holy crap
May 5, 2007
Sixteen days.
May 3, 2007
This might be typed a little differently than the way I usually write here. but thats ok.
There are sixteen days left of my freshman year of college.
I’ve been seeing a counselor here for a few weeks. Its making me actually care and actually want to figure out the Me stuff inside. For a while I had just stopped, and if anyone asked, I would tend to tell them stuff from last summer, or last year, that defined who I was then.
“Then we will no longer be like children, forever changing our minds about what we believe because someone has told us something different or because someone has cleverly lied to us and made the lie sound like the truth. Instead we will hold to the truth in love, becoming more and more in every way like Christ who is the head of his body, the church.” -Ephesians 4:14-15 (NLT). I also like the second verse in NIV “15Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ.”
I’m still a child in a lot of ways. And I think this year I regressed in my faith even. which is kinda ironic and sad. I mean, I’ve grown intellectually, and I know more stuff now than I did when I came in. I’ve read some great books, and I’ve enjoyed learning. But somewhere along the way, I came to the point where I assumed I was fine with or without Jesus. That I could pray or read or love on people when I felt like it, without Being with Jesus before or after that. And I know I’m romanticizing high school, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t this amazing prayer warrier always walking with Jesus. But I also know, I remember a lot of walks, and drives, and talks, and silences with my Jesus. This year, I haven’t done that nearly as much.
I also know that its not through acts or works that my relationship or even salvation status is determined. but, thats kinda how it naturally manifests itself in my life. which is another thing I’m working through, I guess.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people abour the World recently. Lots of people who want to save it too. I went to Displace Me! this weekend in Seattle, to make some sort of stand, to be a public reminder of these awful things that are happening in Uganda. IDP camps are no place to grow up. A state of war is no place to live (see Beka’s xanga for a good post on this too). War is possibly the stupidest thing that mankind does. mmm. minus rape and child abuse. alright. the third stupidest. The fourth stupidest is letting other humans starve.
And so I’ve been realizing. I do want to do something. I do want to “ich will die Welt retten” save the world. But before I presume to do that, I want to learn it. I want to breathe it, live it, cry it, love it. I want to travel to all these far off places. to empathize instead of drowning sympathy. I want to be poor for a little bit. I want to be hungry for a little bit more than 38 hours or whatever that fast was last week (all the money that our cafeteria didn’t spend on the food that the people who signed up didn’t eat, got donated to a fund for World Hunger). I want to know the faith of people who truly depend on it.
And then once I’ve done all that. Alright, Maybe once I’ve begun, then I’ll have the credentials for me. I’ll have shown my mom, myself, that I really am going to do it. That I’m not just going to end up teaching english in an urban high school, living a comfortable life on the north edge of town.
I do want to save the world. And I do want to make positive change. But thats not necessarily through ministry in the way we tend to think of ministry. Its more through politics. and advocacy. and its in the big things that are already working. i think. maybe. we’ll see.
i don’t even know truly, to be honest.
but right now. I will keep holding to the Truth that I know, in love. and with Love and Truth. i think I’ll be alright.
