Oy last night's post was way intense so let's lighten things up.

Yesterday I watched the movie Zoolander with my roommate and our friend Lis. It was quite funny (unlike some of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson's other movies), clever and full of good lines. Some of my faves:

"Words only hurt if you try to read them. Don't play their little game," - Derek Zoolander.

"There has got to be something more to life than just being really, really, really ridiculously good looking- and I intend to find out what that is." Zoolander

After Matilda tells Hansel and Zoolander that she was bulimic, they stare at her in awe and Hansel whispers "You can read minds?" Derek says "Cool!"

Zoolander on racism: "Racism is stupid. I mean, who cares what color a person's skin is, so long as they're really really good-looking?"

Zoolander: "If there's anything that this horrible tragedy can teach us, its that a male model's life is a precious, precious commodity. Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, doesn't mean that we, too, can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident."

I also learned that the answer to life's problems is an Orange Mocha Frappucino.

Photos coming soon!

Its been so long since I logged in that I forgot my username and password. Oy.....

I feel as if God has turned up the heat and the pressure in the furnace lately. I'm not going to go into detail now... I suppose it probably has something to do with my upcoming trip out of the country. Or maybe its all totally the way God intended for it to be. There's one particular issue that's been worrying me a lot lately. As I told some people in housegroup last week, in the last few weeks I've felt more in the crucible than maybe I've ever felt in my life. When I say that, I don't mean that I've never felt WORSE in my life, because I definitely have.

But I can see all this as a real struggle to place my faith and trust in God and not in circumstances, or conventional wisdom, or my own ability to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish. Or to put it another way, God has told me one thing, but circumstances look totally the opposite, and caught in the middle is my poor heart and spirit, broken and miserable and much afraid. And there are multitudes of temptations to abandon what I feel God has told me and do something else that will make me feel a lot better right now.

Yesterday I spent most of the day yelling at God "I'm sick of this, I'm totally sick of this and I want out!" But in the evening I went to a celebration service at church, actually the first praise and worship service in the building that it has taken, I don't know, ten to fifteen years to obtain. And it was all about "Lord you are good and your mercy endureth forever" and "With a mighty hand and outstretched arm, His love endures forever", etc..... Dozens and dozens of reminders of God's power, God's faithfulness, God's promises and God's love. We were reminded of the story of the great struggles and waiting that our church has collectively undertaken to get into this building and how God has been faithful through all of it. And as I was there I felt really convinced, powerfully convinced, that it was actually quite real.

So how then can I choose to walk away from what God has promised and try to find the next best thing just to make myself feel better now and keep myself entertained for the time being? At times this is exactly what I am very sorely tempted to do; especially when I am caught in the grip of lies such as "I'm going to get gipped" and "God keeps His promises to other people but not to me" and "I'm trusting in God but He's not going to come through for me" and "He's going to send me into the wilderness and I will be totally alone and miserable". Especially when I feel like a loser when I see other people get their prayers answered and I have to keep waiting for mine. Especially when the circumstances keep going in the wrong direction!

I constantly fight the desire to take things into my own hands. There are SO many ways that I could take things into my own hands. And some of them would probably make me feel better. Some of them probably would not make me feel better. And sometimes I ask myself "How can it be God's best for me to feel THIS miserable? Wouldn't God want me to feel better?" I guess the truth is, I don't know how to hang on to what God has told me and feel better.

So that is what being in the crucible is like for me right now.

Atlanta retreat

In four weeks I will be leaving the country to go on a little ministry trip to a small country in Central Asia. I will be traveling with two buddies from the Evanston Vineyard, seven wonderful folks from the Atlanta Vineyard and we will also meet up with a brother and a sister from a church in Rio de Janiero, Brazil. Last weekend "Evanston" went on a retreat with "Atlanta" to meet each other, bond and learn some stuff. It was fabulous!


















This is the house we stayed at. It is on Lake Lanier, just outside Atlanta, Georgia. Fabulous!



















It had a beautiful view.








Three of the guys....Jason, Mike and John.


















All the ladies from North America...Luane, Branty, me, Karen, Rogeria. Now we just need Tatianna!



And, as long promised, here is that now famous photo of Mike doing the "dead cockroach" at my 30th birthday bash!