped.  I have felt so incredibly unqualified to do everything this summer—I’ve been working as a pretty good bakery employee, but I’ve not been doing half so well at everything else.

(And this is going to be a long post sort of analyzing why.  I kind of meant it to be a follow-up to the first post with this title, but it only loosely ended up that.)

Um, I’m going to Istanbul, Turkey in the last two weeks of August.  I’m going to the School of Ministry in Toronto in September (literally two days after getting back from Turkey.  ohyai).

And—well.  That fear thing?  It’s been getting worse.  Steadily and insidiously worse.  It’s consistently the first thing I feel when I wake up in the morning.  More often then not, it’s been getting me at night, too—I’m impressed I’ve slept even passably well in the past month (“passably” being 5-6 hours a night, even though I’ve been more or less scheduling bedtimes to allow 8-9 hours).  These things I should be really excited about—traveling and doing ministry and immersing myself in God’s presence—have become monolithic lists of Things To Do and Money To Make.  I can barely remember why I wanted to go in the first place—I only that I did, so very, very, very much.

I have all the money I need for my Turkey trip.  I’m turning in my passport paperwork tomorrow.  I still have research to do for the trip, and shopping, and packing.

By the time I take a hiatus from my job in mid-August, I will have saved about $2000 of the $7000 I need for Toronto.  I’m in the process of sending out support letters.  I should be able to turn in my application at the end of July.  I have to pack and plan and shop for this…and I have to raise $5000 in five weeks.  Which looks like lunacy.

I’m terrified.  And I’m trying so hard not to hate myself for allowing fear to keep me paralyzed, in a stranglehold, for the past year.  I’m trying so hard not to look at the entirety of 2013 so far and feel like it’s been a failure—like I’ve been a failure.  I mean, I got my first paying job, and I’m working at it about 38 hours a week, which is almost full-time.  Six months ago, I honestly did not think myself capable of that.  So that’s really huge.  That’s an accomplishment.  That’s an important milestone in my life.  I’m learning from it.

But I’m keeping up with my friends only barely, or not at all.  I’m short-tempered and irritable with my family most of the time.  I’m doing next to no writing at all—creative or journaling.  My relationship with God consists primarily of lots of guilt and frustration and not enough listening (all on my end); cracking open the Word and reading a chapter looms like a huge amount of work; taking twenty minutes to soak and pray feels like it would be just another opening for my overactive mind to be dangerously introspective, another foothold for the fear.  I feel like I have to distract my mind all the time, or else I literally begin to panic.

It’s been constant for weeks.  I can barely even talk about either the Turkey or Canada trip without my insides just clamping up with stress.

I know—I know—that letting God in is actually the solution.  I know that He shows Himself strong in our weakness.  I know that His grace is sufficient. But because I feel like all of this trouble is my fault—that I brought this all on myself by procrastinating—it’s that much harder to really trust that He’s going to come through.  I’ve had so many prophetic words about it this year—some of them from people who had no idea what I’m planning or what I’ve been feeling—and I can barely listen to them.  It’s incredibly painful, because right now looking grace in the face exacerbates all the shame I’m feeling about not being proactive for so long.

I think my problem is that I lack proper perspective.  Fear and shame = about me.  God showing Himself in my situation = not about me.

Why can’t I take hold of that?  Why can’t I just let Him in?

my big news of today is

I got a job.

Yes, I’m using a reaction gif on a blog that’s not Tumblr.  Sorry not sorry.

That’s right.  After three-plus months of feeling useless and having angst and frustration and emotional meltdowns, Kiersten Lawrence is now a real adult with a real job that actually pays money.  MacKenzie’s Bakery hired me after an interview that was approximately 8 minutes long and consisted mostly of the hiring manager telling me stuff about the bakery.  I think the only questions she asked me were “Tell me about yourself” and “how do you know Jo?” (the lovely lady who gave me a reference).  She literally wrote me into the schedule less than five minutes after meeting me.

If that’s not a God-thing, I don’t know what is.  I’m excited.

I’m not as nervous about starting as I thought I’d be–maybe I will come Tuesday, which is my first day.  (But I’m not going to try to psych myself out.)  I’ll be shadowing the manager, and be on shifts with Erika (another fellow New Day-er, whom I don’t know all that well but is extremely sweet (no bakery pun intended)) for a few days.  It’s easily accessible by bus and the employees are nice and it smells good and IT IS AN ACTUAL JOB.

I am going to choose to be EXCITED ABOUT THIS.

New thing I learned:

Sometimes, crying and praying and asking for answers doesn't do anything but get me more and more worked up. Sometimes I can (and/or need to) be like "Enemy, you suck." and just go to bed.

I turned 21 today.

And … I don’t know how to process it.

It was off to a great start this morning…I had some lovely worship/soaking time with God; I had a dance party; I made some tea and French toast.  I hung out with my siblings (all of them) when they got home from school, and that was good, too.  I did some sketching, which I haven’t done in awhile.  My mother brought me home a massive bunch of fabulous helium balloons.  We went to my dad’s apartment (all of us, and it wasn’t awkward at all, which was really good) and had real grilled steak and garlic mashed potatoes and sweet potato casserole with marshmallows for dinner.  We watched The Help and my birthday cake was confetti cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, which is a new thing for me on birthdays (having in previous years had cream cheese pie, until it started being less of a birthday thing and more of a regular holiday dessert) and supremely tasty.  I got some chocolate (the expensive foreign-sounding stuff) as a present. A few dozen people left me birthday messages via text and Facebook, many quite personally complimentary and sweet.

And that’s about it.

Maybe I’m just lonely?  I wanted to do something, actually do something for my birthday, not just watch it go by like my birthdays usually do.  This year my birthday coincided with college spring break, though—which would have been neat if I myself were in school, but I’m not.  So my friends all had plans already. I miss them a lot.

I thought I could make it into a special day by doing nice things.  But that just makes it a nice day.

It was a nice day—a really nice day.  But it wasn’t…I don’t know.  I guess I was expecting more.  I don’t know what. Good grief, I didn’t even drink any alcohol—not like I wanted to party or whatever, but it is my 21st birthday.  My next “milestone” birthday isn’t until I turn 40, and that probably won’t be anything to be excited about.

 It was a very nice birthday.  But it wasn’t a special one, I guess.  And I’m sad.  I’m so sorry, but I’m sad on the night of my birthday, and I don’t have anything else to say right now.

Part One: Fear and Other Things You Shouldn’t Let Run Your Life

So this is the beginning of a long-promised (and just plain long) post about me and my life and stuff.  It’ll be an update about what I’ve been dealing (or not dealing) with in 2013 so far, a little bit of good and a fair amount of bad.  I would also say that it’s going to be an update on what I’ve been doing during the weeks of blogosphere silence, except that I haven’t been.  Doing things, I mean.

So as you may know, I graduated KVCC in December with an Associate of Arts in General Studies (it was going to be Liberal Arts, until they stopped offering the last foreign language credit I needed.  Uuuurgh).  That was…really anticlimactic.  I spent two and a half years toiling away at reading and papers and talking and making my brain do things and came away with a degree that, from a career standpoint, is totally useless until I get another degree (a bachelor’s at the very minimum) to go with it.  Yay.

Over New Years’ weekend, I went to the OneThing conference in Kansas City with some of the lovely folks from Dwell.  That was pretty much the most amazing four days I’ve had in a long time.  Unlike many conference experiences, it didn’t feel like it was “building up” to anything spectacular — God was already tossing amazing revelations at me and working in me from the very first worship set.  He felt so intensely present and thick and personal.  (One thing I felt convicted about over that weekend was reducing my relationship to God to what’s happening with me, and forgetting that He’s a person and it’s an interaction, not just about results.  I didn’t even realize it was a problem until He showed up in person, and woooo.  Another thing — let me tell you, in all seriousness, conviction is great.  I know I’m not perfect, so in comparison with struggling under condemnation all the time, Holy-Spirit conviction is inspiring, which is probably the point.)

So I heard lots from God at OneThing.  He taught me about relating to him as intimately and intensely personal, inviting Him into distraction when I struggle with it, spiritual warfare.  He told me my gift of empathy was important.  he told me to work on storing up knowledge in the spiritual sphere, like I already do somewhat in the natural.

The most intense thing that happened actually was during the last day.  I had wanted to buy a t-shirt from the merch table(s), so I wandered over there during the afternoon break. One shirt in particular caught my eye, one with Micah 6:8 printed on it:  “Do justly, love mercy.”  (The whole verse runs:  “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”)

It was like somebody rammed a fist into my chest, grabbed my heart, and squeezed it.  I had a physical, visceral reaction to seeing that verse.  So I bought the shirt.  I wore it to the evening session.  And in the middle of the worship set I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and then — clear as a bell — clearer than anything else I’d heard all weekend, probably one of the clearest things I’ve heard from God ever — He said, “Do justly and love mercy:  if you do anything with your life, do that.”

And I was like, “Yes, yes!  I am 100% behind that.  I want to do that, and not even because you said it just now.  That verse articulates what I’ve been noticing is a pretty important part of my philosophy of life and faith and success.  That’s perfect.  That’s it.”

And then I got home and was like, “Um.  That’s really hard to quantify.  It’s not like God told me, ‘Go to Romania and spread justice and mercy for homeless people’ or something.  So…now what?”

And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for two months – going, “now what?”  I had a weekend that should have put a ton of impetus behind me, and instead I completely stalled as soon as I set foot back in Kalamazoo.  That stall has lasted for two completely ridiculous months.  I kind of spent the last week or two deconstructing why, and I’ll go into that in another post.  SOON I PROMISE SOON.

Thanks for reading, guys — <3

It’s been awhile since I made any of this…

they walked for a long time in silence
under the wind
and the westward winding of the sky
and the fall
of the dying colors
the wings of words left unheard
and the sun
goes down
scattering fragments of gold
at our feet
and soaking your face
in the color of everything that
you dream about
and i think
how much
i want to go on forever
but i am always looking forward
and every time i take a step
in the quiet
and the shifting play of light
i look behind
and barely recognize
the two who are walking
in our own footsteps.

original poetry by Kiersten M. Lawrence
26 February 2013