School is In!

I had kind of mixed feelings of melancholy and relief as the girls all got ready for school today. I also nearly had a heart-attack when I realized this morning that I should be waking up around 5:30am to be on the ball with them as they get ready for school every day. It is different now not to wake up, put the music on so they can practice a dance routine, or lay around with books in hand for a lazy summer morning.

Change is growth, as they say. Well, as I say. I don't know if anyone else said it...

I made three successful videos for Jerry as he heads out to a string of events to help raise funds for our Dining Hall, Community Center. I'm excited for a community center, and my first suggestion will be to invest or ask for donations of couches. It feels like ages since my soft fleshy area has set on a couch. Just crouching awkwardly under a bunk is all we ever get for living comfort. Maybe it sounds like a lot to ask, but if you count how many times you sit on your couch at home, imagine if you didn't have one... Just imagine it. Picture it. Right now. You have no couch. It's a painful thought, isn't it?

Some of the kids and young people have started a new trend, a sort of addiction you might call it, but in the most Christian of senses. Phase Ten, the card game. We've gotten to the point where the loser pays all (in a bag of popcorn or a 2 liter of Coke, or in cleaning up afterward, depending on the level of their riches).

I've been a little too successful in my endeavor to put together a new audiovisual crew at Nations church. I was expecting maybe 6 to 8 people to show up, and even less to make it all the way through the course. I ended up with 13 and no one is dropping out... and most are passing with maybe not flying colors. More like some of the colors are sort of blowing in a breeze, lifting a little and then sometimes laying there, flat, and motionless. The point is, there are COLORS, none are failing.

This is good news, but for me it means more time invested in managing the whole thing. Time.... It's such a precious word in ministry. One dude has all the pluck in the world to want to help me so I've been training him in double-time, he's already helping teach the others with the on-site stuff and since he's trusted by the ministry I'm hoping I'll be able to hand him copies of the keys to the camera cabinet soon.

Apart from raising children, raising funds, and raising an army of video experts, life is pretty tranquil...

The Greatest Love Story Ever

If you know me well, you probably know of my little girl crush on Donald Miller, the author. I'm not ashamed of it. I hope someday we'll be author-friends. I already know someone who knows someone who knows him, so just a decade or so to go and I'm in!

Anyway, all of this just to say that there is no little girl crush or any story of "true love" more deeply and movingly told than in Don's book (I'm just going to start off calling him by his first name, so we can get used to the idea that I'll be good friends with him one day). His last chapter in Searching for God-Knows-What is a sort of essay-comparison of the story of the love story between God and his greatest love (you and me), and Romeo and Juliet. Even he mentions that it might be a flawed theory, and maybe Shakespeare didn't mean for it to be taken that far, but he seems to have his facts straight. If you don't believe him you can reasearch (Google) it if you want!

Either way you cut it, my heart was stolen by God the other night as I read the words of Romeo being captured in the same way a Christian finds his way to the heart of God, and fully trusting him, because he fell in love, and he wishes to throw away everything, even his identity as anything else but a Christian:

I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I'll be new baptiz'd;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.