Overflow

I just got back from the Cracker Barrell. Ordinarily, this wouldn't have been that newsworthy of an event. However, I wasn't with ordinary people. I was with the crew from Overflow. The best thing about this group is that no matter what, we laugh. We laugh corporatly, individualy, in small groups. We laugh about ongoing jokes, whatever happened that night, inside jokes about ourselves, we (mostly) laugh at Peter's wild antics and willingness to do anything for a buck. Including singing "I'm a Little Teapot" for all of the patrones in Cracker Barrell. These are the things that are not only forever captured on Joy's digital camera, but in our memories for years to go.

I am vested in this group. It means so much to me. Working in a field that is mainly female dominated, and where most of my co-workers are the same age of my parents or grandparents, being able to hang out with and bond with, and more importantly grow with, a group of people that are my age, and who want to grow in Christ's love is so amazing to me. I feel privileged to know them. I am challenged by them every week and miss them when I'm not able to hang out with them. I look forward to the changes that we are about to embark on. I see it challenging us to be better people than we already are. I committed about a year ago to be dedicated to this group on a hot and muggy late August evening on Dave and Rebecca's back porch. I am renewing this committment sitting here at my computer tonight.

In spite of the changes that we are about embark on at our one year mark, I see our little group growing into something bigger than even we can imagine. I also see us growing closer and bonding over many more $1 dares that involve Peter and random men in restaurants. I love you guys. And I look forward to getting to ya'll better.

Days In and Days Out

It's been an interesting week. I worked 5 of 7 days. They were some of the longest days that I've worked in a while. Lots of very sick people. I called lots of doctors and tried to settle lots of people. It didn't always work so well. But that week is over. As everyone kept telling me...I've worked hard, and learned lots. I guess that that is what it's all about. Being a rookie nurse and all. It's just hard still, trying to deal with all of the dynamics that go into my job. But I think that it's going better.

I learned that I have great friends. Erika and Terry offered me a couch and tables when I move out and Dave and Rebecca offered a double bed. All of this for virtually nothing! I am blessed. I have great Family and great friends. Then, on Friday night, we went to Daytona. Me and mom and Dale and Michael took Josiah to the beach for the very first time. It is always a joy to see things the way kids do for the first time. Just the awesomeness of the expanse and power of the ocean is overhwelming. Let alone from the eyes of a one year old. He is so much fun to be around. He makes me confident tha I want to be a mom one day. One Day. Even though it is summer, the days come and the days go, but at their own pace and rhythm.

Juniper Run

Yesterday, I canoed down Juniper Run with the group from Overflow. Well, Peter and a new girl Amanda canoed I just sat there and tried my hardest not to make us flip over. I felt like a kid in a VERY long and exceptionally dangerous Disney World ride. It would have been in Epcot, not Magic Kingdom.

We started out doing fine. I wasn't getting that wet...just the occassional splash as Peter switched his oar from one side of the boat to the other. Then, things started getting interesting. The river was extremely high, so nearly every tree that normaly you just float on under we had to lie down flat in the boat to navigate under. There were trees jutting up that somehow we kept getting stuck in the middle of them. We were the only boat that kept getting stuck in them.

A little over half way through, we navigating a around and overtop and underneath yet another tree. So Peter trying to be the gentleman he is got out of the canoe and was trying to direct us around it from the outside. So, he did and we were on the other side and the poor guy is doing the best he can to get back into the boat and here comes Raegan and Jayson. As I was trying to form the word "Stop!!" in my mind, they T-Boned us. We swayed from one side(taking on water), so I tried to balance us the other to the other side. Well, apparantely so was Amanda, so we took on even more water. My gut reaction was to go back to the other side. That was the proverbial straw the cut the camel's back, because here we go with me in the middle, Peter half in way, and Amanda just kinda unknowingly swaying us back and forth.

We lost everything. Peter's and Amanda's sandals go floating downstream, but Jimmy caught them. My cooler, Peter's bag with his phone it, and Amanda's shirt we just kinda everywhere. I look up and there is Jayson, just laughing. Laughing so hard he could hardly breathe. Suddenly it was all that I could do. I laughed so hard I couldn't stand up straight. I'm sure this was much to Peter's chagrin,as he and Jon are trying to flip the boat back over. Then, I sorta panicked, because, at 4'11" it's hard to just flip your leg over the wall of a boat that is at 4'10". So, I did it the "hard core way" as Peter put it--just belly flop into the boat and pray hard that you don't flip back the other way.

All in all it was a great day. Joy and Raegan, and Jason, adn I lauged about it for hours at dinner at Sonny's over dinner. The best part is that we bonded. As friends, we made memories that will forever tie us together. I will never forget the Saturday afternoon that Peter and this girl Amanda and I flipped our canoe in the middle of the Juniper Run.

Summertime

I feel lost. Like part of me is missing. My little sister (who just happens to be taller than me) left on Sunday to go to Baltimore. As I sit wrtitting this she is hovering somewhere over us on her way to Singapore where she will arrive sometime tomorrow morning. Jen is on her way to Papua New Guinea with our great aunt Dot. She will be gone for 6 weeks.

I miss her already. It's weird going to bed at night and her not being there. I keep thinking that I'll just pretend she's at camp, but then she'll call us and tell us what a great time she's having. Then I remember that she's not at camp, but on her way to a place on the exact opposite side of the earth.

She will have a wonderful time. She will meet new people and have experiences that will help define her for the rest of her life and she will grow as a person and in her walk with Christ. She will never forget this for the rest of her life. But for me, this marks a milestone. We are officially growing up. I am looking at apartments, she has a passport and is somewhere that I have never been before,and probably never will be.

We are slowly creating our own lives that are not as intertwined as closely as they once were. But I've realized that she means more to me than I ever imagined. She is my sister. We are bound together for better or for worst. But, more importantly, to me, we choose to be bound and I am glad she is having this experience, and I am proud of the person she is becoming.

WooHoo

I am unoffically a student of USF's School of Nursing!!!! I got the letter from the people that process the paperwork with all of the paperwork that has to be filled out. Shot records, do you have insurance, can you be cleared medically? etc. So, the first challenge is to get all of this filled out, sent in, and to blunder my way in to Tampa for orientation the first day I get back from LA. So, I'm just waiting for the Offically, pretty letter that will be framed on my wall.

Lukewarm

We went on vacation this week. We pulled into our front drive at 9:20 pm, and I pulled back out...again at 9:48. Off in search of the perfect pizza to top off a long week of being scrunced in too tight with too many people in a really little place. I have a mild case of sun poisoning on my arms and lower legs, but it'll be okay. I'm a beach bum.

Something struck me hard this week. Harder than the oncoming hurricane season that has already reared its ominous head this year. As I was scrunced and twisted and convorted in a small shower stall in our bathroom that only an infant or small child could fit into and actually shave their legs in without looking like a marionette doll, I was continously fighting with the temerature of the water. At one second it was scaldingly hot. The next millisecond I was shivering because it was much too cold. Standing there stark naked in this microspopic shower stall with my sister banging on the door to "hurry it up!", it hit me...

All this time I've been questioning my Salvation. Am I really saved? Can 4 year olds be saved? or do they have to wait? have I just been playing lip service all of these years. But the answer came to me on a windy night in North Myrtle Beach. I shouldn't be questioning my salvation, but rather the degree of my Christianity. I have been lukewarm for so many days, months, years, that I have forgotten what it means to be on fire, scaldingly hot for God. I've been coasting around, just barely getting by. As much and as passionately as I hate taking lukewarm showers, God hates my lukewarm-ness maginified a million-fold.

I can't seem to get this out of my head. It has continually been coming back to me. I've never experienced some of the things that other Christ-followers say that you have to have to be a "good Christian"...I don't hear God speaking directly to me, I cant' write songs or poems, I'm horrible a journaling everyday, and I have this genetic phobia about sharing things that are private. But, on the way home this afternoon/evening/night (it was an 8 hour trip home), mom told me and assured me as only my mother can, that this is okay. Dad would never talk about his walk, God hasn't left, He know exactly where I am, and that most importantly,and the thing I think gets lost the most along the way...everyone's walk is as different as their salvation story, or their thumbprint, and every other quirk that makes us...us.

Holiness

My small group and I are reading a book called Returning to Holiness by Dr. Gregory Frizzell. It was intended to be a pre-emptive cleansing period for churches and pastors before revivals. We are using it as our Bible study for the summer.

The first section that we covered was on the sins of thoughts. Not just those obvious ones that we, as Christians are ashamed of because we know that they are wrong, but on those thoughts that we don't take time to consider there origin, the motives behind them, and the alternatives that we could be thinking about instead. I confess that there are many times that I don't do this. I fill my brain, and subsequently my heart, with the excessiveness of this world and the waste that goes with it. I rarely take time to spend the energy focusing on God and all that He has blessed me with in the 22 years that I have spent on this world.

I strive to be as authentic of a person that I can be. I want (and need) to take the time to consciencely audit my thoughts. The old adage of garbage in, garbage out is taking on a whole new meaning. I don't want to be fake. I want God to take a hold of my life in a whole new way, in a whole new meaning than ever before. I believe that I am on the road in that direction. I need the steadfastness of God's hands to sustain me. Hold me, Father, to the contract that I signed in my heart, when I was a young girl. Hold onto me in all that I do.

Desires

I finished reading this book by John Eldredge that my friend Amy told me about a few years ago. I don't know why I never read before now, but anyways. I learned alot and am still learnign stuff about myself through this book. I am finding out that I have left alot of my desires in the wayside because I, once again, feel this desire to have to be in control of something. I have a desire to go to Africa and I feel that this is something God wants me to do in my heart. Howevre, my idealistic, practical brain that worries about stuff like money and wierd diseases and time off from work keeps telling my heart to put it aside. I've been dealing with this for several years now, and I'm really no closer to the Congo or Johannesburg than I was then. What giveswithme?
C.S. Lewis wrote "We are half-hearted creatures. Fooling around with drink, and sex, and ambition. When infinite joy is offered us. Like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum, because he cannot imagine what is meant by a holiday at the sea. We ar far too easily pleased." I know that I am easily pleased with things like weekends at the Lake or on the boat, with complacency with my walk with God, with the mediocrity of my relationships with those around me. The desires that God placed within me are there for a purpose. To glory Him and to bring praise to Him. Am I doing that? Is He proud of what He sees when he looks down at me?
Anyways, just a series of thought to send out into nowhere.

Isiah 46

A good friend of mine e-mailed some notes that someone else sent to her. They dealt with Isiah 64. (Read it if you haven't). The theme of the scripture, and the e-mail, was the idols that we place in our lives. For the Hebrews, it was idols of Bel and others. Today, it's our possessions. Our ipods, clothes, cars, cd collections, computers, even the unexpected things like our "ministries" and our "quiet times". We, or at least I, have a tendency to put these things above our walk with God. We are too busy talking to Him and giving him our list of things that we want and think we need to take the time to listen to Him. So, then, my question to myself, and to whomever may be reading this, is what are my idols? What are the things that are holding me back in my walk with God? Is my love of music? My love of film? My love of the written and spoken word? More than likely part of it is my general laziness. My lack of discipline to strive for the one thing that I say matters the most to me. My apparent slothfulness CAN be overcome. I'm convinced. It's been overcome before and is being overcome in other areas. Verse 4, God makes a statement-- "I will sustain you, and I will rescue you". My goal--to rely on God to help me identify what I put above Him so that it can be removed. Because, no matter what I face, no matter what stands in the way, God is here to hold me up and be my stronghold. I want to be like King Josiah--I want to pulverize and crush the idols in my life. Loveya'll Beth

Community

I think I'm in a weird space right now. I just finished talking to a good friend of mine and we talked a lot about community. It seems to be common theme with us. Why is it that we can hang out together, eat at Sonny's or Applebees and talk about things that are fun and be silly. We say that we want to have deep, meaningful relationships. And yet, we run as far away as possible when it comes to committing to those relationships. I'm not just talking about male-female, but having an accountability partner(s). A person or people that keep us accountable to the things we do and say. I ordered a book tonight called Returning to Holiness. It's about becoming humble before God and using prayer and evangelism to become the people that He wants us to be.