Thoughts from the Past Few Weeks

There is no particular order or coherence to the following list...

• Jesus is both gentle and fierce--gentle with prostitutes and sinners and fierce with Pharisees--and I think we often get the two mixed up. We're gentle with the white-washed sinners and fierce with the blatant sinners. But we need to follow in the ways of our Savior.
• I am completely inadequate in every way. Just when I start to think I might be actually helping people, I go to Skid Row and stand in the pouring rain, feeling utterly helpless. Helpless to give these people shelter from the cold and wet, helpless to fill their stomachs except for this small, cold taco in my hand, helpless to make them see that their situation will never be better until they surrender their lives to God. All I can do is tell them...about God's love and righteousness and plan for the redemption of the world...I can't change them at all. I am nothing without Him.
• Alarms mean nothing when you've only had one hour of sleep the night before.
• When I'm depressed for no reason, it helps to go and lay on a blanket and look at the stars and search my heart. Because you know what? I'm usually depressed because of unconfessed sin, because my only Joy I have pushed to the side, because I deem other, temporal things to be more important.
• Strong Bad is insanely funny...and even more so at 4 am.
• Talking to your friends from home is "good like medicine."
• Some Californians will not drive in the rain. If I was that way in Bellingham, I would have never gone anywhere.
• I've decided what I'm looking for in a man. Now God will proceed to show me how very wrong I am...
• It's nice to know people--to begin to understand your roommate on a deeper level than the surface and how to live together without strife, to make friends whom you can talk with about anything, and to see God bringing your lives together for "mutual edification."
• Valentines Day as a single girl doesn't hurt if you're looking to how you can serve others.
• My heart broke for the young teens in Uganda, so much so that I wrote a fragment of a poem:
  Dark eyes in a dark face
  Stare from the depths of a dark heart
  The hope of Uganda
  With hopeless eyes...
  I couldn't finish--there's too much in my heart and I can't find the right words. Actually, reading back over this, these aren't the right words. Oh, for the tongue of Heaven! I am glad the Holy Spirit intercedes for me with "groanings too deep for words."
• "God will take you where you do not want to go in order to produce in you what you could not achieve on your own...We had better start encouraging one another with the theology of uncomfortable grace. You don't need the grace of relief right now, you need the grace of refinement." --from chapel with Paul Tripp
• "My purpose in the life of every person I come in contact with is to have them walk away from each conversation more like Jesus." --paraphrased from chapel with Tom Rios
• God opens up amazing opportunities for relationships with non-Christians where I've not expected them. Remember the kids I babysit? The 12 year old girl has really opened up to me lately and we're developing a relationship, and she'll actually open up to me about deep and important things. So I'm really praising God for that!

If you have some time and want to be convicted (ok, you might have time and not want to be convicted...), you should read some of Gunner's blog. He's the RD at Oak Manor, one of the guys dorms here. http://www.xanga.com/gunner23 (Sorry, I'm not good at html.)