¡¡Bananas!!

My wonderful friend, Erin Sweeney, came over to my house today to hang out with me and it was great! We hit up the Goodwill Outlet and the St Vincent De Paul thrift store (thrift stores are kinda our thing), got some lunch, and watched the terribly amazing (minus the amazing part) Breaking Dawn part 1 (we're saving part 2 for when she comes to visit me in Guatemala). And we finished off our day together with a quick round of Spanish Bananagrams (minus the quick). It took us so long to just do one round and most of that time was spent with us looking up words that we could use in our Spanish-English dictionaries. I quickly realized that word games are hard enough in a language that you speak fluently (for the most part) and that playing in Spanish (even when the letter frequencies are calculated specifically for Spanish) is crazy hard!! But so fun!

                   

                                                                                        

As I already said, Erin's awesome, and saying goodbye (well....more like "see you when you come visit me") sucked! This whole week has been full of see-you-in-a-year conversations and there are more to come this weekend. I hate it! Can someone just hurry up and invent teleportation, please? Thanks! 

I know that God wants me in G-mala for this next little while in my life because He's been showering me with blessing upon blessing in relation to the trip (which, if you've read my post about One Thousand Gifts, has made having a heart of thanksgiving [eucharisteo] quite easy), yet I can't help but be sad that I'll be without all of my favorite people for a still undetermined amount of time. I'm incredibly excited for this upcoming chapter in my life and I can't wait to see the things that God has planned for me, but as I lay here in my bed, surrounded by the walls that have contained my life and all my stuff for the last 20 years, I am comfortable and satisfied. What could be better? I love how God always catches me off guard. :) 

Two birthdays and a farewell...

My family is awesome. This is only the second time we've ever all been together and the first time it's been just us. We all got together today to celebrate Mina and my dad's birthdays and so that everyone could say goodbye to me until March. There was delicious food, way too many laughs (but is there really such a thing?), and more kiwis than I could ever imagine being in my kitchen (thanks again, Susie!). The two most adorable kids in the whole world hung out with me in my room: 

And ever since Lake Chelan there's no way we could all get together and not play Taboo with my dad. Seriously, if you ever get the chance to play with him, he's the most fun person to play this game with ever...that is, unless you're really competitive and you want to win and he's on your team.

Then they will know that I am the LORD...

Two summers ago I read Ezekiel and it was probably the most depressing book of the Bible I've ever read. There was so much destruction and it was all at the hand of God. His people had gotten so far away from what He wanted for them that He sent disaster after devastation after awesome display of destruction. It was a really hard book for me to get through because it was a side of God that I didn't want to see. I wanted God to be the God of grace and mercy, the God of love and forgiveness. I wanted to limit Him to His attributes that I find pleasing or attractive. After I'd gotten about a third of the way through the book I had to stop and question God. If He is the same yesterday, today, and forever then where was the grace, mercy, love, and forgiveness in Ezekiel's day? I asked Him to show me His heart for His people at that time, to let me see this destruction from His point of view. After that I started to feel God's heartbreak for His people and how His extreme love required extreme discipline. Towards the end of the book I was struck by how often He would say He'd do something, and "then they will know that I am the LORD." I started to underline it every time He'd say it. Then I forgot about it.
In church yesterday my pastor was preaching on God's holiness and he had a passage from Ezekiel. I saw a place that I'd underlined "then they will know that I am the LORD" and I remembered how I hadn't noticed it until the last few chapters of the book. So I made a note to myself to look on Bible gateway where it occurs in Ezekiel so that I could underline all of them. There are variations of this statement (i.e. "then you will know that I am the LORD," "then all the inhabitants of Egypt will know that I am the LORD," "all flesh shall know that I am the LORD," "all the trees of the field shall know that I am the LORD," etc.) all over the book. God says it over 70 times! The book only has 48 chapters. God did all of this to prove that He is indeed the Lord God and that He deserves our love, obedience, and our everything.
So here's what I've been thinking about since I finished marking up the book of Ezekiel: how often has God proved Himself in my own life? Countless. So then why is it so hard for me to trust Him? I know that He's God and I know that He can do anything and I know that the only way for my life to mean anything is for me to give up my will, my power, my dreams, my grudges, and my hurts and let Him take over. I know all of this. But when it comes down to acting upon this knowledge, I find it really hard to believe that it's all true. So yeah, I can read Ezekiel and shake my head at the Israelites for their ignorance, for their refusal to return to God and let Him take over. I mean, c'mon, it's so obvious that He's God and they're really still doing whatever they want to do? Dumb!! But I'm in the same boat as them. Why is it so hard to believe something that you know is true? Maybe God shouldn't have said "then they will know that I am the LORD," maybe He should have said "then they will believe and act like I am the LORD."