My Birthday!

Yesterday I celebrated my 23rd birthday! I cannot believe how the years have passed! haha.
It was an amazing Birthday, definitely a memorable one. I woke up around 6am yesterday to loud music playing, and my roomate running in my room telling me to go look out my window. After a min or two of not wanting to get up, I finally walked over to my window and looked down 3 stories to see one of my very good mexican bands and two young guys singing mariachi songs to me. It was awesome! Although I was half asleep, that is one thing I can say no one has ever done for me before!! Throughout the day I went and visited different friends and got lots of cake. ;) Later on that day I had a picnic with Liz and everyone had a surprise party for me.
I just felt so loved, seriously....

Being Challenged....

So God has been stretching my heart and mind in a lot of ways these past few months.
Today felt like some kind of breakthrough though. Well, maybe not "breakthrough", but I was definitely hit hard with a lot of things.
Right now, our church planting team is reading the book "Christianity Rediscoverd", I haven`t read a whole lot of it yet, but what I have read has seriously hit hard and I feel like brought me to a new place. One of the biggest ways that I feel like God has challenged me though this, ...where my focus is. In this book, it talks about a a people group, who had missionaries for over a 100 years, ...missionaries doing good work. Sharing the love of Christ through serving the people, they had a hospital, a school, all these wonderful things, but the people did not know the real reason they were there. This is sad, seriously sad, but I cannot even tell you how EASY it is to fall into this. "Doing" all these things, but in the sense of eternity, accomplishing very little. We cant forget that our ONE and only purpose of missions is JESUS. All though social issues and helping the community are all important, the truth is that if I do all these things and am not keeping Jesus the main focus, these things will amount to NOTHING in the end.

I am new at the whole missionary thing, I still have a ton to learn, but one thing I can say is that it`s hard sometimes, because I dont want to come across the wrong way to people, there have been mormans, jehovah witnesses here, and lots of different missionaries, and these people know that...so the last thing we want to do is make them think that they are apart of some project, that we want to see how many people we can convert. Our purpose here is NOT to convert them, but to show them Jesus in their own culture. There is a book called " Eternity in their Hearts" that I HIGHLY reccomend, this book just talks about how God is already uniqely in each and every culture of the world, and He manifest Himself in different ways in all of these cultures. So the purpose is not to convert them to what we know, but help them find God in their own culture. The problem is that we come with a package of the gospel, we think that we have something they need and think that we can just hand it to them and we are done. It just doesnt work like them though, we have to bond with the people to know what they need, become incarnational. Through this we can find a whole new aspect of God, through going on this journey to find God with them, we come to know Him so much more.
This all is SO MUCH easier said than done though! What I am really struggling with, is HOW do I get God out of the box I have Him in? How do I truly truly become incarnational? By eating the food, living with them, learning the language? These are all very very important things, but what I am learning right now is that beyond all of these exterior things, it is a MINDSET. It is a daily surrender and dying to yourself and taking my cross.

ps. 121

I lift up my eyes to the hills—
where does my help come from?

My help comes from the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;

indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.

The LORD watches over you—
the LORD is your shade at your right hand;

the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.

The LORD will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;

the LORD will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore.

changes

This week has been one of the hardest, bittersweet weeks of my life. Tonight Monica and I went to town so she could go say some goodbyes to friends. How weird that was, we do so much of our ministry together...the thought of her not being along side me is hard to really grasp right now. I am so thankful that God has called me to stay, these people are so desperately in need of a Savior. Just tonight as we were walking through the neighborhood of San Sabes where we have done a ton of ministry this year, I started thinking about everything.

These people are broken..the women we go to see every week who has 7 children to take care of on her own....she just seems so worn out and broken everytime I see her. She needs Jesus so much. There are so many more like her. I don't know why, but lately I have been having this overwhelming feeling thar has been controlling a lot. In 3 days I am going to go from being surrounded by believers who will stop and pray for me at any point of the day, to being COMPLETELY immersed into the Mexican culture by not being around any english speakers. The thought of this scares me to death. I am so excited about doing this, don't get me wrong...I just feel like this is going to be an even harder transition than if I would have come straight from the states to a host family. The problem is that I have already lived in mexico for the past 7 months. I have definitely had a huge amount of cultural exposure, but all the while still living here at the base in my "american bubble' speaking english and kind of having that escape and safe haven if you will to go home to at night. Which has all been amazing and what i have needed, however...now that I already have a taste...but not the whole thing. Now I feel like I need to kind of lay aside all expectations and everything and just dive in as a learner, because life really is going to look a whole lot different from this point forward than it ever has before.

The family I am living with live in San Sabes the neighborhood I have been doing a lot of ministry in that past 7 months, so I really feel like God has me there for a reason. I am just nervous, but at the same time so excited at how God is going to stretch me and cause me to depend more on just Him alone.

:-)

SO.....
life is crazy, what other way can I describe it? Through all of the craziness though, God is absolutely amazing. God is restoring a passion in me that He once placed in me and definitely making me just give up my life to Him once again. love it. sometimes it's hard to lay down my own desires, but then He just shows up and.....like the song that I am listening to right now says "He makes everything Glorious!"
One of the things that I have jsut been thinking about and kinda...refueled with in the past week is the importance of social justice and human rights. In some areas I feel like I have put some of that on the back burner of my mind....in some aspects, I don't know how to explain this fully at the moment so I will refrain and save that for another post, eh? haha....i've been around my canadian friend for tooo long!
Anyway, God has been putting a lot of this on my heart.
This past week in our dorm we had an amazing experience that I really want to write about....i will soon i am about to fall asleep............

Lost in wonder...

This past weekend I went with a few friends to the beach
"Puerto Escondido" it is about 9 hrs away from here. I loved it. This is only the second time in my life I have been to the ocean, and it just leaves me an awe. I wish I could describe with words. So many times throughout the weekend I would just stop and stare at these waves..there were many parts where the waves were so huge that the lifeguards wouldnt let people in. It was just an awesome reminder to me of how AWESOME God is...how He is so powerful. These waves could have taken me out in a second, but at the same time God could command these waves to stop..or rise...or to part. How amazing is that? A lot of the time I just forget to be amazed by the HUGENESS of God...how I am so small.

home

So, there are times when I come to the realization of where I am and it hits me.....wow....I am so farr away from my friends and family. These past couple days have been hardcore dealing with a lot of that stuff. I am missing out on peoples lives. I love where I am, and I love the people here.....so much. It's just that I love the people at home too.
I know my sacrifice is so small compared to many. especially to Jesus, this is not even close to His sacrifice. I am not going through any sort of horrible pain, I am happy...
It's funny, I think that sometimes it's good to just have times when it's hard, because it reminds you of how much you love people. I dont like missing people, but I like knowing that I do...if that makes sense.

takes my breath awake...

So I am pretty much in AWE right now. I wish I could put the amazement and joy that I am feeling into words, but it is so hard. I feel like I am falling in love with my creator all over again! It started out really last night when I watched the lunar eclipse. That is the first time I have ever seen anything like that. I feel completely like the breath has been taken right out from me. Today we watched a video by Louie Giglio, in this video he started talking about the complexities of the human body, in this video he started talking about this cell adhesive molecule called, lanimin.. I will put the link to the video on youtube, and you can watch some of it for yourself. Basically, it is a structure that holds together our cells. The most awesome thing about this is that it is in the shape of a cross. wow....just hearing that left me in awe. The cross holds all things together.

I have always been amazed by creation, every single time I look at the stars I am in awe. When it comes to how things are made, how I am made....I just can hardly even fathom it all. I am by no means in biologist, I only know just a glimpse of it all. .....and that is what amazes me...to think that I could be in awe by what I know, yet knowing that there is so. much. more....leaves me breathless. oh wow I love the mystery of it all.

I cannot tell you how many times I have heard that I am "fearfully and wonderfully made" but just putting all of this together today it and it really went to my heart
more later...i'm sleepy....

i'm dancin' on this mountain top...

hou
So this week is "holy spirit" week so we don't really have classes. We just have time during the day to just be with God. How awesome is that? How many times do I get the chance to go sit by a river or on a mountain for house just spending time with my creator? Today was amazing. Liz and I went on a hunt to find a good place to chill, we had to walk on to someones land to get there and go over a barbed wire fence to get there, praying we wouldn't get shot or something.
Finally we climbed up a mini mountain and decided that was good enough so we stayed put. I went and sat by a rock, and put my headphones on. Immediately I was memorized by my surroundings. Just looking around at how beautiful nature is still gets to me. After reading for a while, I remembered that I brought my streamer, awesome. So I picked it up and started running down the hill and just danced around, it was so amazing...i just felt so free. I can't even describe those moments with God, but I love them. Just when you feel so alive and loved and full of JOY, like and just happy to be who God has made you to be. Like nothing else matters except praising Him. Just
literally feeling as if His presence around you. there is nothing better.

I am really excited about this week for a lot of reasons, the main thing is that there is so much I want to learn about the holy spirit. Before I came here, I had a lot of mixed ideas and almost fear of who the holy spirit was. That has definitely changed, back at thanksgiving time...we had another time kind of like this where we were just on our own seeking and reading through acts and I just prayed that God would reveal His spirit to me in anyway He wanted to Then I started thinking, praying and studying the bible more about it. And I came to the conclusion that, I always seem to put limits on God, why do I think that He can't do the same things today that He did in the bible? He is the same yesterday, today and forever. It says in the bible that Jesus left His holy spirit

.At the end of the week, we had service and someone prayed for me and i was just completely overwhelmed with a sense of peace and it swept me off my feet. I really hope that no one is freaked out by reading that. and if you are......I would just have to say I understand, because I used to feel the same exact way. This is just such an exciting aspect of God that is so important. The holy spirit is supposed to guide me, it just seems like a lot of times I ignore his presence in my life. That is what I want to learn more about...how to just have more faith, and walk in the spirit.
I think I used to think it was a scary thing, I would see pentecostals running around the church shouting and saying things I didn't understand and think...what in the WORLD!!! If THAT is the holy spirit than I want nothing to do with it!!
Why did I think that? Because I simply did not understand anything about the holy spirit and what role he does play and can play in my life. It just seemed weird, and foreign to me because i wasn't accustomed to it. Once I started praying on my own for God to just show me more of the holy spirit...it doesn't require a special service or anything...my world was rocked.
And yes, I think absolutely the holy spirit can manifest himself physically, but it doesn't have to be that way, there are tons of ways just blows my mind.......the very fact that God even allows us to experience ANY of this is incredible, and that very fact that so may times my faith lacks so much that I miss out makes me sad.

learning...

Sometimes, it's hard to not allow myself to get into a certain mentality. I am learning so much here at missionary training school, and I am so very thankful how much God has opened up my eyes.
With all I am learning though, at times it is hard to balance that, I see these people and I God think...wow...there is so much that they need to know about God, I want them to know! I think all of that and I forget, just how much they have to teach ME about God. He has made these people in His unique creation and there are so many different aspects of God that i just simply could NOT see on my own. it is just so beautiful how different we are from person to person, from culture to culture. Our God is so big and we can't put Him in a box by any means. I was just really challenged yesterday as I was sitting in church.....i want to keep reminding myself of all of that. Every time, you think you are going to be teaching someone something, 9 times out of 10 they are going to be teaching you. They always tell us that we need to go in as learners, and I definitely try on cultural things and language, but the God aspect I don't always. I just love thinking about all the characteristics of God and how we are all created in His image. I just don;t want a little of God, when there is so much more.....

random...

So, it's been a while since I've written anything in here, I thought it was about time. I made it one of my "new years resolutions" to blog more. haha. I shouldn't have said that on here. I really should be reading or sleeping right now, but I just need a break, writing is a good release for me and I should do it more. I've realized how much I have been trying to do things on my own lately, without letting God take control and that is why I feel so pressed for time, that is why I feel like I just can't do everything sometimes, is because I CANNOT do this...it is the power of Christ within me.
This week, we've been talking a lot about suffering. That is one of those issues that just breaks me down everytime I think about it. It makes me check every aspect of my life and think...WHAT am I doing? How devoted am I? Yes, I am living in Mexico training to be a missionary, but it does not matter where you are...you can still not give your all. Just being satisfied with "ok" ...it can happen. I really feel like it's been hard in some ways being here, but in reality...this is NOTHING compared to what it could be. I don't want to sound at all morbid, I just want to look at all suffering in a whole new way, Paul says we are to endure suffering with JOY....what does that look like??? What does that REALLY mean? Just thinking about all that goes on in the world makes me think.....ok, so I sometimes complain about the food here. Not always outward, but it is tha attitude of my heart that really matters. That goat soup might make me gag for a second but it is NOT leaving scars on my body. That's just a small example, but it is a BIG deal in a lot of ways, it's learning to be content.....fully content in every circumstance.

I really like to think sometimes that I am becoming more culturally sensitive and shedding my american mindset, but I still have so far to go. One of the huge things that I have learned here, is that God is such a HUGE God, there are so many different aspects of Him... if I just have Him in a little box then I am missing out on SO MUCH. There are so many different types of people in the world, and they all are creations of God and unique beautiful creatures. That is one of the things we are being challenged with a lot......making disciples of Christ....not clones of American Christianity. There is a universal body of Christ and each part is essential.