Tall tales on the high seas...

Sometimes life on the island can get pretty surreal for me. Like, seriously? Is this my life? I mean, I get to do stuff I love every day. I found something that I love to do every day and actually get to do it! On my last day off I got to sit out in the sun with my roommate and read for hours. Then we took a boat in to town to go grocery shopping for stuff for the house that we share. We rode in on the front of our boat, the… bow? That was so awesome. We went in with two other staff who were trawling at the same time cuz the fish activity was crazy that day. So Emily and I just chilled in the front. It was a cruise ship day, which is always funny for me to go to town on cruise ship days, cuz I live here. So, I kinda just laugh at them, like, “Ha, I live here, I’m not a tourist”. There’s this place in Avalon, by the mole, with this fenced in volleyball net. Everytime I pass it, I can’t help thinking about the first time I was here, being Catalina, at the end of my senior year in high school. I never could have imagined this life that I’m leading now, and that was only five years ago. I can’t wait to see where I go in the next five years and the crazy adventures that’ll get me there.

 

p.s. I love the flow of so many different people we get here. I’ve met so many amazing people at this place that it’s seriously crazy.

...for they will see God

I am starting to get a real vibe of annoyance from everybody, all directed at different people. I started to wonder if I should share that during our “Family Time” last night, but didn’t get the guts enough to do it. I don’t know if I’m more sensitive to it because I’ve been reading Piercing The Darkness and the comparisons with the divisions in their church are starting to look familiar. Like, am I just being paranoid, or am I really starting to see a self-righteous indignation rising up in us? So then we start Bible study, the third week led by Susie going through the first part of Matthew 5 – the Beatitudes. We did verses 8 and 9, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God”. The peacemakers one totally hit me first cuz I had just been thinking about division and bitterness. But I was also thinking about the correlation between the “blessed”s and the rewards that came because of it. For the most part, they had been pretty straightforward to me, like “blessed are the mournful, for they will be comforted” or “blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy”. Neither of these two, the peacemakers and the pure in heart, really made sense to me why they would be the direct outcome. But, the more and more I thought about the “pure in heart” one, I think it started to make a lot of sense and having a lot of direct comparisons to my own life. I got the image of the screens that are at the kitchen counters here and how dirty they get. Cuz, when they’re clean, it’s easy to see what’s out there on the other side for whatever it truly is. But then, as we let dirt on it and accumulate on it, everything that we loot at has a haze of dirt “covering” it. So that’s like my heart, pure if I continue to keep it clean and maintain that cleanliness. But if I let in the dirt and crap from the world, the screen gets dirty, dirtying everything I look at on the other side. So, if I feed myself dirty images and thoughts, pretty soon that’s the basis that my mind and heart automatically use to judge things. Which could explain a lot about the frequency that my mind is in the gutter. Cuz everything I look at, think about, my mind goes to how it could possibly be dirty. But if my heart were pure, I could see those things in their pure sense as God intends, rather than with the dirtiness that the world has slopped it in. Which is part of the reason to be here, to take away many of the temptations I was facing on the mainland, and try to start cleaning the screen so I can see God and witness his blessings and creation as he intended us to. But I still seem to have a long way to go. At least there’s progress?

p.s. Emily and Eliot are freakin awesome...