Gracebug

We had a pretty amazing speaker this morning in class. Honestly I can’t tell you why he was so amazing, but coming out of it I am so on fire to get back to Big Red Welcome and start my three part plan for next semester.

1. Share the bridge with as many people as possible the first few weeks of school.

2. Find my woman.

3. Invest my life in her in order to pass on world vision.

Disciples making disciples. That’s how the Kingdom of God grows. And nothing makes me happier than God’s glory.

Additionally we went to Rick Warren’s church on Sunday and he actually preached a pretty good sermon. He did an awesome job of preaching out of the word. Granted it kind of bothered me that everything there was “purpose driven”. But I mean what did I really expect. No church is perfect. It was church.

On a less spiritual note, the honeymoon phase has officially ended. I no longer spring out of bed in the morning. Alas. I have been getting some delightful morning quiet times in while gazing at the beauty of the mountains. Ah, Pasadena! God has been so good!

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

Bacon wrapped hot dog!

We went to do beach evangelism today. It was really rather stressful. I was paired with Meghan, and she is almost as shy of people as I am. So that was interesting. We got rejected a lot. It was chill though. God’s words do not return void.

I don’t really have much to say. It’s Saturday. I got to sleep in which was really nice. I mean yeah the beach was cool. I came home exhausted and I’ve been watching The Vampire Diaries since to recharge.

Yeah I did just refer to Pasadena as home. Isn’t that cute? I actually don’t know how I feel about that.

I think I’ma go play nerts with some peeps. Laters.

I think the coolest thing that’s transpiring at IT at the moment is the developing relationships. Although I can’t really even compare anything to Perspectives because it’s in a class of its own. Double chin!

We visited the Mormon temple yesterday. It was very informative and educational, the poor sisters who got bombarded with our questions were amazing sports about it. But I’m not really sure if I like knowing what I now know about the LDS church.

For all my whovians out there, you know that episode where Amy and 11 visit new Great Britain and there are those creepy puppet poll booths and you watch the video about what they did to the star whales and you can choose to either protest or forget? Yeah honestly if I had that choice about the Mormon faith I might push the forget button. Maybe. Except…

I am so blessed to belong to a faith where I don’t have to work for my salvation. There aren’t any levels of heaven that I have to work to get to the highest one. My God is so big he can do whatever He wants and it doesn’t really matter how good or bad or righteous I am. It is literally God who does His work for me, not the other way around. Like the Mormons I know that I will be reunited with my family after I die, but that is because they’ve all admitted that their righteous works are like filthy rags before God and they’ve accepted God’s forgiveness through Jesus Christ’s death on the cross. Additionally, not only will my biological brothers and sisters will be in heaven, but my brothers and sisters in Christ will be there as well. I have the hugest family ever, guys! Comprised of literally every person who has ever laid down their own works and accepted the righteousness that God offers us through faith in Jesus Christ’s death.

How can I, being so blessed, stand by while people all over the earth are trying and failing to be good enough for heaven? I have the good news that brings peace. That brings an end to the exhaustion of trying while simultaneously giving 100% assurance of salvation. Why would I keep that to myself?

Funny story behind this picture. We were walking to the neighborhood grocer when literally 30 seconds before we walked past this “Beware of Dog” sign we were startled out of our socks by a very large dog who had been hiding in the bushes. There was a fence between us and the dog so it was fine, but it was terrifying. And then we walked by this sign and there was just a little tiny dog so we decided to get a picture. Or rather I did. Oh the irony!

As I was doing my Perspectives homework this afternoon I found one thing rather amusing/astonishing/amazing. I guess in Mark 1:25 Jesus tells that demon to be silent and the literal translation of the Greek word is “be strangled”. So basically Jesus strangled a demon. Jesus is a demon strangler. If that doesn’t make you respect him a little bit more than I don’t even know what will impress you.

Anyways that article was written by this guy Gregory A. Boyd, and later he states “In the light of Jesus’ view of the kingdom of God, it seems highly peculiar that many New Testament scholars over the past several hundred years have concluded that the historical Jesus was, in one way or another, simply a moral teacher.” I agree. Moral teachers don’t strangle demons.

I earnestly apologize that all my photo-a-day’s have been just pictures of me. Mostly selfies. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of whipping out my camera whenever there’s something exciting happening. In any event, I spent five hours this afternoon reading that huge tome that I am (sniffing?) in the selfie. So yeah. Not much opportunity for sight-seeing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll explore the library. It’ll be an adventure.

Today I read an article by John Piper and man oh mackerel is that man quotable.

“At the bottom of all our hope, when everything else has given way, we stand on this great reality: the everlasting, all-sufficient God is infinitely, unwaveringly, and eternally committed to the glory of his great and holy name.” -John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad

So yeah, today we learned about God’s glory and how worship is the basis for missions. Well and for just life in general. If worship isn’t the basis for your life, you’re doing it wrong. That’s what I took away from the hours and hours I did of reading today. Happy Wednesday!

We had our first day of the Perspectives course today. Can I just say that my mind is blown? We talked about the Biblical basis of missions and really hit hard God’s promise to Abraham that the nations would be blessed through him. I came away with two things: One, nothing is more important than God’s call to witness and two, buy me a one way ticket to the world! So basically if you are a human person and you want a worldview overhaul, even one day of Perspectives will do that for you.

The flip side to starting perspectives is that it’s a massive amount of work. Basically I’m doing a fifteen week course in fifteen days. I spent all afternoon(and I do mean all afternoon) reading the (incredible) articles for the class and completing the homework. I’m so excited to continue learning though!

God is definitely moving in a lot of ways here. In one respect, it’s very overwhelming and I don’t even know what to think about first, but on the other hand I am fully convinced that God is molding me and shaping me into the woman He wants me to be.

Which is why it’s exciting you get to see my progress through this blog!

Love Y’all

We had a work day today, which basically meant that I stripped a few beds to bless WCIU and then worked on my inductive bible study. I mean and I walked to Vons and bought a jug of sweet tea, thinking “I need a bigger water receptacle. Oh here’s a nice big jug. Oh and it’s sweet tea as well! Win win!” Which had the unfortunate consequence of me now having to drink all that sweet tea. Bummer.

This evening we had our first Project night and Matt Brown spoke about being real and genuine people. It was a little convicting, I’m not going to lie. Accountability was something he stressed. That scares me. accountability is scary. He also talked about how all sin has a root cause in either fear or pride. This also is scarily accurate. So yeah. Top notch. The spirit is moving and convicting. We shall see what happens next.

Tomorrow is the first day of Perspectives. I’m really excited but nervous at the same time. Since we’re doing the class in days instead of weeks, so each day has basically a week’s worth of homework and readings. I’m a little apprehensive… It’ll be good though.

Night Y’all. It’s almost 1am home time. For those of y’all at home that are worried about how late I’m staying up: It’s only 11pm here. Peace.

There be a picture of my living quarters. It’s a little tight, but it’s starting to feel like my space. I mean I have my soft green blanket, how can it be anyone’s but mine. You may also notice I’m a little bit more red than yesterday. I will explain why presently.

Today we had our first day of evangelism. Which is awesome and terrifying at the same time, right? So yeah this morning we went over the bridge illustration, got into groups, and when to college campuses to witness to random students. I didn’t put on sunscreen, hence the red face. But it was so worth it.

Because my my partner and I led a young woman to Christ this afternoon. Somehow, despite our fumblings and mumblings(mostly on my part) God used us to save her.

AND THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING!!!! Seriously!!!!!!

Coming off of this experience, I am so excited for the next six times we go out and evangelize. Seriously, God is so powerful and he just does what he wants. Period. And if he wants to use you to speak his truth to someone there’s no amount of stuttering that can thwart his plan.

Now the really awesome part is that I am already seeing application for when I get back to school in the fall. Every year at the beginning of fall semester the navs does a huge recruitment thing where we get people to fill out a spiritual interest survey and later follow up to invite them to nav weekly meetings as well as to share the very same bridge illustration with them. I’m not going to lie, last year as I was following up I completely fudged the whole sharing the gospel thing. Talking about Jesus can be really scary. But the thing that I learned today is that it is SO REWARDING!!!!

The first lady I talked to this morning just shut me down. I wasn’t even able to finish the illustration. I could have stopped right then and been like “Yeah, this just isn’t for me.” But she didn’t! I did talk to that second person, and she came to Christ! Now I am just so stoked to go take this new found perspective back to Nebraska.

Additionally we started learning about the inductive method of studying the bible. To be perfectly honest, this is kind of the way that we did the Romans study with navs, only not quite. It’s a little different. But seriously I am so excited to learn this method. It’s so thorough and deep! I am just so excited to dive into God’s word. So excited.

However, I am sunburnt and I’ve had a few adrenaline rushes today, so I’m fairly beat.

At this point I could really use prayers for adjusting to my schedule and living like I’m running a marathon and not trying a 7 week long sprint.

Love y’all!!! (I may come home with a bit of a southern twang. Sorry ’bout it. A lot of the participants/staff have accents and it’s rubbing off.)