two-way disclosure

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thoughts on the phrase "meeting people where they are" triggered by my way of relating to/engaging with/connecting with older and younger people (whether in age or in multidimensional/dynamic stage of faith):

why is it supremely unsatisfying for me to be excluded from the struggles of people i admire? why does it feel unbalanced and unequal, and why does it feel like a snub on my greatest heart desire to pour support into others? how do we navigate the dynamics of healthy amounts of two-way disclosure? considering that my capacities and limitations are uniquely my own and not to be unfairly projected upon anyone else because no one is a self-appointed measuring stick of comparison; that for some reason i crave the deep and cringe to brave the shallows; that i have great capacity and endurance to maintain a posture of intensive introspection because that is where i flourish; that i crave to love and be loved -

how can i calculate our relative social roles (teacher, student, friend, etc) and its ensuing expectations, whether implicitly internalized or explicitly taboo? how do i conduct myself with others so that i may be life giving? how can i be unabashedly and fearlessly me? how can i embrace the capacities and limitations of others, and enable them to simultaneously embolden them to rest in their capacities and challenge their limitations? how can i empower those younger with the opportunity to love on me? how can i urge those older to give me the privilege to love them? how do i have healthy balance of how much i allow my thoughts to dwell on someone's possible reaction to my holistic personhood? my intentions are wholly my responsibility; does my sensitivity to others and their present state expand my scope of responsibility - at least, in how much i am aware of how i may be unintentionally manipulating someone, or soliciting unwelcome responses?

pondering inner posture dynamics of giving of myself (sharing my passions, my experiences, my perspectives) vs. restraining so that i may be able to absorb that which someone else is giving of themselves. pondering that in the latter dynamic, i am also arguably in a posture of giving, especially if i consider the material result of feeling noticeably drained and yet semi-consciously fulfilled and empowered. i "give" when i actively receive and absorb. although slightly an exaggeration, but do i then conversely risk "taking" from others when i give of myself?

engaging with other individuals is a fluid and dynamic and mysterious process, and just lol

sidenotes;
i am shamelessly verbose and speak in fragments and run-ons
i have so many thoughts pestering my brain; what a relief it is to heart vomit it out so i can detach myself and see the bigger picture :9

on another note, i can't believe god has called me to be an activist in this season. this, i gladly and eagerly step into and pour all that i am into it. thank you, god. i love you!

new vocab

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words i would like to tell my younger self regarding relationships lol:

-be deliberate, be intentional [full of intent, full of dedication to the vision], choose to [verb], accept responsibility,
-be attentive to fruit, observe growth, point out growth, nourish growth,
-enable, spur, build,
-honor, trust, communicate,
-enjoy, delight, adore, cherish, treasure
-let life, pursue healthiness, be a student of tenderness, love well, receive well, flourish, enrich others, bless, be blessed

sidenotes;

learning as i go. the "end of history" illusion is so trippy because reading my older posts is kind of super embarrassing ughhh

i'm so annoying, omq
jan 2013: relationships

march 2010: sweeter song
this is my 300th post, lol

alienating

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how disorienting is our human condition, when the petulant demands of our brokenness crowds out and saturates our senses. when our unique experiences of pain and suffering and grief alienates us from all other company which, once a welcome presence, becomes a reminder that no one is capable of perfectly entering into and sharing of our pain. equally disorienting and disabling is to witness the surfacing of others' brokenness, and feeling every fiber straining and vein aching and muscle tensing with unfulfilled desire to alleviate their heaviness. because we can walk alongside each other, but ultimately everyone has personalized monsters in a personalized forest to identify, brave, and conquer. desperate praises to He who is King and Victor, who determines suffering to be a worthy and necessary process in His relentless construction and restoration of holiness in us. praise to Him who declares that out of suffering is the fruit of resilience, tenderness, and joy.

sidenotes;
meep, exercising discretion in who i share my joy and conversely, my sorrow with, considering the present state of the person. pondering the dynamic of sharing joy and accidentally eliciting jealousy which, from my understanding, is a gut response indicative of deeper contentment issues of which i hold no responsibility.

reminders to self

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1) remember his faithfulness
2) breathe
3) determine to jealously guard your time of rest
4) inhale his grace
5) let people love on you
6) twenty four hours are unfortunately shorter than your perception lets on
7) take precautions when your spirit is running on low and people become more so unwelcome energy leeches than they are people to love on

8) be attentive to resurfacing cries of need because it is october and it is that time of year

sidenotes;

meep
i am rather enjoying the multidimensional, overlapping, intersecting, interwoven, and very dynamic nature of this season of life although i am sick & in need of sleep. i'm seeing how god has carefully (and unexpectedly) expanded my energy reserves so that i may be able to maintain shallow conversations for longer and maintain prolonged doses of people interaction. i'm seeing that god has audaciously emboldened me to take initiative in building my network; i'm seeing that this whole thing is a two way process, and that precisely because god provides and enables and sustains, i must likewise respond by receiving and acting.

not an option

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i'm not sure what to think, feel, or do about this new development. is there ever any clear direction when those you most desire approval from cannot give it? when people who have played a formative role in my life are unwilling or unable to enter into the joy of that which is close to your heart? not only unwilling, but straight up resistant? what if they are ignorant to the ways that they cannot meet you where you are? what if they are aware that they cannot meet you where you are? what if running away is not an option and i am left with the mess that is life in my shaking palms and unsure fingers

god would you go before me, like i know you do
god would you help me welcome the bitter with the sweet

p.s. the concept of generational sin kind of terrifies the pewp out of me

sidenotes;
since when did new developments ever come with new obstacles
never, that's when

strange and vulnerable

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it is a strange and vulnerable, uncertain and wonder-full thing to receive, as if it were a virtue to refuse and maintain a posture of giving -- a posture which stinks of self-appointed sufficiency and underlying floods of need and brokenness, masked in the facade of humility. so vulnerable. because when we receive we open ourselves to great suffering; we become a candidate for heartbreak. but when have we ever not been candidates for heartbreak? let us be eager volunteers, striding forth into vulnerability and humility as we partake in Christ's vision and allow Him as a man of sorrows to tenderly speak into our sufferings. will we allow Him to be near us in our suffering, & allow that aspect of His character as comforter standing in solidarity to be made real to us? how else than through suffering, vulnerability, heartache. we are such timid creatures terrified of pain and suffering, and i am grateful for a God who sings victory and fearlessness over us, whose perfect love, which subjected Him to the greatest posture of vulnerability in history, casts out fear

on another note, i am presently aware of a inner resilience not of my own, preventing panic and dismay from caving in upon my heart as i foray into the roles of influence that He has so graciously placed into my lap. i am also presently aware of a quiet voice that says "peace. step forth because i have ordained all of this. i have placed certain people in your life to speak and act my love to you -- others, i have not. i have placed certain positions of leadership into your hands not because of your abilities but because i will be doing the work and i choose you to see it all. let them love, let me lead. follow me."

sidenotes;
i have a cluster headache ):
God is moving!

gomer

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how desperately we need His grace. He loves us when we think we are god. He loves us when we spit in his face and don't even know it because we're busy polishing our own images for a perverted sense of gratification. He loves us when we unceremoniously chuck him onto the rusty back burner - what injustice, what shortsightedness, what vileness, what wretchedness! this is a God who told hosea to love gomer. he told hosea to choose gomer everyday and to consciously and wholeheartedly make gomer the object of his desire. this is the God who loves us and we are so, so in need of His grace

sidenotes;

like sweet rain on my heart
also welcome week i'm so tired are you done yet

ten ways to love:
"speak without accusing james 1:19
pray without ceasing colossians 1:9
promise without forgetting proverbs 13:12
give without sparing proverbs 21:26
answer without arguing proverbs 17:1
trust without wavering corinthians 13:7
share without pretending eph 4:15
enjoy without complaint philippians 2:14
forgive without punishing colossians 3:13
listen without interrupting proverbs 18"

pursuing justice

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"We sometimes see the gospel and justice as separate, like two sides of a teeter-totter. We think talking about the requirements of justice or the material aspects of life, raising that side of the teeter-totter, will diminish the gospel and our focus on the spiritual aspects of life. The assumption is that if one is highlighted, the other is diminished. This kind of either/or thinking, or dualism, is actually a heresy historically referred to as Gnosticism.

This is not how the Hebrews understood God, however. To them, the spiritual and material sides of life were united and integrated. When we think about the gospel this way, our picture changes. Rather than being in competition, as with the teeter-totter analogy, the spiritual and material aspects of life can be pictured as the two sides of a train track--meant to be inextricably connected in one purpose." (39)

"God absolutely uses short-term mission trips, and many of the career missionaries and international relief and development professionals I know were first given a 'taste' of their calling on a short-term missions trip when they were in high school or college. This illustrates exactly why I believe we need to continue to fund and send folks on short-term trips, while at the same time redefining our expectations for what they will accomplish and what they mean.

I believe we need to call these trips by what they really are: Learning trips. Exposure trips. Relationship trips. Engagement trips...Redefining short-term missions trips is about ridding ourselves of the illusion that we can change the world, and instead admitting that the world might need to change us." (151-152)

"Today, however, there is a growing desire among Christians of all sorts to discern and differentiate the social awareness of the historical social gospel movement from the specific theology that under-girded much of the movement. there is a desire to mend the artificial divide--the false dichotomy--between material and spiritual and return to a robust gospel message that includes the proclamation of Jesus and the embodying, person-transforming, society-changing love of Jesus." (209)

"'That which dominates our imagination and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping we are becoming.' [Ralph Waldo Emerson]" (224)

"We forget the sustaining power of grace that was given to energize and motivate us to change the world. Covering grace without sustaining grace can make us consumers of grace. As if grace were a product, we keep it for ourselves." (255)

"To discern the path God would have you walk, begin with repentance. Lament the problem of pain and the ache of injustice in the world. Ask God to lead you, and listen long and intently for His answer. Be willing to obey unreservedly, no matter how big or small, no matter how heroic or mundane the task God sets before you or the path God calls you to walk." (289)

-Pursuing Justice, Ken Wytsma

sidenotes;

be [present] where you are [and love where you are by actively seeking peace of the city]. be where you are.

dysfunction

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it's not just generation gap, culture clash, dysfunction, unpredictability, and a shrill voice. it's also stewing and explosion, brooding and freezing. it's love language of polar opposites, trigger differences, anger expression differences, processing differences, conflict resolution differences, too many differences. reaction differences, interpretation differences. just differences

sidenotes;

this is really uber hard

baby deer and ghost again

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presently//
feeling like a baby deer in angry headlights

i got the crazies out of my system the last time but even so, navigating this new map feels strange and rusty like i had amnesia. like the vaccination shot's disorienting effects are only now receding, deaf to my silent screams of "i've had enough!" and it has left my bones weary, my heart wary, my hands shaking. but i'm trusting my gut & pressing in with prayer in this time of all things new and good. actively internalizing that i don't automatically default into the problem if i am not part of the solution, and that jesus and his grace is once again entirely sufficient. thank you, jesus, for your blood paid freedom.

edit// wow, rereading this makes me realize again just how deep his actions dug into me like shrapnel and tore apart things inside, like my perception of myself in relation to people i care about. actions which translated into "you are my problem. you are my temptation. you are all things bad therefore i cut you out like an abscess, or an addiction." never again

in the past//
but ghost, you are a stranger to me! i am feeling dismay while looking at this messy speed bump in my life. when people underestimate the scope of it all it is belittling to the awful extent of denying my reality, so i suppose on the same token i must doggedly resist the temptation to altogether cast away the need to dwell and process and walk through the aftermath. ghost, in your lingering, look: i am healthy, i am healing. i have friends who step into the dark places and face demons with me. ghost, i'm not running and i'm not scared. the longer you loiter the more things i will encounter and the more i will change. my King sings victory over me.

in the future//
we have the riches of God's love at our immediate and unreserved disposal, in all its heaviness and lightness and vibrancy and extravagance and liberating, cleansing power. there are things he hides from us only to peel away the scales of our eyes in due time. the more i receive of his love for me and for his children, the more i see how little i am, & the more i see how there is a spectrum of growth that he takes us on in all his gentleness and loveliness. what grace, what mercy! Jesus is King here & now, & he is restoring the world - he is more than enough cause for daily, effusive celebration! open the floodgates. Jesus is King.

"Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom

or the strong man boast of his strength

or the rich man boast of his riches,

but let him who boasts boast about this: 

that he understands and knows me,

that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth,

for in these I delight," declares the Lord.
Jeremiah 9:23-24

sidenotes;
mraaaaaw
war of my life, john mayer
scribbled paper, little dragon
i have no idea what i'm getting myself into lol but Jesus is King and he is so good to me!

also, i hate skin problems with a passion ugh can you just pls stop, pls, you are the worst thing that ever happened to me this summer. i loathe you more than my eczema ugh

summed up

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this morning i woke up and rolled like a dying zombie onto my side, surveying the events of my life (because i often do this because i donno) in a groggy attempt to stay awake. and after a shower and some breakfast i came to realize that God's work in my life thus far can be summed up in the following statement:

struggles and heartbreaks are the avenues through which God makes my heart more tender and enlarges its capacity to readily step into the pain of others: starting with pain that i understand and expanding to pain i don't necessarily understand. & He does this because Jesus, as a man of sorrow, saw me in my wretchedness and determined to make me lovely, and so he stepped into my wretchedness and became my wretchedness. he gently and radically embraces me in a love that i in turn dwell in - i wash myself in it, i clothe myself in it, i inhale it. & as i exhale, it is His sustaining love coursing through my veins that blesses others with its rich fragrance as it has blessed and protected and saved me. He is my perfume, my sustenance. God is so good to me.

sidenotes;
< 3 my heart
also, painting with my silly sister is therapeutic
my silly brother is great because he takes pictures with me
& my "when helping hurts" & "life together" arrived YESSSs

edit// 9.10.13 bought a new outfit, & found awesome social justice books at the library
today was a good day (:

suspended limbo

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the weeks preceding the new school year always feels like suspended limbo to me. like a huge pause button that makes my mind foggy and lazy, a time during which i look back to a surrealistically distant past and look forward to see just as surrealistic a future. it's a rhythm of life that i am ill-adapted to; i find myself consciously associating God's work with a faster rhythm of life: when i'm in school, with things to do and places to go and people to meet. why is it that home is my driest and heavy spirited battlefield? although i suppose i know the answer to that question and it comes in the form of generation gap, culture clash, dysfunction, unpredictability, and a shrill voice. i am dragged back to my high school mentality when i come home, but that just means it never left the dark rooms in my chest. the monsters like to come out when i come home. how shameless they are

nevertheless, i also often entertain melodramatic writing (perhaps because my inner world is a melodrama? a tranche de vie melodrama for the purposes of amusement? haha) and my words tend to throw things into stark, vivid relief. things are not nearly as awful as the picture my words paint.

today the shock is mellowing out into shy-faced disbelief because i am amazed by how intimately God knows my heart. today there is anticipation in my palms and anticipation in my stomach because i taste sweetness on the horizon

"Wear your sorrow like the lines on your palm. Like a shawl to keep you warm at night. Don’t mourn the love that is lost to you now. It is a book of poems whose meters worked their way into your pulse. Even if it has slipped from your hands, it will stay in your body. 

You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god. He tried to sweeten you, to water you down. So you left. And now you have your heart all to yourself again. A heart like a stone cottage. Heart like a lover’s diary. Hope like an ocean.” -Anais Nin

sidenotes;
currently:
elodie rama, strange island
emily king, georgia

on another note, i've always been number 11 on your list from the start, but that's okay because Jesus says i'm his number one and Jesus says he redeems you and me and i believe him

enemy in the homefront

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Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. 1 Peter 1:13

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul. 1 Peter 2:11

The end of all things is near. Therefore be clear minded and self-controlled so that you can pray.1 Peter 4:7

Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings. 1 Peter 5:8-9

these verses are always so pertinent when i'm at home, because that's when i let my guard down

sidenotes;
today life is sweet

hardest

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hardest person for me to love, ever

sidenotes;

iono fam

opaque

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i would like to dissect the psychology of blogging/online diary keeping as related to the increasing isolation we discuss in humanities classes. why is it that we feel "safer" being vulnerable and transparent on the internet? does the dividing wall of the screen somehow justify unfiltered disclosure of intimate struggles? do we do this at the expense of real life, interpersonal relationships? what is it that we're sacrificing here? is online vulnerability a means to achieve something, or has it become the unintended goal? what is the future we are painting for the next generation entrusted into our hands? how can we victoriously use the internet as a mere resource for our spiritual, mental, and emotional growth so as to forbid it from becoming our crutch - not to mention a false god which we worship in parched dependence?

sidenotes;
listening to natural self, radio citizen, & rdj2 < 3 so heppy

left field

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my heart? wait how did this happen i'm so confused

sidenotes;

lol

ten times harder

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why is it that i love speaking truth and encouragement to everyone else but when it comes to myself it's ten times harder this is so dumb

sidenotes;

so dumb

cultureshock

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I proclaim righteousness in the great assembly; I do not seal my lips, as you know, O Lord.

I do not hide your righteousness in my heart; I speak of your faithfulness and salvation. I do not conceal your love and your truth from the great assembly.

Do not withhold your mercy from me, O Lord; may your love and your truth always protect me.

Psalm 40:7

being back home is strangely anticlimactic in a stifling and surreal way. the lack of urgency here feels like a heavy blanket over my head. i am confronted with the short attention span of my humanness, because being physically far-removed from tenderloin/berkeley gives my brain a false sense of security and peace -- false, because this security and peace finds its source in the comfort of luxury. poverty is no longer manifest in the physical world here. i can't see poverty prowling the dirty streets. i can't smell poverty making its angry, foul demands at me for attention, nor can i hear poverty shrieking profanities down drug infested streets. just because i am in irvine doesn't negate everything my heart has inhaled this summer. and as i sit here in coffeebean, i feel dismay begin to claw tightly around my heart as i begin to feel more and more alone in the heart mentality that has so violently dug deep into who i am.

"the culture shock will likely be in the mentality, the rhythm of life, the degrees to which people understand or engage with what has been so close to your heart this summer." -nhsieh 

"My prayer for you as you return is for protection and that God would be your strength in spirit, soul, and mind. I myself am going through the difficulty and the spiritual attacks that come with returning to life after a mission trip, or conference, or any intense spiritual journey the Lord takes us on. But lets not let it be just a returning, but a sending out into a new mission field. You have been equipped with authority and with power and with truth. I pray that your identity in Christ will be secure. Praying right now against physical ailment, against temptation, against worry and anxiety and depression, and praying against discouragement and impatience with the self-sufficient, comfortable and ignorant condition of the heart of so many people in socal. I pray that even now God would use your experiences to reach those who you share it with to bring glory to His name and that to those who won't understand, God will give understanding in His own time." -pferido

 

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” -Miriam Adeney

sidenotes;
this is a place of aloneness that i am fearful of staying in; i don't have strength to maintain a posture of satisfaction when i face the daunting silence that echoes back to my question, "do you know? do you know what i have seen this summer?"

ever deeper roots

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ever deeper roots, ever sweeter communion. may ever louder praise incessantly flow from my heart. may all know that you are king. ever more, always & forever.

inner chaos

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“As soon as we are alone,...inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distraction, we often find that our inner distraction manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.” -Henri Nouwen

if i have a daughter, what would i tell her when she experiences her first real heartbreak? i don't know

i finished my last final as a sophomore. i'm now a junior. i am looking forward to a summer in sf. but tonight i would like to watch a good movie, eat comfort food, and cry in bed until there is nothing inside to cry out. even though i'm not sure what there is to cry about. i just know i need a good cry

developing trust in an eagerly responsive God

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last night at post fnf we were talking about our worst traits, and one of us pointed out that we all had similar responses: passiveness, indecisiveness, fear.

i feel that these traits are reflections of the broken order within us. it is the nature of the fall that we rebel & try to wrench control from the King's throne. in doing so, we obsessively and feverishly vie for definitive assurance of future consequences of our present actions. but because it is also the nature of humans as subject to the power of time & the fallen world, we can never know the future.as a result, we become paralyzed into inaction and unfounded fear. we default into worry, which is the complete antithesis to trust in God.

but the radical nature of the gospel changes all of that. because of our relationship with god, we are placed in a realm of fearlessness, where we can step forth in boldness knowing that His perfect love for us casts out our fears. we can know that our relationship with God is a responsive one.

"ask, seek, knock;" "abide in me;" "seek first Me and My righteousness;" "take delight in me;" He says. "& i will give. i will open. i will abide in you. i will give you the desires of your heart."

we serve a God who moves mountains, calms storms, and ultimately overcame the world because it is under his dominion. we can start with faith like a mustard seed and see how God proves to be faithful, and with time we will come to see that we have accumulated a substantial amount of proof that God responds to the cries of his children and is pleased by our baby, timid, uncertain steps of faith. we will come to see that our faith is no longer just a mustard seed; that our fear is no longer our dominating instinct. the broken order is being restored and the scales are falling from our eyes. we can rest, we can beseech him on our behalf, we can act. we are free.

sidenotes;

wakawaakakwakaa

second death week live updates

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sunday 5am // to bed i go

monday 2:24am // i'm feeling pretty despondent about my life right now lol. why skewl
monday 3:41am // so miserable
monday 5:30am // sad lyfe

tuesday 11:47pm // heartbreak is really messy. these past four years i have learned how messy emotional investment and how close it hits home and how it's like walking a tight rope to navigate through it all except it's more like falling from the tightrope and fighting for life in the raging waters and losing strength and letting the current take you while you stare blankly at the sky. i've also learned how nobody talks about it openly. and i donno how good that is because i'm starting to wonder what things would be like if older sisters invested in younger sisters more actively. also i'm really sleep deprived and i'm relatively more dramatic and snarky when i lack sleep don't take me 100% seriously

wednesday 2:23pm // i just realized that i forgot to go to a class yesterday how did i forget to go to class how i don't understand. also facebook makes me so discontent guh

thursday 4:00am // hahahahahhaha it's 4am hahahahaha
thursday 12:00pm // i am so fail i woke up at 10am guhhh. praise god though, i was able to word vomit four pages in two hours which is... twice the speed i usually write. not sure about the quality but at this point i don careee
thursday 2:15pm // wau cutting it so close. i officially dislike apple computers omq. regardless TWO ESSAYS & TWO PRESENTATIONS DONE, TWO MORE ESSAYS &THREE MORE FINALS TO GO

gospel & berkeley

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But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

how wonderful is it that even before i go up to norcal, i am reminded of the radical, earthshaking implications of the gospel?

jesus extravagantly proclaimed god’s love for me: he died an undeserved sinner’s death & lived again to provide me access to a new life in sanctifying preparation for eternal fellowship with my Maker. & because god did this in full awareness of my wretchedness--all that i am inside is laid bare before him, i have no one to prove myself to. i don't have to prove my trust in him at the cost of compromising my safety. trust does not equate to recklessness. i am grateful for the two sisters dear to my heart (shameless shout out, slo&cchen) for speaking sense to me and being gentle while i grappled with guilt (as well as my tendency to go all in, & my perception of what that means).

it is because of this gospel truth that i can boast in the cross and make decisions in a realm of freedom and fearlessness, without unwarranted guilt of disappointing him or putting him in a box. i can trust that he makes my ways straight & that his ways supersede, go before, and surround all of my ways. i am forever entirely in the King’s embrace : ) how is this not earthshaking to monumental extremes? how does this not make praise arise from deep inside without pause?

this is all to say, i am actually going to live in berkeley instead of sf. hahaha

& i have also come to realize in the past twenty seconds... that god is redeeming my wish to live in berkeley... HOWww GOD IS SO GOOD! senior year he took away my obsessive desire to go to berkeley and taught me to trust him by blessing me in SD and now he's letting me go to berkeley for a quarter, on his terms. this is too good, god. i see what you did there. a;slkdjf;alskjdf

sidenotes;
wahahaha
so blessed and safe and joyful to be in THE king's embrace
EXCEEDING PRAISE OMQ

not particularly important, but i wonder why i feel the need to blog. it is essentially an online diary, but with a public audience. i'm starting to realize how much i truly am a blogger -- ever since 12 years old! i have seven blogs serving different purposes, and apart from that i have two private journals that delve even deeper. i wonder why i feel the need to share things with people all the time -- joys, struggles, ponderings. i donnos. how come not everyone feels this need? i feel like an oddball wakawaka

clamoring

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what does it look like to put god in a box? how do we seek to discern his voice while avoiding an inclination towards either the extreme of ignoring wise affirmation from brothers and sisters or depending solely upon opinions of brothers and sisters? who is it that i ultimately fear, and why? when does being cautious and thoroughly thoughtful tread into the world of cowardice and distrust? how do you discern boldness from recklessness and/or stupidity? to whom do i feel a need to prove myself to, if at all? in the stillness & quiet, god i wait for you. my desperate heart, be still, be quiet

sidenotes;

weh

counterintuitive faith

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where do i even start?

i serve a God who is gentle and patient with his children. just as he patiently answered a distrusting gideon’s impertinent demand for confirmation, and how he patiently encouraged a disheartened elijah & a fearful moses, he will prove faithful to be patient with me. he knows the manifold fears intrusively clamoring in his children’s hearts, and his presence remains stalwart in the fluctuating levels of conviction and uncertainty, of fearlessness and of overwhelming terror. he is entirely unafraid and capable of meeting me in the messiness of my humanness — after all, was this not the sentiment in jesus’ life and mission? he who knew no sin came down to earth, took on human form, and walked about on this earth. everything he did oozed “i love you, i’m for you, i’m with you. follow me.”


it is in the character of this very real and literally down to earth God that i can draw my sense of well being from. i would be lying if i said i was fearless, or that i feel completely sane making the decision to live in tenderloin for twelve weeks, or that it’s easy for me to ignore the warnings of friends. i ask myself if i somehow lost my brain whenever i see in my mind’s eye the red quadrilateral of thriving crime on the sf map. i have the street smarts of a manic deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming race car (& although this is an exaggeration, i can’t be too sure). my brief exposures to inner city environments are insubstantial: a timid exploration of a small block in santa ana during homeless ministry, a onetime foray along the downtown sd streets filled with sleeping homeless on my way to a jazz concert, an uneventful encounter with a crazy man in fancy downtown la jolla after 7pm, a fleeting & horrified glance at an armless man kissing the ground for measly NT coins in taipei’s bustling & otherwise apathetic shilin night market. i wonder if he’s still there. in short, i got nothing.


i suppose that’s the nature of faith: it is thoroughly counter intuitive. i don’t go into this ill-informed & i still am painfully aware that worrying about my physical well being in the public sphere is a novel and unwelcome experience for me. i feel crazy, but there is something in my gut (rather, Someone in my heart) that tells me He will be faithful to my meager attempts to obey. He multiplies bread & fish, He moves mountains, & i get to be there to see it. my world is going to be flipped unceremoniously upside down & i will be uncomfortable and terrified. but i do know that i serve a really, really big God. and i know that He loves me. that’s what i got. it’s everything.

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i'm tiredddd