Christoper

Hey everyone,

I have officially moved in at camp now. We're currently internet-less, so I may not be posting as much. Although I'm posting fairly infrequently now anyway...

I'm in the same room and the same bed as last summer, and it's funny how "same" it feels. I realized all of the same things I realized my first night last summer... Oh yeah, this room is really hot all the time. Oh yeah, there's tons of mosquitoes to be killed every night before I sleep. Oh yeah, this bed is lopsided... I'll have to stuff a blanket under there. But really, it's a good room.

Last week, we had a visit from three people who work at KBK, one of our sister Baptist camps in Fort Qu'Appelle, in Southern SK. We had a great time swapping ideas for games, songs, and staff training. We even decided to swap some senior staff for a week this summer! Seriously. We're going to switch 7 cabin leaders. I think it's going to be awesome.

We decided to take them out for ice cream on Thursday night. We drove to the tiny town of Christopher Lake and tried one place with a huge sign spray-painted "open", and it apparently wasn't open. It's actually quite interesting how many businesses in Christopher Lake have permanently painted the word "open" on their buildings... we were out of ice cream options. So we did what any good bunch of Baptist ministry leaders would do... we took them drinking and dancing at the Silver Bullet bar. I can't believe I haven't checked out that bar until now. The people there are so kind, way past what we deserved for the small number of drinks we bought. They set up the karaoke machine for us (and once we started singing, they probably wished they hadn't!), they let us play pool for free, and they let us play with their cat. We talked about social justice and evangelism and music and politics.

The only minor crisis of the week was the call from our T-shirt company saying "we're almost done printing your Quest shirts, but we realized that we've been missing a letter in the text and printing 'the Quest at ChristoPER Lake' instead of 'the Quest at ChristoPHER Lake'..." It was actually kind of my fault because I approved the final design for the shirts and I missed the mistake! But no worries, they fixed them all.

What else has happened since I last wrote?... Well, I went to Borden, which is another small town in Saskatchewan, and I attended their grade 12 graduation ceremony, although I knew none of the grads. I was driving Robyn there, and then she wanted me to stay. But actually, we couldn't get in because there wasn't enough seating, so we just walked around Borden (in fact, I think we saw the whole town), and it was deserted, because everyone was at the grad! So that was different. I also went birdwatching and photographing with Rose and Abbey near Delisle, another small town (apparently this is the theme of this blog post). We saw some great birds... coots, grebes, a couple American avocets, some yellow-headed blackbirds... and we even saw a few muskrats! It was a lot of fun. Here's a picture Abbey took of me, taking a picture of a bird.


Well, today I get to drive 8 seniors up to camp! This is our first camp, so please pray for us. The non-stop week-after-week craziness of the summer begins today, but it starts off at a slow-ish, "senior" pace... plenty of crokinole and puzzles. Here's hoping my crokinole skills have improved since last year...

Oh man! I almost forgot to tell you the exciting news! Christine, my best of all Saskatonian friends, and her boyfriend Dan are... engaged! The wedding will probably be in mid-December, so I might have to move exams around to be part of it. Hopefully "my best friend's wedding" is a good enough excuse!

My Vancouver friends begin their road trip to Saskatoon a week from today... I'm counting down!

Don't inhale

Well, I guess I'm on blogging vacation right now. It's funny that I seem to blog less now that I don't have any homework... I think there might be a connection there.

Today was a really perfect day. It was hot outside. I went from 2 extra blankets two nights ago to only a sheet last night. This morning I helped out with an inner city clean-up that my church was volunteering at - picking up garbage in back alleys. My team was having an unofficial contest for weirdest piece of garbage found. I found a whole fish, all dried up. My dad found a chess piece - the king. Another person found dentures. I think she unofficially won the unofficial contest. I think the best find of the day was a vacant lot that would be absolutely perfect for an urban garden. There's even perennials growing there already. It used to be a garden. There's no gate, and a path runs through it. Maybe I could inspire a Jacob's Well-ian urban gardening movement here... too bad my church isn't in the inner city... Later in the day, I spent a lot of time reading, I went for ice cream with my parents, and I took some pictures of flowers. I think the only bad part of the day was two minutes ago, when I accidentally inhaled some toothpaste, straight down my throat. I don't recommend this - it got me coughing and coughing and I think I wrecked my windpipe.

Which is bad, because I have to do an announcement about camp at church tomorrow morning. I haven't really figured out what to say. I'm going to go to church with my dad 2 hours early. He will finish his sermon and I will prepare my announcement. Really what I want to say is "You all had better sign up for camp, because camp is only a third full, and it's going to suck if we don't have any people." But I think that's a little harsh. I need Rachel's help. She's tactful. (But seriously, pray for the camp if you think of it... we really are praying for more campers.)

Let's see... what else... well, I suppose I promised I'd write about the wedding and sleeping in a tent. The wedding was great. My favorite part was when both candlelighters arrived at their candles and simultaneously, their candles went out, and they looked anxiously at each other, then ran back up the aisle! I love little moments that lighten the mood at weddings. And I didn't sleep in a tent! Because of the rain, us "singles" decided to sleep in the "living area" of the hunting lodge where the "couples" of the group were staying. Unfortunately, this is also the area where 6 deer heads were affixed to the wall. I believe that explains my strange animals-coming-alive-and-killing-people dreams while I was there... Here's a picture of Rachel doing her best deer head imitation.


All in all, though, it was a good trip. We got to hang out with the newest batch of puppies, and we met the first member of the third generation at Homowebmape: 6-month-old Caleb. I took a lot of cute pictures. Oh yeah - another great story - we're driving to Brownfield as a family, and we're in Alberta when dad realizes he forgot his debit card at Tim Horton's. This wouldn't normally be a big deal, but him and my mom were planning on leaving from Brownfield to go to Calgary and fly to San Francisco for a week for his convocation. And my mom left her debit card at home for us. So they were money-less. The best part was the initial conversation in the car.


Dad: "Kids, how much money do you have on your debit cards?"
Rachel: "8 dollars".
Dad: "Um... Daniel?"
Daniel: "100 dollars."
Dad: "Beth?"
Beth: "I don't know.... maybe 400 dollars?"
Dad: "Is that the best we can do, kids?"

They took my debit card, but I don't think they even used it. They're so frugal. Frugal even though my dad is now a doctor. Haha. A doctor of ministry.


Well, I have a couple weeks left of work before I move up to camp for the summer. Mostly I'm looking forward to June 25th, when 3-4 of my good friends from Vancouver are taking a road trip to come visit me! Having Saskatoon as a destination for a road trip is pretty much unheard of in Vancouver. That's how much they love me. We're going to hang out in Saskatoon and then up at camp. I really can't wait...

Boring, perhaps.

This may well be the longest it's taken me to post a blog (2 and a half weeks!) and the most boring blog I've written. But I thought I would write. In case you started thinking I died.

Since "boring" is the theme, why don't I start with the weather? Today I called up to camp, 2 hours north of here, and it was snowing. It wasn't much warmer here in Saskamatoon. I am sleeping in a tent all weekend, and here's hoping the weather improves. But at least I will be in Alberta. Maybe they're stashing all the warm weather somewhere over there. My family is driving out for our annual Homowebmape gathering (see blog from May last year). It will be different this time, though, because one of us is getting married - Ashlyn Webber. That doesn't usually happen, so it will be fun to participate.

How have I been so busy that I haven't blogged, you ask? Well, I work 9 to 5 now. Which is easier than the life of a student in many ways, especially because at 5, you're done. No homework. You can do what you want with the evening. I have mostly read books, watched "Lost" (a very good substitute for "Alias") and gone for coffee. Actually, coffee is a theme for me right now, because that's what I do for a living. I take potential camp staff out for coffee in informal job interviews. Except that I don't like coffee, so I usually purchase a hot non-coffee beverage. I'm not going to lie, it's a pretty sweet job. I do other things too, things that involve sitting at a desk and not doing any exercise to work off all the hot non-coffee beverages. And in the evenings, I sit some more. Good thing I'm going up to camp in a few weeks, where the potential for my body moving around is slightly higher.

Otherwise, I'm just enjoying life with the family for a while. I love when we're all around the table for a meal. And I'm looking forward to the road trip this weekend. Next week it will be just us kids, because my parents are going to San Francisco for my dad's Doctor of Ministry convocation. Rachel will take over the role of "mom", because she's feeling domestic lately. I will be the eldest daughter, and I will help out when required, such as in the cooking of butter chicken. Daniel will mostly sing falsetto for us, because he will soon be auditioning for the role of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables at his school, and the song is very high.

Also... I am learning Greek. I have a goal to test out of the first semester of Greek and take semester 2, so I'm trying to do a little bit every day. Danice gave me a textbook and I bought a workbook on Amazon. We'll see if I can keep it up when I'm at camp.

Emotionally, I've settled down a bit. Sometimes the pangs of Vancouver memories hit me and I wish I were there, but I think most of my conscious mind has re-rooted itself. Jodi wrote something interesting about feelings of "uprootedness" in an e-mail to me:

"I think this restlessness is probably a good thing, it reminds us that our true home
is with God and that our hearts are and will be restless until we find our
home in him.  How then, to keep the heart soft for that final homecoming when there
are so many home-like-comings and home-like-leavings in the meantime?  And
how do we become more and more integrated rather than more and more
dis-integrated in the process?  It is easy to have different personas in
different places.  But perhaps the preparation for our final homecoming is
to bring those different personas together into the image-bearers we were
created to be."

I think this is very true in my life. I don't feel like I'm two-faced, but I do feel like different people bring out different sides in me. So besides missing people in Vancouver, I miss the parts of me that aren't as fully expressed when I'm not around them. I miss myself. For example, Danice has a way of bringing out the goofiest side of me, and the part of me that just wants to talk and talk about everything and anything that happened in my day. I don't feel as free to be goofy or to talk like that here, and it's not that I'm uncomfortable doing those things around people here, it's just that it's not as natural. But I love the proud and admiring big sister side that only comes out when I'm here. So maybe it's about figuring out how to express all of these things no matter where I'm at. Or maybe it's about accepting that these are all great parts of me that can take turns. I don't know...

Well, I'm really running out of things to say... I'm sure I'll have more after my tent and wedding escapades this weekend. I promise to write again soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of pictures from a family walk we had by the river. The policemen were herding the geese from the road back to the river. I guess this is what keeps the police busy in Saskatoon - it took four of them, it seems.

Hanging out with the Baptists

Well, as of today I am a working woman. You can find me at Emmanuel Baptist Church, working for the Quest camp, for the next 5 weeks. I am still feeling quite uprooted and confused, but at least now I'm a productive uprooted-and-confused person. Today's goal was to figure out how to copy information from last year in the computer program we use for our registrations, called "EZ Camp". Turns out it's not so "easy" to use. Actually, it's hands down the most unintelligible and illogical program I've ever tried to make sense of. But today, I conquered it, I made it do what I wanted, and that is a job well done. I also got to know my coworker Jeff a lot better, and I'm getting more and more excited about the way the summer is shaping up.

I must tell you about last weekend. Last weekend I went to Banff to participate in the Baptist Union of Western Canada General Assembly. I thought I was going just to play piano in a worship team a few times, and otherwise goof off with Chris in Banff, maybe hang out with Jodi a bit... but God had much larger plans. He was really sneaky and underhanded this time. He lured me there and got me hooked on my own denomination. You see, I've never been very attached to the idea of being a Canadian Baptist, or even a Baptist. Apparently, this is true of many Baptists. Attending a multi-denominational (trans-denominational?) Bible school certainly hasn't helped. If anything, I've become wary of denominationalism and eager to focus on what we all share as Christians. And I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

But this weekend I discovered that it's also not a bad thing to feel a sense of belonging to a larger family of churches. I realized that the Canadian Baptist family of churches that I was "born into" - that I did not choose - is also a family that I would gladly choose if given the choice today. This assembly presented me with a seemingly uncool and innocuous group mostly consisting of middle-aged men and women, who were in fact undercover rebels and renegades steering the denomination in a radical direction. I was actually so excited by the kinds of decisions they were making that I sat through a whole morning of business meetings. I saw them pass an ambitious budget, change the denomination's name to bring it into greater solidarity with our sister denominations in Canada, and restructure the board so that more time would be spent "doing" and less time sitting in meetings.

I heard so many stories about churches and ministries moving outside the walls of the church and meeting needs... farmers from rural Alberta sending grain to Kenya during a famine, professors from Carey educating pastors and lay leaders in Africa and Latin America, churches in Vancouver entering into the suffering of Pickton's victims, and found out that my denomination supports ministries I've come to value while at Regent, like A Rocha and REED - showing concern for justice, crying out on behalf of exploited women and the exploited earth. I saw the leadership of the denomination pass to a woman president, and witnessed many male leaders reaffirming the Canadian Baptist belief and practice of ordaining women and expressing their gratitude for the perspective and leadership of their female colleagues. I heard words like "kingdom" and "shalom" repeatedly, and realized that these people are passionate about the same things I've become passionate about at Regent and at Jacob's Well. I saw it written on the faces and in the tears of the leaders as they described the good work that is being done and that is yet to be done. Suddenly people I hadn't even met were affirming my choice to do the M Div, offering to support my education financially and praying for me. I felt a true sense of belonging, something resonated deep inside me, and I could see myself standing on the shoulders of all these new heroes of mine, following in their footsteps.

People who grow up in Christ-following families often speak of a time when they "made the faith their own". I guess you could say this weekend I made the denomination my own. It's obviously not as big a deal, but it's a pretty big deal for me as I look ahead to a career in ministry. I'm still open to God leading me in a different direction, but at this point, whether in pastoring, camping, or missions work, I would be thrilled and proud to work with the Canadian Baptists.

I leave you with some pictures I took on the drive to Banff... which was, to me, a wonderful rediscovery of the beauty of the prairies, an experience that felt like being unfurled and opened up under the big, big sky.

Transitions.

So it’s been forever. I know. The end got quite busy.

Let’s start with the present and move on from there. I am in my bed in Saskatoon. I’ve slipped back into my other very familiar stream of my life. Everything is almost the same. Except there’s a new bench at the side entrance of my house. The Ford Escort had been totaled and replaced with… a Ford Escort, but a newer model, more sporty. Dad has a couple more grey hairs in his beard. Oh, and there is now a neighbor kid two doors down who practices his bagpipes on his driveway every day after school.

Saskatoon is what Saskatoon is once the snow is almost all gone… brown expanses of dead grass, bare brown trunks of trees, and matted piles of brown leaves from last fall that didn’t get raked because the snow came by surprise. Gravel all over the roads, sprayed there over the winter to make them less slippery. Unlike the ice, gravel doesn’t melt – it has to wait to be washed away. It blows around in the wind, creating desert-like sandstorms and making my eyes dry. Nevertheless, everyone is thrilled, because according to many, it is warm enough to wear shorts and T-shirts. I try not to think about the magnolias and the cherry trees and the daffodils and the drastic reduction of my outdoor color palette, and I comfort myself with the thought that I’ll get to experience spring all over again. Saskatoon really does become beautiful. It may actually be beautiful right now, and I just can’t see it because I have yet to remove my Vancouver glasses.

Don and I were talking today about whether it feels like I’m two different people, and whether I like myself better here or there. I like to see it more as a question of roles. I play much different roles here than there, roles with more history. Which can be good or bad - sometimes history is wonderfully rich, and sometimes it is more limiting. I get to be the proud and loving big sister, and that’s one of my favorite roles. I get to sit on the stairs and listen to Daniel practice singing and playing his sax and remember how crazy talented he is. I get to welcome Rachel home from her backpacking trip in Europe, and jump back into our playful banter and we get to laugh at each other as if the months hadn’t passed. I get to be a daughter and feel my parents’ love more directly. I get to throw wood on the friendships that have been slowly burning over the last four months, through e-mails and phone conversations, the ones that remember me and wait for my return.

But I won’t pretend it wasn’t hard to leave this time. Vancouver and its associated relationships are gripping me more tightly than they have before, and the pain of leaving has made me somewhat melancholy over the past couple of days. I have found a real place at Kits Church in Vancouver, and I don’t want to miss out on what happens there over the summer. I have enjoyed being Gospel Choir member and daily beach visitor and transit supporter. Mostly, I have become attached to my roommates. I remember leaving last year and awkwardly hugging Danice, but this time, I was a blubbering mess, crying halfway to the airport. I have no clue how I ended up with such great roommates, especially having witnessed the much more difficult roommate relationships some of my friends have had. And they really love me too, so much that a couple of them are making a road trip to Saskatoon (an unheard-of road trip destination) to visit me later on this summer! I can’t wait.

I guess I could catch you up on what I haven’t written about in the last month, and tell you about singing in the amazing final Gospel Choir concert, seeing Danice play in a Balinese Gamelon, going to Galiano Island with my Christian Imagination class, and touring around Vancouver with my mom, but I’m trying to live in the moment right now, and this is where I’m at. I’m excited to be here, I’m enjoying taking up some good roles in people’s lives, and I’m happy to get caught up with everyone again, but at the same time, I feel like I’ve left a big piece of myself behind in Vancouver, and I’m still trying to sort through the resulting confusion and ache.

a Vancouver poem

Ok, I need some feedback on this poem, especially from Vancouverites... I'm presenting it as part of a project this weekend. This project is what I've been so busy with that I haven't been able to blog... along with the exam I'm writing tomorrow morning. Pray for me! More to come soon...
VANCOUVER MAKES ITSELF AT HOME IN ME

One day
when I wasn't
paying attention

I slid the red-soled freighters
over my feet and
plodded leisurely across the water

I felt the stroke of the sea on
my sandstrewn nape;
its tides scattered all my seastar freckles

my hair flowed down in cascading
tresses, coursing into the gutters and
drowning every sidewalk

my fingers crept up through the knuckled branches
of the catalpas lining tenth ave, hands
hardening inside gnarled mossgreen gloves

my back assumed the curve of the downtown skyline,
each gleaming building a glassy vertebra
slotted stepwise into my spine

I meandered through
the evergreen neverbrown of it
the mountainheight oceandepth of it
until it recognized me...

and
all at once
thousands of cherry blossoms
unfurled their blushing flags
across my face

Blue screen (and blue rain) of death

Someday I will tell you the story I promised, about the Best/Worst Youth Retreat Ever. Suffice to say it involved walking back and forth through the snow, in the rain, for hours, snowboarding for the first time in my life and doing wicked awesome but finding upon reaching the base of the mountain that the power went out, so the chairlifts weren’t working, having to walk up the mountain with the snowboard, one of the youth kids having an asthma attack on the walk up the mountain, and one of the coolest nights of worship and prayer.

The rain has been pretty constant this month. I watched the weather tonight, and it is somehow three degrees warmer in Saskatoon right now than it is in Vancouver. There is something seriously wrong here. I wouldn’t mind so much if rain didn’t make me so COLD. You get wet, and then you’re in buildings that aren’t built for keeping people warm, so you end up colder than in Saskatoon, where you’re only cold for the five seconds it takes to get from the car to the house. Most people are depressed here. Some are very skilled at handling the situation. I saw a lady hold her umbrella between her chin and her shoulder, still keeping her dry as she used both hands to find her bus pass in her purse. Incredible.

I have a worry greater than weather right now, and it is called the blue screen of death. This is the actual term for my problem. Even as I’m typing this, I’m aware that at any moment, without notice, the blue screen of death may appear and my computer will restart. This has been happening at least once a day for the past few days. The blue screen of death says “Commencing physical memory dump.” This does not sound like a good thing. I’ve got everything copied over onto another hard drive, and I’m basically waiting for my computer to finally crash and burn, and saving my documents every few minutes. My dad hopes it will hold until I come home. My back-up plan is Danice’s “extra” computer, which she borrows from her church for youth ministry stuff. It is a Mac Ibook. I’ve never used a Mac. I guess it would be sweet irony to be forced across the vast Mac-PC divide because of memory problems in my PC. We’ll see what happens… but if you think of it, you could pray for my ailing computer.

I spent much of today drinking tea. Because of a weird shortage of volunteers today at Jacob’s Well, and their commitment to send people out in pairs, and a necessary visit to a downtown friend who insists on making inappropriate comments to women (and therefore cannot be visited by them), I had to wait for my fellow volunteers at Mr. Donair. I had loose tea, which is served with a full mint sprig in the mug, and a cup of dates on the side. It was excellent. I read some of Shane Claiborne’s “The Irresistible Revolution,” which is awesome, and makes me excited about being involved at Jacob’s Well. I later had more tea with Pauline, the 92-year old woman who started Jacob’s Well, and for the past 30 years has been walking the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, talking to all of her friends on the street, a practice she continues to this day. Pauline believes in the power of Scripture to change people, and she often gives little slips of paper with Bible verses to her friends. She rarely finds these slips discarded on the street. Talking to her is quite the experience… one minute she’s talking about how someone wanted to murder her, and then became her friend, the next minute she’s speaking forcefully about the need to command demons out of people, and then she looks at her watch and says it’s time she went home to feed her cat, Marmalade.

Well, I should get to my work… one major assignment to accomplish weekly until the semester ends three weeks from now. I’ll leave you with a challenging quote from Claiborne’s book…

“When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. She ceases to be something we are, the living bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get clothed and fed), but no one leaves transformed. No radical new community is formed. And Jesus did not set up a program but modeled a way of living that incarnated the reign of God, a community in which people are reconciled and our debts are forgiven just as we forgive our debtors (all economic words). That reign did not spread through organizational establishments or structural systems. It spread like disease – through touch, through breath, through life. It spread through people infected by love.”

Rivers and snakes

Hey everyone!

Sorry for my blogging absence. It turns out that figuring out what to do with your life is time-consuming, and I’ve spent a couple weeks catching up at school and trying to figure out how to finish all my assignments before the semester is through, which is sooner than you’d think. I’ve got the plane ticket home – my mom is visiting me for a few days, and we’re flying back together on Apr. 18^th. What I’ll do when I get there is still TBA.

Since deciding on the MDiv, I’ve felt quite peaceful with myself, and much more purposeful in my classes. Actually, more purposeful in everything. I’ve been trying to see lessons in everyday occurrences, things I can learn about myself and my gifts, and about how to be a Christian leader, how to love people more deeply. It’s refreshing to feel the momentum of this decision, even though I’m not sure exactly where I’m going. Realities are starting to sink in… how many more classes I need to take, how much it will cost, how challenging church-related jobs are, the huge responsibility that comes with teaching people about God. Generally, though, I feel like I’m growing into myself, and I love it.

I’ve been thinking about all the different streams of personality that make us who we are. Passions, interests, gifts, experiences, all running alongside each other, coming out in different ways. I like to picture myself on a rubber dingy in one of those lazy rivers at a waterpark, where there is a slow current carrying me along. (I remember my dad losing his keys in one of these lazy rivers when I was young…) There’s also several other little rivers parallel to mine, some with faster currents, some moving at a much slower rate. They intersect in some places, they twist and turn ahead, some slowing down and some picking up speed. I see my decision to do the MDiv as me grabbing my dingy, climbing out of my lazy river, and jumping into a faster stream, getting carried away along it. The slower “biology” stream is still there, still flowing, still part of me - I will always find outlets for that passion. It will still feed into whatever I teach people in ministry, and the time and money I’ve spent studying biology will never go to waste. Who knows? Maybe it will build speed further along the way - maybe in another season of life, that will be my calling. Or maybe God will delight me by joining the two streams together and forming a larger and even faster river. But basically the last month has been about God taking off my river blinders, showing me that there are fast-flowing, rushing parts of who I am that I’ve been ignoring, because my lazy river was a lot safer and less controversial and still a lot of fun. It’s been fascinating to zoom out and see all the flowing streams of who I am, and to discover that I’m much more complicated than I thought, and to remember that no matter what I do, these beautiful (and not-so-beautiful) elements will keep flowing through me, showing up as hobbies and passions and careers and interweaving their way through my life. But right now, I’m feeling this burst of exhilaration at the whitewater rapids that are carrying me along into the MDiv.

I’ve been reading some great books lately… for my Systematic Theology class, we all had to read John Stott’s “The Cross of Christ”. There is a lot about the cross that I’ve never considered in depth, even with 23 years of church, 23 seasons of Lent. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to think more about the cross- it covers a lot of ground, but it’s very readable. It’s got me thinking a lot about sin, which isn’t such a bad thing to think about during Lent. Stott says that until we realize what a big deal sin is, until we stop sauntering presumptuously up to God, we won’t experience the true joy of forgiveness or the depth of love he showed at the cross. Stott also quotes from a book by Harvey Cox called “On Not Leaving It To The Snake”. Cox’s idea is that sin is not so much rooted in pride, in wanting to be God - but instead in apathy. For Eve, this meant letting a snake tell her what to do, an animal over which God had given her dominion. She refused to be truly human; she “went with the flow” and surrendered responsibility for her actions. This is apathy and sloth. I see a lot of it in myself.

I’ve also thought about something I read last year about how we “unpersecuted” Christians in North America experience suffering, how we can still identify with passages about suffering in the Bible, like 1 Peter. We still suffer in the process of sanctification, like every Christian. Becoming holy is a painful process. Actually, sin in our lives is often more the avoidance of pain than the temptation of pleasure. We want to lie to avoid the pain honesty brings. We want to cheat to avoid a bruised reputation. We want to sin sexually to avoid the pain of deep unmet emotional and physical needs. Sometimes what I need to remember is that denying myself and taking up my cross is a defiant (and often painful) action against the apathetic, pain-avoiding ease of sin. It’s better to choose to suffer and let God sanctify me than to take the easy way out and let the snake tell me what to do. I don’t know why, but thinking about sin this way gives me more of a passion to see God destroy it in my life, it gives me an eagerness to suffer in self-denial, to refuse to give in, to experience his sanctifying work.

That's all for now - maybe later I'll tell you the story of my weekend, which I will title "The Worst and the Best Youth Retreat Ever".

It's decided.

I picked up the program change form today... soon I will be Regent's newest MDiv student!

Let the adventures begin...

Not-so-reading week

Hey everyone, sorry it’s been so long. I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching and journaling in the last couple of weeks, and it has sapped all of my writing strength. I haven’t even written any poems in the last little while, which is rather scary, because I have a project to turn in about a month from now, and only a couple of poems to my name… it’s time to downsize to haiku…

Danice and I had an excellent time with the MRIs. We are happy to report that we do, in fact, have brains, and we even got to take home a CD full of pictures of our brains to prove it. I tried my hardest to post one on this blog, but you need a special program to show them. So you’ll just have to come visit me, and I’ll show you my pictures. The best part was that we got to do Sudoku during the MRI, while having our brains scanned! That was the decision-making component. Good thing I had all the Sudoku practice during my New Testament survey class last semester…thanks to mom for clipping them out of the Star Phoenix and mailing them to me.

Lots of firsts for me over the last week, which was reading week, but didn’t contain very much reading. It was my first time getting ashes on my forehead for Ash Wednesday. I went snowshoeing for the first time, and I was a natural. I think it’s because I’m so experienced with snow, even though I’m not very experienced with shoes. I also had a first-time experience catering for my church retreat. I say catering, but what I mean is making 25 bag lunches. I discovered that most people don’t really care about food. They care about coffee. And having it ready when they arrive. And they care quite a bit about the coffee in the carafe labeled “decaf” actually being decaf coffee. Oops. They gave me some grace, because I’m not a coffee drinker, and I don’t know the grave importance of these issues.

Also, for the first time, I didn’t come close to fainting when I had blood drawn. I have a fairly severe needle phobia that usually sends my body into shut-down mode – ringing in my ears, eyes blacking out, muscles going weak, a cold sweat all over – everything you see in the movies and laugh at. It’s an irrational fear, as irrational as Danice’s fear of squirrels and mold, and, horror of horrors, moldy squirrels. I have had little success telling myself that it won’t hurt – because it’s not the pain I fear – I have no idea what part of it scares me. It’s an immediate bodily response. This has accounted for some of the most embarrassing experiences of my life, especially several years ago, in my only case of “vicarious” needle phobia, when I nearly fainted watching the removal of my sister Sarah’s IV. She was quite upset when the nurses ignored her and rushed to my aid, helping me into the wheelchair reserved for her… But this week my blood test went fine, despite the fact that the previous evening, I read on the internet that needle / blood phobia (more specifically, vasovagal syncope) is one of the only phobias that can kill you, since it makes the blood from your brain and heart rush to your legs and other big muscles, and can cause cardiac arrest. Not the best choice of pre-blood test reading material. Nevertheless, I made it through. Hopefully it will help the doctor figure out what’s wrong with my upper GI tract.

This whole vocation discernment process has consumed much of my thought this week… I could hardly focus on anything else, which made my school reading a chore. I’ve been busy exploring my motives and gifts, asking the people closest to me to pray for me and help me understand who I am, and spending time with God, sometimes yelling at him and sometimes just straining to listen. I’ve been reading “call” stories in the Bible – Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Saul, David… that has been eye-opening. It’s been a time of vulnerability for me. I’ve fluctuated between the extremes of thinking I’m very “cut out” for ministry, that I would be very effective and wonderful and inspirational – to thinking I’m a mess, and a foolish, silly, sinful, confused little person who couldn’t possibly offer any deepened understanding of God to anyone – and I’m landing somewhere in the middle, which I think is ok. I think if God leads me forward in this, I will need simultaneous reminders of my giftedness and my foolishness to keep me humble and sane.

The most frustrating part is knowing that I’m the only one who can put all the pieces of me together. The people I love offer me different views of myself, their perceptions of me and my abilities and passions, but I’m the one with the most angles on myself. I’m the one who experienced that strange sudden mind conversion that is starting to seem to me like a call, because of how irrational and unprecedented it was. And it’s frustrating not being able to prove it, or explain it completely. But of course, I have the Holy Spirit to help me, and he is not to be underestimated. And I think that slowly and fumblingly, I’m learning to listen, and seeing broader ways God wants to shape me, things he wants to deal with in my life whichever direction I choose. This excites me and gives me hope in the midst of the confusion.

Please keep praying for me, if you think of it.