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I’m stretching out this week. I joined a prayer room team.
I moved to KC four years ago. I started working at the bookstore part time at that point, I was going to FSM full time. Over time I really found a home in the bookstore.
At any rate four years later, I have found myself having a hard time getting into the prayer room. There I said it out loud. Whew. I have a hard time getting in the prayer room. I’m nervous about even talking about this, but it’s real and it’s me. So here goes.
I’ve always said that living here is vastly different then visiting. When I visited I could sit for hours and hours and I never wanted to get up. I was mystified when I moved here. It wasn’t even vaguely similar.
I found myself in a strange phenomenon. I worked 40-60 hours a week right next door, but yet I couldn’t seem to get into that room. After a long day, the last thing I wanted to do was go sit and pray, and when I did go sit I couldn’t pray. I just sat there wide eyed and working in my head, composing emails, thinking through schematics or just staring straight ahead thinking about nothing.
I would occasionally think “how did this happen to me?”, “why can’t I do both?” “why can’t I be consistent?”
It really weighed on me. To be so close but really soooo far away.
Then last night, realizing that in the truest sense I am a Martha. I love Jesus, but I get caught up in the work. I have a hard time just “being” before him. I have to be doing something.
I’ve become a Martha living amongst hundreds of Marys. What a nightmare.
The only way to change this, the only way to turn it around is to be deliberate, to be consistent, to be intentional. That’s painful, that sounds hard. I don’t like hard things with “delayed” results. I’m an instant gratification kind of girl. I need results. I’m not patient.
I talked to my dearest friend Tracey about all this, she kindly prodded me and said, ”Kristen, you have to sew longer then a minute to be able reap something.” So true.
My shiny new prayer room leader said something along those lines last night. She said the prayer room is kind of like the gym. It seems like something amazing and easy when you get the new membership card, but going everyday is hard, and you don’t see the benefits right away so it’s easy to not be consistent.
God stretches out to me, I have to stretch back. I have to painfully work on being intimately acquainted with him. I have to be intentional.
God, grant me grace.
you wear a camo hoodie with clouds of eyes drawn on it.
People will stare.
You will think those people are rude.
You will realize your hoodie was rude first.
Your hoodie was staring at them.
There are not many times I wish to go back home, to go to back to Wheaton. But today is one of them. My brother just called me from outside Edmund Chapel, outside of a funeral of a woman that changed my life.
I am proud to have known her, I am proud to call her mentor, a friend. As a professor of Biblical studies at my high school, she got a lot of flack for being a woman, not just a woman, but an incredibly strong eccentric woman.
Every fall she taught freshman Old Testament. As the leaves began to turn color and the air grew a little colder, all the campus would have their windows open enjoying the fresh air, and every year without fail an ear piercing, horrifyingly shrill scream would fill the autumn air coming from Academy Hall. It would penetrate every classroom in every building on the campus. Everyone across campus would crack a smile and remember the day that they too heard that scream (at much closer range), the day that Mrs. Riebock taught us about Israel, the covenant, and circumcision (and nearly made us all pee our pants). While that was a valuable lesson, it wasn’t the most memorable for me.
In our World Religions class she brought us all over the world and challenged the very fabric of what we believed. It was incredibly uncomfortable. She brought us all to a worship service at a Hindu temple. It is something I will never forget, an experience that I am so grateful for. She made all that we learned tangible, we touched and smelled the way others felt about god.
I remember vividly coming up to her after writing a paper on Buddhism, I was almost in tears, I told her that I wasn’t sure I believed in God anymore. She smiled and told me that that was okay. She handed me a couple books, and she let me read and read and write paper after paper. She let me ask the hard questions, and she never fed me the answers, I always had to find my own way. She let me find my faith, not just the faith of my parents, but my own. I lost and found my salvation in that class.
I love this woman, who she was in God. I love how who she was translated into the lives of her students. She met me where I was at, she loved seeing me uncomfortable, she wasn’t afraid of doubt, or what others thought of her.
I’m glad to know she stands on the other side of life, in front of all of us, still urging us forward into a glorious life in God.
“Lonely and hurt girls”
another search that ended with yours truly.
I’m on a roll.
“pretty crippled girls”
This is what someone googled and then found my blog… it actually completely fitting for how I feel tonight.
Oh the irony.
Can I just say soooooo thankful football season is about to start? So thankful.
The baby brother
My brother’s apartment, all the bottles are known as the “graveyard” – all the different types of alcohol they have slayed (or that have slayed them)
Some rock and roll xBox 360 game
This is from the trip into the city for Tacos, this building is the Museum of Science and Industry. Built in 1893 for the Chicago World’s fair, it is the only remaining building; the rest were destroyed at the conclusion of the fair. Tesla displayed there, and you thought that the Prestige was only a movie…
Ghetto taco joint, my family has been coming here since it was opened in the late 60’s.
Ghetto Tacos, the light emanating from them might in fact be a sign of righteousness on the earth
O Chicago how I love thee
