Roasted Twizzlers And Other Adventures

So much has happened since my last post! I feel like my brain is only now catching up. You know a lot of changes have taken place in your life really quickly when you go to your fairly new job and it's the most familiar thing in your day. I can say that I am doing quite amazing! There's been several changes, some of which I will talk about here and some that I won't, but all of them are good changes. It's been a crazy awesome adventure!

First of all, I've finally bucked under the iron-fisted intolerance against country music in my apartment. I have one roommate that dislikes the country and music in general and the other hates country music with a boiling passion. Here I am, the country girl who grew up on a farm and loved it. I'd noticed that I always listened to a country radio station when I visited my hometown. But I stopped listening to it over the past 3 years living in the city. When I cried on the way back to the city after visiting my old hometown is when I decided: "The heck with this! I'm going to listen to it!" It was like reclaiming territory that used to bring painful memories of my past. *cues video game victory music* Now it just brings up images of the beautiful mountains in my hometown and makes me feel peaceful. It makes me feel closer to home. This doesn't mean that I only listen to country music. My taste in music is ridiculously varied.

This past weekend I moved apartments. I'm in the same area. My new apartment is literally down the road from my old one. It's confusing when I come home from work because the route is so familiar. I haven't accidentally gone to the wrong place yet though. Had some close calls. The new place is smaller and I love that about it! It's interesting, but a smaller place helps with my anxiety. The city chafes against my anxiety so anything that makes my environment more simple serves to counteract that effect. I feel like I can breath in this place.

On the Assassin Training front, I have made great progress! After some trouble with sugar withdraws (my sugar intake was ridiculous when it came to drinks) I have arrived at my goal of drinking just water! Anything else is every great once in a while. Water is now my go to drink. I feel fantastic! Not just because I reached a goal, I physically feel great! Plus, an added bonus is I'm still steadily losing weight. The other morning I reached the 5th hole in my belt. I used to only be able to reach the 1st! I don't own a scale and I don't plan to own a scale. It helps keep my focus on my health instead of obsessing about weight.

If you're wondering about this post's title, yes, I did roast some Twizzlers. They were surprisingly delicious!

I've started a 2nd job doing childcare at my church during our freedom and recovery ministry nights. Working with children is a challenge for me. Usually I attend a group during these nights, but it looks like Jesus has a class just for me. It's called childcare. It's challenging, stretching, healing, and so much fun. My anxiety immediately jumps when I'm around children. They're so innocent and vulnerable. So trusting. They always pull me out of my shell, whether I want to be out of my shell or not. Slowly, Jesus is reminding me how to just simply trust, love, and be myself. I usually start out intensely uncomfortable and anxious and eventually I'm sitting down playing with the kids, remembering how to let go and be a kid myself. I truly believe being in touch in your inner kid is very spiritually healthy. It reminds us that we aren't in control, we're totally dependent on a Daddy who loves us more than we can possibly imagine.

There were many fun adventures hanging out with those little ones! Two of them decided they wanted to bond with me. So they threw me in jail. I tried to talk my way out of it. I asked passing kids if they would bail me out or bust me out. One kid was tempted, but then just smiled at me and walked away. I was all like "I thought we were tight!" lol. I argued that they didn't read me my Miranda Rights. Of course that didn't work. Then I got creative. I glanced at my prison guards and said: "Oh, it looks like you accidentally built my cell out of chocolate" and I ate my way out of jail. I was re-arrested about 3 steps from my cell. After a few more escape attempts I finally turned to one of them and asked, "What was my crime?" The response: "You bit a dragon!" . . . . . . My bad! Lol. After that clarification they pulled the whole good cop bad cop routine on me. These kids are awesome!

I have so many fun stories from childcare! I want to write about all of them, but that would make my post really really long and it's already long. I will mention that there was a little girl who decided that her baby doll's name was "Cereal." This kid is going places. I could feel my time with these kids healing my heart. I came out of my shell and actually got comfortable. I was safe and they were safe. They trusted me and felt safe with me and I started accepting that. My lap became a popular seat during that Veggie Tales movie we watched and I started to learn that it's okay to hold them. They're safe with me. I've been afraid around children for years because I blamed myself for the abuse in my past. I thought that if I was around them, I would somehow infect them with whatever badness was inside me that caused my hurt. On a mind level, I know that's not true. But sometimes it takes more than head knowledge to reach those hurt places in the heart. So many times Jesus heals people with people.

And that's simply beautiful.

Our Hope and Our Mission

I haven't figured out how often I want to post on here. I would like to come up with a regular schedule for that, but knowing me I'll do everything but the schedule I land on. So maybe it's safer to just not have a plan right now. I'm one of those creative, unorganized types if you haven't figured that out from my first post lol.

A lot happened yesterday and not so much today so I'll probably talk more about yesterday. Yesterday the capital "C" Church just blew me away! My church is going through a rough time these past two weeks. We've lost our lead pastor and our executive pastor. It's a big church with multiple pastors. It wasn't an instance of our pastors choosing to serve somewhere else. It was more of one of those moments that makes your heart hurt, anger boil, and really challenges your already shaky ability to trust. Originally our church staff, governing board, elders, and remaining pastors didn't know how our church would react. An emergency meeting of church leaders and members was called. I'm a member, so I was there and saw this first hand. One of our pastors read out from the stage the statement that was later posted on our church website of the incident. I could feel the waves of disbelief and numbness wash over us all. We were all listening hard and I think we were all listening for the same thing because when he got to a certain part of the statement we all jumped to our feet. That part was "We remain utterly committed to the mission of transforming unconvinced people into wholehearted followers of Jesus." It was like a bomb went off in the auditorium! A 500 strong crowd jumped to its feet and cheered and clapped. I saw the looks on our pastors' faces. This was not the reaction they had been expecting at all. It was a moment that I will treasure. I was and am so proud of my church. Our main concern was the mission that God gave us. We weren't a crowd of people mindlessly following some charismatic leaders. We were truly changed, on fire people with hearts beating as one for the gospel of Jesus. From that moment, our church has been stronger, closer, and more unified.

Of course, that was the leader and member meeting. Our church averages an attendance of around 5,000 people on our weekend services across our 4 campuses. I was serving this weekend on speaker support, so I got to attend all 3 of our services. I'm so proud of my leaders. They got back up on that stage for every service and read out the statement. We were not going to sweep this under the rug. We were going to be honest, transparent, and address the truth. I was holding my breath, daring to hope. At the same moment, same part of the statement about being committed to the mission, the people in that auditorium jumped to their feet and cheered, just like we did in that leader/member meeting. It happened every single service. What's more, we had more people attend this weekend than I can ever remember! We were parking cars in the field next to our building because we ran out of parking spaces!!! Our intermittent lead pastor shared with us that many local churches had been praying for us. Two of them even driving around in our parking lot during the week, praying. An outpouring of prayer and support came from our partner churches and local christian schools. What you would expect to kill a church, instead made us stronger and pulled together the capital "C" Church. I could feel it in the air. Jesus is here, taking something horrible and turning it around for good for His Church (Romans 8:28). We're still grieving over this tragedy, but we don't grieve as people who have no hope. We're bursting with hope. I can't wait to see what Jesus is going to do next!