honestly...

Community is getting hard, but God is more and more faithful every day.

So this has been the latest struggle: feeling out of place in transit and having nothing to offer and thus feeling unwanted and un-needed. Totally lies. After the disaster that was last night, I woke up late and feeling isolated and irritable. Again. I spent some time cleaning up my space and being silent rotating my thoughts and feelings around my head. That didn’t really change everything. So I decided to get out of the house to drink some coffee and read some Bible. I started getting little texts as I was leaving (from everyone but the one person I was craving them from), and I started seeing God using people to encourage me. And it was raining! And today was supposed to be sunny and bright. How beautiful is that? I see it as a little love note from Him, just a little chin up petite guerrier-jeune mariée (thank you!). 

When I got to double-shot, the first person I saw was sweet Johanna, looking desperately London-chic. We hugged and small talked and finally I worked up the nerve to ask her if we could talk (because, once again, I really really needed to talk to someone about all of this). So after I got my coffee she sat down with me…

I realized that after an experience like this weekend, you can’t ever really share it with anyone else. It’s like the whole Frank Laubach bit where he talked about however much you want someone to know you, to really know you, only God can.

My transit family will understand. Mostly. Maybe my mom will, but the rest of you, who I so desperately want to share it ALL with, just won’t, because it’s all too big to share.

And so Halley held these things in her heart…

It’s so strange that my world is getting small enough that I randomly run into a couple of my roommates when I go out for coffee and reading time in the morning. It’s even more strange, though, that my world is getting so much bigger in the way that I’m meeting new people almost everyday.

One of these new people is a guy named Brandon, who, when not studying petroleum engineering, spends his free time reading Bonhoeffer. I met him this morning at the coffee shop, and then again tonight at community dinner (p.s. I cooked tikka masala and it was   b o m b). He mentioned that he was going to a show with some frieds later at the Collective, a local bar/coffee shop, and so, naturally, I decided to join. 

Deb decided to come along, which, to be quite frank, might have been a bad decision being as the coffee house scene is not at all similar to the bar scene. 

gonna finish this later… i promise.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that God made the sun stand still. Scratch that. Most of the time it’s hard for me to believe. 

I rest, though, on the hope of something greater and the evidence of things unseen. That and psychedelic electronic music.

I didn’t hear him during dinner on the roof top with friends. I didn’t feel him in the concert. But in the car, in the quiet car with the stars up above, i saw him.

This morning marked our second official morning prayer walk. Whitney and I formed a pair and took off west on 23rd. We ended up focusing on one apartment complex that I have come to know as “the prison complex”, not because there are an increased number of tenants with criminal records (which I’m sure there are), but because of the layout of the buildings which all face inward like cells around the jail yard. They are painted a dull gray and surrounded with spiked fences. I jest not. 

They most depressing part of this particular complex is that the playgrounds are empty of the smiles and shouting and laughing of the children that should be playing in them. They are  e m p t y. You don’t even see kids outside. Why? Here’s my slightly uneducated guess: In the last few months there have been eight shootings. Eight. In fact, one of them happened today. 

In the middle of this though, God is here. He has a plan, and He hasn’t forgotten West Tulsa. And I know that one day there will be children outside again someday.

Faith is the evidence of things unseen, mon ami.

“As I analyze myself I find several things happening to me as a result of these two months of strenuous effort to keep the Lord in mind every minute. This concentration upon God is strenuous, but everything else has ceased to be so. I think more clearly, I forget less frequently. Things which I did with a strain before, I now do easily and with no effort whatever. I worry about nothing., and lose no sleep. I walk on air a good part of the time. Even the mirror reveals a new light in my eyes and face. I no longer feel in a hurry about anything. Everything goes right. Each minute iI meet calmly as though it were not important. Nothing can o wrong excepting one thing. That is that God may slip from my mind if I do not keep on my guard. If He is there, the universe is with me. My task is simple and clear.”

So. I didn’t go to Kansas City. In fact, I didn’t even go to church this morning. What I did do was sleep in. I spent the rest of the morning in a little bit of a funk, wondering why I am here. And does any of this matter? It seems like everyone else is really gung-ho about transit looking… extreme. Being extreme. And I fall into this pitfall all the time of seeing what God is doing in someone else’s heart or life and seeing the MOVEMENT of Him there, and instead of letting God move in His own way in my life, I try to take on the movement for myself. For instance, say God is doing a simplifying work in someone and they are getting rid of all of their stuff. My reaction is to go “Wow, that is effing awesome. I see God at work, soooo, I need to start getting rid of all of my stuff”. 

It’s so off. SO off. And so the terrible irony is that some of the same heart problems I had about Kansas City while I lived in Georgia have followed me all the way to Tulsa. Except for now it’s not IHOP (I have a total peace about that after talking to all my roommates about it- I get it now- it really is not the end all be all, it is just very specifically for only a few people, not the whole church) NOW, it’s the KC boiler room, which I hear is the shit. I don’t want to go, though. I am so intimidated by it. And scared of how I will react to it. And scared that transit tulsa will get so infatuated about what is happening there, that tulsa will be forgotten. 

So since I stayed in town, I got to go to a Q&A time with Floyd McClung, who is in town for the weekend. I was definitely supposed to be there. It’s cool how God works like that, p.s. Anyways. So he ended up round about talking all about these questions and issues that have been rotating in my head. Conclusion: God is calling specific gifts and purposes out of each of our lives. Out of my life. I cannot look like anyone else, or do anything else is doing and try to force God into it. It doesn’t work that way (thank God). God doesn’t need two of the same transit programs, or two of the same people, or two of the same bricks. He needs all of us to be us. He needs all of us to let ourselves be shaped into what He wants.

And I am so okay with that.