Four Weeks and Counting

This last week and a half has been insane. In so many ways. I am tired, my soul is tired... And I don't have the capacity to write about what God is currently teaching me. So, here's a rough update of my life.

1. School is over in a month. What?? Homework, projects, tests and Chemistry labs galore... These next four weeks will be busy, busy, busy.

2. I got a job for the summer! I'm working at a day camp out in Williamson county (it's about 45 minutes from my house) as the Ropes Director. They told me two things I'll never hear working at the Beams: the program is entirely yours, do whatever you want with it, and budget is not an issue. Um... Okay! I can work with that. And even better? I get to come back to my house every evening, and I have my weekends to myself. Check.

3. I'm heading home on Friday to celebrate my best friend's bachelorette party! This has been many months in the making, so I am so excited to see it finally happen! And I am taking a few days to hang out in Kirksville with Gretchen afterwards.

4. After that, I'm heading back to Stl to work at Honeybaked for a few days for Easter. And I was informed today that I am getting a raise. Yes!

5. I was supposed to be running a 50k with my dad. But, see, there is this ankle of mine that I broke a few years ago and was too hot-headed to let heal properly. It is now proving to be quite the problem. I've done everything I can to keep it from getting worse, but it doesn't look like I'm going to be able to do the race. I'm pretty bummed, but it isn't worth injuring something else over. So, to the doctor I go. I'm praying I don't need surgery.

6. Sam and I are planning on driving to Seattle at the end of the summer. 5,000 miles. Why? Because we can, of course.

7. God is good. I am stubborn. And I thank him every day that he fights for me, which often means fighting me. I thank God that he wins every single time. 

Imagine Abundant Compassion

Imagine Abundant Compassion. 

These words hang, cast in metal, on the wall in the back of an artist's workshop in the middle-of-nowhere Illinois. (I tried to buy it, but the best she'd let me walk out of the store with was the "breathe" one pictured above) I saw them yesterday, and I've not been able to get them out of my head. Maybe it's because I've been thinking just the same thing for a while now. And to see them staring at me from the most unexpected of places, well... that's a hard message to ignore.

A dear friend of mine once asked me what I thought it meant to understand humanity. The question has been on my mind since he first posed it to me almost a year ago, but I never could come up with a good answer. That drove me crazy, so I never answered at all. Bits and pieces I understood. But I never could seem to grasp the concept all at once. It seemed too big, too complex to answer in one sentence. And, in all honesty, I was too caught up in myself to give the idea the attention it deserved.

I gleaned a greater understanding of it while traveling in Europe. I saw the kind of hunger and poverty that we never see in America. But, even then, I wanted the quick fix. My first response was the desire to patch it up and move on. Give the hungry food, give the homeless shelter, and move on to the next good deed.

That surface desire deepened to an ache a few weeks later, in Amsterdam. Standing in the Red Light District, I realized that there really is no quick fix to the suffering of the world. God wounded my heart, not for the lack of food or shelter that his people have, but the state of their hearts. In Amsterdam, for example, the real tragedy of the Red Light District is not their profession, but that their hearts do not know the love, worth, and value they have in God. The answer is not just a change of circumstance, but a change of heart.

Last week I spent a few hours talking to a friend who works with a ministry that provides low-cost housing to the homeless in Nashville. They also work to pair up the residents with volunteers who hang out with them, teach them life skills, and generally invest in them. He said that in his six years of working with the ministry, one thing has stood out: having or not having housing doesn't make any difference at all. If they cannot find a volunteer to pair with the resident, the resident almost always moves out. Without someone to give them some sort of value, without the presence of relationship, the ministry doesn't work. The residents choose to go back to the streets.

So far I've just got bits and pieces of what God is revealing to me. I have no idea what it means to really understand and love his people. I don't really know if it can be summed up in one concise thought. But it is a question that God has laid on my heart, and the more I pursue it, the deeper my heart aches for God's people. The deeper and more abundant he makes my compassion.

I remember standing in Amsterdam, feeling overwhelmed and broken and helpless. I stood in the middle of a crowded street and wept, simply because they were my beloved brothers and sisters. I wanted to run away, to wipe away my tears, to hide my face. Stay put, God said. Be broken for them.

"But I can't fix this," I said.

No, God said. But you can be broken for them. Let it make your heart soft, he said. Just watch what I do with it.

I think understanding humanity starts with compassion. And compassion? It comes from being wounded deeply.

It does what we so badly need: it awakens our souls from slumber. 

"Awake, O sleeper, arise from the dead, 

And Christ will give you light." Eph 5:14

May God wound you deeply.  

Wound Me Deeply

I've been back in the States for two and a half months now. Two and a half months, and I am still being changed by what I experienced last semester. Two and a half months, and the adventure is nowhere near being over. Two and a half months, and I am just beginning to understand the God I came face to face with on the other side of the world.

He challenged me. He confronted me. He pushed me. He annihilated my comfort zone. He swept me off my feet. He changed everything about me.

How?

He wounded me deeply.

And I thank him for it every day.

God brought me face to face with the suffering of his people. With the needs, hopes, desires and dreams of his most beloved children. He broke my heart for what breaks his. And I am just beginning to understand what that really means.

Coming home was crazy. It was Christmas, I was working, and I had a bunch of friends to try and catch up with before I headed back to Nashville. Nashville came, and I had a new roommate to get used to living with. School came, and I had severe reverse culture shock to face. And throughout all of that, God deemed it a good time to make me wild and panic-inducing promises.

And now, all of that has quieted down. Two months into school, and this is the first week that my head has actually been quiet. No more crazy bouts of spiritual warfare (they were ridiculously intense for a while, in response to God's wild promises) a new level of understanding with my roommate, and I have adjusted to living life as a different person.

What lay beneath all that noise, waiting for my life to settle enough for my stubborn self to pay attention? That deeply wounded, deeply pained, deeply distraught heart that God fostered in me for his people. It lay dormant for a while, hovering just beneath the surface, waiting for the quiet moment it needed to re-emerge.

Re-emerge it did. With fervor. With fire.

"For I have come to set the world on fire." Luke 12:49

I feel called. But I do not know to what, exactly. I feel driven by this wonderfully wounded heart of mine, but I have been wondering to what. I'm not sure. But sitting around waiting for divine inspiration is a surefire way to suffocate the stirring of the Spirit in me. No, lack of concrete direction is no excuse for lack of action.

God has laid a project on my heart to figure it out: find out what other people around Nashville are doing. What moved them? What need did they see that God drove them to meet? Every time, I hear God tell me the same thing: talk to the people around me. Talk to the people who give of themselves every day. I'm assuming that the more I talk to people and find out how they put their wounded hearts to action, it will become clear how God plans to put mine into action. Or it'll be something completely different.

Either way, here we go.