So i came across this song. And it peaked my interest so i’ve decided to blog about it.
Here are the lyrics: 

Song: Topics
Artist: Nevertheless
Album: In The Making… 

She spent the night out with a guy who gives attention when she cries herself to sleep, I heard her say…
And so she gives him what he wants as long as he can make her feel okay, but she’s not okay

And we avoid the topics, we make the kids have secrets
When they are exposed and everyone else knows
We’ll say we never knew it, that they had a problem
‘Cause if we would have known, we surely would have solved it
But we can’t, it’s too late

He’s skipping classes ’cause he hates them, hopes he passes, not to take them all again, I heard him say…
He escapes them with the pills, the ones he takes to make him feel like he’s okay, but he’s not okay

And we avoid the topics, we make the kids have secrets
And when they are exposed and everyone else knows
We’ll say we never knew it, that they had a problem
‘Cause if we would have known, we surely would have solved it
But we can’t, it’s too late

God, you’ve gotta save us, we hide behind the faces that we make to disguise
The things that were ashamed of and all the ugly things that make us close our eyes
They make us close our eyes,
why do we close our eyes?

We avoid the topics, we make the kids have secrets
When they are exposed and everyone else knows
We’ll say we never knew it, that they had a problem
‘Cause if we would have known, we surely would have solved it

This poses a few questions…

1. What are “the topics” anyway!?  I’m assuming its sexual promiscuity, drugs, cutting, alcoholism, orgies, pornography, abuse, beastiality, incest, etc.  What other ones am i missing?

2. Does your youth ministry avoid the topics? You know, the tough ones that make you feel uncomfortable to talk about with your kids.  

3. If you don’t avoid the topics, do you fly through them crossing your fingers that none of the kids raise their hand during altar call because if one does…

4. Do you know how to handle it if a youth admits to struggling with one of the topics?

I am going to be completely transparent right now and admit to my bloggers that I struggle with question number 4.  Why?  Because I know I don’t quite know how to handle if a youth tells me she is cutting or likes going to orgies or…God forbid, performs in beastiality. Seriously. It sounds crazy but how many youth might be in your youth ministry that struggle with one or more of “the topics” and we either avoid them or skirt around them in order to not have to admit not knowing how to handle them. 

On top of all this, how do we personally (as the leader) and we collectively (as the youth group/ministry) first create an atmosphere safe for exposure? When i was in youth ministry, i hardly felt comfortable admitting what I struggled with regardless of “the topic” being discussed during the night. I was afraid of judgement. How sad. Fear of being judged by your own brothers and sisters. So we create these masks to wear and pretend things are okay. 

What do you think? Do you have a story? Do tell, maybe it will help others (like me) figure out how to handle certain “topics”.

I know that I personally want to learn more about how to handle these kinds of situations and how to counsel those involved. If anyone has any resources i could look into, I would appreciate it. (:

Thanks.

keep smiling.be love

*Photo: “The Art of Pretending” by Nonnetta, Deviant Art.

So this is my first post of ‘09.

It came on a quiet night this year. Alone at midnight, i raised my champagne glass of bubbly Pepsi and rang in the new year with a pirate-esque photo of myself which i uploaded onto Facebook. Cheers to the new year.

Before then, i was busy writing my New Year Resolutions. They are as follows:

1. Start over. *For me, it means not giving up. And sometimes you just need to “start over” even if its not physically literally starting over. This resolution goes with my last resolution.

2. Be more… patient . kind . slow to anger . quick to listen . encouraging . thankful . compassionate . understanding . loving . joy-giving . supportive . self-less . trustworthy . serving . humble . courageous . fearless . merciful . … *That’s pretty much self-explanatory. The triple dots mean there are more to be added.

3. Drink at least one glass of water everyday; no Pepsi allowed unless I drink a glass of water first. This goes for home, work, restaurants, anywhere. *I am so serious about this and have been doing great (except today…but i still have time right?)

4. Wear my seatbelt every time I am in the car. *Now this seems like common sense, but ever since my first car - a ‘93 Saturn SL1 with the lovely automatic seatbelts, i forget very often (almost all the time) to now manually put on my seatbelt in my ‘98 Nissan Altima GXE. i know, tis a shame.

5. Learn the piano and take voice lessons: set aside one evening a week (Tuesdays) to school myself. Practice on other days where time permitted. *I was supposed to start these (at home) classes today, but today was a crazy stressful day, so i postponed my “schooling” for next week.

6. Meet with Grace and have “No Pressure, No Diamonds” recorded in the studio. *For those of you who know me, actually writing and performing a song of my own (which can be seen on my Facebook) was a BIG deal. I am not very confident or extroverted. It took me 10 years (since i first started writing lyrics) before I ever finally did an entire song of my own. And i have to say “entire song” because I did write and record the hook for one of our youth pastor’s rap albums (The Quickening). It’s a song called “Complete”. So it’s going to be another push to actually get into my dad’s studio and record it.

7. Set aside one day every month to watch a web-seminar on worship leading. *This is pretty awesome actually. I found this website called The Worship Teleseminar and it’s free worship leading and worship ministry training. They ask you to register (it’s free) and once you login, you are able to access online replays of each session and download the mp3’s and handouts. This is part of my personal dedication in growing to become a better worship leader/director.

8. Look for a graphics art course to take and learn more about designing. *This will come after my piano and vocal classes. I will either look for something to take online, attend a graphics art course at the local community college, or ask one of my friends to teach me. In due time.

9. Write and perform more original songs. *Easier said than done, but I need to push myself more.

10. Organize my worship stations and post them available on my blog for other churches to use, oh yeah, and blog more. *One of these days i’ll get them all together and you’ll be able to find them under “Refuel Your Creativity” as well as regularly update this here blog o’ mines.

11. Stay within my budget. Take out money from each paycheck and put within savings. Save more money by not purchasing what I don’t need. Pay off credit cards/get out of debt.  *I am well on my way towards paying off my credit card debt (for the past 2 years) since i have not touched a credit card since i began this quest. As for taking out money from each paycheck? I have been little by little. Of course, it helped that when i needed emergency money for stuff, I was able to dive into that a bit. Still, paying off my credit card debt is the most important.

12. Take a multi-vitamin daily. *I need to keep healthy and this is one way to achieve success in this area. Call me crazy, but i love Centrum orange-flavored chewables. They remind me of those awesome Flintstone chewable vitamins that we used to eat as kids! No “horse-pills” (and aptly nicknamed by their grande size) to force myself to swallow and it doesn’t leave that odd vitamin after-taste. 

13. Trust God… in all areas of my life. Spend more time with Him. Read the Bible. Listen to podcasts. (ex: teachings from Mars Hill Bible Church) *Okay, okay, so i classified all the Christiany stuff in one resolution. But i think we can all relate to this. And as for podcasts, Mars Hill Bible Church is so far my favorite to listen to. If anyone has any suggestions on new ones i can subscribe to on iTunes and give it a whirl, let me know. 

14. Pursue… Healing . Restoration . Trust . Hope . Personal forgiveness . Peace . Rest … *These are collectively self-explanatory like resolution #2 as well as personal. I’m sure i’m not alone.

15. Take every positive moment in life. Take only the growth and lesson from every negative moment in life. Leave the past behind. Move on.  *This last resolution goes with my first resolution.

Keep smiling . be love . emunah . ahavah . speak life . dream . live

There you have it. I hope maybe I have inspired some of you. 

If not, it’s all good. (:

until next time, peace out girl scout ;)

keep smilng.be love

Adventure.

That’s what i want. all the time.

It’s why i love Ted Dekker’s books. The Great Romance. Being pursued by Elyon. Awe. Imagination.

It’s why i love pirates. Sailing ships on the high seas. Swashbuckling battles. Excitement. arr matey! Walk the plank.

It’s why i love spontaneity. Random thoughts. Freedom from constraint. Overcoming inhibitions. Exhilaration.

and it’s why i love worship stations. or prayer stations. or multi-sensory worship. whatever you call it. I am currently reading “Wild Goose Chase: Reclaiming the Adventure of Pursing God” (doesn’t the very tagline cause your heart a commotion?) by MarkBatterson, compliments of winning a Twitter game hosted by Terrace Crawford. I am not even half way through the book yet and it’s so astoundingly unsettling! What a state of discomposure. I love this book. Here is where I left off to write this post:

              “According to the law of requisite variety, the survival of any system depends on its capacity to cultivate variety in its internal structures. Disequilibrium is life. Equilibrium is death. Prolonged equilibrium dulls our senses, numbs out minds, and atrophies our muscles.
               In physical exercise, routines eventually  become counterproductive. If you exercise the same way every time you work out, your muscles start adapting and stop growing. So you need to change the routine. You need to disorient them. The same is true spiritually.
               This is why we need the Wild Goose in our lives. Without Him, life becomes an empty routine or dull ritual. The Wild Goose keeps things crazy.”

So i stopped to think about my life. And how disoriented I feel…almost all of the time! And you know what? My disoriented life keeps me on my toes. Yes, it can become overwhelming at times or stressful, but in all actuality, it’s part of the adventure. Whenever my life seems in order, i end up feeling bored and quite apathetic. I’m starting to think I should never pray for a life of order. Especially when all i want is adventure!

And it goes the same for church. I get bored in church, easily distracted, tired. And its simply because i often get stuck in the same routine every Sunday: worship then teaching, worship then teaching. I want depth, i want new notions to become entangled in, new ideas to dance with. And that’s how i found out why i love chasing the Wild Goose… and why i love worship stations.

I’ve always had a passion for this area of worship and quickly became the  worship stations coordinator (my unofficial name? lol) for our youth ministry (The Bridge Youth Ministries) and for our youth church, The Sanctuary. I love “refueling my creativity” by creating new stations or borrowing others to mold into the theme of the teaching. I love organizing the “labyrinth/prayer room” each year for our youth retreat. I love thinking up new directions to enhance worship in such a way that we can feel, sense, hear, smell, touch, taste, dream, embrace God.  Multi-sensory worship encourages participation, action, and movement. It’s an invitation to reckless abandonment. I love it! (:

So, my dear readers, i can’t wait to continue chasing the Wild Goose; oh so captivating is this adventure with Elyon; to be pursuing this quest with God. This is the way life should be. This is what a relationship with the One who pursues and chases me should be like as i pursue and chase Him in return. This amazy (crazy amazing) amusement we play together. The pure joy. The rush of excitement. The overtaking adoration.

This is love.

“So when you say forever, can’t you see?
You’ve already captured me.”
             -Mae ‘The Sun and the Moon’

keep smiling.be love

That extra hour of sleep was awesome! I woke up this morning feeling like I slept great. So when I woke up at the sound of my alarm this morning, I was fine with getting up to make it to Conversation and Connection: People who Lead Worship Bands. I went to represent Refuge, Jesu went to represent the spanish band, and Armando went to represent the Connection band. We split up into different groups to discuss various things. One question was, “how do you get your kids on the band to have a worship attitude instead of an “its all about me” or whatever attitude?” People suggested devotional time or a book to read from. I wanted to tell them what I’ve observed over the past 3 years of being the worship director.  One is worship music. I’ve noticed a definite change in my team when they walk into rehearsal with worship music already playing in the background. Music completely changes the atmosphere of the room. Worship music sets the tone. My team members won’t come into the Sanctuary for worship rehearsal yelling and laughing and joking around if the worship atmosphere is set. God’s presence is in the room.  The second thing is personal reflection. Sometimes we come to rehearsal or church with so much on our minds that we’re stressed out or still dealing with whatever happened during the day and it’s amazing what some quiet time will do for us as individuals. Sometimes its writing a letter to God, other times its reflecting on a verse or two, answering a personal question. There is so much I still want to implement in our rehearsals but get so busy I end up forgetting.  But I want to work on that again.  And as always, before and after rehearsal, I feel its important to pray together as a group whether its short or long. So yeah, the first two things I was dying to say to our circle group but… I couldn’t! lol One person told me I should have just jumped in, but everytime I opened my mouth to start speaking someone else beat me to it. So then they said, well what about raising your hand, but I didn’t think we were in school lol. It was kinda frustrating. Oh well, at least whoever reads my blog can hopefully benefit from this.

Breakfast time thanks to Jesu. If it weren’t for him, I would have went another morning without breakfast. We stopped by the Brown Bag deli but they are closed on Sunday so we stopped at the Panini and Pizza place in the Westin and ordered amazing bagels! (:

General Session five… started off with Talent: an amazing feat from the Living Illusions crew where she was locked and handcuffed in a clear cylinder of water. It was remarkable to watch her the entire time and of course the anticipation builds as Linkin Park’s “Crawling In My Skin” played in the background (music moves you!).  The Skit Guys were hilarious as usual. Artist: Shane and Shane – again they did a marvelous job.  Speaker: Mark Yaconelli. He did a great job! He talked about what we learned from Dan Webster’s Leading from the Pages of your Life when he talked about if you are doing something in the church that makes you tired, makes you irritable, and sucks the life out of you, then that’s not God.  I loved his story about the night dance and how he ended it with actually doing the disco to “You’ve Got The Best of My Love”, shimmering disco ball and all.

During the session I found out that out of the 5 people going back to Jersey, 3 changed their minds and swindled their way out of going to classes and taking tests lol and are now staying. I quickly realized that there was room for one more person in the van, not three. So I squashed the dilemma before the dilemma became and three of us girls took out clothes for our last day tomorrow and any other necessities and sent our bags a-packing with the remaining two team members that needed to leave today. Yay for quick thinking. It wasn’t until after that we (myself, Billy, Samantha, Jenn, Romulo, and Sarah) went to eat lunch at Subway. There we discussed Rock Band and tattoos. (:

Our Rock Band discussion prompted our arrival at the YS Store Rock Band area where I proceeded to do vocals for the very first time for that game for the song Maps by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs. Jenn was on drums, Romulo on guitar, some random youth worker on bass. It was fun. Like I tweeted at the time, Amy would have been proud.

I decided once again to skip a seminar but that’s ONLY because during the convention, the seminar that I previously planned to take at this time was Crystal Kirgiss: From Youth Room to Dorm Room: Helping Your Students Prepare for College for the simple fact that my One Way Turn girls are all seniors this year, but alaz, they switched it to day two and I was already planning on taking Soul School which made me regret going to Soul School instead of Crystal’s class. Rar. So yeah, I walked around the exhibit hall, uploaded my blog post to my site at the YMX booth, got a free shirt thrown at me and land in my arms as I walked by lol. The girl who was trying to catch it saw it happen and said, “nice…” ha.  I ended up catching up with exhibit hall peeps and tweeps and lost track of time and didn’t go to the other seminar I planned on going to which was Mark Yaconelli’s The Dark Night of the Soul: When God is Absent. Later on I found out that Jesu went and said it was the best seminar he’s been in for the entire convention. I’m so glad to hear that, especially from the newbies… To hear how much this conference has impacted and challenged them. I love that.

The exhibit hall comes to an end. Samantha and I helped break down the YMX booth a bit, I went back to WorldChangers booth and picked up a pile of shirts for our kids back home and grabbed some Etnies flip flops from the 30 Hour Famine booth since they were giving them away as well.

General Session 6… Talent: Living Illusions (great), The Skit Guys (hilarious, especially the ad-libbing). Artist: Kendall Payne – oh, she cut her long pretty hair! Maybe it was crazy hot over the summer? So she went back to her first album look. Her first two songs were amazing and caused me to buy her album and she signed it for me. Jenn already found me blogging this now and asked me to learn “I Will Give You Love” to sing it in the Sanctuary one of these days. Tony Jones was the speaker and I must admit I wasn’t paying attention much. They lost me after the song and dance unfortunately. Worship: David Crowder Band – as usual absolutely amazing. And being surrounded by a family of youth workers singing in unison to our astounding God is simply amazy (that’s my word for crazy amazing…reserved for only specifically rare crazy amazing circumstances). My favorite one-word was during the song “You Are My Joy” and when we all sang the last word of “joy” together. My favorite part (not in You Are My Joy) is “Oh and everything will change, things will never stay the same, we will never be the same…” ah, what a song lyric… especially for someone who struggles with believing that things will never stay the same… sigh. Still working on that.

Right now… I’m at the Internet Access booth finishing up this blog post for today (yay!) and trying to ignore the cacophony of the band “Lost and Found” behind me.  I’m sorry, they are simply not my cup of tea. And YS is pretty smart having them go first and make all the YWs sit through them waiting for the Skit Guys. And for those of you who do enjoy them… better you than me, my dears.  Oh my gosh. Now they are doing Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Please stop. Please. This has got to be worse than Adam’s Christian mimes! Except for the fact that he has pictures. Lol  no… now the guy next to me is singing along…

I’m not ready to go home tomorrow. Not ready to go back to reality really… back to the things I let this Convention be my escape from (and for those of you back home who are reading this, don’t be offended, its not about any people). Well tomorrow is another bunch of seminars, none of which appeal to me which means I’m skipping out again, but you know what, I had an amazing time here this Convention and honestly the critical concerns course, most of the general session talks, and most especially the Twitter connections and discussions amongst other YWs made this weekend for me. The only thing I’m dying for YS to add to next year’s line up of seminars is “Worship Leading”. Please guys, not a little “People who Lead Worship Bands” Connection group. But a worship leader class where its about leading, how to lead (and not put on a show), letting the Spirit flow and being flexible to that, and most of all – have a time of worship where we all sing and worship God together, maybe even let us lead songs – who cares if someone might be good or bad. Honestly if they are bad, then you can even tell them they are not supposed to be leading worship and you have no idea how they got the job unless they are working in a senior citizens church, get my drift… lol

Okay, I’ve endured way too much of this Lost and Found band! :\ Time to post and be out!

Until tomorrow everyone.

keep smiling.be love

Good day, good day.

Seriously.

First up, the rest of the CCC: Leading from the Pages of Your Life by Dan Webster.  Oh wait, maybe I should mention that I slept in as long as possible before having to get up and get to this class which = no breakfast. ha. anyways, the rest of this class was… how can i put it… phenomenal?  Honestly, if i leave this convention with only what i learned from this class, it is enough.  I absolutely recommend anyone and everyone to take this Critical Concerns Course whenever you hit up NYWC. I dont want to spoil it for anyone but i just have to write about what i learned from it for everyone else who is unable to attend NYWC. 

Yesterday we went over one of the two key points: 1. Take time to listen to (someone you are conversing with) their life.  And we did the timeline that i mentioned in the previous post.  Today’s key point was 2.Understand the two life-long works of leader development. 

A. Get clear on the work that has your name written on it.    
B. Grow your heart, soul, and character.

With that said,
                           Truly successful people…

 * develop a set of competencies/skills.  This is simple: Master your craft! Take classes, go back to school, learn! It’s never too late to continue learning. Don’t be lazy thinking you know it all. You don’t. Young or old, I look up to every person that pursues knowledge and growth.

* build relationship alliances that take their life (and friend’s life’s) impact to a multiple.  This is quite simple as well: cultivate relationships with people who are positive and encouraging. Allowing yourself to be surrounded by consistent negativity is damaging to your soul, your spirit, and your life. It’s important to envelop your self with support, accountability, and friendship.  And it’s amazingly two-fold. It’s not about what you can get out of it, but how you can pour into them and in return they will pour into you.

     *  develop enough character not to blow it all up. This is the toughest part of becoming a successful person. Responsibility brings out the monster within us and when we encounter obstacles, whether its rejection, failure, defiance from others, fear, stuff just doesn’t work out like you planned, etc, it’s up to us to develop enough character not to explode in anger or crumble into a huge mess. Everything that we’ve built up about ourselves can shatter in an instant in a lapse of controlling your emotions. So strive to allow yourself to feel the hurt, the anger, the fear, whatever it may be and at the same time, not let it control you.

Here’s where it gets more personal: Ask yourself these three alignment questions.

1. Where is the life/joy? What are the things that light up your world when you talk about them, what are the things you love to do, what makes you come alive? *Go deeper and keep a journal for 30 days and track all of your alive moments.
2. Where’s the fruit/impact? Where did God take your efforts and make it more than you ever could?
3. Where’s the affirmation? What are things that people notice about you? What can you do with relative ease that most people struggle doing?  What is it that makes people ask you, “how do you do it?” and all you can do is shrug your shoulders and say, “I don’t know, it just comes to me.”

Mind-blowing stuff if you ask me. I challenge you, if you are reading this and you don’t know what you are supposed to do for the rest of your life, answer those questions. And if you already know what you want to do, answer them anyway, because the worst thing in the world is pursuing something that your heart is not into. By doing so, you’re only hurting yourself, others who could be touched by your gifts, and your capacity to be used to your fullest potential. Talk to a mentor or leader.  Take classes, cultivate relationships, develop character.  I assure that your life will become an amazing adventure. I’m so confident in this, that I’ll give you a 30-day money back guarentee if you are not satisfied. lol 

So! After that course, I checked out about half of the exhibit hall with Samantha (@milagrosfarias for those of you who Twitter).  Met up with Todd (@thesnuffy) at the YMX booth before heading over to Subway where we ran into Nadim (@simplyinsider) and realized that we met earlier in the hotel the day before. Very good. My best friend Ali would appreciate that I ate a 6inch Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich. Lol That seems to be our Sunday find dining choice in between our youth service and the young adult service.

General Session Uno… Worship: Starfield – amazing. Glad to have this for multiple sessions this year. Artist: Newworldson – loved it. Talent: Amena Brown – I love her, but we missed hearing her speak because we were stuck at Subway. And Joe Castillo whom I call the sand story guy.  Wow.  His sand story on the Prodigal Son nearly brought me to tears.  That was the best sand story of his that I have ever seen. Speaker: Mike Pilavachi – Engaging and animated. I saw him do the same teaching two years ago at NYWC Austin, but it was still cool.

Seminar Series 1… I went to Jeanne Stevens “Soul School” class, stayed for about a half hour before I got up and left. Not because I hated the class because in fact, Jeanne is a wonderful speaker despite the evil curse of the word “um” that seems to be upon her. But in my opinion (and its only my opinion peoples), there was too much talk and not enough soul nurturing application unless you call “hey, now turn to the person next to you and choose which one of these three points applies to you and why, you’ve got 5 minutes”. And sitting next to someone who was clearly more uncomfortable and closed up than I was made even attempting to engage in conversation like pulling out nails with my bare hands. And I’m not very open myself. After leaving, finally met up with Sara (@saraeden) and met her friends Colleen and Tyler. Also met Brian (@exposed2Jesus) and John (@studentministry).

It’s Sarah’s 28^th birthday today and we went out to dinner at Little E’s Lounge which is above Mahoney’s in Pittsburgh.  Very nice, quaint little spot with an instrumentalist or small band, kinda like a coffeehouse but restaurant. Sarah got a birthday serenade. I had a $7 cheeseburger which…how do I put this… was completely worth the $7. If anyone here is looking for a great place to eat with great food worth the money and side entertainment in the background, this is the place for you.

General Session Dos… Worship: Starfield – don’t know. Lol we got stuck at the restaurant because they messed up some of our separate checks. And with a party of 14 (three married couples) that’s 11 checks lol so we were nice about it because most restaurants try to refuse that.  Speakers: Andrew Marin, Margaret Feinburg, and Soong-Chan Rah – so because of the restaurant mix up, we also came in on the tail end of Margaret’s question and answer portion. But Andrew Marin and Soong-Chan Rah did an awesome job with their talks. I especially enjoyed sprawling out on the YS Store floor with some of my team and chatted with Jesus (@Jesu7) (and like Marko said, I mean Jesus the youth worker, not Jesus Christ). We discussed much of what Marin and Rah were talking about so it was great.

Afterwards, myself, Sami, and Sara walked over to Sara’s hotel (William Penn) and enjoyed comfy couches and chairs and had hot chocolate and laughed and sat in silence. Good times. (:

Back at the hotel, Jenn and Sarah and I debated Marin’s talk about homosexuality and the church. Now I just want to say that its this kind of stuff that I long for: debating discussion, wrestling with statements, notions, ideas and conversing amongst each other without opinion pressure. So we talked and then I began my blogging. I was instructed by her to blog about what I brought into the discussion that she responded to with “that’s deep, I love that.” Lol  so here it goes.

In discussing listening to Marin’s question and answer portion, I was fascinated by one of the questions which pretty much asked how do we minister to gay and lesbians in the youth group? And Marin’s answer was pretty much “the same way you minister to the heterosexual youth in your group.” (completely paraphrasing obviously). And really, how crazy… how crazy and messed up are some churches that seek out people with ‘simple sin’ (that’s what Jenn loved the most). Seriously though, it’s like these churches open the doors to the public but screen their congregation. It’s like they say: Oh, you are bitter? Come on in, we’ll talk about forgiveness. Oh, you’re hurt? Come on in, we’ll talk about healing.  Oh, you are a normal unsaved person? Come on in, we’ll talk about Jesus. But if a homosexual comes to their “open door” then they say: Oh… you’re gay/lesbian? Um… I don’t know, I don’t think you should be here. God says homosexuality is an abomination and we follow God’s word here. Oh… you’re a prostitute? Uh… yeah, I don’t think this is the right place for you.  Oh… you’re what we want to call “abnormal, too hard to save, too much to deal with” sinner? Yeah… we can’t help you.  In discussing this with Jesu, he said, “Church is like a hospital and its like someone with leukemia comes up and wants help, but the hospital says no, we can’t help you.” That’s crazy. That’s…church? That’s messed up.

Well this is my second attempt of blogging this very post since last night after working on it for 2 hours, it vanished and I was panic-stricken until I realized… yeah I wasn’t getting it back.  So here it is again. (: Hope you enjoyed it if you even made it this far. If you did, mad props to you! Do you use “props” here?  No? Okay, it’s like “kudos” or like “getting a pat on the back”. (that’s for all you General Session Oners!) :P

keep smiing.be love

“How many people do you know who aren’t a part of a church, company, or community because of the way they were treated?  They don’t want anything to do with God because of ‘all those religious hypocrites’.  People hurt people. Somebody wronged somebody else.  And they haven’t done the work to apologize and make amends and work through it.  Some people refuse to humble themselves and do the difficult work of learning how to forgive and reconcile.”

So that poses certain initial questions:

Given the fact that people who become hurt by someone’s actions end up causing hurt towards someone else because of those past actions - who then is the total blame?  The first who caused the initial hurt and never apologized for it?  The second who caused the next hurt due to the past hurt and never got over it?  Or both?   And do we give the second guy a little slack because they are only hurting others because they were hurt by someone else in the past so it’s not entirely their fault?

I made a design that says “hurt people hurt people“.  and it’s so true.

And we all have been hurt and we all have hurt others.  And we’ve all hurt others because we’ve been hurt.  deeply.

So how do you overcome this?  And how do you heal from hurt?  It takes some time, but when is it ‘too much time’ to the point where it’s just time to “get over it already”?  

Not everyone is going to forgive.  Certainly not everyone is going to “forget”.  Not everyone is going to say sorry.  And how do you at least do your part?

And we’re all human.  Sometimes we don’t even know that we hurt someone.  Sometimes we do know we hurt someone but we don’t want to apologize because “they deserved to be hurt because of what they did to me or what they did to them.”  Is that ever an exception?

And we know it’s not easy to be biblical and “turn the other cheek”, but is it even possible if we don’t know how to actually do that?  Jesus didn’t mean it in a literal sense, so how does it happen?

And is anything we do that hurts others justifiable?

What do you think?

“At one point, the woman asked why the world was so broken and why people have such difficulty getting along.  The question seemed to have come from years of reflection.  And it wasn’t just an intellectual issue, this was something that deeply troubled her soul. ‘Why is it so hard for us to get along?  Why do we have to fight with each other? Why do we have to hurt each other and sue each other and say horrible things about each other?’  As she was saying this, I realized that what she was saying was less a series of questions and more of a lament. A grieving.
We’re disconnected with each other and we know it.  It’s not how things are supposed to be.”
                 -Rob Bell “Sex God: ‘Chapter Two: Sexy On The Inside’.”