Mama

What is it with girls and wanting to reject what's naturally in them? I'm talking about femininity. A couple posts ago I wrote about how I'm a romantic and I can't really help it. Today I'm going to talk about how I'm motherly and I can't really help that either.
I'm staffing a DTS right now, which means I'm walking alongside other adolescents, most of them younger than me, who feel they have a call to missions, want to grow more and be discipled in the truths of Christ so they can be more equipped take the Good News to the world. I wanted to staff a DTS because I know that I love seeing transformation. It's one of my favorite things. Watching something or someone go from old to new, dead to alive is fascinating to me and moreso, I love being a part of the process. So walking into this, I knew I would see lots of transformation and it would be great. But I've been surprised lately at how great it's actually been. Like, how much I genuinely love and care about these students. I was expecting to love and care about them obviously, but not this much. I'm noticing silly things like, if I'm walking around on campus and I see one of them waving to me from a distance, my heart leaps a little bit and I get an overwhelming sense of pride for who they are. Or I'll be in class and hear one of them ask our speaker a brilliant question and get teary eyed from how far they've come since day one. Or I'll watch one of them start falling in love with another person and my mother hen feathers will rustle up and I'll just want to protect them from the inevitable hurt and risk that comes with loving someone else.
It's weird.
Another example, the other day we did the ropes course. The ropes course is all about team building and unity. It's all what you make it. If you want to be lousy and reject teamwork, it will be a hard day for you on ropes. But if you hold others above yourself and decide to devote yourself to being a team, the day is everything it possibly could be. And that day, my team.... was SO great. Selfless, sacrificial and serving. Each challenge we went through, I noticed each one of them moving form the mindset of 'individual' to a mindset of 'team', which, if you've experienced the shift of that mindset, is a very powerful thing. The whole time I was just observing them, and my heart was bursting with pride and love for how great they were doing. I didn't care that my feet were throbbing or that my harness was giving me bruises under my butt. I was just silently praising God in my heart that his Holy Spirit has been transforming the hearts of these people, these people that I love dearly, these people that make me so proud.

So, GREAT, now I'm not only a romantic, I'm also a freaking mom.
There goes all my plans for being an independent hard-ass.

Here's some pictures of people in this DTS. Try not to tear up.

Seven Storey Mountain

     "On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.
     Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.
     My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
     My father painted like Cezanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cezanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of the masses and for all the circumstances that impres an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decorations or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.
     Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.
     I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my other some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
     If what most people take for granted were really true--if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.
     If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would have never entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man."

--Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pg. 1



Page one, guys. Page ONE. I just got this book in the mail today. There are 400 pages left. YES. Praise God for brilliant minds that choose to write honest things on paper that make the rest of us feel sane.

Call me Audrey, please.

    I'm a romantic. I'm just beginning to realize it. Probably because I've subconsciously suppressed it for years. Because when you're a girl and you're romantic, it means you're dependent and needy. And the last thing a girl ever wants to be seen as is dependent and needy. So, of course when I find myself getting butterflies when a certain man walks in the room or when I catch myself daydreaming of being swept off my feet, my knee jerk reaction is to shut it off and remind myself that fantasies are just that, and not reality. And that I'd better stop thinking something like that is going to happen, because it's not. And if it does, it will be short lived.
     Anyway, I've changed my mind. I think I'm going to start nurturing my romantic nature. Not in a lustful or manipulative way...but in a way that honors the fact that I'm a woman. And honestly, my mind isn't just geared toward romance between two people. I desire romance in everything I pursue. A romantic career, romantic relationships, a romantic life. I think that's okay. I think it's okay to realize that imagination and adventure and relationships are all things that make the heart come alive and as long as we're not using it for vanity or selfish gain, then romance is one of God's most beautiful gifts.
     I think I'll start writing poems. I think I'll read more poems. I think I'll read ones by Sappho, Rumi, John Donne and David the Psalmist. I'll listen to Jeff Buckley and Damien Rice. I'll wear dresses and I'll bat my eyelashes. And maybe when I like I guy, I'll make it known. Classily, of course.

The Monastery--After The Fact

It's been a couple of weeks since I returned from my weekend at Mt. Angel. I don't want to turn the experience in to some spiritual high that I'm trying to clutch and grab onto for as long as possible, but as I read over my journal entries from that weekend, I have to say that a chord strikes in my heart and I feel the pull towards contemplation tugging yet again. I feel a slight lift in my spirit and flutter in my soul thinking about the raw beauty of solitude with God. Obviously, I haven't been able to get time like that with God back here at the YWAM campus. But I've noticed that some revelations from that weekend have definitely translated into my day-to-day here, which I think is really important, and tells that the experience wasn't just hype.
For one, I don't find myself resenting corporate prayer and worship anymore. Before the weekend at the monastery, I could pinpoint numerous times when simply being in worship or intercession with other Christians made me so furious I would run out of the event and go to my house, slam the door and scream cry into my pillow for an hour. I could never figure out why praying and worshiping, things that are supposed to be deep times of communion with God, would make me so damned pissed. But in the silence at the monastery I noticed that in corporate worship times, I wasn't seeking God for God's sake. I was seeking a vision, a picture, a word, anything to share with everyone else in the room to prove that I "hear God". Not only that, but I was definitely testing my own ability to twist his arm--to see how much I would whine and strive until I got him to do what I wanted. Of course you never realize these things until you are able to step outside of things and take a good hard look at yourself. God definitely helped me do that. Now when I'm in worship or prayer I take comfort in the fact that it has nothing to do with me. All worship and prayer is about is bowing my head and honoring a God a thousand times bigger than myself. It's about sitting in the wonder of the fact that I'll never be able to control any part of who He is. I'm helpless in taming him. And just to clarify, this isn't sappy sentiment I'm talking about--I'm not sitting wide-eyed, with warm fuzzies about God (although there's a place for that). I'm talking about a deep peace and sense of humility, knowing that I am tiny and God is HUGE. That simple fact of knowing that it's useless for me to manipulate God or back him into a corner, melts my rage. Thank God.
Secondly, my bible has also shifted from being a source of resentment to a source of life and refuge. I want to read my bible. Because it's not about me. It's not about what I can get from it. Yeah, that's a perk. But it's just a perk. The Bible is about learning about the biggest most beautiful most complicated neverending never able to understand thing in the whole universe--God. And something about picking up this Bible freakishly gives me life in a way nothing else does. It honestly freaks me out sometimes, because I can't explain what it does in my soul. It shifts things. It hasn't been like that for a while and I think the shift is this--lifting my gaze from my navel, to God himself. He's so much cooler than me.
Again, thank God.

Addiction--The Monster Becomes A Child

In terms of addiction (and probably any uncontrollable repetitive behavior), I've come to this conclusion about things.
You can ask the 'why' about the behavior. You can trace back years and years and maybe even find the cause. But that really doesn't fix anything.
You can fill your mirror and notebooks with sticky notes full of encouraging quotes and scripture verses. But that really gets you nowhere at the end of the day.
You can blame your circumstances for your behavior and claim that if only things were different, the behavior would change. But then you change jobs or move towns and you're still you.

So, my conclusion is this. The details of why your addiction is there is irrelevant. Helpful in seeing the big picture, maybe. But as far as fixing things--irrelevant. The reality is that a serious of circumstances have brought you were you are, and all you can do is take ownership for the fact that you now have an addiction. Now, the only person who can fix it is you. It's your choice to take it in your hands, with the grace you know God has bestowed upon you, and make day by day choices that turn your addiction from something that controls you into something that you control.

It's not about who or what caused it. It's not even about the substance itself. It's about you owning your life.  When this revelation hits the heart of an addict, it's powerful. Because striving after finding the right 'remedy' ceases. It's no longer the right step-by-step plan, the right key to unlocking your past or anything like that--it's your choices. Your present choices. Which way are you going to take them? Your next chance to decide will probably be in the next 5 minutes. May God help me and us to make the right one. I think He's the only one who can. It's weird when you realize that nothing in you is able to make the right choice...but suddenly, after desperate supplication to an invisible God and meditation on scripture your soul suddenly has the power to say no to the things that have so easily wooed it once before. The Holy Spirit transforms, heals and helps. But...doesn't move our mountains for us. He, like a gentlemen, still leaves everything in our hands, but offers a gentle whispering in our ears of guidance and hope. Beautiful, huh?

"You are the mother
the mother of your baby child
the one to whom you gave life
and you have your choices
and these are what make man great
his ladder to the stars"
--Timshel, Mumford & Sons