Idle and Blessed

Global Summit week. Lots of languages, lots of encouragement, lots of cool ideas. God's heart for the globe is exploding our hearts. This stuff makes my mind forget time exists. How am I supposed to study for exams and write papers with all this Russian in my head? :)

****A Prayer Written on Thanksgiving One Year Ago**** Giver, You have blessed me with so much. I'm frustrated with myself, with this broken situation humans find ourselves in, because we grab onto things and store them up and have a really hard time doing anything else. I'm like those monkeys or birds who see glittery shiny things and hide them away, you know. It's embarrassing. My plans. My home, my family, my ideas, my school. My food, my money, my friends. My books, my clothes, my computer, my bed, my phone. It's just that I get nervous and heated and defensive when I feel like "my stuff" is in danger of not being mine. It's the stupidest thing in the world. Because none of this stuff is mine at all, it's not intended to be. It's such a curious thing, this human addiction to things and the compulsion to store them up. Especially when I've been commanded and commissioned to do the opposite. "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on ea...

Well, you know I'm busy when I forget to blog. On top of being busy, though, I've been thinking about so much lately that it's hard to write about it. I'm kind of ADD about everything. God keeps finding something new to show me every couple hours, before I've digested the last hundred. As I wrote about in my last post, one of the major ways the Lord has been communicating to me lately is through beauty. I would tell you to please go walk to Belmont and stand under the red trees and look up into them and see God, but the truth is that you might not see Him at all. You might just see red leaves. And I would tell you to please get on Spotify and listen to Ronnie Freeman's "Perfect Love" album and hear God. But you might only hear some really cool worship music. I don't know. God has been playing in my life lately with the idea of completion. At the end of my shifts at work, I always grab a case or two of water bottles from the back and set them out fo...

I'm reading some of the best books right now, and I need to recommend them to you. Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen By virtue of being written by Nouwen, this is worth reading. But also by virtue of being about ethics. Blood Brothers by Elias Chacour A Palestinian Christian's account of being forced to leave his home in Israel when the Zionists invaded and Israel became a state. Extremely interesting for its point of view - the tension between Jews, Palestinians, Christians of all ethnicities, and various world powers was/is more complicated than we want to believe. Israel's statehood is more complicated that we want to believe... The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway Don't hate me for loving Hemingway. This book is simultaneously dark and hilarious. Maybe a commentary on people who have nothing to live for? I don't know, that's just what I'm picking up. Fabulous writing. The Bible Made Impossible by Christian Smith Addresses Biblicism in the church. I'm finding t...