Martin Luther King Jr. Day

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf

Some timeless words from MLKJ. What an inspired piece of work this is. Faith in action.

a late night thought

Lately as I do my slow reads of small passages of the Bible, the Lord is pressing the weight of each word on me as I read and reread. It's like each word is a little pebble dropped into water, drifting slowly down to settle on the underwater land - slowly they drift down, and slowly they sink in a bit more, and wow! they pop off the page.

Last night as I was trying to fall asleep I thought of what good practice this is for slowly looking at and weighing the lives of each and every person that I come in contact with. I think the tendency for reading Scripture and being with people is to rush, rush, rush through what we think we know to get to something that strikes us as foreign, and then we sit and mull. I think our tendency is to try to sort people and scripture into "known" and "unknown" categories, so that we can skim past the "known" and fixate on the "unknown." With people, we want to brush off the uninteresting and with Scripture, we want to rush through the familiar.

Anyhow, basically I think that a slow reading of each of the words in the Word is good practice for looking at people with thoughtfulness and slowness to judge.

dreams of late

I have had a couple very interesting dreams lately.

The first was that I was driving on a winding road that somehow also was a very high tree branch and I lost control of my car (which I was sort of driving flippantly) in a turn, but managed to jump out and cling to a tree branch as the car disappeared. Then as I was hanging on the limb, feeling myself very likely of falling soon, a male (not sure of age) came to take my place and I somehow watched him from a safe place as he managed to easily climb up. Then me and my cousin's wife wandered around the low-land looking for him. I also think I might have been driving away from a hospital, if that means anything to you. The whole thing sounds pretty Christ-like to me.

The second dream was just last night. My sister and I were in a canoe. I was sitting in the front, and all of a sudden I see we are on the edge of a massive, sheer waterfall. Before I can even try to stop us, I feel us tip and start falling. The thing is, I know we will survive it. I see my sister quickly land in safe waters, but I stay in the canoe and make my way down more gradually. I'm kind of scared, but exhilarated by the whole thing too. I didn't remember me landing, but I remember being close. The waterfall was huge and powerful. The first thing I thought of with this is that it represents relationships; my sister was in a hurry to get married (and married a really nice guy).

New Years 2007

Here are some things I've been thinking on, supplied to me from a variety of wise people, that I would like to move from theory to practice:

1) I really wish that I would stop desiring an easy life. God is not trying to secure a perfect earthy existence for us, so we should not be trying to do this for ourselves. His desire is for us to grow more in the image of Christ, and that does not happen when things run smoothly. I want to learn to cling more tightly to Jesus and to spiritual things - like faith, hope, love and peace - and not to be so dependent on my earthly environment.

2) Trials and suffering purify the heart, and they are just as much a part of God's goodness and love as his pain-free blessings. We are called to consider trials a deeply joyful experience, even though we are in pain. There's a bit of duality, but it's not contradictory, in theory. Yeah, I know. I'll keep you posted. There's a disconnect there for me.

3) Faith is perservering bravery that refuses to despair. I need to stop fearing extreme situations... like being in relationships with men. Look at Jaguar Paw in Apocalypto. Our finest moments are when we meet challenges with fearlessness - think about how he jumped over the waterfall. Exhilarating! Imagine how much greater our trust in the Lord would be if we were out on the limb a bit more often.

4) The Lord has also really been showing me how much I am letting fear rule certain areas of my life instead of him. And it is a deep seeded trait, lodged within my physical body. I feel like I've suddenly been made aware of a Lord of the Rings type fortress that exists within me. Corny comparison, I know, but this fear runs deep and is old, old, old.

So these are some themes that I keep coming back to in a theoretical kind of way, and I'm really hoping that they make it into a cellular kind of faith - deep in my bones.

My New Years resulutions are so spend more time in focused prayer and scripture reading. I'm praying that the Lord will increase my desire to do these disciplines, and I am praying that he will change my heart as I spend more time dwelling in his truth. I'm really hoping that this type of daily maitenance will keep me from the minor bouts of depression I usually go through. I'm also hoping the Lord will give me greater self awareness and understanding this year. I'm also hoping to plan a cool vacation, look into some mission trips abroad, spend more time writing, and for the Lord to put serving others on my heart more often, spend less money on fluff, be more consistent with tithing and actively seeking out the lost. and to attack the big course load I've signed up for in Spring, and to push for doing my personal best. and I'm hoping that I will absorb the yoga training well and be able to turn it into another avenue that I can use to help others and glorify the Lord. and I'm hoping that the Lord will be priming me to thoroughly enjoy being in a future relationship with a good, godly man. and to get into the best shape of my life, eat healthy, and learn to cook more meals.