life is a crazy mixture of hard and beautiful

...hard to watch the coldness in erica and aaliyah's eyes as their family falls apart around them, throwing bricks through windows, threatening one another with knives, dad beating mom during aaliyah's birthday party and causing the other kids to run home...

...hard to see justin again, this kid i've been praying for all year, to see some growth, some softness to the gospel in his life, and then for him to move to las vegas...

...hard to have a cheerful attitude about picking up the church again...and yet finding the strength to put on a smile and a song and pray for the kids as i clean up another one of their messes...

...hard to love through an excruciating head ache and terrible sore throat...

...hard to walk from door to door in the heat and the humidity, not knowing what encounter is behind your next knock...

...hard to not be broken enough by my sin...

...hard to get in bed after a day where the hours were too long to even calculate and then realize i still have to prepare a bible lesson for the morning...

...beautiful to rest my chin on eddie's curly head during the missionary story and cry over God's great goodness to me...

...beautiful to help qwue-qwue find habakkuk in her bible during church so she could look up her memory verse and then hear her read the whole book to herself at a whisper...

...beautiful to spend a whole evening just miriam and i, making eggplant parmesan in an amazing kitchen, driving with the moon roof open praying and talking about things that matter and how we can be spent for the kingdom...

...beautiful to have a mud fight in the fry's back yard and then have both angel and hosanna grab my hands when it was done and we were rinsed off to show me their kittens...

...beautiful to find strength whenever i read my bible or hit my knees...to realize how very much i need to be there more...

...beautiful to see a glinpse of a kindred spirit in ranisha, to work past the bitterness and anger and see her longing for love...

...beautiful to fall in love with the grace that i keep seeing more and more in the lives of the other interns and the saints at this church...

...beautiful to ponder how we can show we're crazy-in-love with Jesus in the broken neighborhoods of north tulsa...

...beautiful to attend my eighth bible study of the week and come away pondering something fresh and amazing about my God...

...beautiful to be told over and over to see and savor the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus...