LT wrap up

The end is nigh. I have less than three days left here in Colorado. At 4:30 am Saturday morning I will be hitting the road back to MO with Thomas and Jake.

It’s been an amazing summer.

Today I went to the craft shop and made a really epic necklace with each bead representing something I learned or did while I was out here this summer.

Are you ready to see my summer in jewelry form? (The brown wooden beads separate each week of the summer.)

Week 1
Five small colored beads: These are the colors of the YMCA and represent my orientation day.
Light blue crystal: It’s the color and Spic and Span and therefore represents my starting my job in housekeeping.
Cross: Represents Drage’s talk about being chained to Christ this summer
Shiny disco ball bead: Drage’s talk about how “the moon reflects the light of the sun (Son).”
Green bead: My sinus infection, the first of many sicknesses this summer.
19 white beads: The first time our Project Group met
Purple bead: The trip to the Rockies game with Mizzou friends
Rock-like bead: First trip into the Rocky Mountain National Park with Thomas, Jarod and Meredith

Week 2
Speckled bead: Represents the time I got violently ill for two days after eating a hamburger from the Spruce.
Six turquoise beads: The girls in my Life Group, which I had the privilege of leading this summer.
Brown wood bead: It kind of looks like a mask and thus represents TrueFaced, the book we read for LT.
Three blue crystals: They stand for me, Brett and Amanda, the original QC team as we were formed the second week out here.

Week 3
Red cross: “And I don’t have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way that He loves us.”
Brown bead: First hike to Bible Point with Kelsey Conroy.
Pink bead: I got pinkeye.

Week 4
White swirly: Project Group trip to Glen Haven for cinnamon rolls then RMNP for my first sledding experience ever!
Muddy bead: I was frustrated with God and feeling really stagnant at the time. I wasn’t sure why He brought me out to Colorado.
Black disc: Neil Kring’s talk about fear stirred up some trust issues within me about marriage and my future.
Two orange discs: The Rocket Summer’s Walls and Something to Live For really spoke to me as I cried out for God to show me why he brought me out here and to show me how to live passionately for Him.
Two green beads: “God is good, and God is strong.”
Bear charm/blue crystal/hummingbird charm: The best day of QC ever, which included a bear sighting and six hummingbirds at one feeder among other shenanigans.

Week 5
Orange rock: Hike to Eagle Cliff with Amelia.
Yellow crystal: Community workshop
White cross: Talking about evangelism and the Bridge Diagram with our Project.
Green bead: Drage’s talk about being passionately focused and Philippians 3.
Flower: My allergies crippled me for two days.
Pearl: My first Saturday night trip to Boulder and Pearl Street.

Week 6
Pearl: Project Group trip to Pearl Street in Boulder.
Squiggly bead: Tubing in Boulder with the Project Group
Small colored beads: LT Spirit Night! Mizzou, A&M, Illinois, ISU, Kent Bowling Green, Michigan and OSU.

Week 7
Turquoise rock: Terrifying night hike to watch 4th of July fireworks from Lumpy Ridge
Two yellow crystal discs: “When you are hurt, you can either get bitter or get better.”
Red coral: I read Crazy Love and finally felt like I was passionately pursuing God.
Green and blue swirl bead: Hike to Moraine Park for an awesome afternoon with God.
White square: “God will fulfill scripture, he just may not use your script.”

Week 8
Star bead: Workshop on Fighting for Joy
Brown wood bead: Camping with the Project Group
Striped bead: Barclay’s testimony
Two white star beads: Spontaneous late-night star-gazing on Trailridge Road with Jade
White disc: I made the decision to commit myself to a Saturday sabbath this coming school year.

Week 9
Two green beads: Two hours of awesome prayer time with the Project Group
Pink bead: A nerve-wracking but really good conversation in the Admin
Seven black crystals and 15 clear crystals: Grad school research day where I narrowed my search from 22 initial schools to 15.

Weeks 10 and 11
Black and gold bead: Realizing during my workshop that the concept of marriage is an idol for me.
Moose charm: Snow Mountain Ranch with the Project Group for crafts, horseback riding and moosejams! (That means we saw a moose.)
Yellow bead: “So, now go.” The commission to go back to our campuses. It’s yellow for Mizzou.
Clear rectangle: Technically not quite completed, but I am on schedule, Lord willing, to finish reading the New Testament by the time I leave Saturday. I have Jude and Revelation left.

And that’s my summer put as succinctly as possible. It’s a goal for me to really talk about what God did for me this summer, so if you have any questions or want to me to elaborate on anything that happened, please let me know. I’d love to tell you about it.

The Quandaries of Sharing the Faith

Tonight was Axis, something the Rock does on a monthly basis to go over each of the Rock’s seven values. They are as follows:

• Loving God
• Honor God’s Word
• Commitment/Participation in Fellowship
• Humble Selflessness
• Being Filled and Controlled by the Holy Spirit
• Good Stewardship
• Missionary Mindset

Now, I’ve only been to two or three Axis nights this year, but I’m pretty sure that out of these seven values, Missionary Mindset is probably my weakest, so I was excited but nervous about what John had to say.

I got a lot out of tonight’s talk. Evangelism is something that has always intimidated the crap out of me. I remember distinctly my youth minister in junior high telling me he really wanted me to go to a evangelism conference for junior highers called Equip and I wholeheartedly rejected that idea. The idea of telling others outright about my faith terrified me, and to be honest, still scares me a lot.

I guess I always had this mindset of “My actions will speak for me. They know I go to church, they see the way I act. That’s enough.” And while I still think that is super important in our lives as Christians, John helped me see beyond that a little tonight.

Here are some random tidbits I picked up…

“We are communicators, not convincers; Lovers, not recruiters.”
There is nothing we can do to “save” people or convince them to be Christians. That’s God’s job. It’s our job to love others, listen to them, and tell them about our experiences and lives. It’s God’s job to capture and save them. We just do the initial ground work. I’ve always loved the idea of just loving people for the sake of loving people. One awesome quite I came across whole reading Kristin Chenoweth’s biography was from her grandmother. Kristin asked her grandmother if she thought being gay was a sin, and her grandmother just replied, “I don’t know, but Jesus told us to love everybody without judging, so I try to do that.”
What an awesome concept.

“Don’t assume what people want until they tell you.”
I think this was the point that hit closest to home for me. The idea behind this is that we make excuses for not sharing our faith by saying, “My friends don’t want to hear me talk about God.” But have any of your friends ever told you they don’t want to? Mine haven’t. I had never thought of it like that, and it blew me away. I have made so many assumptions that my friends who aren’t as involved in a Christian community, or even downright don’t believe, don’t want to hear about my faith journey. I’ve been relatively reluctant to share what a difference The Rock has made in my life with some of my other friends, just because I assumed they didn’t want to hear about it. I’m going to stop these assumptions.

“Not sharing your faith because of a potential question that may not even come up is crazy.”
How many of us are afraid to talk about God because someone might ask us a hard question we don’t know the answer to? *raises hand* Yeah. As John told us tonight, it’s okay to say “I don’t know.” And to be honest, a lot of the time, these hard questions might not come up right away, so we shouldn’t be scared of them.

“The world hated me first.”
So many of us are scared that sharing our faith will cause people to pull away and dislike us. Yeah, this could happen, but remember John 15:18-19. The world hated Jesus first. What a sobering thought.

This semester I posted a giant list of my Spring 2010 goals outside my door, and I think I may need to amend mine and add one: Live out loud.

Yes, it’s a dated Stephen Curtis Chapman song with a reference to Who Wants to be a Millionaire from the show’s heyday, but it’s message is what I should be doing.