These are busy days

I’ve been busy over the last week or so.  I had my meeting with the lady that has a say whether or not I get into CFOT.  I don’t really know how it went, can’t really say it went good or bad.  Which is good, I don’t think I sent her running back to her room thinking that they should not let me in.

Then there was the Commissioning (ordination) weekend for my friends, and of course I was at all the events that I could be….you would not have caught me anywhere else.

I’m so excited for my friends, they have completed their training and are on their way to their first appointments as ministers in the Salvation Army.  These are exciting days for them, and sad ones for me.

I love the cadets we had at my church this year, they were awesome.  I am very sad to see them go.  Which kind of makes me wonder, how I am going to handle to constant goodbyes that come with Salvation Army officership.  I guess it will always be sad to say goodbye, but we must obey when the Lord calls.

Rolling Rolling Rolling

Tomorrow I have to meet the Candidates Secretary…which makes me really nervous.

1. She is a stranger…what do you talk about with someone you don’t know?

2. She has a say in whether or not I get into CFOT

What if I go there and act like myself, and she does not like me?

What if I go there and act like someone else and she can tell I am being fake?

What if she asks me hard questions?

What if she is not nice to me? 

I am so nervous it is not funny.  I just feel like the entire thing is going to be her sizing me up…which it might not even be. 

In other news I counted every last ounce of food that went in my mouth last week and I only lost 1.6lbs.  Yeah 1.6 is good, but I had just hoped for at least 2 after making all those good food choices.  I have not let that discourage me though, I am keeping up with it, and writing every last ounce that goes in my mouth this week.  Hopefully it will pay off more.

 

Well it is time for a diet update I guess

I weighed in 2lbs less at weight watchers this week.  Which is good, but considering it had been 3 weeks since my last weigh in not so good either.

Still I press on, I am at the doctor on July 8th and hope to at least be a bit down from what I was when I saw him last.

I bought my tent this weekend and I put it up tonight to see how to do it.  Pretty good, I am really looking forward to my camping trip this summer now.

So my officer told me last night that she was going to start pressing things on to get my full case papers going for CFOT, so today they emailed me and got some more information from me.  So hopefully that will start moving a little quicker.

I do have to take a course, but I’d kinda like to wait until later to take it to get a feel for whether or not I will get accepted because the course is $900 and you only get reimbursed if you get accepted.  $900 is a lot of money.

Other than that nothing much is new.  I am all moved in to my parents house now, getting ready to save all the money that is required.  So things are rolling, I just hope that they roll the right way.

I am exhausted

And my sister did most of the work. 

This weekend was moving weekend.  My sister and I moved as much as we could out of my apartment and over to my parents place.  It was 2 days of work and I was almost going to cry because it looked like we were never going to make a dent in the stuff…until I let Linda just start throwing stuff away.

So now all we have left is the big stuff to move…a dresser, bottom half of my china cabinet, my bed, my desk and a bookshelf.  I have no idea where all this is going to fit in my parents place and I am pretty sure they don’t either.

I hate moving.  Hate it.  Which is funny, because I am working towards a life profession that will see me moving very often.  I keep telling myself though at least there will be no big furniture to move, and they will get me movers to move the boxes…..that’s the one part of being a Salvation Army officer that I will hate…..moving.

Well it has finally happened

I turned 30 years old today. 

I was dreading this day for the longest time.  I have been depressed about this day.

Friends told me that it was no big deal at all, and I did not believe them. 

Well today when I woke up, I believed them…I did not feel any different than yesterday.  I am fine.

Then I hopped onto my bike for my 14.7KM ride to work and not only am I ok with being 30, but I am going to embrace it.  My 30s are going to be my greatest years.  I have a lot to accomplish, and unlike all the things i wanted to accomplish by the time I was 30, I am actually on the road to doing now, and if I had done them sooner it would have not been right I think.

I am getting into shape in an effort to take better care of my health.  I am watching what I eat, not only to lessen fat intake, but to try and get the proper nutrients into my body.  I am exercising, who knows…maybe that goal of running the marathon will come true in my 30s.

I am getting ready to go into CFOT.  This has been a lifelong dream and it will happen in my 30’s.

Things are going to be good, 30 really is the new 20.

Also a shout out goes to my Grandma Erva Deacon, who would have been 84 today…I love you and will always miss you, especially on our day!

Sometimes someone has to say it for you to hear it.

I’ve been having a real hard time with the spring bus schedule change.  In the spring, my regular bus to Scurfield and Waverly gets cancelled, and in order to catch the one that leaves five minutes earlier I have to get out of bed about 20 minutes earlier…(it’s my second bus you see).  Anyone that knows me, knows that I have a hard time in the morning, so leaving 20 minutes earlier has been quite an adjustment.

Sometimes when I am running late and miss my first bus, I see my uncle on the next bus.  We usually don’t get a chance to chit chat, because we usually don’t wind up close enough to talk.  Today though, we wound up sitting right next to each other pretty much.  We talked mornings, and hockey.  Somehow we transitioned from hockey to running, and my uncle said something that I have always known to be true, but I just really needed to hear it today.

He said:  I’ve learned something with my running, and that is I gotta stop worrying about what everyone else is doing, and how well they are training and their times, and concentrate on my own race. 

Even though he was literally talking about running, I took what he said to heart.  On my way to officership, I have been paying attention too much to other people, comparing myself to them.  Wondering why I am not as smart, eloquent, or well rounded.  I get it into my head that because I am not like so and so that means I will not be a good officer (I’ll have to explain one day what I mean when I say good officer).  Just because I am not like other people and don’t seem to have it all like they do, doesn’t mean that God won’t use me.  Actually it seems to me that if we look into scripture, God uses screw ups more often than not.  I need to stop comparing myself to everyone else, and concentrate on the race that lies before me.

As for the last post, thank you both for your comments, your thoughts mean a lot to me.  Secondly, I have been trying to get over it, and I am.  I did receive some encouragement tonight after choir practice.  My officer came to me and told me that she saw some really great leadership in me tonight.  Considering what she had said before, I appreciated it.  For me it just made me aware that she does see some good things in my ability and that encouraged me.

In totally unrelated news, I’ve been having some trouble lately with my limbs.  Actually that is not totally unrelated because to be accepted to CFOT I have to be in reasonable good health, and there is something concerning me a great deal right now. 

For the past month, I have been noticing that if I stand still for more than 10-15 minutes my right leg has been falling asleep.  Annoying but bearable.  Well today, the tingling started in the shower…not even 5 minutes into it, and it has also spread to my right arm.  I had a hard time leading the choir tonight because my arm was so tingly.  It still functions well and does not hurt at all, just really tingly, and now my hand is really red.  So I am considering calling the doctor tomorrow to see if I can get in to see him.  I hope it is something simple like a pinched nerve or something like that, that can be fixed.  I hope it is nothing big enough to slow down my application process for CFOT.

 

This is a test, this is only a test…..

If this were real adversity things would be much worse and you would not be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

Ok Ok, I had to throw some humor into my day.  Perhaps I am the only one that remembers those commercials from the 80’s.  It was before the cold war ended, before the Berlin wall came down.  I didn’t really know much about these things so I looked it up, and you can read the information here.  It was on the American channels of course, but I remember watching TV and having shows interrupted with this annoying beep and some instructions about how instructions would follow in an actual emergency.

Well I am feeling very “tested” these days, if we want to go into church lingo.

Things don’t seem to be going very well.  It’s amazing how quickly things can change. 

I’ve been trying to learn to be a better person, I want to learn how to be a very good officer.  My officers have been pretty good at helping out with that too.  What has really blown me away this week though is some of the stuff my officer said to me this week in our meeting about my development.  I know that there are things I need to work on before I go into college, but some of the things she came up with were like, I don’t know, it’s like they are looking for things to say that I am doing wrong. 

I am a big girl, I do somewhat ok taking criticism (depending on the source).    Most of my friends will tell you that I am pretty upfront and honest and accepting of my weaknesses,  of course there is stuff that no one likes to hear and yeah my initial reaction is always to get mad, but usually after a couple of hours or days I can see the point in what someone has said.  Not in this case though.

Some of the stuff that was said was true, and I can handle it.  Some was so off base though, it has left me reeling.  I need to just build a bridge and get over it, but I am so mad…so mad.

That’s why I feel like I have been tested.  I need to act in a way that is professional and God-honoring, because if I don’t that shows to me that I can not handle the adversity that will come my way as an officer.  When I become an officer there is definitely going to be criticism, that is a lot of the time probably going to be just, but sometimes, it will be totally off-base.  How I react will be indicative of my relationship with God, and his love.  So yeah, even though it was way off base, and even though I am mad…this is a way to grow and learn, so that I can be a good officer when the time comes.

So here’s to building bridges.  Everyday is new, and provides new opportunities for growth.

Does it make a difference?

I had to run to Safeway to pick some things up on my way home from my parents today, and I happened to be wearing my uniform still.  It was not really busy or anything, but a couple people took double takes.  It got me to thinking, and I wondered does the uniform really make a difference to evangelism?  We say that’s one of the reasons we keep it around, so that we are recognizable to others, and we can use it as a tool for evangelism.  Does it really work?

I think the uniform is good, I think it could do with a makeover, but that’s just my opinion.  I am tempted though to do a little experiment and wear my uniform out in public on a certain day of the week, and then the same day the next week wear something else and see if there is any difference in the way I am approached or if I am approached at all. 

I don’t know we’ll see how it goes.

Should we really have a target audience in Worship?

Something that really drives me nuts about evangelical Christianity is the way we have turned it into a business.  We have something to market and sell.  I guess when you are trying to save the world from eternal damnation, you have to make the product look as attractive as possible.

The problem is, in making the “product” look as attractive as possible, we really dumb down what the gospel is all about.  Instead of teaching Jesus as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Savior of mankind, we market him as a fix all for all of our problems. 

No wonder so many become disillusioned with faith in God, because they did not become rich after coming to faith, or they did not have all illness healed.  Everything was not pretty and Rosy.

We tend to ignore the part of the Bible that states “in this world you will have trouble”  John 16:33 (Read on to what Jesus says) We are given hope here yes, we can have the peace of God when all hell breaks loose.  Hell will break loose, things will not always be good in this life, so lets stop trying to fool people into thinking it will.  (thanks to Rick McKinley for re-opening my eyes to this truth in his book This Beautiful Mess)

The other thing that really bugs me about the “marketing” of Christianity is the whole target audience thing.  My least favorite phrase is “this service is meant to target____”

This is problematic for me in a few ways.  It’s problematic because we tend to dumb down the gospel to the genie in the lamp tool who is simply here to meet my need.  I’m not at all saying that God does not meet my need, but I really don’t think he cares whether or not I get the good parking spot because I prayed to him to help me.

It is also problematic because it can tend to add to the individualistic nature of our society.  Where it is me first and I’ll think about others if it suits my need, or as long as it doesn’t make me uncomfortable.  We prove this point by having target audiences and making worship about our desires and tastes.  Worship becomes about what pleases me instead of what pleases God.  It also gives headway to the lie that Salvation is a personal choice that is between one person and God.  It’s becomes private and something I can be comfortable keeping to myself.

It is problematic because it creates marginalization and segregation.  When we have a target audience, we have a deliberate set of people we are trying to reach and the others…not so much.   We might try to make sure that there is inclusion for everyone, but in targeting specific groups we are sure to leave people out. 

When we sell Jesus to target audiences we tend to segregate old from young, men from women, singles from marrieds, rich from poor, etc etc the list could go on, I’m sure you get what I mean. 

When we have a target audience, we disassemble the community that God intended for us.  We water down the message of the gospel and what it means to live in the kingdom of God now. 

There is no easy solution, sure I believe that God meets us where we are, but I also highly doubt he wants to leave us there.  So how do we create genuine community living in the kingdom of God?  I think we need to go back to the basics and look at how Jesus did it.  Stop trying to sell the kingdom of God, and just live the kingdom of God….maybe that’s how evangelism should work. 

It’s funny, the tradition I grew up in (The Salvation Army) in it’s early days didn’t seem to care much what people thought of them and although you might argue that they had a “target audience”  they did not seem to be selling a popular version of Christianity.  What’s funny about it, is it seems that when the army was under fire for it’s practices (people were being thrown in jail, mocked, beat up etc) those are the times when the army grew the fastest and the most and many people met Jesus Christ.   Maybe there is a lesson in our roots.

Things are moving along

Well I had a meeting with my officer (pastor) last night to go over the plan we came up with in the fall to get me ready to go to CFOT (seminary).  We had set some goals, and we met to see how I was doing with them, and I’ve come a long way with them.  They are not the type of goals I think you ever achieve completly but, they are things you always want to work at, like for me the goals are confidence, conflict avoidance, and organizational skills.

 I felt good after our talk, I expressed some things that I needed to and was reaffirmed in some decisions I have had to make.

 So now my officer is going to send in to get my case papers started and I will be on my way.  It’s a long process, and I want to take my time doing it.  So to start now and work toward going in Sept 09 is my goal.

I picked up my tunic today from the tailor.  I think it looks good, so I guess if I can get some S’s by Sunday I will be wearing it to church. 

It’s actually getting exciting now….and more scary but I am glad to be on this road….what a difference from last year.