big problems, little problems...

What a week it has been, both on a large scale for the whole country and on a small country in my own life and the lives of people I know.

-28 people dead in Connecticut in a shooting at an elementary school.

-An old college friend's brother in the hospital with antibotic-resistant pneumonia and kidney failure.

-Friends struggling with unemployment, depression, financial problems, family issues, and so much more.

-Daily struggles in relationships and learning how to follow God better.

-Final exams and papers.

Two major things have come to mind after all these events that have taken place in the last week:

-First of all, how blessed I am and how small my problems are compared to what they could be. An event like the one that happened in CT this past week makes me feel almost ashamed for getting overwhelmed over final papers. It also makes me realize how ungrateful I am, how much I take things for granted—not least of all, how much I take God's Word and the hope that I have in Him for granted. Obviously I cannot imagine going through such an unspeakable tragedy like the families of those lost in CT this week. But I also cannot imagine living in a world where such tragedies happen without knowing that God is God. People question how God could let these things happen, where He was in a situation like this, and so on. And it's hard not to wonder why such a thing happened, least of all at an elementary school. It's heartbreaking. But at the end of the day, I know God is sovereign, and I know God is loving. No, it's not "fair" for these things to happen. No, it doesn't take away the pain. We live in a tragically broken world. But praise God, there is hope beyond this world and the brokenness that fills it. By the grace of God, one day this broken, tragic world will pass away, and instead we will be in a perfect, holy, new, unblemished one. No more sin, no more pain, no more tears, no more brokenness. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

-The second thing that has been on my mind in light of all these events of the past week is that even while I make too big a deal of things I shouldn't, and even while I don't realize how good I have things, and even while my priorities are such that I think my life is overwhelming over things that are ultimately *so* insignificant…God still cares. God is God. He cares not only about the big problems like a senseless killing spree, but also about the little problems, like a fifteen-page paper that's stressing me out. This is not at ALL to say that my problems are equally important in any way to those of the families in CT, but to say that God cares about them all. His eye is on the rise and fall of cities, yes, but also on the sparrow. If something matters to me, if something effects my daily life, God not only knows about it, but also cares about it, and cares about bringing me nearer and nearer to Him through it.

God, whether our problems be big or small, thank You for knowing them and knowing how they make war upon our souls, threatening to drown us with each passing moment. Sustain us, O God. Let us not go down to the pit, but place our feet on the solid ground of your love and provision, despite the ever-growing turmoil that threatens to turn us aside. Help us to trust You with our problems. Help us to draw nearer and nearer to You with each new attack that Satan, our own fallenness, and the brokenness of this world bring upon us. Save us, O LORD. Help us not to let any problem, big or small, turn us from You. Kyrie eleison.

MMXII, part two...

I'm weirdly excited for 2012. I don't remember ever being really excited for a new year until now, but for some reason I am. Maybe it's because the world's supposed to end this year. Maybe it's because even if that doesn't happen, a lot of other stuff will - like finishing my thesis, graduating with my master's degree, moving to [insert one of about six places here], starting a doctoral program (Lord willing), and who knows what else. But I think more likely, it's because lately I've really been learning to trust God and to see the work He's doing in my life in a way I never have before, and as a result, I see the 366 days of this new year as infinite possibilities for Him to love me, to protect me, to care for me, and to teach me.

I think it's also because I'm excited about my resolutions. I know resolutions are rarely ever kept, and that's part of the reason why I've made sort of unusual ones...ones that go a different direction than the ridiculous and unattainable goals of losing 250 pounds and getting a six-pack and reading every classic book ever written and learning two new languages and being a better person that people usually aspire to.

So that's why my first resolution is to focus more on thankfulness and joy, as I posted about last time. My second resolution is to do new things in 2012...I'm tempted to say 50 new things, and I think that's probably an attainable number, but I'm honestly not too concerned with the number of new things, so much as just the attitude of being open to new opportunities and growth, and of being aware of the way I use these opportunities and growth. That said, I'm going to do new things this year...I've got a few ideas written down of things I specifically intend to do, but mostly I'm just going to take things as they come...and photo-document as many of them as I can, and put them in a scrapbook so that in 366 days, I can look back on 2012 and all of the new experiences it's brought!

My third resolution is boring, and (sadly and rather oddly) probably the one I'm least likely to keep, but I'll share it anyway. It is, simply, to keep up with cleaning my apartment (especially the kitchen). I believe it is one of my most moronic traits that I do not make myself spend 5 minutes a day tidying things up, but instead always wait until things get kinda out of control...even though I know that if I spend 5 minutes a day cleaning, I will keep things clean, and if I keep things clean, I will be infinitely less stressed out (messy apartment=oppressive to my soul).

But anyway, it's almost 2 AM, and past my bedtime (maybe my fourth resolution should be to sleep at normal human hours...but let's face it, that's probably never going to happen, least of all while I'm in grad school!), so I am off to bed. Happy 2012!

MMXII...

So as the new year approaches, I've been thinking about resolutions. Where is my life now and where do I want it to go this year? That's a loaded question for someone who could end up in one of about eight different places next year. But that's a whole other blogpost...

Looking back over the last year, I'm truly amazed at how God has worked in my life - all the things He's taught me and all the ways He's changed me. It's really wonderful to see just how involved God is in my life. Sometimes I don't realize the ways He's growing me until they've already happened, and sometimes I see it as it's going on, but either way, it really is just incredible, and I just feel like I cannot say that enough. :')

Anyway, back to the resolutions...one thing that's really been on my mind lately is the need to have a thankful heart.

1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 says: "Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus."

So I guess that's what I'm feeling the need to pursue this year. And so I'm planning on doing what DAVO has dubbed "1000 things to be thankful for in 2012"... I'm going to take time every single day to write (in a yet-to-be-purchased fabulous new journal) what I'm thankful for. My goal is to do about 5 things a day, although 1000 would only take 2-3 a day, so there's some flexibility there. Over the past several years especially, I've loved writing down ways God has been faithful (through journaling or blogging or whatever else), because it's so absolutely wonderful to look back on those things later, especially in times of great struggle. That said, I'm really excited to spend an entire year recording all the ways in which God provides for me. Plus this ties into two HUGE themes that God has brought up again and again in my life for a long time now - manna and remembering.

Well, it's almost 3 AM and I'm tired and don't have much more to say, except that anyone reading this should join me in finding "1000 things to be thankful for in 2012"! I'm so absolutely looking forward to God teaching me through this and I'll definitely be posting some of the things I'm thankful for throughout the year! :)

Buechner + Christmas

So since it's pretty much been the year of Buechner for me, I figured I'd post some Buechner quotes on Christmas tonight...enjoy! :)

"The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it."

"Back then to the essential message of Christmas which is Emmanuel, God with us, and to the questions it raises: Who is this God and how is he with us? "The high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" is the answer to the first. The One who is with us is the One whom none can look upon because the space-and-time human mind can no more comprehend fully the spaceless, timeless Reality of the One than the eyes of the blind can comprehend light. The One who is with us is the One who has made himself known at most only partially and dimly through the pantomime of nature and history and the eloquent but always garbled utterance of prophets, saints, and mystics."

"It seems to me one of the miracles of the Christian faith is that the feast of Christmas survives what we have done to it -- all the hoopla, clap-trap, commercialism and all the rest of it that I don't even need to go into because everybody knows what it is. Yet, somehow it does survive. This extraordinary moment when the whole year slows down and you point to this unimaginable event where God somehow became made flesh. It is so cataclysmic; it is so extraordinary; we try to make it habitable; we try to make it cozy; we make creches and we sing Christmas carols. At best, it can be touching and real. At its worst it can be cheap and banal. What often occurs to me about Christmas is that if it is really true, if the word really became flesh, if the mystery behind all that really took the form of a human life, this vulnerable, tiny human life whose skull you could have crushed with one hand, then there must have been extraordinary anguish and intergalactic struggle to have this extraordinary thing come to pass. It wasn't an easy thing to happen. There is a kind of terror about Christmas, a kind of holiness and awesomeness about Christmas that we tend to forget. The resurrection and the life came down and tasted the bitterness of death."

"Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all its cracked up to be, then eve at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.”

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast."

Thoughts from a blissful Sabbath...

First off, let me just say, I love the Sabbath. I haven't kept it perfectly all my life, but I think it's one of the (sooooooo many) things God's been teaching me over the last few years, and I think it is absolutely one of the most beautiful gifts God has given us (if we would actually let Him).

In Mark 2:27, Jesus says "The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath."

In other words, God knows how much we need to Sabbath even more than we do. And so He gave us the command to REST. I know some people who don't shop or clean or run errands or anything on the Sabbath, and I don't usually treat it quite that way (sometimes those can be hugely worshipful activities for me...but that's a different story)... But regardless of what people do or don't do on the Sabbath, I think it's so incredibly important to use it as a day of rest from the things you need rest from, and it's glorious when you do.

I came across this quote probably five years ago, and it's always stuck with me:

"To put it another way, the rest God instituted was meant first and foremost to cause us to interpret our work, to press meaning into it, to make sure we know to whom it is properly dedicated."

I think this is such a good way to think about it. I know personally, when I get so busy with classes and teaching and grading (and applications, lately), I start to lose my sense of meaning. I trudge through daily life as if with blinders on, only able to see well enough to put one foot in front of the other, not aware of my surroundings, just struggling to survive. And this just isn't how God meant for us to live!

So every seven days, God sits me down, takes off the blinders, gently lifts my head up, opens my eyes, and invites me to glory in the bigger picture, to be refreshed by Him, to be reminded of the greater purpose in everything I've been doing all week. He invites me to BE, and not to DO. And it's amazing. I didn't really Sabbath intentionally for like the first twenty years of my life. Going into senior year at Wheaton, I was about to apply to grad schools, and knew from experience how crazy that could make a person, so I decided to be very intentional with my Sabbath. I'm sure I didn't do it perfectly, but it was a beautiful experience, and I know that God used it to help me to trust Him with my future and to not completely lose my mind.

This year (after a summer of working far too many Sunday brunches), I decided to do the same thing for basically the same reasons, and once again it's been beautiful, and I look forward so greatly to the Sabbath. I'll admit, in some ways, it's a little bit stressful, because at the back of my mind, there is a little voice telling me about all the stuff I should be doing. But the more I Sabbath, the quieter that voice is, because I know I'm not even going to give myself that option. And it's so freeing! The other six days, I always feel the pressure of this world and like I should be doing work constantly. Then the Sabbath comes and I know that I don't have to do, but only to be, and that's amazingly refreshing.

I've spent a lot of Sabbaths lately listening to sermons from my three favorite churches/pastors (Redeemer Presbyterian/Tim Keller, Red Rocks/Chad Bruegman and Shawn Johnson, and Mars Hill/Mark Driscoll), listening/worshiping/dancing to music (so much Gungor :) ), reading, talking to friends, leading the high school girls' Bible study, helping out with youth group, and just resting. God has used all these to just fill me up spiritually and revive my soul in exactly the way I need after it has been battered and worn out week after week. Without these days of refreshment and revitalization, honestly, I don't know how I'd be surviving this semester. And God absolutely uses them to re-fill me with joy even in the midst of all the stress and difficulty and bad circumstances that come into my life.

That's about all I have to say right now, except for...thank You Abba for the Sabbath! :')

Some belated Thanksgiving thoughts...

Okay, so I am extraordinarily blessed. Even when it doesn't feel like it (which has kinda been the last few days). God has been indescribably good to me, but I'll try to describe at least some of it in honor of Thanksgiving, and so I can look back and be reminded when life gets crazy and I forget.

I am so thankful for.......a God who KNOWS me and LOVES me. I'm realizing more and more how incredible that is. Humans love so imperfectly, and humans hurt each other so much. But God loves me perfectly, and God heals me. That's pretty incredible.

I am so thankful for.......all the saints God has brought into my life. "A saint," according to Frederick Buechner, "is a life giver. A saint is a human being with the same hang-ups and dark secrets and abysses as the rest of us. But if a saint touches your life, you come alive in a new way." I am amazingly blessed to have saints in my life, and I would not be who I am today without them. To have a safe place to be vulnerable about my "hang-ups and dark secrets and abysses," to have people who trust me with theirs, to have people who love me for who I am regardless of what I can do/be for them, leaves me at a loss for words. God has been doing an amazing work of healing in my life, especially over the past few months, through these saints, and I am in awe of that.

I am so thankful for.......my past. At times it's been an insanely difficult path, and there have been moments of staring into the pit and realizing that God was absolutely waging war for my soul - and He won! :') - but still, God is good. There have been so many trials and battles and hurts, and there still are...and I have done a lot of stupid things, and I still do...but God has absolutely made beautiful things out of brokenness in my past, and by His grace, I'm struggling and growing and learning to trust that He's gonna do it with the things that are currently broken, too.

"Only if we trust God to turn past calamities into future comfort can we look back with gratitude for all things." -John Piper

God, thank You for who You are, and how You love me. Help me to trust You with my brokenness and my scars. Make them beautiful, God, and make them a thing of worship. Amen. :')

On finding God's will...

I think I have a weird decision-making process. For all the big decisions in my life, I tend to wrestle with all the different possibilities, making pros-and-cons lists and spreadsheets, trying to weigh all the options, and just generally over-analyzing and over-thinking everything. Then after all this effort and thought and inner turmoil, I think I generally make the decision on what feels like a whim.

I did this with college. Up until about a day before the deadline, I was torn between Wheaton and Westminster. I spent hours and hours trying to figure it out, or talking to others and trying to get their opinions... Then one day (and just in time), I just picked Wheaton. Not sure why. I just picked it.

Once I make a decision like this, I don't look back. I'm not interested in living a life of regrets or what-ifs. Plus I believe that God won't allow me to make the wrong decision if I am really seeking His will. So once I picked Wheaton, there was no looking back, no questioning whether it was the right decision, no regrets. And I do firmly believe God led me to pick Wheaton, and have believed that through all of the very good and all of the very bad times I had there.

So once I make a decision, I'm fine, and I trust that God is leading me, yet making that decision is still often a ridiculously hard process. Over the last month or so, I've spent a TON of time in prayer and reading the Bible and listening to sermons and talking to people about God's will, since I was in the process of choosing doctoral programs to apply to (the process for that, by the way, was very similar to the usual steps I mentioned above - spending countless hours and days and weeks in turmoil, then deciding it all really suddenly and for no apparent reason).

Psalm 16 has been so important to me lately:

Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.”

As for the saints in the land, they are the excellent ones,
in whom is all my delight.

The sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply;
their drink offerings of blood I will not pour out
or take their names on my lips.

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
I have set the Lord always before me;
because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.

Therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices;
my flesh also dwells secure.
For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol,
or let your holy one see corruption.

You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

I especially love the second half of verse 5, which simply says "you hold my lot." I think the more obvious part of it is that God knows our future, and (if we seek Him) He is leading us and won't let us go astray. God has a plan for us. And that's amazing! But I think maybe there's more to it. He holds our lots, which yes, I think means He's protecting our futures from all of the things that could come along to try to destroy them. But I think He also holds our lots in the sense that He holds onto them until we're ready for them.

One Tim Keller sermon I listened to in particular talked about this sort of thing: he talked about how when we're driving somewhere and get lost, and we stop and ask for directions, the person can either draw us out a map or a list of directions, OR he can get in the car with us and direct us step-by-step (which admittedly would be kinda creepy). When we're lost in life, though, and we ask God for His will, we want the map more than we want the relationship with Him that is what we really need.

But I think God holds onto things about our futures that we're just not ready for yet, and I think that's beautiful (albeit frustrating sometimes)! He knows us better than we even know ourselves, and He knows exactly how much we can handle every day, and He gives us exactly that much. And even though we claim we want the whole map, He knows we can't handle that, and He gets in the car and leads us step by step, which is WAYYYYYYY better, because that means we aren't going to mess up the directions!

That said...God is good (so very, very good). He holds my lot, so "therefore my heart is glad, and my whole being rejoices..." :')