God is Spirit

To say that God is Spirit is to say that Life does care.

That the very thing that Life comes from does care.

Not by a universe that is indifferent but by a universe that is relational.

To come to the end of yourself is the center of the Christian story.

My sins prevent me from perfection.

I am ready to acknowledge that there is a God and it is not me.

When we continue to inflate our own ego, saying I can do it is not the Christian faith.

To walk in the spirit is to say that I need Your Energy.

My senses God and my rational powers have lost their imagination.

What I see is despair.

I need something that will transcend what I can see.

I need help outside of my circumstances

because my circumstances without external help will kill me.

-Rob Bell

women's retreat

i'm going to try to avoid stereotyping in this blog...but i think it will be slightly inevitable and you know sometimes stereotypes are true. most things are true in some circumstance...however random. excuse the abruptness/lack of transitions.

this weekend is women's retreat--and it defines everything that is wrong with the current church culture--and my life.

this entire week was a fiasco of planning/organizing/correcting/fixing/changing/hanging on by a thread. i had two choices. i could care and freak out trying to make everything happen OR i could check out. i chose the first. what did the other interns choose? the second. is this unusual? no.

i sat in on the first session last night after staying up til 4:30 am the previous night hanging out with my roommate who is everything that i love about life. she is everything that i became during college and brings out the person that i love in myself. she cares about life. she's not afraid to be passionate about something. BUT it doesn't freak her out. she's my stability, my heart, my soul. We could live together for the rest of our lives. we could do anything--conquer the world.

maybe out in the real world it wouldn't be true.

maybe living together in the real world would destroy our relationship-

maybe that's why i'm afraid of committing to living with her next year.

maybe i'm supposed to move beyond that.

if this year is moving beyond that, then i don't want to move beyond that.

i had to leave her this year b.c we are each other's stability. i needed to learn how important that stability is in my life...whether it comes from her or not.

The women that attend this retreat are the typical middle age middle class overweight woman or the younger set that are heading that direction. My absolute greatest fear in life is becoming this very kind of person. All other fears are surface things that i could get over if put in an extreme enough situation. 

i fear mediocrity. 

very few women who came on this retreat would be ones that i would be friends with in real life. they are the ones that share one experience with you and expect you to be the greatest of friends. solid stable friendships take time...that's something i've been trying to teach the girls i live with. 

i fear conformity.

i thought in working at camp i would be setting myself against the grain, would be setting myself apart. forcing myself out of the chaotic mainstream of society into rest, peace, God's way. Instead i've found if this is what setting apart is i don't want to be set apart. i want to be in the middle of the chaos...the mainstream of society...the messy passionate glorious secular world. those are the people i can relate to...people that i find fascinating...people that i can really learn from...people that teach me to define myself instead of being defined by others. people who don't feel the need to hold it together..to be perfect. people who do what they love...not what they feel obligated to do. why do i want to be a part of that world instead of the middle class christian world? b.c i am too closely linked. it makes me fear conformity to the point of rebellion instead of doing things purely for their intrinsic value whether they are part of the mainstream or not. 

i want real.

i want messy.

i want pain.

i want passion.

i want laughter.

i don't want needy.

i don't want control.

i don't want perfection.

i don't want insecurity.

i don't want pride.

i don't want shame.

i don't want cynicism.

i want real.

i want to love.

i want to breathe.

i want to feel.

i want to be free.

and i ask for the impossible, don't i?

but that's what we are created for.

That is the Creator.

With man this is impossible but with God all things are possible.

The truth will set us free.

everyone has their ideas of what i should do with my life

to whom much has been given much is expected.

that is how i feel about my set of talents. i have been given much.

make the most of every opportunity for the days are evil

i use my talents in the current situation in every opportunity possible

do not just go the one mile but walk with him two

i go the extra mile b.c i can clearly see it...others don't see it..i have been burdened

come to me all who are weary and heavy ladened and i will give you rest for my yolk is easy and my burden is light

why am i so tired?

why do i see all of these women who take care of everything coming to a retreat like this and they are so exhausted?

i don't want to join their masses.

work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord not for men.

but i want to work at it with all my heart...i have found the satisfaction of giving it all to the Lord and there is nothing greater. why has this year been so different?

for the things i do not want to do i do and the things i ought i do not do

there is a war waging within the members of my body

when will the war stop?

i am bombarded on every side

the Lord is my refuge in time of trouble, a mighty fortress

i do not want to blame any one party.

search me Lord and know my heart. see if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

i become so increasingly aware of what an awful person i am in my own right. i am so weak yet i am too strong for my own good.

in my weakness You are strong

a broken and contrite heart You desire

i want to turn my brain off...i want to follow the Spirit.

the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

I'm sitting the desk yet again...second weekend in a row.

And I spent an hour last night yet again indulging my digestive tract's cramping.

And my head is pounding yet again from a sinus infection that just won't go away.

I hope I never take being healthy/feeling well for granted after this year.

I've almost gotten used to feeling subpar. It's depressing.

But it can't go on forever right? Either its gotta get better b.c of everything that I'm trying to fix my body or its gotta get worse. If it gets worse, I go to the doctor b.c I don't know how much longer I can take this. God has been using my body to teach me that I can't fix anything, I'm not in control and there's not always a simple logical reason for why I feel the way I do. Maybe I really am lactose intolerant or maybe my body is just on the blitz. Maybe my sinuses do make my motion sickness a hundred times worse or maybe I just can't take mobility for granted. Either way I am finally reaching a point where I can accept/ignore it so that it doesn't keep me from doing things. Unlike earlier this year when I felt like the world was ending every time I felt ill....which was a.b every couple of weeks. That means my stability factor in life is going up....which is good. And I think I am finding solutions slowly but surely. I don't know if I can counsel if it doesn't get better. I physically would not have been able to handle being with kids--or anybody for that matter, all the time this year. It really will not be of my own strength that is for sure.

It's as if my body has spent the year physically crashing from all the time I pushed it too far during high school and college and ignored what it needed--healthy food, exercise, sleep, rest in general. It all caught up with me in the last eight months. Now I pray by May it will have recovered enough to be of use this summer. It will definitely change my pace. thinking about pace..

Yesterday my starbucks cup (a grandevanillasoylatte...now i really sound like a high maintenance city chick) had a quote about how commitment, contrary to popular belief, frees us instead of enslaves us--frees us to do things wholeheartedly without reserve, without fear b.c we have made up our mind, we have chosen something, and in choosing it, we no longer have this assortment of options to expend our time and energies trying to balance. It's committing to something, flaws and all, and getting something done instead of spending that same energy evaluating and critiquing all the options but not actually doing any of them. I just wrote this whole big long theory thing and realized while its true its not really the heart of the matter. 

I've been spending most of this year detached, evaluating/critiquing myself more than anyone else. I'm the kind of person that especially in the last couple of years has found great joy and freedom in committing to things wholeheartedly. That's why I love camp, because it gave me a place I really could commit to something wholeheartedly and go in with reckless abandon. I thought this year would be even moreso b.c I'm at one place and involved in one thing but its not. It's been good for me to evaluate myself and rethink everything about myself but I'm tired of it and I'm tired of the same attitude pervading everyone else about camp. This detached critical attitude among the full time staff at camp is discouraging. My friends at college weren't even this bad. Denise is the only person who would undoubtably puts the greater good above her own agenda...when she understands the greater good. She's new so she's not jaded but that also means she also doesn't understand the big picture very well yet. She just doesn't know but she wants to. The others don't care. They don't want to know. It's self-preservation but its self-preservation b.c they don't trust that God will provide. But that's not logical of course. Logic says if I don't cover my ass, somebody's gonna get me. Faith says if I don't cover my ass, then God is gonna get me. wouldn't you rather have God get you than even yourself? or do you not trust him? do you think you can do better than He does? Faith isn't counting how many times I've had to do this for this person or that that person didn't do this for me that one time. That's logic. Faith/love holds no record of wrongs. Faith trusts that God will take care of His children. I'm talking to myself more than anybody else right now.

I graduated college exhausted but the best kind of exhausted. The exhausted that said that I gave it my all and I can walk away knowing I made the most of every opportunity. This year I've learned a ton about myself and my relationship with God has deepened greatly b.c of this resistance, this self-preservation all around me, not b.c of people challenging me to grow. b.c of the negative, not b.c of the positive. i'm tired of doing this half ass myself. i'm tired of my ego keeping me from giving wholeheartedly. i'm tired of my insecurity destroying my confidence in my abilities. i'm tired of being afraid. and i'm still exhausted. it's not as if protecting myself has made me any less exhausted than i was during college. and i'm not anywhere near as satisfied. we're all afraid of burnout but we're burnt out not b.c we gave wholeheartedly but b.c we've tried to protect ourselves; b.c we didn't give out of God but out of ourselves; b.c we didn't trust that God would really provide if we served Him with all that we had...like He has asked us to. 

the weirdest thing just happened...

wow i have no idea what to make of this.

someone offered to make a job connection for me in st louis. i looked on his facebook page for the church website and found reliantchurch.org. clicked on it and have spend the last day and a half falling in love with it. its creative. its inner city. its diverse. its simple, young, active. and i have been praying about it for the last day and a half to not rush and just say yes. so i finally went tonight after talking it over with past/future roommates about it to send the friend who made the connection a facebook message to say yes i am most definitely interested. BUT first i thought for some reason, maybe i should check just to make sure that it was the only st louis church on his facebook page and that i would be writing to him about a church that he doesn't know about and he'd think i'm crazy. so i looked.

and i couldn't find it.

i searched through his groups ten times looking for it.

and its not there.

and i found a different church that wasn't there before.

how the heck...?

and the new church on there is a church with a HUGE staff and tons of programs and nothing that i would ever be interested in working for...minus the fact that it is an actual job possibility in an economy that doesn't provide much hope.

needless to say i have absolutely no explanation besides God.

and what does that mean i am supposed to do with it?

I did not google search for this reliant church.

I found it by clicking on a group link on this guy's facebook page and then found the website on its facebook page.

but its not there anymore.

this is clearly not where he works.

this is clearly not where the job offer is.

but the church is wonderful in all that it is doing.

it is real.

and beyond any rationalization that i could ever come up with, God took me to that website.

the reliant church is close to where my roommates were looking for an apartment in st louis.

i told God that if i were going to move to st louis...anywhere for that matter...i'd have to have a community/connections to live in. i was not going to move somewhere blindly with two roommates and expect to stumble into a community. i wanted a guarantee. there it is. 

how do i explain it?

God what do you require of me?