¡¡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."

One Thousand Gifts

You know that moment when you finish a really, really, really good book that took you forever to get through because you had to put it down every 2 minutes to copy down some mind-blowing thought recorded on its pages? I just had that moment. One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp is the best book I've read in a long time. There are multiple pages in my journal filled with quotes from this book that made me stop and think. There have been so many times since I started reading this book that something has made me think of one of those quotes or concepts recorded in my journal. There's so much simple truth in the pages of this book. I don't even really know how to describe it. The overarching theme of the book is having a heart of thanksgiving (eucharisteo). She was challenged by a friend to write down 1000 gifts from God and in the process she began to see how, when you're looking for gifts, they are all around you. 

You know how there are some books that you finish and think, "Wow, that was a really good book," and then you just go on with your life? This is not that kind of book. This is the kind of book that you finish and think, "How did I not know all of this before? And how can I not begin to practice the concepts of this book?" and then your whole way of thinking about things is changed. Forever. 

Read it. It's amazing. Ann's writing style takes a little getting used to, but the things she has to say are well worth it.

The fall of man

Just the other day I started reading the book of Genesis and today was chapter 3: The fall of man. I know that traditionally everyone likes to blame Eve (and women in general) for the world being the way it is today, because Eve was too dumb to see through the devil's lies and stay away from that stupid fruit from the tree of  the knowledge of good and evil. And people have argued back that Adam ate the fruit too, it's not like when Eve tried to give it to him he protested. So I've always had this view that it was both of their faults and if Eve hadn't done it that day Adam would've done it a different day...it was bound to happen, basically. Well today I noticed this: "she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate." (v. 6b) For some reason I've always pictured Adam off doing his own thing the whole time the serpent was talking to Eve and he just happened to be walking by when Eve offered it to him, or she called him over to try some or something....but I never pictured him standing right there next to her the whole time.
First, I think it's interesting that the serpent never addressed Adam, only Eve. But more importantly, I think it's weird that Adam never said anything during this whole conversation; he never corrected Eve when she said that God said they'd die if they even touched the tree, he never questioned where the serpent was getting his information, he never said, "hey Eve, maybe we shouldn't because we don't even know who this serpent is, but we do know that God created all of this wonderfulness and He probably said we shouldn't eat from this tree for a reason." He never stood up for his wife when she was being deceived. No, I'm not going on a rant about how men are terrible, because I don't think they are. My point is that I think we often over-romanticize the garden and what people were like before sin entered. I think that we think that if Adam and Eve had never eaten that fruit then everything in the world would be peachy. But even before sin entered the world humans were still humans, they still had free will and I don't think they always chose to do what was good, they just chose to not do what was wrong. I think there's a big difference between doing no harm and doing good.
I guess I was just struck by the fact that I also fall into this trap of wondering what life would've been like if they'd never eaten that fruit, if no one had ever eaten the fruit. I find myself thinking that everything would've been peachy, but now I'm thinking that may not be true. People are still people. Maybe that sounds depressing and cynical to you, but I actually find comfort in that. I never have to wonder what could have been because I think we would've ended up in the same place we are today with or without the fruit, which makes the idea of God's love even crazier to me. I mean, I know that He knew everything before He even made us, but that's really hard for me to wrap my head around so I still find myself sometimes thinking that maybe when He created us He had a twinge of hope that we'd always obey Him. But no, He always always always knew that we'd screw up and that He'd have to give up His Son for us and that we'd continue to turn our backs on Him even after all that. It makes me think about this song that stops me in my tracks every time I hear it: "In wonder and fear You knit me together. You should've been scared when You breathed into me. I have a feeling You knew what I'd say and what I'd do, but Your love said do it anyway." How crazy is that?! We've never been perfect, even when we thought we were, but because God's love is so unfathomably huge He still made us.
I think the dumbest part about all of this is that even though I realize how huge God's love is for me, I'm still going to screw up and do stuff that He's told me not to do. I'm still going to do things that show that I don't really rely on His love to sustain me. I'm reading this book called One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp (super good book, but I can't read a lot of it at a time because every other paragraph had some sentence that punches me in the face) and there are these two parts that I think of a lot when I think about how I live my life, the things that I think about, and how they reflect what I believe about God.

"All fear is but the notion that God's love ends.

Did you think I end, that My bread warehouses are limited,

that I will not be enough? But I am infinite, child. What can end in Me?

Can life end in Me? Can happiness? Or peace? Or anything you need?

Doesn't your Father always give you what you need? 

I am the Bread of Life and My bread for you will never end.

Fear thinks God is finite and fear believes that there is not going to be enough

and hasn't counting one thousand gifts, endlessly counting gifts,

exposed the lie at the heart of all fear? In Me, blessings never end

because My love for you never ends. If My goodnesses toward you end, 

I will cease to exist, child. As long as there is God in heaven, 

there is grave on earth and I am the spilling God of the uncontainable,

forever-overflowing-love-grace."

"If authentic, saving belief is the act of trusting, 

then to choose stress is an act of disbelief...atheism. 

Anything less than gratitude and trust is practical atheism."

I have a lot to work on in my life. But I find comfort in the fact that God is showing me new things because it means that I'm hearing from Him, it means that I'm still listening for His voice...or maybe He's talking louder. Either way, I know that God is real and that He loves me more than anyone else could, and while I don't always live in a way that shows I believe that, He keeps reminding me.