Europe

I've got Europe on the mind and heart. . .and the Olympics just reinforce this right now. I've got men's figure skating on in the background - W.O.W. My skating abilities on display at Union Square in San Fran during the holidays are laughable in comparison. . .and they're sooooo young (or I'm old?)!

Anyways, why I'm writing all this is to invite you to pray with me, and many others, for Europe. A ministry of Campus Crusade, called Global Media Outreach, created this awesome website with a page for each country, giving you stats and specific prayer requests. What a great way for us to increase our heart for the world, asking God to do great things for He is certainly capable. And a fun bonus is that our geography skills will improve too! :)

I've signed up here for a daily email reminder to pray for a specific country every day for the next 40 days, starting tomorrow. Look at that, facebook will be a distant memory!

Facebook

Is it spring? I hope so!

Tomorrow is the start of Lent - a 40 day time of prayer and fasting leading up to Easter. I've actually never given up something for Lent. For the longest time I thought: that's only for Catholics. And after I got over that I realized that often I have impure motives when I try to give something up - it's usually not to glorify God and deepen my walk with Him. Well, the past couple of days I've been asking God "what would help take my walk with You to a deeper level?", wondering what He would say. I sense that the answer right now is facebook. So the plan is to not go onto facebook for the next 40 days (unless it's absolutely necessary for work purposes), spending that time in reading, fellowship, writing, prayer, etc. I'm excited for how God's going to use this to deepen my dependance on Him. . .and lessen my dependance on facebook. Please ask me how it's going! :)

Any thoughts on Lent?

Discover something new

I hope that I will always have a desire to discover new things, regardless of what stage I'm in (the post right below this one will help you understand where this thought comes from)!

One of these new things for me right now is the world of road bikes. I made my first Craig's List purchase on Friday and am now the owner of a Trek road bike! I am really excited about this new hobby and hope that the Lord will use it to open up opportunities for me to enjoy Him, His creation, and who He's made me and others to be even more!

can you believe it's a 1994?!

Valentine's Day

Hi friends! Hope you are well and feeling loved today. . .first and formost by the Lord!

I had a lovely afternoon with some of the Cru ladies. We decopauged journals, decorated cupcakes, and had a little discussion about beauty. We listened to a song titled, "There Will Never Be a More Beautiful You" - so true. I love helping others, and myself, grow in a biblical understanding of God and ourselves!

I've been reading a great book lately that I recommend to all woman. It is sweetly speaking to me in my singleness but is also writen for those in other stages of relationships. It's called "When I Get Married", by Jerusha Clark, and each chapter addresses a myth about marriage (ex: I'll always feel loved, I won't feel lonely anymore, life will be so much better, etc), replacing lies with truth shared via scripture and story - ah, sooo good.

I have a love/hate relartionship with singleness, though I am asking the Lord to continue to change my perspective so that I don't waste this season, but rather use it for His glory and my good. Here's an article I recently read and recommend to all the lovely single men and women reading this. It's titled "In the Meantime: What to do while waiting on God". Please go read it, but if you choose not to here's what the author encourages us to do:

Get to know God

Build a community

Do what you love

Discover something new

Help others

Buy dishes

Be reasonable

But Don't compromise

I'm encouraged this Valentine's Day - I hope you are too!

Incomprehensible

. . .and yet He has made a way for us to know Him through Jesus - amazing grace how sweet the sound.

"When we try to imagine what God is like we must of necessity use the that-which-is-not-God as the raw material for our minds to work on; hense whatever we visualize God to be, He is not, for we have constructed our image out of that which He has made and what He has made is not God. If we insist upon trying to imagine Him, we end with an idol, made not with hands but with thoughts; an idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand" (The Knowledge of the Holy, AW Tozer, pg 8).

Love Sweet Love

Hi friends,

Happy Friday!

I just stummbled upon this blog/website with lots of super fun and mostly easy Valentine's Day ideas. . .check it out HERE (I'm loving knowing how to link things!).

Ok, off to prep a "Chicken Fiesta Soup" to throw into the crock pot - oh how I love simple domesticity! :)

An Update

Just a quicky. . .then back to work, what a weird day! So, I'm going to have a root canal and crown done in the coming month. Today he removed the root and put some temporary filling/medication in there to ease the pain. I'll go in early next month to have the real stuff put in. Obviously, I don't really know what any of this means but I trust my dentist. It's going to be a long process though - lots of driving in the near future. If you read the other post in time, thanks for praying for me today!

Good things of the day:

- my dentist leaves for a medical missions trip tomorrow (yay for not earlier!) to Guatemala, pray for Him and His team!

- got to see my older brother for a 1/2 hour (the rest of the family were busy or out of town)

- hit 1000,000 miles on my car and it's still going strong (as far as I know)

- the first trees are blooming around town, one of my all time favorite things!

Off to prepare for an evangelism training I'm doing with our students after the weekly meeting tonight!

Dentist

Hi friends,

First off - thanks for help with the links thing. . .let's see if I can make it work:

Testing, Testing. . .one of my favorite blogs is THIS ONE!

Also, I stand corrected - Tebow is not going to be in the Superbowl, his commercial just happens to be during the Super Bowl. Now you know how much I know about professional football - nada! :)

Now a quick prayer request. I'm headed to the dentist today (which requires going home) because I've had some swelling and pain for a week and a half. Since I don't want to pop advil for the rest of my life I decided it was time to call and see what I should do. Pray that I would have peace about having to cancel meetings with students - I hate doing that. Pray that the Dr. would see what the problem is and be able to take care of it quickly. Thanks!

I'll close with a verse or 2 that I've been chewing on lately, from Romans 4:

8Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be."[d] 19Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah's womb was also dead. 20Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, 21being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. 22This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness." 23The words "it was credited to him" were written not for him alone, 24but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. 25He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.

Mulla

Do you ever use the word "mulla" instead of "money"? I'm not sure how it came about but my best friend and I often call it that.

Anyways, mulla is a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around. Especially when I am being enticed by the latest, greatest gadgets. Granted, like I mentioned in the 2nd of the 4 posts tonight, technology is not my thing, I do still find some of it to be very exciting and helpful and therefore very tempting.

Really, what I'm talking about here is the i-phone. If I'm honest with myself I've wanted one since they came out. And my desire to have one has just increased over time. Here are some of my current reasons as to why it would be so handy, in random order:
- maps and gps readily accessible for all the traveling and exploring I do
- helps to make downtime and breaks on campus more effective
- lightweight and easy to take anywhere, unlike a laptop
- networking and keeping in touch with students via email and facebook would be so much easier/faster
- a calendar that's quick and easy to access and update as no day looks alike in my life
- when talking to a student, perhaps one who is not a Christian and possibly will feel uncomfortable being seen with someone reading from a Bible with them, it would be so great to pull up a passage online - putting them at ease, hopefully to talk more comfortably about spiritual things instead of worrying about what others are thinking about them being seen with someone who has a Bible out (this, at Cal in particular, can have negative connotations)
- a decent camera to catch sweet moments in life at any time
- tunes to jam to at all times - but more so at times where I need to drown out the noises at a coffee shop so that I can actually focus and get some work done
- shortening my to-do list by being able to tackle things right away, instead of having to wait til I get home, which then cuts into my social life and the time that I need to recharge for the next day
- and the list goes on. . .

So, what's stopping me? Mulla. Can I justify the one time purchase? Perhaps. But the monthly cost? Not sure. What do you think? What have you decided about the i-phone, or similar devices, and why?

Oh - and the i-phone is not the only materialistic item I have on the mind right now. I'm also looking into getting a road bike which is yet another financial investment. Decisions decisions! More on that another time. . .

Does God Exist?

15 Cal students packed into my living room this evening to discuss the existence of God. How cool is that? They could have spent the hour and a half studying, napping, facebooking, or partying but they chose to tackle hard questions that are eternally significant - which we will continue to do every Tuesday night this semester.

This is so good for them. Professors at Cal and the subject matter they teach, as well as the way they teach it, can be so antagonistic toward the Christian world-view. Each of the women at small group tonight are beautiful, intelligent, and articulate. There's a reason why they're at Cal, and I believe one of those reasons is to grow a relationship with God - often through the testing and fire of being in a very hard spiritual climate. Many of them shared things that they have learned or are currently learning in classes that, from their perspective (maybe not the professor's) support the existence of God, how exciting! Many of them asked great questions, proving they are thinking deeply and desiring to truly believe in God's existence.

But, this is also so good for me. Just because I'm on staff with Campus Crusade doesn't mean I have all of the answers and know how to articulate them succinctly - I am very far from this. Truthfully, my childlike faith (that I'm thankful for!) is enough for me but not enough for the many people in my life who don't believe - I want to grow in my ability to articulate responses to hard questions more and more.

I'm so glad we're in this together! And I'm thankful that we can ask the Lord for wisdom, and He will provide the understanding and words that we need the moment that we need them. If you, or someone you know, has questions about spiritual things let's help each other move forward in them!

Links

As you can tell from my previous post, I can't figure out how to do links - technology is not my thing. Can anyone help?!

Football

Yep, I haven't blogged for almost a month and this is the topic I'm kicking things off with. . .football!

I love the game, and I love how sports bring people together. I also love praising God for the incredible things the bodies He created are capable of.

Granted I don't really stay on top of teams and players - especially in professional football, partially because since coming to Cal (sorry to say my alma mater's team doesn't really count. . .yet) my heart has been won over to the college football scene. And partially because I'm not the greatest at remembering the names of people I know, so why would I try to remember the names of people I won't ever really know?!

Anyways, I just read an incredible article in the Washington Post about Tim Tebow, a professional football player who's name has been coming up a lot lately. He is not only staring in the Super Bowl on Sunday but is also staring in a commercial that has brought about a lot of controversy.

Take 3-5 minutes to read this article, you won't regret it:

"Tebow's Super Bowl ad isn't intolerant, its critics are"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/01/AR2010020102067.html