25 November 2007

Tears on Sundays....

Okay, I just want to say that I was a rock until August of 2005. I hadn't cried in probably 10 years until my grandma died that August. That's when the floodgates opened. And now I'm a flipping emotional basket case. But I just wanted to clarify that it was not always that way.

Now, with that said, if I have Sunday nights off of work there is probably a 99% chance that you will see me cry if you are in my apartment between 7 and 8 pm. Why? you ask. That's easy. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I don't know what it is about this show, but it never fails to make me cry. This Sunday's episode was the 100th family, and boy was it a whopper. The family actually had a nice house to begin with, so they were able to donate the windows and trim and appliances and a lot of other things to other families in need. It didn't seem like this family needed to be chosen, but it turns out that four of the 7 (soon to be 8) children were actually the mom's sister's kids. These kids lost their dad 6 years ago in a car accident, and their mom had a hard time dealing with it. She began to get past it when she started to date a guy and then broke it off. He did not take it well and went to her house and attacked her with butcher knives. She survived this attack, but the lunatic did not spend much time in jail. The mom began to date another guy and the first guy came to her house again and shot both the mom and the boyfriend, killing them both. So these four kids, the oldest of whom is now 13, lost both of their parents in 6 years and were taken in by their mom's sister. Their aunt/new mom has devoted much of the past year to serving as an advocate for women and children effected by domestic abuse. That's why this family was chosen.

If that wasn't bad enough, other families from previous episodes came and helped this family's build. They gave updates on these families, and their stories were so powerful I cried every time they showed clips of past episodes. Like I said, emotional basket case.

All this to say that Dr. Kreider was right. The secular world gets it when the church may not. The church has been called to be the body of Christ, sharing His love to the nations. The problem is we are really good at sharing His love with ourselves and not reaching out to those outside our comfort zone. But we can see evidence of God's love outside the church. I realize I haven't articulated it very well, but it is deeply convicting to realize that others are stepping out to love the hurting when the church has failed. As the Casting Crowns song says, if we are the body, why aren't His arms reaching? Why aren't His hands healing? Why aren't His words teaching? ... Why aren't his feet going? Why is His loving not showing them there is a way?

24 November 2007

Allergies

I wish I knew what I am actually allergic to. Most people I know that have weird food allergies know what they can't have. Take my brother. He knows that if he drinks milk or has any sort of milk product, he'll have a nasty case of projectile vomiting. Though we thought it was funny when we were growing up, I don't think it's as funny seeing a 16-year-old vomit all over. It's a lot more nast to clean up. Then there are the people who can't have peanuts because it makes their throat close up. And the people who can't have gluten because it does something bad. But me...we don't know what I'm allergic to. But whatever it is, man does my face get swollen when I eat it. I've had this "problem" since I was a teenager, but we have never been able to figure out what causes it. Granted I've never had formal tests done, largely because the swelling happens so infrequently, but lately it seems to be happening a lot more often. On Thanksgiving of all days my mouth got HUGE.




I wish I had the picture Dan took....he's holding the camera I'm looking at in this picture. I'm sure you can see the grotesque-ness of it better from his angle. But, if you look at the left side of my mouth, it's noticeably larger than the right side. It doesn't hurt, but it's really annoying and it makes it difficult to drink. They took a picture of me drinking because I had to drink out of the right side of my mouth because my lip on the left side wouldn't go around the cup. Then we thought that maybe it would be a good idea to ice it. I mean, when you hurt your ankle and it gets all swollen, you ice it. Naturally, it would make sense to add ice to the swollen lip as well. That's the reason behind the other picture. It kind of looks like I got into a fight or something. Or maybe I lost a tooth in the food. Or the cat bit me. Or something. SO, we have decided to come up with a story as to why my lip was swollen on Thanksgiving and necessitated a large pack of ice being placed on my face at dinner. The story is we got a little carried away when we were passing the food around the table. I was the "end" of the table and got the job of putting the excess food on the secondary table (that part is actually true). Apparently I was going to slow and Tiffany actually tossed the casserole dish of yams at me. I turned around from nicely placing the mashed potatoes on the secondary table to see a big dish of orange flying at my face. I got my hands up in time to catch it and prevent any mess from occurring, but not in time to prevent a generous blow to the face. Lucky for me, the teeth that the dish hit are fake and so no dental damage was done, only extreme swelling in the maxilofacial region. That's my story. So much better than allergies.



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19 November 2007

Reading Week is GONE!

So, I realize that this post is similar to the last couple...or, rather, it's almost a combination of the two-ish. Reading Week is already over, and man it went FAST! It's now fall break, which means another week without class. Supposedly I'm working on all the homework I didn't do last week. I don't necessarily think that I'm being unproductive, considering we are almost done with a huge group project that we had barely talked about before break started. And I've read most of the articles for theology. So I've done stuff....but I have a lot more stuff to do and the time that I need to do it is basically not there. Oh well....I know that it will get done. And relationships are more important than book smarts anyway.

Okay, enough procrastinating. Off to read Humanity and Sin, by Bob Pyne.

13 November 2007

Your one life...

There are days where you are really productive, and everything that needs to get done gets done.

There are days where you just have a lot scheduled, so you're busy all day and all of a sudden the day is over.

There are days where you set out to be lazy and you succeed...by playing endless hours of Zelda (or something like that).

And then there are days that just happen. You planned to get a lot done, but the next thing you know it's 7:00 at night and you have done a whole lot of nothing. You know that there are assignments to do and people to contact and things need cleaned, but you waste the day on the couch. Today was one of those days...

I was really productive this morning working on the group project for Dr. Young's class. Who would have thought that studying persecution in the book of Acts could be so interesting? The problem is, once I got done with that and went home, I wasted the entire rest of the day. I talk about how important it is to be a good steward of our time, yet I can't even practice what I preach. There is so much I could have done today, yet I chose to ignore all that and do nothing. I honestly don't know where my time went....but I do know that I feel guilty about not spending it wisely.

CAM International
has a slogan that says "What are you going to do with your one life?" (Or something like that) I guess my answer to that question on a day like today is "nothing." I know that's not true, because I know that God has amazing plans for me and He is the reason I'm in Dallas to begin with.

So, as I ponder my day and what I've done with my time, I pray that you too ask yourself, "What am I going to do with my one life?" May you seek to use your time here to glorify God as you passionately serve Him.

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06 November 2007

Reading Week, Here I Come!

Praise God! Reading week is just days away, I have officially finished one class, I finished my two exams for this week, and the group project that is due the day we get back from two weeks off is just about finished! I don't know how it all fell together, but it did. WOOHOO!

On another note, I would like to apologize to everybody who was in chapel today. If you were there, you heard a message that had some quality material in it and I believe that if you were able to pay attention much could be learned about the current state of Christianity in the world. There is a lot of potential for this lectureship to be very informative. That's not why I'm apologizing. My apology is for the presentation of it. As great of a scholar as Dr. Netland is, it seems he is not much of an orator. In fact, that could have been the most boring chapel presentation I have seen since being at DTS. I have never experienced somebody reading a paper for 40+ minutes and calling it a "message." So, I am sorry. Not all of the missions lectures are like that, I promise.

Speaking of missions, sometimes I think of how great it would be to be in Mozambique already. It seems the trip next summer just is not coming fast enough...but then again, we haven't started raising support yet, so I guess it can't come too quickly.

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