Renee - The Quoter, part 4

I've been reading through C. S. Lewis' "space trilogy" ('Out Of The Silent Planet', 'Perelandra', and 'That Hideous Strength') as of late and there was a particular part in the end of the second book, 'Perelandra' that hit me...

"The peoples of the ancient worlds who never sinned, for whom He never came down, are the peoples for whose sake the Low Worlds were made. For though the healing what was wounded and the straightening what was bent is a new dimension of glory, yet the straight was not made that it might be bent nor the whole that it might be wounded. The ancient peoples are at the centre. Blessed be He!" p215

To kind of sum up this book, it is about a planet mirroring our own planet's history and being at the point of The Fall. Ransom is sent from Earth to help prevent this newer/younger planet from making the same mistake we did. The topic of the above passage was discussed throughout the book but I feel like this paragraph especially really finally got to me and some things that I've been trying to figure out. Specifically, it's talking about the fact that because of The Fall and of sin, we needed and were able to experience the glory of God/Christ coming down and becoming flesh to redeem us. But we were not created perfect so that we would sin and be able to experience that.

Reading this has brought up in my mind the struggles I've had with differences between my own testimony and that of others. Especially when I joined InterVarsity I would hear so many remarkable testimonies of people that grew up not knowing Christ and who God transformed out of drugs and promiscuity and many other things. For a long time it was very hard to embrace my own testimony of growing up in the church because I didn't have that story. I felt invalid because my story wasn't as moving as these other people's stories, like I was too innocent and that I had to come from this hard background for God to *really* use me to draw in other people.

(sidenote: I am not in any way saying that I am innocent or that I have never sinned. I sin and miss the mark every day of my life.)

So, what I've come to realize, in a very simplified way, in reading this is that God's perfect glory shines through every testimony and that we were not born good so that we could sin and show God's glory and mercy, but because we do sin, He brings us out of one possible goodness into another that is also completely good and neither is invalid. So whatever story my life will be, the goodness that He derives from that is just as valid and good as the goodness that He derives from someone else's story.

An excerpt from my journal...

[One of my coworkers] said something in the kitchen today that I’m still reeling from. I don’t even know how to process it. I just want someone to come in and say he was wrong and use all the words I can’t find to make it all make sense. He said that we’re basically just a hotel. That the IV groups that come here could do the exact same thing at a hotel. But then, if that’s what my IV had done, I wouldn’t have gone to work for whatever random hotel we would’ve gone to. So why am I here now? What’s the point?

… because just like He can use any person, and has chosen me, He can use any place, and has chosen here. This place is holy ground, all of it. It’s a shelter from the storm for so many people, a safe haven. As much as I am His, this place is His, and He gives it back to us.

Renee - The Quoter, part 3

“In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day’s walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life – natural life – has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?”

‘The Four Loves’, C.S. Lewis,  p.71-72.

“For then it will seem to us that we – we four or five – have chosen one another, the insight of each finding the intrinsic beauty of the rest, like to like, a voluntary nobility; that we have ascended above the rest of mankind by our native powers. The other loves do not invite the same illusion. Affection obviously requires kinships or at least proximities which never depended on our own choice. And as for Eros, half the love songs and half the love poems in the world will tell you that the Beloved is your fate or destiny, no more your choice than a thunderbolt, for ‘it is not in our power to love or hate.’ Cupid’s archery, genes – anything but ourselves. But in Friendship, being free of all that, we think we have chosen our peers. In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting – any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends ‘You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.”

‘The Four Loves’, C.S. Lewis, p.89-90.

Renee - The Quoter, part 2

You know that feeling in your heart.. When your heart is just pounding.. like it’s actually outside of your ribs.. exposed.. vulnerable.. wonderful and awful.. and heartsick.. and alive.. all at the same time.. What do you call that?

Uh, love.

"Dan In Real Life"

Home away from home...

I’ve spent the past 9.5 weeks in Sacramento. I think I marked my time there by weekends.

Weekend #1… Graduation and graduation party

W#2… Christmases with family (yes, multiple Christmases)

W#3… Disneyland with friends and sister

W#4… Wedding (not mine, lol, I don’t know why I felt the need to clarify that one)

W#5… Intense Scrapbooking

W#6… Santa Cruz with the rest of the fearsome foursome

W#7… Super Bowl party

W#8… Shopping and sushi with the girls

W#9… One-on-one time with one of my important Laurens

W#10… ‘The Office’ party with great snacks, Bowling

 And those are just the highlights. Throw in a few InterVarsity large group meetings, a handful of trips to various movie theaters, sushi and cheesecake restaurants, Sunday mornings back at church and as many updates on people’s lives as I could possibly cram in. I feel like there is so much more that I did but it seems to all be blurring together now. Oh, I also did my taxes in there somewhere. Yay me for being prompt on that one.

 I’ve now barely been back on my island for 24 hours (28 to be exact for some) and it’s been eventful and mellow all at the same time, but I’ve come to expect that of this place. I got picked up in a skiff (that’s a pretty tiny boat for those not familiar). So me, my 80 pounds of luggage and 3 other people. That was only a little unsettling for someone who’s not too thrilled with large bodies of water, especially when it’s dark out. Basically, the smaller the boat, the more anxious I get. But like my first time doing the trash barge, it’ll be a night that I won’t soon forget, because there were dolphins. They followed us back to camp. One even jumped almost from straight under our boat. Breathtaking. Once I got into camp I had to laugh at the fact that it seemed nobody knew I was coming back that day. I said hello to those I could find and headed to my empty house. I thought I’d be meeting my new roommate, but it turns out she’s visiting family in Hawaii until Friday, so I’m back in an empty house. They gave me my first full day off to settle in and I truly appreciate it, but I’m ready now to get back to work. Also, ironically, I’ve realized since being back that I’m ready to move on from here. Nothing bad happened and I’m not saying I’m leaving before the time I agreed to or that I’ll never come back. I’ve just figured out in being gone for 2 months and coming back that it’s time to take my next step in life. Now if only I could figure out which step to take. I have a feeling 2009 has even more in store for me than 2008 and 2007 did.

 p.s. When you are going to a camp on an island with very little electricity at night and you walk to your house alone every night in dark conditions it’s probably not a good idea to be reading a book called ‘The Killing Hour’ at the same time. Especially when said book is all about a deranged serial killer who kidnaps girls about your age and strands them in dark isolated places and some are found with live rattlesnakes sewn shut in their mouths.

Renee - The Quoter

Lena knew she had spent too much of her life in a state of passive dread, just waiting for something bad to happen. In a life like that, relief was as close as you got to happiness.

p99, 'The Second Summer Of The Sisterhood'

Renee - The Scrapper

So, I don't know if I really had a choice in the matter, but I'm a scrapbooker. Nothing like my mother, aunt, or sister's mother, but a scrapbooker nonetheless. This being said, I haven't scrapbooked a thing in probably a year and a half, if not longer. So going into this three day weekend that they put aside every year to just scrapbook, I've been a little overwhelmed. Today is the last day of this mad marathon and maybe with the end in sight I can finally get some work done.

Of course, I'm now about four years behind and have a whole book of my island I want to put together, not to mention my whole InterVarsity life. And, no, I don't plan on doing the whole thing in one day. I'm not crazy. Well, not in that respect anyway.

So now that I'm resolved in this mission, there's only one more question I must ask myself...

Where the heck do I start???

Renee - The Fruit Junkie

So, at some point during my time on the island, a certain friend of mine asked me how I might gauge our topic of discussion on the scale of one to apple. It’s a little game we play sometimes always with a different form of scale, but this one got me thinking (always a bad thing). With the amount of time that I had on my hands, I created a form of measurement based on my love of any and all fruit that I could think of. Here is that list…

 

1. grapefruit

  .5. pear

2. orange

  .5. blueberry

3. banana

  .5. peach

4. mango

  .5. watermelon

5. plum

  .5. tangerine

6. cantaloupe

  .5. cherry

7. pomegranate

  .5. avocado

8. grape

  .5. kiwi

9. strawberry

  .5. pineapple

10. apple

Renee - The Klutz

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to realize this specific area of my persona, but it has come into my understanding that I am quite the klutz. I always knew I wasn’t quite on the “graceful” side of things, but I think the dim light bulb started to flicker a bit brighter when I fell down my stairs a couple months ago leaving me with a wonderfully baseball sized bruise. Now, working in the kitchen has had its share of spills… quite literally. Usually I’m pretty good at being careful with only a few minor cuts and burns, but because I wasn’t careful enough with our industrial sized mixer during the summer I spilled about three gallons of boiling water on my feet. So now, here I am and I thought I’ve been doing better.. can’t even remember the last burn I got. I guess that means something big had to happen sooner or later. Enter my wonderful determination to wear my flip flops (sandals, slippers, thongs, whatever you want to call them) whenever possible.. translation: whenever I’m not working in the kitchen. I was helping some friends move all of their stuff from their storage unit into a U-haul van to drive up to Santa Cruz and of course, like the genius I am, had no problem or worries about wearing my flip flops on this occasion. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone then when I say that their washing machine and I got into a little “skirmish” resulting in the loss of a very tiny, but very real portion of skin on one of my toes. :( And finally, the icing on the cake is that on my first day back to work when I got back to the island I was scooping ice from our ice machine and I cut my finger on a piece of ice. That’s right, a piece of ice. Of course it would be me to figure out how I could injure myself with ice. It was a pretty good slice, drawing out a nice amount of blood. Don’t worry though, everything stayed sanitary.

So that’s my little story.. don’t worry, there’s plenty more where that came from. Hopefully, I’ll make this an ongoing thing. Not the lack of coordination, but the blogs about some of the wonderful quirks that make me me. Hope ya’ll enjoy.

p.s. How has it taken me so long to realize the amazingness that is 21 Jumpstreet?

Coincidence? I think not...

Sometimes I’m really sad by how amazed I am at what God does and how He constantly speaks into my life. Let me see if I can use the right words to give justice to how amazed I am currently…

 One big thing seems to be the books that are coming into my life out of all kinds of different places but all seemingly connected in themes. A week before coming out to Catalina in January I went to three different thrift stores looking for jeans and wound up in the book section of one looking for random books to take with me since this place is so conducive for me to sit back and read. There I found “Piercing The Darkness” and “This Present Darkness” by Frank Peretti. Both have heavy themes of prayer and spiritual warfare. I’ve been working on consistent and continual prayer in my life more deliberately in the past year and these books have been a perfect timing to open my understanding and questions about prayer. Then I have this amazing friend named Eric. He has this heart for prayer and justice that is infectious and inspiring. He brought a few books with him while he’s out here for the summer and lends them to me. Reading “Red Moon Rising” and soon “Punk Monk” have just continued to spur me on in pursuing this thing we call prayer. Also this past year I’ve been put in more than a few situations that have seriously forced me to go to God in prayer because I had nowhere else to turn. They were/are some pretty powerful things that make me fall to the floor seeking for God’s hand and will in the situations.

 So that’s one area where God is just amazing me by how many things he’s coordinating in my life to make sure I don’t miss out on what he’s trying to tell me. Another thing was just in this last week and mostly today. Last week I listened to a sermon from Kansas City’s Boiler Room’s podcasts. They have at least three podcasted series, yet another thing that Eric has turned me on to. This one is called The God Story and breaks down the Bible into 33 sermons. The one we listened to last week spoke partially about Hosea, one of the “minor prophets”. What they talked about piqued my interest in a couple ways. First, I realized that I was unfamiliar with the person Hosea which doesn’t happen very much for me having grown up in the church and hearing most of the Bible in kid-friendly stories. And God called upon Hosea to marry an “adulterous wife” so he could understand God’s relationship with the Israelites. That’s just crazy for me, and having never heard it before I wanted to actually read the whole book after listening to the commentary to it. Then there’s the fact that I really identify with where Israel was at this time, being close to God then turning away to worshipping idols, warnings to come back followed by judgment until they come back to God and then restarting the cycle so many times. So today, my day off, I decided to actually read the book, the first time in a while that I’ve read the Bible just to read it. I mean I read it and discuss it for church and our small groups and different devotionals we do here, all constructed by someone else, but never like this. Anyway, so my Bible is a study Bible and the top half of every page is actual scripture, then the bottom of every page goes deeper into everything on the top half of that page. So it explains important words and concepts, interprets “difficult verses”, draws parallels between specific people and events, describes historical and textual contexts of passages, and demonstrates how one passage sheds light on another, to name a few things. There are introductions to each book and cross references.

 So I’m reading Hosea, finding so many parallels to my own life and to the other topics we’ve been talking about this summer in our small groups and themes for the weeks. Like Hosea 2:19-20… “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.” Justice and faithfulness being two key traits and actions that have spent a lot of time in my brain getting tossed around for the past couple of weeks figuring out what they mean in my life and in God’s will for my life and the world. Then I was reading Hosea 2:23… “I will plant her for myself in the land; I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.’ I will say to those called ‘Not my people,’ ‘You are my people’; and they will say, ‘You are my God.’” which by itself in this context is pretty powerful stuff and then I look at some of the cross references it lists 1 Peter 2:10, the verse after the verse that just happens to be our verse for the entire summer that we recite at every meal every day. 1 Peter 2:9… “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” v.10… “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” I had to step back for a second and be amazed at how everything always ties together and that this can’t be just coincidence.

 Oh yeah, and about two months ago I borrowed a couple of books from this family that’s living here. The one I’ve been reading for the last couple weeks is called “Prophet” and is another one written by Frank Peretti. It’s about this guy who starts to see visions and becomes a present time prophet no matter how he tries to resist it and the importance of paying heed to God’s warnings to turn away from our evil and return to him. I have no idea what God has for me in the coming years or even the next few months but I can’t help but to make sure I’ve got my eyes open to what’s coming next in my life

 

p.s. thanks for letting me kind of decompress a little bit of what is currently swirling around in my head. Sorry it went a little long…