i-don't-want-to-be-here reflections.

I like Dudley Woodberry because he is a seminary professor for sure. He teaches like one and has slides like one and organizes his thoughts in a lovely professorial way. It makes him much easier for me to listen to and I feel much calmer.

Makes me laugh that I am getting enough better at typing that I can look straight at the speaker and smile and type other things altogether and not make too many errors. When we were overseas and I was using those Arabic keyboards I wondered if I would ever be able to type like a normal person again.

Things are feeling a little bit calmer; I think it has been the choice to talk to friends a little bit and to choose not to go down some of those existential paths that I could go down… but I know there is only yuckiness on the other end. I remember Burke lying under the table and wanting to X himself. Not quite there, thank goodness. Holly and Teresa were good to me. Dixon was his usual pastoral super self. I miss the afternoons of lying on the couch in the youth office and just laying it out with him. We didn’t get much time to talk but mostly ran around after his little boy. Which is fine. And we talked, like we always do, about watching Thomas walk out the plan in Nashville and what it would mean to us church planting a non-Anglican Anglican church.

So, back to processing. What am I thinking now? Trying to be concrete and not vague.
1. God is good, and he is merciful. And he hears us. More than anything on the trip I feel like my love was purified and my heart enlarged. I saw more of his face and heard more of his voice and saw a much larger slice of his life just by walking in the nations. Who God is is good. You can’t walk across North Africa or be in a place where it is harder to be a Christian or see the destruction in Kabul and not understand something new about the glory of God. You can’t walk in the largest mosques in the Muslim world and not see something about the patience and lovingkindness of God. You cannot be willing to go away with him and read lots of Bible and give to his people and not have your knowledge of God be increased.
2. The anointing of God is real and powerful. I felt like there was a mantle of protection that I carried through Kabul simply because God had chosen us to be there. It is not about us but all about him, and when we walk in that place we see so much freedom. The call of God takes all that you are and gives far more than you need. There is no freedom like being given up to God’s purposes. People who are totally regular and certainly not completely healed are walking in power because they said yes to God and were willing to be in with him.
3. It is hard to be in America and be satisfied in normal, suburban, everyday American life. This is my sermon about Ellen Jaspar (Caravans, James Michener) and what is real reality. How I can deal with 18,000 coffee choices and crises over things that don’t matter and spending fortunes on clothing and pointless details and investing whole lives in what never actually impacts a human life toward reality or wholeness. I like Afghanistan because it is real and primitive. Grace is expensive. And we don’t even understand in how many ways we waste our lives.

My personal sort of revelation centers around obedience and sacrifice. I tend so much to sacrifice as my internal protection… and my whole personal mindset is founded around this. I am able to sacrifice and I should do it. It is not usually that I feel like (consciously) that it makes God love me… but just that it is what he deserves from me, and who am I to hold on to whatever it is?

My sacrifice is the work of my own hands that I want to give to God. My obedience is my submission to what God wants to do in me. My sacrifice is motivated by fear; my obedience is motivated by love. And it is not that I have not been obedient; it is more than anything that I need to live because I have heard and not hear along the way. What is a girl to do whose first response is usually to see how much I can sacrifice? But to press into intimacy with the Father and ask him to lead me in the way that is right?

I love Erin. I didn’t know she was part of the episcoposse… why is it that there is a certain understanding among all the kids who grew up Episcopalian? I am not sure what it is that holds us all together or makes us of the same mind.

I miss the symbolic life of the eucharist and the real grace of the sacrament… I have not pressed in to the reality of living sacramentally like I want so much to… pour the blood of Jesus over me.