True Foundational Studies

It's been ten days since the big move and I think the culture shock is beginning to ware off. Granted, I only moved across town, but the difference in culture and surroundings is VERY different. I'm now in the full time undergraduate college world. It's so strange. Aside from all of the changes and challenges and various other speed bumps along the way, it has been a wonderful week and a half!! I'm meeting more people than I can remember (the internal rolodex can't keep up!!) and I'm getting the feel of campus life again. I'm remembering what academia is like, and I am also thankful that I have a surprisingly small number of formal papers to do this semester!! I think the thing I am most thankful for, however, is the time that I took off of school.
I cannot even describe the difference it has made. I've been reflecting on the past few years over the past week and a half. If given the opportunity to go back and have a re-do, there are things I would have done differently, things I would skip over quickly and things that I would have held onto a little longer... There are a lot of things that I wish I had done better, or differently, but I wonder if it would have been as meaningful had it looked clean and pretty.
The things I am most thankful for are the trial of living in community with other broken and imperfect people, learning to take risks, learning to be vulnerable, realizing that there are few people I truly trust, learning that mis-trust feels safer, but separates people from one another... All of these are foundational lessons that have led me to here and now, and I'm finding out how no classroom could ever as effectively teach these lessons as experience would. What an honor it is to have had those experiences!! Despite the difficulty of them. God sure seems to know what he's doing.
I know this journey hold so much more and I'm so excited to have God's providence in the past revealed to me in the presence. We serve a Good God! Amen?

...In Remembrance Of Me

I never really understood communion. As a young girl, moving to many different places, and in and out of many different churches, I always thought it a strange ritual. I never could understand why we ate a stale cracker and and then washed it down with grape juice from a tiny cup. Now that I'm older I have found that I still don't understand it completely, but God has shared precious things with me about that sacred ritual that seems so odd.
Jesus came to set us free, right? He came to stand in our place on judgement day so that we would be found clean and free of sin, but what if there's more? What if that cleansing took place now, in this life here on earth.
A few weeks ago after a moving time of silence after communion, God began to speak to me heart. In our time of communion, God asked me to stop trying to keep myself safe. He asked me to let him be my protector. Then again, today, as we took communion, I heard the faint voice of my King whispering to me. It said, "You've always wanted something tangible of me. This is the tangible representation of my love for you. Do this in remembrance of me."

Our God is a tangible God. We can taste, see, smell and touch his goodness.