quotes

this lovely thing was part of an art contest put on by a local plumbing company that was a major sponsor of the portland art festival. it got me thinking about quotes. here are a few of my favorites...

"being powerful is like being a lady. if you have to tell people you are, you aren't."
~margaret thatcher~

"christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."
~g.k. chesterton~

"God moves in two ways; events and processes."
~steve trujillio~

"when my life was thrifty thrifty
my one sheep soon grew to fifty
after that i lived for fun
and found my flock was back to one"
~welsh proverb~

¡GOOOOOOOOOL!

i must confess i am a bit of a soccer fan(football, for all you non-americanos). i'm too much of a cheapskate to spring for cable tv, so i've had to content myself with watching whatever games i am able to catch on the spanish channel.


i might lose friends for admitting this, but i cheered for argentina today. yes, mexico made the first goal (and a lovely goal it was), but i still cheered for the other guys. it's awkward because i have many mexican friends and many argentine friends. i don't quite know what decided it for me. maybe it was their six-point demolition of serbia & montenegro, maybe it was some subconscious sissy-girly reason like preferring their uniform to mexico's. i can't really say. anyway, it was a fabú edge of my sofa game. i'm sure my neighbors think i'm nuts.

i've always loved soccer in my way. i'm not a huge sports watcher, so any sport that will extract a saturday afternoon from my life - in spanish, no less - for me is pretty hardcore. maybe it's because it's the only sport i ever played. i was six and i was terrible. for years i gloated about the fact that we never lost a single game...but then i wondered if they both teams they'd won. we were just six and seven year olds after all. regardless, it gave me a love of the game that will serve me well when i live anywhere outside the states.

(speaking of the states, can we just pretend we're not there. it's a little embarrassing that we suck so bad.)

don / alex

 

tonight i ran into an old friend that didn't remember my name. i couldn't really hold it against him because the last time i saw him was nearly a year ago, and he was incredibly drunk. at the time he told me his name was alex but tonight he went by don. you can read about it here.

last time i saw him i was with jben, and we prayed that God would set him free from bondages. God even gave don (or alex, as he was known to me at the time) a physical symbol of spiritual freedom. you really should read the old post. it's a great story.

so tonight was "can we help?" and as we were walking back to the church from pioneer square i saw alex (only i couldn't remember his name either, and he told me it was don) sitting on the bench in a bus stop shelter. i stopped and said hello and asked him if he remembered me. he kindof did. i asked him how he was and he told me he was sober for a whole week now. i wow-ed and congratulated and asked him if i could pray for him to have strength to keep going on such a tough path. he said ok and my pastor steve came over and prayed.

as we were leaving steve asked him if he was connected to any AA meetings. don said no, so steve pulled out his resource book (part of what we do with "can we help?" is help people find and access community resources, agencies and ministries, so we had our resource book with all that info right there!) and we wrote down the phone number for AA of oregon, so they could help him get into meetings downtown. then he asked us if we knew where he could get a blanket. we tried to find a place to get him one tonight, but everything was closed. but it turns out he's native american. there are three full pages in our resource book for agencies and ministries that focus on help for native americans, so we gave him the address and phone number of a downtown agency that helps native americans get all the help they need accessing programs just for them.

just then the rest of our team came by on the way back to the church and one of the girls recognized don as someone her husband had prayed for last week when we were out doing "can we help?". i got to say, "look at that! see how much God cares about you?". i told him i'd look for him next week and he'd have to tell me all about how it went with getting to those help programs.


he is why we do what we do. the 'least' according to society - a homeless alcoholic with out even a blanket to his name. and yet he matters so much to God that God brings people into his life over and over just to say, "i love you. i haven't forgotten you. you matter to me. i can lift you out of this." what an amazing God!

swimming

i have always enjoyed swimming. i'm no champion, and i'd never win a race, but i love it. which is good, because it's about to change my life.

being chubby is a vicious cycle. the less you exercise the more weight you gain. the more weight you gain the more humiliating it is to haul your fifth wheel onto the treadmill or stairmaster and exercise, so you don't exercise. then you gain more weight. you see where this is going.

as almost anyone reading this knows, i've been "curvy" most of my life. i'm so curvy that my curves have curves. which brings us back to the being humiliated when i work out thing. i have made some pretty significant lifestyle changes (like selling my car and walking everywhere i go) to force myself into a more active and healthy lifestyle. i have been eating better overall, though i still have my moments, but since i've made all those changes i haven't seen any change in my physique. and it's been six months now. so i decided to join a health club.

ever noticed that when you do a difficult thing that is the right thing, that God meets you in the middle? He does. as my friend rachael says, "the hard thing is usually the right thing, but if you do the hard thing God will bless it". words to live by. really.

so i made the sacrifice, and though i'm saving up for my trip in september i joined the gym that's a block from my apartment. i tried to get the membership sales guy to cut me a deal since i can say with confidence that i will probably never use any of the machines. but he said he couldn't do a pool-only membership, but he'd cut the joining fee to the same fee the one-year membership people pay, since i said i would've done a year but i'm moving to scotland in december. that saved me around $60.

i'm really dragging this story out, aren't i?

anyhoo, i went in on monday night for my first swim. talk about spectacular! i forgot how very much i love swimming. just being in the water was making me grin. i thought about my developmentally disabled cousin that would shriek and flail with ecstatic glee when we put him in the pool. i didn't quite go that far...on the outside. i assure you i was shrieking with glee in my heart. laugh if you will, but you must admit that it's the small things in life that bring the greatest pleasure.

so i told you this story to tell you that God is good. He knew that i would swim an hour a day, five to six days a week, if i joined that club, so He motivated me to do just that. He knew i would only really do it if it was convenient, so He made it so. He gave me ridiculous pleasure in something that gave me about the most complete workout of any form of exercise, and made it so fun for me that i will even wear a swimsuit in public. now that is a miracle. doesn't this have, "sheena, God loves you and wants to help you be the best and healthiest sheena you can be" written all over it?

what a good God.

catch-up

 

here i am again at the end of the weekend with a week's worth of blogging to catch up on. this week was good, busy, crazy, nice, stressful and full of all the reasons i love living in downtown portland...especially in summer.

okay, so there's a good ten days before it's really summer. but in portland it's 'summer' once rose festival rolls around. (well, really cinco de mayo, since there's a big carnival on the water front for that too, but the weather's usually pretty wet still in may.) last weekend was the starlight parade (at night - hence the name) and yesterday was the grand floral parade. i attended neither, but love the influx of people downtown to enjoy the festivities with family and friends.

instead of going to the parade yesterday, i stayed in bed late (very late!) and then caught argentina kicking the ivory coast's butt. i'm so glad the spanish chanel comes in on my flimsy antena. i'll watch soccer (football, fútbol, futebol, fusball...whatever you want to call it) in any language, we just don't usually get games here on regular broadcast tv. another plus about moving to europe!

later i met up with the chick posse for some much needed sit-and-chat over an array of deep-fried happy hour munchies. we had to pop over to the store to look for a few thing, but no, we didn't end up buying any sunglasses. life's been pretty hard for one of the girls, so it was nice to just be, to just relax and laugh. not that we don't always laugh anyway, but the point was to enjoy eachother's company. that we did.

and then i stayed up til 5am reading a book. it was a really good book called kissing adrien by siri l. mitchell. christian romance would be the classification, but the christain part and the romance part were secondary to the heroine's self-discovery. i highly recommend it. well, if you're the type that likes travel and chick-flicks. (mitchell also wrote another great read called chateau of echos.) i had never in my life stayed up all night to read a book, until about two months ago. now i've done it twice. i better not get into a habit of this!

which brings me to today. church, lunch, laundry, nap, tv, email, blog. that's my day. that's my week. not too quiet, not too dull.


(...oh, i should add that i got to talk to jben this week. deifnately a highlight!) 

empty

whoever said empty was a bad thing? we spend our whole lives putting into ourselves so that we don't have to see what's at the bottom.

but what if we did see it? what would happen? who would we find there? do we dare to risk that?

the last few years of my life have really brought that home to me. i cannot be successful, beautiful, likeable, reliable or worth anything of my own making. i've tried and it doesn't work, so i tried covering it all up, but i cannot change something when i don't know what it is, or if it's even really there. but the more aware of this i am the harder it seems to be to let go of the things i use to fill myself so that i don't feel empty.

because empty means i'm not in control

and if i'm not in control i'm not safe. and there were times in my life where i wasn't safe, and i can't let that happen again. so it's up to me to make myself full of whatever i think will make me seem however i should seem to be loved. wanted. safe. but i try to make it work and i find i can't do it.

you see, it's an ugly circle. it's the power of me. it only changes when God asks if He can pour me out and replace it with Him, and i say yes. and do you know what this is called?

holiness.

and you thought holiness was the absence of sin. it isn't perfection, it's transparency. it's being visible before God. not hiding anything, not having any secrets. it's what david was talking about in psalm 139:23-24 when he said, "search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life."

the only way to get to that place is to risk. to trust. to take God at His word. to take a deep breath and let go. there's no safety in knee-jerk self protection. there's no healing in being in control just to make sure i don't ever get hurt again. as morganstern put it, "life is pain. anyone that tells you otherwise is selling something."

the only way to know the Father is to embrace the work of the cross and quit trying to make my own way. the Lord is talking to the church, not to the unsaved, when He says in revelation 3:20 "look! here i stand at the door and knock. if you hear me calling and open the door, i will come in, and we will share a meal as friends."

the call to emptiness is not a call to lack of existence, it's a call to relationship. to knowing the love of the God who longs to free us from the poison of our own choices and the choices of others. the emptiness is so that we will be transparent enough to reveal His light, His beauty, His love, His glory.

* * * * *

do i dare to take the Father's hand
not knowing where this path will end
believing He can truly see
through all this haze that's blinding me

and will i really trust the words He said
though they seem untrue when i look ahead
and will i let Him set me free
from the folly of trying to trust in me

thursday contemplation

tonight kathleen came over. we've been getting together on thursdays for a couple months. the idea is to pray for edinburgh, both for the city and for the people there we love that are running after God's heart for that city.

since i became really truly clear that it's time for me to move to edinburgh we have had an on-going dialogue about what is in my heart to do while i'm there. it's been a gift from God to be able to think those things out loud, things that have been in my heart and silent for years. it's made me realize some things about myself.

i sell myself short...all the time. i see myself as a 'supporter' a 'helper' and an 'implementer', but God's asking me to be a bit less safe and dare to put legs to my own dreams. i'm seeing so clearly how everything in my life has been equipping me for this season, and it's got me wondering what this season will be equipping me for. it's sobering and exciting all at the same time. things are becoming so clear to me that i can actually put them on paper and talk them out. it's like i'm finding my wings, and it turns out i'm meant to be a hawk and not a chicken. it's the difference between being comfy in myself or relying on God. as much as i love 'safe' i just can't abide the thought of looking back on my days to a life full of 'what-if?'.

so i'm thankful for faithful friends that spur me on to love and good works, friends like kathleen. i'm thankful for the awareness that God has already given me what i need to do what He is asking of me. and i'm thankful for my journal where i scribble this out in prayerful contemplation. and i'm thankful for thursdays.