i'm a tool- of God

So, I’ve been full of the knowledge that this summer will bear immense challenge for me, but also that this summer will bear amazing growth. It’s going to be a big few months. I knew that without being able to comprehend at all how it would happen or when I would be able to understand the fullness of that growth.

But, I think I finally am beginning to understand. I’m beginning to see. And finally—FINALLY!—I am no longer full of the insecurity of thinking I am unusable by God. I am full of the knowledge that I am a total tool. God’s tool. He’s been using me this whole time, preparing me for what is to come.

Tonight someone said something very wise to me. I was lucky to be able to write it down. She said, “Sometimes people see gifts in us which we cannot yet see in ourselves.” It takes time, sometimes, for us to see what God has revealed so clearly to others. Sometimes that inability to see is denial. Sometimes, however, it’s preparation. And when the time is come, when God feels we are prepared (sometimes to be unprepared), he removes the filter and starts to let us see what others have seen all along. He uses the words of others to penetrate the haze, so we can start to believe. Believe in ourselves. And believe in His awesome power.

I had a thought that came as a reflection of my discussion with this wise, wise woman. It was also in relation to something my pastor told me when I confessed I knew nothing about Pastoral Care—how could I possible provide spiritual guidance when I had no idea what I was doing? Well, I may not know what I’m doing, but GOD knows what He’s doing. And I am sure that He is at work!

It’s taken me a long time to understand that I can be used by God. That He has equipped me with gifts, and the potential to develop certain gifts and the opportunities in which to develop them. He has selected me specifically to do a job that no one else can do: I have a particular purpose for being created. I’m excited that this summer will be progressive in terms of figuring out what it is!

So I’m proud to say that I am a tool. And I’m going to totally own it.

we can love because He first loved us

So my first year of theology school has been very revealing in many ways. It has begun to familiarize me with the structure of the church. It has taught me where that structure comes from, and why it was established. And it has given me the knowledge and the freedom to question and be skeptical of both tradition and the church, as I learn more and more about what Jesus was really talking about—and how that has gotten skewed in the last 2,000 years.

My first year then has been good because it has allowed me to understand what’s really Christian: to first love God, and then love His children and the rest of creation. So, I knew that. I understood it.

But then someone put it in perspective for me. She made me hear it again. Don’t you love how you can hear the same words in a different way when they’re being used as instruction from God? My friend said, “Our ability to love others comes from the fact that God first loved us. We cannot truly love others until we recognize that God loved us to death despite our sins—and seek to understand that love.”

What a smart lady. Aren’t I lucky to know people who speak such wisdom? It’s completely the hand of God.

So I began to see where there is room for improvement for me. Because I have an appreciation for Creation. But I have difficulty, at times, loving Creation. When people use harmful words. When they are unkind, unwelcoming, unforgiving, exclusive. When people cut me off in traffic. And appreciation is vastly different from love.

So I understand that I have a lot of work to do before I am able to see the face of the Beloved in the face of those who seem unlovable. But now that I know what work has to be done, I can get started on it.

Easy, right?

a heart that's bigger

This week has been all about growth. If you didn't know, that is the theme of the entire summer. But do you ever get a small glimpse of the big picture, even if you can't fully grasp it at the time? Briefly, this week, as I started training for my new job, I got a glimpse of the big picture. I didn't understand what that big picture will be, but the glimpse was enough to know that there is a changing inside of me.

I know this changing is a good thing, a maturation for the next step in life. I feel as though many of my peers have already accomplished this step, that somehow I'm behind them, but still on God's schedule. I don't fully understand what the next step is, but I am eager for more understanding.

I had a conversation recently about growth, and where it comes from. I had confessed that I am afraid of the challenges of the summer: providing pastoral care (without prior experience), working more than full time, preparing spiritually for another year of seminary. But I'm also eager for those very same challenges, because I know there is no growth without them. All of my seasons of growth in the past have included fear. And it is in the decision to face that fear, with the full knowledge that God is holding my hand all the way through it, where something in me grows up. If you run, you'll never know what you could have gained.

So, I've decided to be intentional about facing fears. Recently, the scariest thing to me has been my capacity to be used by God. I feared very strongly that God couldn't use me in the way that I knew my peers were being used by God. And yet, I yearned to be an instrument of His. So I prayed to be overtaken by God's purpose. But the moment that an opportunity presented itself, I was afraid again: that I would fail. What's with all this fear! I'm not going to live in fear-- so I'm doing the things that make me afraid. That's growth. That's a heart that's bigger than it used to be. I'm so grateful for the woman God is making me to be. It makes me think of this one part of my favorite Bebo Norman song, A Page is Turned. It's a wedding song, for sure, but there's one part that goes like this:

A page is turned in this world to reveal a little girl
With a heart that's bigger, as it is unfurled
By the language in her soul, that's teaching her to grow
With a careful cover of love that will not fail
And the God of second chance
Picked her up and He let her dance
Through a world that isn't kind

then it continues with the wedding part:

And all this time, preparing her the one
To hold her up when she comes undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And grown up tall, here you are
Your day has come.

Well. I don't know about my day having come (or rather, I know that part of the song doesn't apply), but the entire rest of it speaks to me. I see myself as a little girl, and I know how lost I was and how innocent before I knew God. But God picked me up and He gave me the joy to dance! And now, NOW, I am the girl whose heart is growing bigger as the language in my soul is revealed. Through Him. Because He gives me challenges that I refuse to run from.

I am learning about the God of love. I'm growing up.

appreciating the great, the small, in the big apple

This weekend, I had the opportunity to take a trip outside my zone, and bus up to New York City to visit my dear friend, Elaina. What an amazing experience. I'm not sure I expected anything more than to see Elaina once more before I accepted the start of summer, but it turned out to be so much more than that. Surprise.

I'm always amazed by the way that God uses the great and the small things. So often, we overlook the small things in the present, only to see them contribute to the bigger picture much farther down the line. It's often much easier to use the great things to make a great statement. But sometimes, I think the great things make a subtle impact, and that the small things are immediately great.

New York is a great place. The entirety of the city is just dramatic, a skyline of buildings reaching to the heavens, amazing feats of American architecture and physics. Jam-packed with people and things and with the capacity to just be completely overwhelming. I can recall graphic memories of being overwhelmed by city life; Jakarta, Indonesia, full and busy and hazy and loud; and Washington, DC after two days on the road-- equally busy and full, confusing and hurried. But New York didn't hold that same overwhelming feeling for me. I woke up as we were pulling into the city and got my first glimpse of the skyline and thought, this city is tall. I didn't realize DC was so short. But I wasn't overwhelmed, and I wasn't surprised by the lack of feeling overwhelmed until later. That growth-- to feel comfortable in places where once I didn't-- I feel like that subtle growth is just a small symbol of my overwhelmingly great personal growth in the last nine months. Subtlety from greatness.

While I was here, I also attended a church service at a Spanish-speaking Lutheran church in the Bronx. The service was small and spontaneous, conducted half in Spanish and half in English, but completely in the presence of God. I can't imagine myself being aware of God's presence in such a place a year ago-- or, at the very least, sitting in the service and being completely preoccupied with the facade of the building, the flow of the service. I had never been to such a church before. But I found I rather like it, smiling and laughing during the service as I might not in either of my other churches. Churches like this one give me hope that the body of Christ belongs to everyone.

After church, I sat down with Elaina and her friend Isaac Everett, a recent seminary grad from Union Theological Seminary and member of the emergent group/intentional community, Transmission, and had a wonderful conversation over lunch (in a NYC diner!). Our conversation inspired me to think. There were so many thoughts carried over from lunch, I wish I had taken notes! Elaina and I took a long walk through Central Park afterwards, when I took this photograph:

We discussed how easily it is to judge people. How our perceptions of others have the ability to influence our thoughts in such a way that it alters our ability to see Christ in them. And how our inability to be transparent to our brothers and sisters in Christ, when we keep secrets and hide the parts of ourselves we are less proud of, can also alter their ability to see Christ within us. We miss the beauty in God's creation when we hide among the fields of others like us. We miss the beauty of God's creation when we fail to look closely enough. Great impact from something small.

The weekend also included a lot of walking, a lot of good conversation with my closest Wesley sister, a lot of great food, and NYC sights. Plus, amazing hospitality, buses, buses, the Subway, and ferries!

I'm sure that I'll be back.

maybe it really IS all about who you know-- or at least, how you KNOW them.

Recently, the caterpillars have been out in droves. Really, it's hard not to step on one just walking down the sidewalk. And then I saw these two, and it seemed perfect for what I wanted to talk about: the necessity of living our lives with others.


I'm not sure about you, but I saw these two guys and I imagined them having a great caterpillar conversation. Just lined up, catching some sunshine on the stone, enjoying life and the company of the other. Maybe, they're contemplating their beautiful futures (as moths or butterflies-- are these those kinds of caterpillars?). Maybe one just mosied on over to the other because he was there. I like to think that we are drawn to each other like this.

And when we consider what the picture would look like of a caterpillar alone, instead of with his friend, isn't it just a little bit sadder? Well, it is for me. I have felt more and more this past year, that we are meant to live in community. We are drawn to each other. We play off each other. We learn from each other. And we are better able to realize the magnitude of God's abilities when we see them in each other. We become better versions of ourselves through serving others.

So if we're compelled to live in community, if we're created for this purpose as I think we are, then relationships are what life is all about. It's how we live, interact, love each other that we are able to show God's love for the world. It's kind of like life really is all about who you know, really KNOW, and how you love them. Isn't that encouraging?

A friend introduced me to this amazing band called the Cobalt Season, and I have been listening to their fourth cd, In Search of a Unified Theory nonstop for the past two days. I was first struck by their sound, and then kept in awe once I started to hear their lyrics. These in particular (from their song, Begin Again) relate to my thoughts:

I wanna find my way
Find my way back home
I want to learn to love
And I want to be known

Everyone wants to be known. We can only kick our shoes off and really be comfortable when we are. And I'm convinced that being ourselves, owning the particular details that God glories in His creation of us, is definitely the way to go.

my shady past

Today, I have found myself thinking a LOT about the dream. The vision that inspired the idea that I could really live abroad out of a bag for two whole years, and the fact that I would want to. It's related so much to the growth I've experienced since I've moved to DC, and more than I thought it would be, to the past that brought me here.

I've decided that I'm going to spend time in reflection over the next few days/weeks on the influences that have brought me this far. And while I can't promise to go in any particular order, there's definitely some recent activity, instigated by individuals who have of late become MAJOR players in the life of A. A, being me. That have me thinking a lot about the future and a lot about the past. But those recent folks aren't going first. Sorry to get your hopes up.

So many know, but some do not, that I was not raised in a Christian home. This is my tired story: that my parents are both interracial and interreligious and so my sisters and I were not Christians. We did not go to church. And I did not know who God was.

But the beauty of this story is that God knew who I was all along and placed just the right people in my life and me in just the right circumstances that I would come to know Him. One of those persons was my best friend, Rachel. We met right before the start of high school, and it amazes me now how we got along so well, when we had so much less in common. But God knows what he's doing. She was the first person who took the time to teach me that God had been patiently waiting for me (but she wasn't the last. I seem to need repeat lessons that God continues to patiently wait for me.)

I truly believe that God has blessed our friendship. We have been separated by geography for more than half of our friendship (six years, actually, and three different countries, two states, and the District of Columbia), but we always seem to join together in conversation or email and rarely but blessedly in person, and just KNOW what the other has been experiencing. Regardless of what I'm doing in my life, or what she's studying in school, how our families are faring, any of that-- we always just understand the other. And this kind of love and support, I think, has helped to prepare me to think that the earthly ties of geography don't have to separate us from our loved ones. We can maintain strong bonds and friendships across foreign lands and oceans. The world is open to me, and although leaving family will be hard, it has become acceptable as one of those 'of this world' things that will not tie me down.

Onward, God. Where are we going?

humanity's like that, i think

I've recently been thinking about the fortitude of the human spirit. How amazingly resilient we can be in times of trial, and how we have this beautiful ability to draw from what's good and lovely in the world, in such small, simple things. How sometimes its a major choice to let those small, beautiful things affect us more than the things that can get us down. In my fantastic yet still unnamed small group of women that meets every Thursday night, we recently watched the following creation of a fellow student. We were all pretty moved by the simple images not unlike those we all see on a regular basis, familiar scenes and places doing familiar, normal things. But we realized that when we stopped to actually SEE what we merely walk past on a regular basis, we realized that we miss the beauty of LIFE.

I took this picture tonight, and I said to myself, humanity's like that, I think. At first glance, these are dying tulips. The height of their beauty is gone-- the petals have opened up to reveal the delicate inner petals and parts, and the verdant green and saturated pink is gone. The petals are even beginning to wilt and wither on the edges, and its soon going to be time to toss them out. But just look at this photograph.


They're still so beautiful. Even aged, even at the end of life, there's still beauty in these tulips. But only if we take the time to notice. Humanity's like that, too. The people who are wilted around the edges, whatever the reason may be, they're still beautiful, but only if we take the time to notice the God in each other. The damaged and the broken and the wilted people are just as much children of God as those who have known Jesus all their lives and grown up in church. The ability of humanity to maintain beauty despite the trials of life, that resilience, is incredible. It's God.

Don't you think?

putting thoughts to paper (sort of)

"In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth." (Gen 1:1) "Then God said, '"Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."' (Gen 1:26) Eventually, humanity got additional commandments: to love our neighbors as ourselves and to '"take care of Jesus' sheep"' (John 21:16).

But I ask you, how well do you think we have cared for His sheep and the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, the livestock and all the creatures that move along the ground? How well have we loved our neighbors? I will be the first to confess that I have not always done these well. And that it is very easy to get swept away by the world that Christianity has conformed to and to belong to it, instead of to Jesus. To be consumed by consumerism and by the things that we have instead of the things that we can do for one another. To forget that we are called to care for God's Creation in its entirety: to be stewards of what God has entrusted to us. The animals, the lands and seas, and more importantly than even those others, so important that it is second only to loving God, Himself: loving one another.

Yet every day we hear of some great new travesty in the news. We hear about sex-trafficking of young girls. We hear about drugs, and gangs, and guns and violence. We hear about starvation, and the rising cost of food. Greed. Waste. Selfishness. How poorly we have treated God's Creation. How poorly we treat each other.

It's almost enough to make one lose hope in humanity. But not me. I have hope. I know there are servants out there, stalwart servants and enduring laborers doing the work that God asked us to do. I know they exist, because I've heard of them. In some cases, I've even seen evidence. And now, I want to meet them. I want to work with them in whatever mission they have to change the world and I want to be inspired by their empowerment. I want to affirm the work that they are doing. I want to shake the hands of the toilers who seek justice, I want to break bread with them and bring stories of them back to a place that has also seemed to have lost hope. I seek to be a listener, learner, worker, and an affirmer. And then I seek to be a deliverer of hope, an inspirer to others, a story-teller and a mimic. And most of all, I seek to be changed.

So this is the beginning of a very long process for me. Very much of it will be in planning. Not until much, much later, will anyone be able to see the fruits of that planning. I've told you about my theology and motivation. Now let me tell you about my logic, my idea, and my means.

I am just finishing up my second semester of graduate coursework. I am a dual degree candidate at Wesley Theological Seminary and American University in Washington, D.C. I am earning masters degrees in Theological Studies and International Peace and Conflict Resolution. This trip is going to be a culminating experience, in a way, of those two academic disciplines in action: post-graduate fieldwork, if you will.

After two semesters of study, I began to feel that the debt I was incurring would soon exceed my capacity for repayment. So I began searching for a full-time job that would pay for tuition, and allow me to be a half-time student. I knew there had to be a better way to be financially responsible. So I looked around and applied for tons of positions, and after 5 months, my labor was rewarded. I landed a full time job (that is right up my alley and in a great community) that pays for tuition, and pays, too! So while I'm taking classes and working, I can also start repaying my student debts. While I'm doing that, however, I'm also going to be saving the money that will fund this trip. The hope is that at least 75% of my debts will be repaid by the time I finish both master's programs, and that I will have enough money saved to both continue my payments while I'm abroad, and be abroad for one and a half to two years. It's a steep goal. But I have a unique motivator.

The trip itself is going to be somewhat of a winding journey. From the U.S., I intend to head south first, traveling through Mexico and Central America. I have one friend in South America who may or may not accompany me on a portion of my trip. From there, I intend to travel east to South Africa and work my way north. I have very few connections on this continent, but hope to develop some in the next four years. I will then head east again from Egypt, through the Middle East, and into Asia. I currently have friends living in Thailand, Japan, and Indonesia. I'll work my way south to SEAsia and then skip over to Australia/New Zealand to end my trip.

I intend to backpack as much as I can, only taking brief time outs from this style of traveling to refuel and regroup, and package occasional things up to send back home to the states. Whenever possible, I want to be able to stay with the groups I will be working with, at the level of the community in which they work. I am specifically interested in organizations that deal with matters of ecojustice, women's empowerment, and the religiously oppressed (no matter what the religion). In the next four years while I am creating the means to live out this vision, I will be organizing, researching, and making contacts to sustain it. At this point, the vision for this journey is very broad: planting trees with the Green Belt Movement, working with an organization like Amani Ya Juu or Red Persimmon, learning about the Burmese monks. I welcome your ideas and suggestions. I can't wait to start learning more about the world through the planning process as well.

So I know the sketch is rough (very), and the ideas grand, but I feel very drawn in. My world has changed since I started graduate school; it sounds different, it looks different, it smells different. I know that if God can do all that in just a year, that he can open doors and when necessary, windows and hatches and crawl spaces to make this vision a reality. I'm excited about the future; the people I will meet and the work I will do-- I can't wait to get my hands in it!