Excitement!

Lovely friends and family,

First I apologize for the overload of blog posts this month. I am nearly certain that this will be the last one for October. But I have some exciting news to share! I will be moving this week! And I found out today. And I am rather overexcited about this new move. I don't know how many details I can give, but in short I will be moving into a home owned by a ministry in downtown Denver. I will be living in a house with a house director and four women who are trying to find a new place in the world. I believe this is the first time this ministry has invited someone outside of the ministry to live in one of these houses as far as I understand, so it will be new for both me and them. It is a very exciting opportunity for me and I couldn't be more thrilled! I have no official role or responsibilities in this house (other than normal household chores). I will be paying rent and have no obligation to work for the ministry or anything. I am welcome to join in the women's lives as much or as little as possible. I am hopeful that I will be able to join in their lives enough to form relationships. I plan to fellowship over dinner with them regularly and spend time with them many evenings in order to become a part of their home and their lives. I will be living close to a good friend of mine here as well which is quite exciting for both of us. She works for and lives in the ministry homes as well, so we are excited to be in this community together. Praise God for this awesome opportunity in this new home!

In the midst of my joy and enthusiasm, I would also love a bit of prayer. :) This opportunity just came up last week and I just confirmed today that I would in fact take it. They would like me to move in by November 1st. Which happens to be Friday. It also happens to be the first day of a lovely friend's visit to Denver! While I am very excited for his visit and plan to use him in my moving process (Thanks in advance Zach. You're the best!), it will be a bit of a chaotic week. I'm working to get homework done before all this commences (as you can see by the fact that I'm writing a blog post, I am excelling at this) as well as start packing and moving some of my stuff into the house. However, I'm not sure it's all going to get done and I know I will be a bit overwhelmed. So all your prayer is appreciated!

I think that's about all! Oh and for those of you fabulous people who have been writing me letters, please do not let this deter you. (Side note- I'm not sure what's going on with my vocabulary in this post. I think it's due to my level of enthusiasm. I hope you find it enjoyable.) Just text me and I will send you an address to which you can mail letters! Yay! Thanks for joining in my excitement! Have a lovely evening all!

Beauty from Ashes...but for now Mostly Ashes

I’ve always thought that I was a relatively genuine and real person. Lately I’ve been finding out rather quickly that that is not necessarily true. I’m pretty good at putting up a façade. These past couple of weeks I’ve been struggling with this and working on setting a goal for change. My goal that I want to be working towards is one of freedom from pretense, the ability to sit in my brokenness and not feel the need to hide it. What I’ve found to be incredible is how much grace I can have towards everyone in the world but myself. I am so ready to forgive everyone and love everyone, but the minute I fail to be perfect, I beat myself up. As Christians, we are raised to be our best and that’s what we should be. But we need to be teaching each other and ourselves what it looks like to have grace for ourselves and for others in the church. How can we understand God’s grace fully when our ideas of grace are so flawed? The idea behind this post is the thought that I want to be free to be broken. But that can’t happen without grace, for myself and from others. First comes grace, then comes freedom, and then brokenness can be accepted and acceptable.

You see this has been a rough year for me. It’s been a really incredible year and I never want to minimize the many blessings that I’ve received this year. But that’s not what this is about. This is about the brokenness that this year has brought. I’ve made some bad decisions. My heart has often and is still often not in the right place. I’ve deeply hurt some people that I really love and been hurt deeply as well. I’ve lost a best friend who I miss a lot and it was because of my selfishness that the friendship fell apart. I left a lot of close friends and family members in Wheaton to move to Denver. There have been some hard transitions and some growth experiences brought on by my own decisions. My heart feels a little torn apart at the moment. And coming to seminary I didn’t let my heart stay that way. I felt the need to cover up the brokenness, to hide all this crap under the carpet, to look like I had it all put together. Because if you’re going to seminary, you do right? It’s funny. My group therapy class (which is pretty much learning group therapy by being in group therapy) talked last week about the fact that since we’ve all been at seminary God’s been breaking each of us down like crazy. One girl said, “It’s like you give all your money to the seminary and God’s like, ‘Oooh yay! Let’s do this!’” Yet you never see this because everyone is afraid to show that they are not perfectly living for Christ wholeheartedly because the church expects these seminarians to be the best Christians imaginable. And while there is a legitimate conversation to be had about leadership in the faith, that’s not what this blog is about nor what I feel needs to be my focus at the moment.

It’s interesting- when I’m struggling tends to be when my face breaks out pretty bad. So these past couple months I’ve woken up every morning and put on the cover up because I would hate for people to see the zits on my face. That’s the picture God used to wake me up my fakeness. One morning He just said, “Look at the face you put on every morning. Forget it. Just be real.” I’m tired of being fake. My cry is this: “Oh love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee!” And there I stop because for now that’s as far as I can get in that song. My soul is weary. So now, in this weariness, I’m trying to figure out what the heck it means to be real and live vulnerably and honestly in the brokenness. In my CE classes we talked about it a lot. To quote one of the wisest men I know, I am living in the tension. I have so much hope and positivity and I trust that healing will come. But in this moment, I want to be real while not losing that positivity that is central to me. And I have absolutely no idea what that means or what that looks like. But I just want you all to know that I do not have it all put together. I am at seminary and I am hoping to spend my life doing missions. But that will never mean that I have it all put together. Because that’s not what life is about. The point is not that I’ll follow Him perfectly, but that I’ll follow Him no matter what. We have these high expectations for our pastors and people in ministry. We expect them to be better than us. But the thing is they are just as human as us. And we should never ever expect perfection or anything like it from them. Life is about the journey of growth for everyone. And this journey is not a straight line, but a cycle. We think we’ve dealt with things, but somewhere down the road they come back in a new way. Because as long as we live on earth sin and temptation will never be gone from us. We will never fully overcome them. Even as pastors and missionaries. But praise the Lord that our hope is not in our ability to overcome them and to “succeed” in life, but in the fact that Jesus already overcame and is our salvation and only hope.

So the hope I will cling to until more healing comes is this: “Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’ve come. And I hope by Thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home.” I am clinging to the testimony that God has brought me this far and has carried me in His love. And I know He will bring me safely home one day. And until then He is with me always no matter what storms I walk through. So as I said at the beginning of this semester:

Jesus draw me ever nearer as I labor through the storm. You have called me to this passage and I’ll follow though I’m worn. May this journey bring a blessing, may I rise on wings of faith. And at the end of my heart’s testing with your likeness let me wake. Jesus, guide me through the tempest; keep my spirit staid and sure. When the midnight meets the morning, let me love you even more. May this journey bring a blessing. May I rise on wings of faith; and at the end of my heart's testing, with your likeness let me wake. Let the treasures of the trial form within me as I go; and at the end of this long passage let me leave them at your throne. May this journey bring a blessing. May I rise on wings of faith; and at the end of my heart's testing, with your likeness let me wake.

Home

What is home? This past week I've been greeted with the words: "Welcome home!!!" in three different locations. And I know in my heart that each of these is my home. And yet none of them are. I'm both confused and certain, unsettled and excited about home and what it means. Home is such a special concept. It's where my soul is welcomed and I know I belong. And ultimately I'm not going to find that in its perfection here on earth. But the reason I have so many homes is that there are places on this earth where I feel the welcome deeply and I know that this is indeed where I belong for this time. This stirs the longing inside me for my true home and brings so much joy. Because if home can feel this good here, how much better will it feel there?! I guess this is just turning into a journal of how all my travels have made me feel. But today I felt it was worth saying. I guess that's what this blog started off as anyways: travels. Oh how interrelated the concepts of travel and home are. I guess all I'm really saying is that going to Wheaton was going home. There are so many people who I truly know and who truly know me, people I would do anything for and know I can count on to do the same. Wheaton is the place where I grew up, I know it like the back of my hand. I don't need my google maps app there. :)  It will always hold a piece of my heart, especially as long as so many of my treasured loved ones live there. I rejoiced to be there and I left feeling blessed and content. I had been welcomed and loved. God revealed himself to me and spoke to me of heaven in relationships and the familiarity of that which my spirit knows and recognizes. But I arrived home in Denver and knew again that that's what it was. Home.  I saw my already beloved mountains that speak daily of his majesty and create a deep excitement to see how heaven could be more beautiful than this. I drove on the roads that are becoming familiar, hiked on a gorgeous path, and sat with a friend as we soaked in Gods presence here in our new home.  And I resonated with the Philip Phillips lyrics that God has been speaking to me these past few weeks "just know you're not alone cause I'm gonna make this place your home." But tonight I arrived in Pepperell, MA, a town that has long been near to my heart, and was again welcomed home. This place always amazes me. First, it's the place where my dads side of the family normally gathers for holidays so it holds a lot of memories with a lot of very special people who I love deeply. But it's even more. I always know I have a home here. There are several homes growing up where I learned how to care for others and be a good hostess. But this home was where that lesson of true hospitality no matter what that means was driven home most deeply. This is also the place I picture when I picture my ideal morning quiet time with God. Heaven sometimes looks to me like Auntie Sue and Uncle Bills back porch, sipping a cup of coffee, a dog or two at my feet, watching the sun rise over the beautiful fields. These three places- they are home. Not just because of what they are to me here, but because of the deep longing they awaken for that true home when all the pieces of my very separate homes can be pulled together in the place that my soul truly hungers for when I seek home. And until then, I rejoice that I can be in three of my beautiful homes in one week. Praise God for airplanes! So much joy.