Not alone

So I was thinking today about how many of my close friends are actively pursuing an alternative life path. They are from a broad range of backgrounds, with various college degrees and all different kinds of gifts and passions. My friend Alyssa is in Grenada now, working with the Peace Corp to help with the blind students there. Karissa is in Costa Rica working with students with special education needs and looking into other options for future ministry. My friends Miriam and Kristine are preparing to serve with Campus Crusade's Bridges ministry in Houston TX. Anjuli is heading to California to work at an alternative Christian school for children and is considering going on a mission trip to Dubai this summer.
There are other young people I know, people from church back home, from my family, from my peers in college not to mention all the people I have met this year in Dallas who are preparing to serve with Pioneer Bible Translators, Wycliffe international and SIL international. They are not choosing the "American Dream" wit nice jobs and benefits and a stable secure salaries. Many are giving up the comforts of good health, air conditioning, and stable governments to serve in other countries.
Why are we all making this choice? Some people went to Bible college others went to state schools. Some were raised in the church and have been on more mission trips than they can remember, others didn't really get on board until after college. All different kinds of interests and motivations and pasions, but all making similar choices.
Yet there is something that is guiding each and every one of us who has made the decision to do something different with this season of our life: faith. Faith that God has a plan bigger than we can imagine, faith that it is for our good as well as for the good of all men. Faith that we are going to be ok, even in Africa, or the middle east or Papua New Guinea or Houston TX. Faith that a life lived pursuing the will of God, no matter how insufficient our abilities and how insurmountable the obstacals, is the only life we want to live.
I find it encouraging and exciting to know that I am not the only one who found themself unexpectedly flung into a life they did not expect. God is calling people from all different backgrounds and walks of life to serve him in unexpected ways. How awesome is our God.

ten things to do for entertainment while driving alone across the vastness of Texas without radio reception.

1. recall songs from your childhood and sing them at the top of your lungs the nonsense ones are the best.

2. rest your chin on the steering wheel and let your teeth rattle together.

3. count missing reflectors on the center stripe of the highway (I got up to 65 before I hit a construction zone and there was no stripe at all).

4. drive slowly in the fast lane and make all the speed demons mad (its really fun to switch lanes right before they try to pass you).

5. try to guess what kind of person is driving the car before you pass it on the highway(i.e. male/female, young/old, race/marital status).

6. read everything, from mudflaps to shredded billboards (it's amazing what they put in print).

7. drive with only one toe and your pinky finger (not recommended by your local law-enforcement agency) .

8. see how long you can maintain the speed limit exactly without cruise control ( optionally, try to drive one mile over).

9. wash your windshield and pretend you are in a dangerous downpour (never actually done this, but it sounds fun).

10. try to identify roadkill by smell alone (I am only sure of success for skunk).

happy trails!!

Life Takes Time

Life takes time.
Day in,
Day out,
Easing from one age to another.
Dig in deep,
Stretch up high,
Hold all the bits together.

Winds blow,
Rains fall,
Seeds fall to the ground.
Seasons come,
Seasons go,
Years pass without a sound.

A vision,
And a dream,
A seed of hope and promise,
Sown in hearts,
Sown in time,
Rising up among us.

Our youth,
Our wealth,
It will all pass away
Life will be measured by it's fruit.

Why is Freedom Scary?

A few months ago, I had a stomach virus. I hadn't thrown up in years and as my least favorite bodily function, I wanted to avoid it if at all possible. But as I sat curled up on the bathroom floor, completely incapacitated by the pain in my inner being, I began to realize that it was an unavoidable event in the process of healing. There was no way to recover from this sickness without the unpleasantness. I gave in and soon as I had thrown up, I felt completely exhausted, but the pain was gone.

Sometimes, I have the same reaction to the leading of the Holy Spirit. I would rather repress the momentary unpleasantness of conviction and even the subsequent freedom, because I am so afraid of change, of losing control and giving into the Lord's will. But when I ignore the Holy Spirit, I make myself spiritually ill and weak. If I am repressing the Lord's leading in one area of my life, how can I have true communion with Him?

Sometimes it is hard to diagnose the reason for spiritual illness. I find it easy to come up with lots of other excuses for why I am feeling the way I am, when I should be quiet before the Lord and ask him to reveal why I am struggling so. Ever since I moved to Dallas, I have had a nagging in the back of my soul telling me that all was not well. I wrote it off as stress from transition. Then I began to have a hard time in my quiet time, paying attention to what I was reading and learning. I noticed that I didn't intercede for others as much or as sincerely as I had a few months before. I decided this must be stress from school and lack of sleep. Then I began to have a hard time in worship and remembering to pray for all the 'usual' stuff. But I never stopped and asked God to show me what it was that was wrong. Somehow, I had a feeling that He would require something difficult of me and I wasn't willing to risk losing my illusion of control and security.

Fortunately, I serve a God who is kind and loving and able to guide even his most deluded of children. I had told a friend a few days ago, that I often make a decision and plow ahead until God smacks me in the head and changes my plan. God knows me, and knows that even while I am learning to listen to him, it is still hard for me to hear sometimes. And so even though he wants me to learn to listen better, he also wants me to have the best he has to offer me, thus the head smack.

The crazy thing about finally hearing what God is trying to say, is that freedom and joy are quick to follow behind. There is great joy in knowing that I am back on track with God, even if the path ahead is now more difficult than I first expected. I thought I knew how I was supposed to serve God here at PBT, and it was hard to realize that I had been wrong, but it was also a huge relief, because now I am free to discover the great things God has been preparing me for and designing me for from the beginning.

infinity. . .

When discussing the potential infinity of the Noun Phrase in English grammar, I began to look at the concept of infinity from a new perspective. In English, we have the ability to create Noun Phrases that carry on and on (ex: the girl with the ball, in the car, by the house, in the city, where I grew up, in the state...) This has the potential to go on ad infinitum.

My theory is that all things, not just language, have the potential to carry on forever. So why doesn't it? In general, all things have the potential for infinity unless interrupted or impeded by some external force that cannot be prevented or diverted. In language, if we all continued stringing phrases together forever, we would no longer have discourse, simply billions of individual monologues. The limitations that have been placed on language are; the need to communicate, the need to sleep, our need to stop and eat, and ultimately our own death.

There are limitations placed on all of nature which prevents the potential for infinity from ever being realized. Most of these limitations can be summed up as 'time' and 'space'. These are outside forces that keep us and all of nature bound and finite. Humanity has been in a struggle since the very beginning to push these boundaries, grasping at infinity in the vain hope of increasing our standing in the Universe which could only come about if we ever broke the limits of time and space. We try to live longer than ever before, longer and better. We try to spread our influence out to the farthest reaches of attainable space. We have 'shrunk' the space of the earth by mass communication and rapid travel technology. We have measured the speed of light and have calculated the size of the Universe, but we are still bound by time and space, our days are numbered and we cannot be in more than one place at a time.

A Christian view of the infinite brings an element of hope into humanity's futile struggle. This hope comes from the idea of an infinite God who created these boundaries, but is himself outside them, completely untethered in his capacity to be. He has promised that we can have eternal existence in his presence if we submit our feeble wills and lives to his as long as we have life. And from what I glean from scripture, space is affected by time and will therefore no longer have the hold on us that it does now.

So, if we become freed from time and space, what is going to keep us from becoming equal with God? What will the dividing line be between created and creator if these limitations are removed? This takes us back to the origin of this thought, language and grammar and our use of tenses. We have the potential for infinite future, but God trumps us with the reality of infinite past, present, and future. He is infinity perfect, the ever constant state of infinity, and against that we can hold no candle.

Homeless?

I was speculating the other day, what makes a home. What is it that makes us say, "I am home" about any particular place that we live? 'Home' is not just a place where you stay...it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the length of time you stay there either. There are times also when a place you once called home, for one reason or another, ceases to feel like home any longer. All this is speculative, of course. There is no really quantitative way to define 'home'. I can however give a few of the qualifiers for what makes a place feel like home for me.
One of the first things is that it has to be comfortable. Physically comfortable and emotionally comfortable. If I have to be careful or change all my habits, if I don't feel like I can have people over, then it isn't home. People make home mostly though. If I am living with people, then of course, they become family...they have to be, because who you live with needs to be people you love, trust, and feel completely comfortable. But you also need other people, because otherwise, it is just like being on a long visit with family. The faster I make friends on the outside, the faster a place feels like home. Of course, there is always the necessity of finding a church to be a part of,
but the role played by a church community can vary as well. If you have a lot of Christian friends outside of church, it may not play as large a role than if it is your only connection with other Christians. The Church, the body of Christ as a whole and the fellowship found therein, is vital to my survival in any environment. Anyone, no matter how homeless, can thrive with the body of Christ to ground them.

outside the box....

The idea for this blog came to me this evening while I was once again packing my meager possessions into boxes in preparation for my move to Dallas. I kept thinking how I glad I am that my worth in life was not measured by how many boxes all my belongings fit in. Life is so much more than what we take with us when we move. The tribal groups of Papua New Guinea can and do carry everything they own balanced on their heads. Most people in America need a fleet of moving vans and personal vehicles to transport their earthly belongings from one residence to the next. I may have more than a cooking pot and a grass skirt to my name, but everything I own still fits into one car quite nicely and is still more than I really need for survival. It strikes me as odd that humans put so much significance on what we own, and use our material possessions to gage our self worth.
Lest you get the impression that I don't suffer from this strange delusion, I find myself constantly fighting to remember that it is not the clothes I wear or the car I drive, or the hair cut, or the makeup, or the books I read, or the music I listen to or any other cultural definer which makes me who I am or gives me worth. Life is so much more than the boxes I put my things in, and I am ready to start living life outside the box. I want to step outside the boxes I have built for myself, those sanctuaries and shrines built to the "comfortable" things in life. I reject the boxes that I think others want me to fit in. Anything that limits me beyond what God himself has limited me to is simply a tool of the enemy to keep me immobilized lest I actually live in the freedom of grace. Can I really do that? Even as I pack up all my stuff, half wishing I could pitch it over the bridge into the Brazos, half wishing I could be driving some posh 2008 Dodge Charger at the head of my own fleet of U-hauls, I wonder if I can ever really be free...to live outside the box.