7-22-08

Lists:
(In no particular order)

Things that I definitely will not get tired of:
1. Talking about the Lord and how Good He is.
2. The cranberry-apple-walnut-chicken salad at work.
3. The raspberry lemonade at work.
4. Sneaking samples of the gelato at work.
5. Watching people's reactions after they try the gelato.
6. Playing cards with my family and friends.
7. Slaloming in the evening after the lakes have cleared out and the water is calm.
8. A different and more beautiful sunset every night.
9. Receiving answers to prayers over and over again.
10. The black passion-fruit ice tea at work.
11. How happy my puppies are after they swim in the lake.
12. Jet-ski.
13. Rope-swing.
14. Fellowship.
15. 360's on the knee-board, it's funnnnnn.
16. The feeling of release when I give up things to Him.
17. The smell of pine all the time.
18. The sky, all the time.
19. Stars.
20. The turkey and apple sandwich on cranberry walnut bread at work, its amazing.
21. Gods blatant answering of prayers.
22. Sitting down after a long day of work, so nice to sit nowadays.

Wildlife I've seen:
1. Dear, everywhere.
2. Horse flies, everywhere.
3. Foxes (foxen?).
4. A bear.
5. Bats.
6. Fish.
7. Grey Squirrels.

Wildlife I have accidentally killed with my car:
1. Numerous bugs.
2. A medium sized bird.
3. A chipmunk.

Wildlife I have almost accidentally killed with my car:
1. A black bear.
2. A fox.
3. Numerous toads.

Good Stuff

From Praise Habit by David Crowder

“Everything in It’s Right Place”

I used to think I knew where to find God. He seemed to always be where I put Him last.
He was in Sunday school every Sunday morning. He was in “big church” right after. He was there most Sunday nights, too. He was around our dinner table when my father read from the blue Bible-story books. He was there when I prayed before meals. He was there most times I prayed elsewhere, too. He was there during my quiet times. He was at church on Wednesday nights. He was really there at summer camp. He loved church camp. I think He just liked summers better in general. Once school started back, the moments with Him were father spaced, it seems. I enjoyed finding Him. It felt like things were right. Even if they weren’t, it felt okay. I wanted more moments with Him. I heard there was a Bible study on Monday nights, so I went, and sure enough – He was there. I had an accountability group and we met on Tuesdays, and sure enough – He was there, too. I heard about another Bible study that met on Thursdays, so I went, and wouldn’t you know it, there He was. He began showing up in the songs we sang around 1983. It was called contemporary worship. It was great. He was always in these songs, so I would sing them whenever I wanted to fin Him, and sure enough – there He’s be. By the time I got to college I thought I has it all sorted out with everything in its place. Then tragedy came.
Tragedy always comes. If it hasn’t come for you, it will. Not the losing-your-homework kind or the having-to-flush-your-goldfish kind, but the kind that leaves you stripped. The kind that tears from you all the ideas about living you once believed untearable. Mine came my junior year of college, and it came in a phone call. It was my mom. She said, “David, something very terrible has happened.” The words that followed were bombs. As they came hurtling toward me through miles of telephone wire, my muscles turned liquid, and when she finished, I was left wilted on the floor, and God was not there. At least I could no longer find Him. And I had no idea where to begin looking again. The places I used to frequent, I no longer trusted. In seven minutes everything I had thought about everything was dramatically different.
College is hard enough without something detonating in the middle of it. It is a pivotal moment. Your values encounter other values in the classroom and textbooks. Your faith is on trial inside libraries and laboratories. In my philosophy classes we read Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle was not a Christian, but he sure sounded like one. This bugged me. Or was it that my Christianity sounded a lot like Aristotle? This possibility was even more troubling. And in literature, thanks to Derrida deconstruction theory was preventing us from deriving any intended meaning from a text, because apparently language itself was now unstable and arbitrary. In my theology classes we studied how the Scriptures had been assembled, and I was concerned that I had not been informed of this arbitral processes earlier in my formation of faith. Had it been hidden from me? Why had I always been given such neat answers for messy questions? Or was this the proper time for the hearing of such things? Perhaps by your junior year of college, after you have been a Christian for fourteen years, you are properly equipped to sort out things like this?
There was a lot of sorting out to be done concerning most things and where they were to be placed in this faith I carried or that was carrying me, and it was proving a daunting task. And then in the middle of this sorting, an explosion. I was covered in shrapnel, clotlessly bleeding. And when I had bled out, when there was nothing left, I found Him. And He was not where I thought He was. Not where I had put Him last.
He was in a Chick-fil-A sandwich.

I have loved Chick-fil-A my whole life. But when your world implodes, nothing tastes good. I was poking at the thing and a thought hit me that there is one part of the sandwich I don’t enjoy. There is about a quarter of the breast that consistently dissolves into a lesser grade of meat and soggy breading. I pulled the top bun off and tore the portion away that didn’t look appealing. There was a natural break in the meat. It was easily separated. I put the top back on and ate. It was the best chicken sandwich I had ever eaten. I wadded up the foil sandwich bag and smiled for the first time in a really long while.
It may not sound like a real breakthrough, but for me it was truly cathartic. In a small, decisive moment I was aware of what was good and took effort to peel away what wasn’t and in the process became re-enamored with the Giver of good. I remembered out beginnings, when that statement “It was good” [Genesis 1] was first uttered. I thought about how the bad was never intended. Things started to come to life. Blood that had slowed to a crawl began to find its way through my veins again.
The consequences of this discovery were huge. If He was in a sandwich, where else could He be found? Every moment was becoming holy. Nothing was nonspiritual. This was habitual praise – a perpetually sacred acknowledgement of the Giver of every good thing. A relentless embracing of good and a discarding of bad with an awareness of the one who in the beginning spoke those life-affirming words.
When good is found and we embrace it with abandon, we embrace the Giver of it. This book explores that journey. This book is written in hopes that you begin to find God everywhere. Yes, in church on Sunday at 9:00 am, but also in the seemingly mundane. In traffic on Tuesday at 5:15 pm. In a parent-teacher meeting. In the colors of a sunset. On the other side of a tragic phone call. Every second is an opportunity for praise. There is a choosing to be made. A choosing at each moment. This is the Praise Habit. Finding God moment by revolutionary moment, in the sacred and the mundane, in the valley and on the hill, in triumph and tragedy, and living praise erupting because of it. This is what we were made for.

Moment.

I have been working a lot, hopefully burning calories in the process because I have not had time to go running daily like I was doing before the work started, but today was a morning off, so I went. I took my white dog, Jack, with me because the horse-flies don't seem to bother him as much as they bother the black one, Bear; they bother me with my dark hair, but I can deal with them and the dogs can't really.

It was about to start sprinkling and I had my iPod on shuffle, which I never have it on and a Beastie Boys song started playing. My morning running always teach me something because I think. It was that moment in between when the whole world feels like it has stopped rotating waiting for the first drop to break the cloud barrier and start plummeting to the earth, the blacktop I'm running on, Jack's white curls, or the pine trees above us. Nothing against the Beastie Boys, but Intergalactic Planetary just didn't fit the hesitant moment that I was running through.

Running past a struggling worm on the road brought back an old old memory of my brother. We live on a hill back at home in Cleveland, and when it rains we are always in the perfect location to witness a stream of water coming down our culsdesac. The worms come out onto the road in hoards, and my brother and I thought it was our self-appointed duty to save them all, so off we would go shoeless and soaking wet, up and down the road to put all the obviously disoriented worms back in the grass to safety and shelter. We did this all the time and it was wonderful. It was hard to phase us with 'gross things' back in the day.

There was no wind at all besides what I heard in my ears from my own movement, and it was just a still moment. This may sound a bit Buddhist, but I wish there was a way for me to harness that feeling of a moment for when a table gets upset when their Diet Coke taste weird, or when I forget to ask for whipped-cream on someone's mocha. Normally those things are not worth getting flustered with, but it happens. I have been getting sidetracked about my prayer life recently. Things were going better in that area of my spirituality, but lately there are some lame excuses for why I haven't been completely covering my whole day with prayer. I think that the stillness of the air helped me realize that I can have those moments that that God has a hand in all of this: the air, the worms, the diet pop, the running, the reason for it all, the coffee, the seafood, all of it. It's wonderful.

According to dictionary.com:

won·der·ful [wuhn-der-fuhl]
–adjective
1. excellent; great; marvelous: We all had a wonderful weekend.
2. of a sort that causes or arouses wonder; amazing; astonishing: The storm was wonderful to behold.

God's love is wonderful. 'Excellent' and 'great' are not enough to describe it. 'Wonderful' falls short. 'Awesome' does too. None of this that I write or say can come close to describing His love for us but it's what he wants, even if we can't find the words, and just feel the stillness of His presence, it's what He desires. Like the band Edison Glass says "When I'm with you I find myself, I seem to lose him somewhere else. What is it about you that makes me see? You never expected perfection,
All you want is my affection." It's good. It's God.

Today has grown wings and we're welcoming change
With expectation, open eyes, and outstretched arms.
We're asking sweet spirit place your mark on us.
Sweet spirit, let our mortality be swallowed by life.

We're shedding this thick,
Numb and overly insensitive skin
And trading it for something we can live with
To live and breathe without restriction.

Now this is your release.
We've burned out the eyes of restraint.
Don't hold back.
This is the release.
We're changed from within.
Jesus You've proved where the real freedom's from.

Today Has Wings
Edison Glass


With love from the north woods,
M

Summa'Summa'

This has been the summer of conquering fears and new experiences:
1. I conquered my fear of falling off of tall things by going on very tall roller-coasters (Millennium Force anyone?).
2. I conquered my fear of bathroom sinks (well, more like my detesting of them) by getting a cleaning job at a resort cleaning.... (drum roll)........ bathrooms!!
3. I have never really had multiple jobs, and I just got back from my first day of my third job at a coffee place called Brew Moon, and all three are going well!

Come visit!

So..


God has been doing some crazy awesome things here this summer, in my life. It has been such an eye-opening summer these few weeks I've been up here, and I can't wait to see what else God has in store for my time spent up here.

To start-off, I was kind of in the end of the year, burnt-out lull that usually comes at the end of a school year; I was basically ready to be done with it all and come up north. At the beginning of the quarter, things were going really well spiritually, but I remember telling my discipler that I was comfortable in my box and wasn't ready for something to shake it up, but that I knew that that isn't the way to go about my spirituality. Jesus wasn't a settler, he didn't stay content in a box, so neither should I.

So, in the midst of this lull, I got a nudge. The theme of 'today' and capturing the moment to use for Him started running through my thoughts and appearing in lessons, and I basically pushed it to the back of my mind thinking that I will pay attention to it during the summer (which is a bad attitude). So finals week comes, and God was more then nudging me, he was basically saying in His own way, "Makella, there is going to be something radical or crazy that you're going to need to be spiritually prepared for, so get ready and get excited..." so, I did get excited, I am excited... and I can see it happening already.

I have been praying and speaking with people about how there is not much of a spiritual influence here in Eagle River, there are a few Christians who I have fellowship with, but for the most part, life for the inhabitants is a bit lacking... My friend and I were talking about how something needs to happen, and that especially our one friend, whom we love very very much, hears something about The Good Life. A few days ago after praying over this, pretty much the exact conversation I had been praying for happened with the person we were hoping it would happen with. I could feel the air in the room change and I was literally shaking, nervous that I might not say the right things, but trusting that God will provide me with the words to say. With tears in both our eyes at one point, we talked and asked questions and it was... awesome. God provides a way, He provides the words, He provides it all, all the good. Now, I'm not sharing this to sound 'mightier-then-thou' I just want to share a story of how good He is.

I praise Him, for He is my provider.