A Testimony (As Pulled From My BCM Application)

            We Christians are often intimidated at the thought of presenting our personal testimonies because describing our walks with Christ usually takes more than 200 words, 2.5 minutes, or whatever other limitations we often put on a slightly more formal testimony. Even a lack of limitation, which I currently have given the nature of this application, leaves the difficulty in discerning what is relevant to include. Am I going to tell you what I think you need to know in order to make you feel like I am the one to fill a particular position? Given what Scripture tells us, God has done and is doing and will do what God wills. With that, I will dig up my past with God that I see most pertinent to who I am right now as a friend, daughter, sister, granddaughter, aunt, acquaintance, and servant of Christ.

            I remember crawling under the pews of my church when I was a child as my dad stood behind the pulpit delivering God’s message to a much more patient and attentive congregation. I remember my cousin Morgan coming to visit when I was around 8-years-old on a Sunday when we took communion, and I recall her confused face when the plates simply passed me by without me partaking. She could hardly believe I was not a Christian, but I shrugged it off. I remember when I did learn to sit still and would stare at the engraving upon the altar: “Do This In Remembrance of Me.” I remember not knowing how to read the first time I noticed it, but over time I gradually gained knowledge of each word’s pronunciation along with its meaning. I came to the point of understanding each word’s meaning but still being confounded by the entire command itself, so I shrugged that one off, too.

            I shrugged a little less when I got to a Christian camp during the summer I turned 11. The news got out that I was not a born-again Christian like apparently every single other girl in my cabin. Thus, my counselors’ mission to save my soul commenced. I was pulled aside during pool time to “chat,” only to be given a tract with a very simplistic illustration of a changed life in Christ’s salvation. It’s not like I didn’t know what it meant to be a Christian. I got the gist of it, seeing as I did go to church and my father was a pastor. However, this was the first time that anyone really invited me into the body of believers. I wasn’t opposed to the idea, but I still didn’t quite get the importance. We all left that tract session with my counselors under the impression that I had just been saved. I knew, though, that nothing had changed but my growing curiosity.

            Upon arriving home from that experience, my parents actually talked to me more about what it means that Christ died and rose again for us, and they told me that I can come to experience Christ’s love at any time if I can recognize my sin and my need to have Christ as my Savior from my sin. After doing some serious 10-year-old thinking on this, there came a day when, while I was sitting on the toilet, I decided it was the time to pray to God and confess my sins. I do remember *feeling* the change at that point. I remember bouncing out the bathroom to tell my mother that, “It happened!” I had just flushed my sin down the toilet, and I’d never felt so free.

            Shortly thereafter, I was baptized in my church by my father, but eventually the newbie Christian euphoria faded. I spent my subsequent years straight through my graduation from high school not pursuing a relationship with Christ, let alone gaining more knowledge of who Christ really is. To do “this” in remembrance of me was to nibble on a piece of bread and suck down a shot of grape juice. I am so taken aback now whenever I see middle schoolers and high schoolers truly living in faith. I didn’t get it back then. Praise the Lord for those kids who do.

            So let’s fast-forward to now. I still don’t feel like I get it, but I learned that’s part of the importance of faith. God reveals himself in different ways to different people, and I’m slowly learning to see God in every moment and through other believers’ eyes. Finally, I understand that doing “this" is to do all things in remembrance of Christ, and I experience just how bad I am at trying to do this on my own. God doesn’t guarantee that we will ever fully “get it.” In fact, he assures us that His thoughts and His ways are not our thoughts or our ways. Consequently, God is our endless pursuit.

Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder

What does it mean to be in the presence to God?
What does it mean to *feel* the presence of God?

I spent the majority of my thinking and praying time this past weekend at Eagle Eyrie caught up in these two questions. Asking them to God feels a little strange--to think, "God, where are you?" when that question can really only *feel* like it's being projected into thin air. Recently a girl I attend Bible study with shared that she feels like her prayers are bouncing off the walls. She was yearning and praying for God to do something big and apparent and meaningful and purposeful and without-a-doubt Godful. That desperation has manifested itself in similar ways for me at somewhat frequent times this junior year of college, so I was totally feeling her when she was telling us all about this so freely. The funny part was when she was asked to close the study in prayer and she could really only give a bit of a smirk before she started praying, revealing that she *knows* she's still gotta pray even when her prayers are boomeranging in her head.

That's the cool thing about spiritual lows and feeling out of tune with God. You can't ever really say something weird is up with God, like he suddenly decided he doesn't like you today or that he really is just playing games with you for funzies. Even when you're frustrated with God that he doesn't feel accessible anymore, you still know his truths and his qualities that are forever fixed. Whenever God is up to something, it would be a lie to say he's not doing it for your good. A blatant lie. It's the truth of salvation that holds onto you, not vice versa, so as Jon Foreman sings, "It would be a lie to run away."

I believe love encompasses a lot more than we can ever understand. I do praise God for that, even when I'm not feelin' him.

For a little scriptural version of what's been boomeranging up in my own head and in my prayers, here's Psalm 13:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and every day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, O Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death;
my enemy will say, "I have overcome him,"
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
for he has been good to me.

I Don't Want a Title

We played with Wordle in my digital storytelling class tonight, and I made a wordle of this here blog of mine. The resulting jumble of words consisted of a huge "God" with all of the other words basically nestled in it or lying on the outskirts of it. My thought: "If only."

I usually feel defeated before I even start writing something, because I always want to write about nothing. Rather, I want to reveal the nothing in my own writing. The seeming problem is that I don’t have anything significant to say, because God took all the significance we can ever come to know and had it written down for us to read. I can copy verses or even make certain applications of verses, but I’m still not really saying anything myself. Most of the time, I don’t even understand the significance of what’s significant. I am a seeker, and it seems a rare occurrence I can truly call myself a finder. I’m re-reading Blue Like Jazz and Don Miller hits on a lot of those, “oh wow, if only I had been exposed to this before,” sentiments, and I am partially grateful for having to reconsider the things I considered once before as a freshman at college… a totally different me.

My chest gets tight a lot lately, and my first thought is always, “God, is that you? What do you want?” I’ve never really experienced this frequency of chest-tightening before. Perhaps it’s an anxiety disorder, but I think it’s my life and the emphasis I am putting on the “my.” I was asked by my interviewer yesterday what I would want to get out of a summer at camp. I considered the question for a while, because my immediate thought was, “Do I really even want to have an answer to this question?” I realized the only truthful answer is that I want to understand God better in the sense of also realizing how much I can never possibly understand in this life. That’s the only way I can think to build faith. The I and the me are so selfish that I simultaneously need them shoved down as I’m discovering more and more the skyscraping qualities of God. Otherwise, I include myself in the mix. My discoveries about God are simply that: my discoveries. Thus the perpetual stuck and the always wanting and the never having.

I just feel stupid writing any of this down, even though I don’t know how to keep it inside. In my constant longing to dig and dig and dig and dig until I finally reach the tip of the root – a root I have never *seen* but *know* is there – I can’t help but feel like I keep tripping myself up with my own tactics of getting there. If the Bible is my shovel and prayer my radar, perhaps I should focus more on using these tools more proficiently.

Analogies are weird.

With that, I’m off to skip class and eat dinner with Katie Titus. Those are my thoughts, and I’m heading out now knowing how limited they are. Nonetheless, I am encouraged by knowing (because God said) that God’s thoughts and God’s ways are far greater, and I hope that you are, too. If nothing else, God is still God. Be encouraged.

Now

This has been the strangest week of feeling like there's so much to do while still feeling so little demand on my life. I'm still getting midterm grades back, so none of my classes are pressing assignment and test deadlines on me. It's almost like I got an extended spring break in coming back... but it doesn't appear my friends got the same gift, so that takes away some of the excitement.

However, it's been adding to my excitement about God. I had a phone interview for a counselor position at Camp Crestridge yesterday after all of my classes, and it lasted an entire hour and seven minutes. Honestly, it only felt like half an hour. As my interviewer so clearly stated (and restated), the interview was really just a conversation -- a meaningful one in my book. The camp is just another Christian summer camp in a lot of ways, but in the ways that it does stress its differences and in the ways it does take a fresher, more genuine approach to reaching out to kids, I see that those ways are my ways. And in that way, I really do want this "job."

So here's to God not filling my deep desires but rather my most earnest needs, and right now, I need to desire for God and I'm so grateful to really truly have that for at least this hour.

A Tribute

My project on my great-grandmother is underway. Technically, I should be writing about her on the *actual* project blog right now, but what I want to share is a little more up the alley of "To the Life!" I was perusing through some great resources my great-grandma gave me over break and found within a scrapbook dedicated to her a little something one of her daughters (my grandmother) wrote about her:

A Virtuous Woman

Her husband could not have asked for a better wife. Her value is beyond description.
Her husband can trust her with the care of his household and his good name. She will guard his assets.
She looks out for her husband's health and best interest.
She provides for her family. When necessary she worked outside the home.
She made sure her children were fed, though at times, she may have wondered where it was coming from.
She was tireless in meeting the needs of her family.
She has good business sense and knows what and when to purchase commodities.
She has a great strength and is not afraid to work.
She is vigilant, always keeping watch over her family.
She is always prepared.
She provides food for the sick, comfort for the bereaved, words of encouragement to the downhearted. She cares for the lonely, and elderly. Her deeds of kindness cannot be counted.
She is not caught off-guard when trouble comes. She knows where her help comes from. Her help comes from God.
She is a compliment to her husband. He is not ashamed of her, and she honors his positions of leadership.
She is a woman of strength and dignity. She faces the future with confidence.
She is a wise woman. She knows when to give advice. she is not meddlesome. She has taught her children well, by example and words.
She tends to the affairs of her household. She can always find something to keep her busy.
Martin, Charlotte, Phyllis, Carolyn, Wayne, and Carl cannot praise her enough for what she means to them. They have indeed been blessed.
Charlie knows that among the daughters of men, he got the very best.
Mother is both charming and beautiful, inside and out, and she knows that true beauty comes by knowing God, fearing and loving Him and knows that her greatest praise comes in His smile and His "well done."
We, her family, are the fruit of her hands, and may we praise her by our commitment to love her God and follow her example.

A tribute to my mother (Mildred Shelton)
By: Phyllis Shelton Hunt
(A Paraphrase of Proverb 31: 10-31)

Cookies

I've spent a lot of time not reading the Bible. On top of that, it shows. Primarily, it shows when I approach God, and I realize He already has answers for me that I haven't bothered to seek in His Word. When I really think about the fact that God has given us something that is now in the form of a book--something that some may simply call an historical text, some a mythological text, and then some of us who depend on this book for the sustaining of our lives--it straight up blows my mind. We haven't quite reached the desperate situation of Fahrenheit 451 or The Book of Eli where we want nothing but to fill our minds with every single word in order to preserve the book for future generations, but it is a bit of a wake-up call to read that book or watch that movie and realize how little time we've spent not only reading and memorizing the Bible but studying the Bible and living the Bible. The times I start to feel that God is least accessible are those times I've been so far from the Scriptures that they almost seem foreign to me when I finally revisit them. It's a little sickening how frequently this happens, but I know it happens because I've not been able to get into the mindset of one who truly does "depend on this book for the sustaining of [her life]."

There are a lot of "how to"s out there for reading the Bible, commonly written by pastors and scholars. Here's one, for example. My grandmother has mentioned in her Sunday school class that she finds it particularly effective in her own devotions to read from both the Old Testament and the New Testament in one sitting. My pastor responded to an email I sent him recently with this bit of wisdom about reading the Bible:

"You can read it like a phone book, you can read it simply to make a good grade on an exam (which I did often), or you can read it to feed your hungry soul. This latter way is the only way to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ."

This left me wondering how to characterize a hungry soul. The "how to"s and the tidbits I can pick up from my grandmother or my pastor are truly helpful, but what can I get out of these practices when I've been eating too many cookies before dinner and am, therefore, not hungry for the substantial Word of God? How do I make my soul hunger and thirst for the Lord? Well, don't eat the cookies. Sounds simple analogously. By translation, I'm pretty sure those cookies are even harder to resist than literal cookies. Not eating the cookies means not leaning on my own understanding, not leaning on my friends' understandings, not leaning on my family's understanding, not hoping in what I prefer, not letting my faith go blind, and pretty much not putting stock in anything but what I know has lasting purpose and consequence. The thing is, I know that the Bible has lasting purpose and consequence. I've experienced it myself! I know those verses that are particularly relevant to me since they often pop up in my head when applicable. Why am I not constantly searching for more of those?

Cuz cookies are nummy.

It's funny the parallels we can draw between our physical and spiritual lives. Must be some reason why Jesus pointed them out so much...