Have Cheap Luggage, Will Travel

After spending the last 9 days in Okinawa, Japan (a small island south of the mainland), I have so many blogs that are rolling around in my head but I will try to consolidate them to a collection of concise thoughts for now.

What I learned about Okinawans:

They pave their road in asphalt made of sea shells - They are surrounded by one of the largest coral reefs in the world and have a ton of it lying around. The Japanese know how to be efficient that is for sure.

They take a 2 hour naps in the afternoon – The crazy thing about their napping is that if they are working outside, they just lay down on the ground right there.

America nearly killed everyone on the island once – Being in Okinawa was really embarrassing for me most of the time I was in town because I was an American. First off, my brother-in-law is a Marine and is stationed there. 75% of our military presence in Japan is on the island of Okinawa and Okinawa constitutes less than 1/10 of the land mass for Japan. So basically, Americans have over run the island which is only 65 miles long. The worst part of this is why we are even there in the first place.

In the battle for the Pacific during WWII, we bombed the crap out of that island in order to get a foothold to attack. When I say that I really mean it. In the first 24 hours of the Battle of Okinawa, we dropped almost 4,000 tons of artillery shells on the island. More than 1/3 of the civilian population of Okinawa lost their lives. To be sure they took many of our soldiers with them, but it was still daunting to see.

I visited the underground tunnels where the Okinawan military made its last stand. They had a museum there that had pictures of the villagers that were maimed by the bombing. There were a lot of kids. Most of the 4,000 soldiers that made their last stand in those tunnels committed suicide over their defeat. I put my fingers in holes blasted in the tunnel walls from grenades that helped with those suicides. I felt a little bit like a Nazi visiting a Holocaust museum.

What I learned about me:

I want to be a mom worse than I knew - My sister has a 6 month girl and 4 year old boy. Sometimes when we would be running around, I would have my niece on my hip with my nephew’s hand in mine and I loved it. While I was there, I changed poopy diapers, kissed scrapes, made food. I tell my friends all the time about how I can’t wait to be a mom but that feeling just multiplied by a million.

I love my sister more than I knew – On the plane back home I felt what can only be described as intense sadness. I missed her and her family so bad that I wouldn’t let myself think about them for fear of bursting into tears. More than once while I was there, I considered what I would have to do to just stay over there. Running through scenarios of how I could dump my life in exchange for a life with them made me realize how bad I want her to live by me.

There is more to come but this is the stuff I needed to get off my chest right away.

My sister almost died when she was a teenager. She took a bunch of Tylenol and drank a quart of vodka but still woke up the next day.

I must admit after it happened, I was shook up but the realization that I could have only had one sister instead of two only hit me a few years ago.

On Friday my dad told me that he thinks that my sister took a weak pill like Tylenol because her suicide was “a fake” and she only wanted attention.

- No matter that most people that commit suicide with pills use Tylenol along with other drugs.

- No matter that suicide is the third leading cause of death for teenagers.

- And certainly no matter that my sister told me that she intended on dying that night.

I thought that when you had kids that you were on their side no matter what. Apparently I was wrong about that.

I am mad. Mad at the blackness that exists in this world but mostly mad that it has found its way into my family.

I don’t believe in accidents or coincidences or purposeless people. We were all created as individuals with our quirkiness for a reason.

My mother’s whole life is about her kids. When she was growing up all she ever wanted to be is a wife and a mother. She’s never said this, but I think that she only wanted to be a wife because the end result was kids. Everything revolves around me and my sisters in her life.

It can wearisome sometimes for me as one of the kids but I realized the other day why is has been so hard for us lately. My mom hasn’t had a job in her niche in a long time. She is a leader but not the figure-head-follow-me leader. She leads you as she is walking right beside you. Sometimes you might forget that she is even there which makes her an excellent trainer for businesses and she hasn’t done that kind of job in a long time which is why the overemphasis on us kids lately. She has no outlet for the stuff that she was created to do.

So what is my purpose? I really couldn’t tell you to tell the truth. True to my Google lovin’ self I googled, “What is my purpose?” First thing that pops up, “Do you feel like a looser?”…Maybe I should stop. Next thing that pops up, “Find your purpose in 20 minutes.” That’s not going to do it…Next thing, “Rick Warren’s answer to Purpose.” Okay, I really give up now.

Google didn’t help so I spent some time rummaging through my own knowledge library in my head. Things that I thought were important a year ago, even last week sometimes, are not important to me now. So what now…

I think I am at the conclusion that to understand my purpose or why I was created, I need to start with my creator. What does that mean?

The God I believe in is a personal God who cares about me as an individual. So for me to get to know Him is not within a book or study class but simply hanging out with him in the quietness of the morning, over coffee of course.

Maybe you don’t really believe in God or his plan for your life. Maybe you think we are all an accident and you believe that you will come back as a tree when you die. But in the words of Morpheus, My beliefs do not require you to believe, and that believing disbelief in your purpose won’t prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won’t prevent you from tripping.

A friend of mine at work had a panic attack last week at a conference. It was really unsettling to me because he has been one of several people at my job to have panic attacks in the last few months.

Most of my life I have griped about my jobs. The only job that I can think of that didn’t make me crazy was my 4 year stint as a sandwich artist that was housed in a local gas station. Even as I write this I am starting to realize what made me love it so much. It wasn’t the job so much as it was me. I was in high school but I was balanced in the things I was involved in. I worked a ton, but I had drill team. I did a ton of drill team stuff, but I had great friends. I hung out a ton with my friends, but I spent a lot of time making sure I had good grades. So I had balance in all things.

It is very difficult to have balance at Women of Faith and it only gets worse the higher you are in the organization. Now that I am older I am starting to see the bigger picture and that people are not always victims of “the man”. There is usually a well functioning system of abusers and enablers. At my current job, too much is asked of my superiors and they ask too much of me. The problem is that people never say no more. They just quit. Or have panic attacks.

When will it be enough? Well, I am not waiting for somebody else to yell fire. FIRE!!! I am on fire and I need help! I am not so sure that bitterness or a panic attack or a new job is not waiting for me down the road because I won’t say anything.

You guys can pray for me because I don’t imagine that this conversation with my boss will be a fun one. Maybe it just is what it is, but I guess it’s not very fair to not give my job a chance. I wonder how she will react. “Hello, I’m on fire. Can you help?” :)

My life is making me want to give up lately. I think that when you are young that you never think that 30 is a real thing. Maybe in my mind 30 was like winning the lottery. It only happened to people on TV but would never happen to me. Turns out I was wrong and it looks like 30 will come if I like it or not.

Even thought I never thought becoming a quasi-adult would never happen to me, I - true to little girl without a Daddy format – imagined quasi-adulthood as a married woman. The question for me now is what if that doesn’t happen, what do I think of myself?

To tell you the truth, I really have no idea. What bucket do I fit in? Where do I belong? I always had this idea of how life was going to go and it is not going according to plan.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not sobbing in my pillow every night. I’m just confused. Do I wait for the circumstances in my life to create who I will be when I grow up or do I charge ahead to make my own circumstances?

I have this vision of myself straddling several fences right now.

I have one foot in my church world which I love but I don’t want to get too far from where I came from because I am afraid of loosing the rawness of the real decision I have made to follow Christ.

I have one foot in my work world which I also love but I don’t want to put both feet in because I lived too many years letting my life revolve around work and know what a dead end/ revolving door/ black whole life you can create for yourself when you are a workaholic.

I have one foot in friends’ worlds which I need but they have their own lives, so I am always fighting for their time with boyfriends, work or anything. Except for my friends Bryan and Jen who are always there for me no matter what.

So as I watch myself tread water in all these worlds, I wonder what it will take to push me over the fence and at the same time get completely sick of doing nothing.

At my job, we have been working on a conference for teen girls and the funny thing is, those girls are asking the same questions and they are 15. I guess this wondering never changes but one thing you can be sure of is that I will not tread water for long.

I met a girl today that said she wanted to teach film/photography in college because the students are always sad and she gets to love on them. Not that she loves teaching so much but that she loves broken people.

I have always thought that same thing but I just thought it was because I was a little messed up myself. Which has a lot to do with it but after some deep introspection over Starbucks, I really think I like broken sad people because to be broken and sad means that you actually have to care about something - to have passion. I bet that film students are all like that because it makes them better at their craft. Who wants to watch a movie that the director felt okay about? Maybe summer blockbusters fall in that category but I digress.

Passion and sadness. I bet that most people would not put the two together but for me being passionate means that you feel deeply about things and you are not afraid of that feeling whatever it is. People often hide their sadness because we humans look on sadness with pity. Why? Sadness to me seems like a great opportunity.

Can you ever really be known by people if they only know the happy sunshiny parts of you? More importantly, can you ever really know yourself if you are never challenged by the circumstances in your life?

To embrace sadness and be comfortable with it is to wear your insides on the outside. All gooshy and getting all over everybody. Kinda uncomfortable in a vulnerable way. I have some friends that are insides-on-the-outside people. They spend a lot of time in their house away from others because too many people have hurt their gooshy outsides – mostly Christians actually which confuses me because for some reason they want to be friends with me.

But you know - they know who they are. They wonder about careers and kids and all the stuff that the rest of us wonder about, but they do not wonder about WHO they are. Makes me jealous. I guess the lesson here for me is to be comfortable with my sadness around others and to be comfortable with my friend’s sadness without trying to fix it because it is beautiful.

I sometimes forget how small my existence is in the scheme of things and am usually rudely jerked out of my inwardly focused trance with a blog in mind.

Vancouver is a beautiful place. When I first arrived, I walked along the harbor observing my surroundings. A flock of geese grazed to my left and in the harbor to my right, people were kayaking and tossing balls in the water for their dogs to chase. A handful of sparrows jetted in front of me and all around me were groups of people playing with their kids, grilling out and chatting over local wines. The area was full of people enjoying each other but it was 5 PM which means that they all had to get off work early to be here by now. My first glimpse what kinds of ideas frame this place.

The skyline is littered with tall condos and all of these buildings far out way the office buildings. So, the question is, were do all these people work? I imagine that you can find them at Starbucks, restaurants, manning gas stations as well as in the office buildings. While I was there, only one young person served me my coffee or brought me my breakfast. I guess they think that your job doesn’t define you and that careers aren’t the main focus. Weirdos.

The city is nice but it isn’t new. Most of my meetings were in buildings that would be considered run down in Dallas. In fact, my first meeting was with the Canadian Country Station of the Year for the last three years and when I walked into the lobby, I thought I went in the wrong building. They obviously built the building in the 70’s, moved in and have never renovated. There is nothing really wrong with it. It just smelled musty and everything is orange and peeling. Almost all of the buildings are like that.

I watched a man dig through the trash behind my hotel, but he wasn’t looking for food. He was foraging through everything that we threw away and organizing it into piles. Glass bottles here, cans there. He was making a living off what we threw away. While he was digging, a ton of other trash fell out of the dumpster on the ground. When he was done, he cleaned all of the extra trash up and made sure that it looked like it did before he got there.

Life is just different there. White people are the minority. Homeless people are considerate of their surroundings. People care more about what they are doing after work than work itself.

At the end of my trip after I had observed all of this, I felt really weird. Like I had stumbled past the lamp post into some fantasy world that didn’t really exist. Was I the weirdo? Were my ideas of life shallow? Was this the real world or was the world I came from real?

As I considered staying in this place and abandoning everything that I previously knew to be true, I settled into my seat on the plane flying direct back to Dallas. And then I was jetted back to “reality” by conversations flowing around me.

“Your shoes are so cute, where did you get them……I am going to e-mail George and let him know that I saw his name in the paper…….I don’t give a –bleep- if we missed the numbers, they are just going to have to deal with it.”

Ah, Dallas and real life. The question now is, do I tell my klan about the world I saw beyond the lamp post? Will they call me a hippie and roll their eyes? Will they send me back there? But more importantly, will I be different? I hope so.

I am feeling a bit listless as I sit in the airport on the way to give another one of my Friday nights to Women of Faith. And maybe bitter.

One of my friends recently wrote an amazing blog about how we should learn to love where we are now – not 5 years from now. I got to tell you, it is really hard to love working too much, very few friends, no boyfriend which means no prospect of marriage any time soon which means everyday I am increasing my risk of having deformed babies according to my sister.

Or is it loving how much my relationship with the Lord has skyrocketed in the last year or the amazing group of girls that I found in my small group at church or loving how supportive and fun my team is at work or loving the idea of the guy that I will end up with next because of how different my standards are now?

It really comes down to attitude. You can choose to wallow the circumstances that you think are awful or wake up to the fact that if God knows everything and works it all to the good of those who love him – than where you are today is no accident. I think I recently realized that I can spend all my time dwelling on the stuff I hate or learn to see the silver lining that God wants me to see.

In case you are not inspired by my words, please be inspired by the Starbucks cup I am drinking from right now.

“You are not an accident. Your parents might not have planned you but God did. He wanted you to be alive and created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal your purpose. You were made by God, for God and until you understand that, life will never make sense.”

I don't really feel like I have a home. You know that place where you can know that you can just be comfortable in and that you can say, "This is home."

We moved around quite a bit when I was growing up. I lived in 7 different houses in two states before I turned 18. The house that I spent most of my junior and high school time in was sold when my parents divorced when I was in college. Since then both of my parents have lived in several different places and will probably not stay very long in the one that they live in right now. In fact, my Dad basically flips houses for a living.

So, I consider the apartment that I am currently living in my home. The problem is that something always comes up and I seem to move every year. To make it worse, most of the time when I move it also includes a roommate change.

I really hate the moving time because it is a reminder again that I have no home. I leave my pictures up on the wall until the last possible moment before moving. Until I started writing this, I didn't realize how hung up I am on it.

Anyway, I am in the process of moving again but am actually homeless right now as my lease doesn't start until the 1st. So, my sense of instability is in hyper mode right now hence the reason for this blog.

Instability - I guess that is really it. As I creep up on 30, I guess I am really craving some stability. That is probably why I have been thinking about marriage so much lately and evaluating all the guys I meet against the "could I marry him" yardstick. And yes, that means that if you are a guy and I have talked to you in the last year, I have already evaluated if I could marry you or not. :) Like marriage is an inoculation against instability, but in my single mind it sounds pretty good.

My craving for stability is something like I haven't eaten all day and I just have to eat something which kinda scares me. In those moments when you are starving and just have to eat something no matter what it is, McDonald's even sounds good.

Instability. Cravings. Ramblings. As I ride back "home" on a plane alone, these thoughts cloud my mind. Hopefully I will have something new to worry and ramble on about soon.

Love you guys.

Disclaimer to my mother This is not a slam against your parenting. I knew that you might think that and I thought I would nip it before it was an issue. :)

Every wonder why you always meet 20 year olds that have all the answers to life and 30 year olds that feel like life has a leg up on them? I think it is because the older that you get the more you realize that you have no idea what you are doing.

Well, here I am fully admitting that I have no idea what I am doing and that the life I have is not the life I planned. I never thought that by the time I was closing in on 30 that I would not be married, still living pay check to pay check and not have a 5 year plan. So were did I go wrong? Let's see if we can figure it out.

I can't help but laugh when I think back to my little 18 year self setting out with huge plans and knowing that the college world that I was entering into was in for the shock of its life when it got a hold of me. Well, turns out that they were doing fine before I showed up and after I spent 7 years there, turns out that they are also just fine without me. So I learned my first lesson - The world doesn't need me.

Okay, how about a job? That is a smaller mountain to tackle than the world. When I got my first job out of college, I remember thinking that they had no idea what was in for them (even though I had already learned lesson number one.) I made a huge impact right away and eventually when that ended, turns out that they are still in business. Who knew? Lesson number two - Work does not need me.

So if my jobs don't need me, than maybe I can find a person that needs me. This also is good for a laugh or some pity if you think about it. I met a very nice guy who had a fine life without me and after 6 years that ended, turns out that we are just fine without each other. Life goes on. Lesson number three People don't need me.

I think my problem has been that I have been waiting on something else to depend on me to define my existence when the Lord was just waiting around for me to depend on him to define my existence. We talked this week in church about Ecclesiastes 1 (below) and I think it is the reason for my thoughts.

"Vanity of vanities! All is vanity." What advantage does man have in all his work which he does under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. That which has been is that which will be, and that which has been done is that which will be done. So there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one might say, "See this, it is new"? Already it has existed for ages which were before us.

I think what I am saying is piddling around in the vanities of life (since everything outside of the Lord is really a vanity) and not really leaning on God is where I went wrong. So - I am a 28 year old, un-married, un-wealthy person who has no idea what she is doing and I think that is a good place to be.

Lately, I have been volunteering through with my church in downtown Dallas by partnering with a church that has literally transformed the crime rate in their area by buying buildings that used to be crack houses and turning them into ministries like half way houses and pregnancy centers. All this with a staff of 2 people. Very cool stuff.

When I have gone down there to volunteer, I have meet people that are incredibly receptive to hearing about Christianity and people that are much nicer to strangers that I ever am. Interacting with these people has really changed me personally and I have become addicted to serving because it is somewhat of a high. Everyday I see that the Lord is after balance in my life because I recently saw that my service for the Lord isn’t always going to be such a fairy tale.

In my latest trip to volunteer for the downtown church, we were painting some houses in the neighborhood that the pastor had started making relationships with. The houses were old and we had to scrape several layers of paint off before we could put some new paint on them. The girl I was working with was up on a ladder which was broken so I had to stand underneath it to brace it. We got to a spot that apparently birds loved to roost on because it was caked with bird poop. So she had to scrape off the bird poop and since I was bracing the ladder, it was coming down on me. As I was getting showered with little flecks of dried bird poop, I thought what a different experience this was for me as opposed to the other times.

The true heart of local missions is finding a way to really connect with somebody on a regular basis to be Jesus to them and the best person in this situation to be that for the people in these houses was not me but the pastor of that church. My service was allowing him to become closer to the lost in his neighborhood.

So service can change you but it isn’t all about you. It took a shower of dried bird poop to teach me that.

Anybody who has been reading these blogs knows that my life very recently has made a drastic change for the better. I have had an encounter with the reality of a relationship with The Lord and it has revolutionized everything about me. Have you ever had something like that happen to you? Don’t you just want to tell everybody? Your friends and family, the guys behind the counter at Starbucks – But do you always tell people?

I think it is rare to find a person that does not have one of these stories, but most people think things like, “My story is just like everyone else's” or “It takes too long to tell” or “People don’t want to know that stuff about me”. They never tell their story unless you through them in front of audience to give their testimony.

At Women of Faith, I have seen thousands upon thousands of women become Christians because the speakers from stage tell their stories of how God wooed them out of their junk with such brutal honestly you can’t help not being moved. For me the biggest place that I see Jesus in my world is in other people’s stories. The power of story is so amazing.

Here is my point. I think that this the biggest mistake that we make when interacting with one another. Never really honestly connecting. Talking about superficial nothingness until we are blue in the face because it makes us tired to think about getting into a deep conversation.

So tell your story every chance you get. You will never know whose life you will change.

Ask people about their stories. You never know who is just busting to tell you something that happened to them and you never know how it could change you.

And thanks to Jeremy who fearlessly had a deep conversation with me this weekend and reminded me of all this. Your story changed me.

When does a kid turn into an adult? Maybe it isn’t an age or a certain place in life. Maybe it is when you brain starts to change its thinking. Like, when did changing yourself or learning something new get so hard?

I find myself coming across habits that I have and wonder why anybody really wants to hang out with me. For example, I think I drive my roommates crazy with my incessant cleaning. It is not like they are dirty or anything, but I apparently can not stand the sight dishes in the sink. Or shoes in the living room. Or clutter on the counter. Does that sound familiar? Aghhhh! I am my father. When did that happen?

Anyway, I really like my roommates so I have spent the last month trying white knuckle my way through not cleaning the house every single day. It is not working. When I wake up in the morning, my first thought is dirty dishes. How sad is that?

Here is another one. I had discovered that I am a shameless flirt. Yes, yes. I like boys and boy attention and basically everything about the opposite sex. (Perhaps there is a reason that God placed my in an all female organization? :) ) I have really made a concerted effort lately to just be around boys instead of badgering them with my constant requests for attention. And… it’s not working. Every time I travel for Women of Faith, all of the crew is guys my age and I am sure that they have a good laugh about me over the lunch table because I flirt with them all.

I wish the Matrix movie was real life. Then I could just type into a computer, relationship skills. Press enter and wham! I could jump up with one fist in the air proclaiming, “I am confident in myself and do not need to flirt with guys!”

Why can’t life be that easy? Why does changing your self get harder every day? How can we stop ourselves from becoming our parents?

This is real adulthood ladies and gentlemen. The realization that life is hard and that you need something bigger than you to fix you.

My favorite books are those that make you think above and outside yourself. For most people this is not a comfortable place to be but it is by far my favorite place to be. I just finished a book that did just that for me and I want to tell you about it.

The book is called Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. In the book, Miller talks about how he believes that Christians might be spending their whole lives focused on things (Sprinkle vs. Dunk – Priests vs. Pastors) that aren’t even that important in the grand scheme of life if you don’t tackle the basics first. The basics being, do you know who Jesus is and do you have a relationship with him? Maybe this example will help explain the reality of the situation.

My friend Anne is the most balanced person I know when it comes to opinions about other people. Too often when I am around her and talking about how one of our co-workers is making me crazy (basically throwing them under the bus). Anne is so quick to bring out their perspective and remind me that there are things under the surface that maybe I couldn’t see. She would never have an unkind word to say about another person - ever. So if somebody told me that they met Anne had she went on and on about how much she hated this person she met at church or something, I would tell you that we must not be talking about the same person. You see, I have a close relationship with Anne and know her so well I can predict her behavior. I know who she is. Do you know Jesus like that? I sure don’t.

I am a learner. I love to read and attend lectures and learn everything I can. The hard reality that I am realizing is that I can not learn how to have a relationship with my creator but I do have to try. If you were married and only hung out with your spouse every other day, would it work? Nope. Same rules apply here.

What is really profound about this stuff is that the God that created the whole universe cares about you as a person and deeply desires a relationship with you. He is just waiting for us to pay attention and that relationship will change everything about the rest of your life. Don’t believe me? Just wait until it happens to you.

So, go take a walk and chat with God. Tell him the deepest secrets of your life or just tell him about aggravating co-workers. Either way a life changing relationship awaits you…

When I was in high school, my grandparents on my dad’s side died and I didn’t want to go to their funerals. My parents didn’t make me – huge mistake. That was almost 10 years ago but I still get overwhelmingly sad about their loss sometimes.

My major in college was communication studies and I learned a lot about the stages of grief.

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

People usually float back and forth between the stages until they get to acceptance and then they are able to move on with their lives. By not attending my grandparent’s funerals, I trapped myself in the denial stage for several years. It is not a fun place to be because you will always have this cloud hanging around that colors your world until you are able to deal with it and move on.

The reason that I bring this up is that I recently broke up with my boyfriend of 6 years a few months ago and we saw each other for the first time since he left last night. It was a horrible but wonderful experience.

Basically, I love him so much but do not want to marry him and he feels the same way. So because of that continued mutual love and respect, after breaking up we still talked all the time and continued being friends. After seeing him last night, I realized that I was trapping myself in the denial stage again! I was just hoping I could keep him in a jar on my life shelf to pull out when I needed someone to complain to or cry to or share my day with. Can’t happen. My relationship has died and I feel the same way that I felt when I lost my grandparents.

So, I now know why God says to guard you heart. It isn’t protection against somebody that would hurt me, but from somebody that would love me. If you think breaking up with a boyfriend that cheats on you but you love him anyway is hard – try breaking up with one that you love and he loves you back.

My life is has been swallowed by a sea of femininity in the last year. I work in an office with 99% women, travel for work to conferences where there are thousands of women, just recently broke up with my boyfriend and live with 2 girls. The lack of boy interaction is really starting to get to me.

For the past six years I have had a boyfriend around on a daily basis and now that it is gone, there is a huge deficit that I didn’t even know that I needed. If you think I am just yearning for another boyfriend, it is actually worse than that.

Last week in church, a very nice looking 6 foot tall guy sat next to me. The seats aren’t that spacious so when he would move just a little bit during worship time, his arm would just brush mine on accident. It would totally yank me out of the zone every time it happened. This is ridiculous.

And to make everything more frustrating, I believe that God has my perfect guy out there waiting for me. So every time a boy walks by, a million question run through my head.

Is he “the one”?
If he is the one, does he know he’s the one?
Did I put on makeup?
Does my one care about makeup?
Am I loosing it?

AHHHHH!!!!

I am way too old to be freaking out about boys. OR is this a problem that plagues all women to the end of time? I hope not but I fear I may be wrong…

I have gone to church and considered myself a Christian my entire life. So, why when I started working at a ministry (Women of Faith) did most people that have been in my life for a while, including my parents, give me a funny sideways look?

Here is what I think. Accepting Jesus as a part of your life is only the first step and only one of many steps on the path in really becoming a Christian. Calling yourself a Christian, going to church every week or living a good life doesn’t save you. There are plenty of people that live life by what most would consider Christian principles that are not going to heaven.

If you are a Christian, than people should be able to look at your life and not miss the fact that you have The Lord in your life. I am sure that people looked at my life in college (living with my boyfriend, never going to church and getting drunk every weekend) and said if that is Christianity than I have it too. Yuck.

Until someone can look at your life and see something different, be very cautious about applying the term Christian to yourself.

Ever been gut checked by a 21 year old Navy guy? Not something that most people can or want to brag about but that is exactly the way I felt when I checked up on my cousin Chris’ Myspace page the other day.

If you have read any of my recent posted blogs, than you know that I have been undergoing a little Jesus revolution in my life. I am getting on everyone’s nerves with my new found passion for faith and life is good. Everything is making sense for me and I felt like I am doing a good job of centering my life on God. Or so I thought.

If you visit Chris’s page you can’t miss the constant references to Jesus and the wording that hits you in the face with the severity that his love for the Lord carries in his life. Let me tell you what I mean. Here is a quote from his “about me” section.“I love Jesus more than anything as you will find through out getting to know me, if you don't already… I still love Jesus like tomorrow will never come…I'm a military man who loves Jesus Christ.”

Now when was the last time that somebody talked to you like that? When was the last time I talked to somebody like that? (Here is where I encountered the virtual gut check) I’ve been in church my whole life and I can’t remember the last time I saw passion for Christ like that. Not even most ministry people talk like that.So, what does it mean to be a Christian? I think Chris (a 21 year old, Navy guy, not raised in the church, and for sure no seminary student) really gets it. If we really come to terms with the fact the creator of the universe cares about the details of our lives and has wonders beyond our imagination waiting for us after we die, than we should all be so grateful that we found this truth that it leaks out of our very pours, just like Chris.

Now instead of just sitting at the feet of the great Bible teachers of our time and feverishly taking notes in church on Sunday like you learning a Spanish lesson, combine that with taking a clue from my cousin and consider that the shear awesomeness of our Lord should create such passion in us that we can’t keep it from leaking on all those around us. Even on your Myspace page. Thanks Chris.