Tagged by Andy

So a friend of mine (Andy) tagged me in his blog to write six random things about myself and then tag six other people to do it as well, though I'm not sure I have even six readers of my blog at this point.

1) Though I dont have cable television, I do manage to keep up on my two favorite shows, The Office and Project Runway. Now I know that Project Runway caters to women but I like the construction and fabrication aspect of the actual clothes they design. Oh well.

2) My wife thinks I'm autistic. I walk on my toes, I memorize things well, I tell the same stories over and over, I mutter little jokes to myself that only I find ammusing, I can keep a running count of cards up to a four deck stack and I find great comfort in rocking back and forth when ever I am distraugh.

3) I hate talking on the phone. I dont hardly ever call people or anything. It probably makes me a bad person.

4) I love building things with my hands. Maybe its because I dont get to do it as often as I like, but I think I could do it for a living. I did it over the summer for a couple of months and loved it. I think its all the thinking tim you get. Your hands are busy and you mind can be elsewhere. Unless you are using sharp instuments.

5) When I was little I would do this thing with my fingers to tell my mother she was being wierd. I found out last week that it is actually the sign in ASL for wierd. Which I guess at some point I knew but forgot because I had been doing this since I was 5 or 6 years old. Which is wierd right?

6) I like green things. I like plants. Watching them grow and flower and produce. There's something whole and right and simple about the order and the progress, the flow of seasons, and the smells of life in the soil.

Now Im supposed to tag people who blog but I dont really know that many so how bout Aaron, Micah, Glen, Willy, Chelsea and Leisy

Stage 3 of Moving and the First Week of School

So when asked about how i was doing I told someone I was in the third stage of moving (like the five stages of grief). The third stage is utter loathing of cardboard boxes. (The others are, in order, excitement about moving, realization that you have only a week left to pack, the drudgery of furniture moving day, and finally acceptance.)

On a lighter note I have technically finished my first week of teaching! Its gong well and I'm seeming so far to be able to do my work at school so I don't have to take it home with me. The teachers and the Principal are pretty amazing and have given me some nice complements that they have heard from students (mostly that I'm going to make them work but that they really enjoy the class.) All my classes except one have a test on Friday, and the one that doesn't has already had two quizzes (they groan a lot but hey, its anatomy and physiology and there's a lot to learn.) This morning I led staff devotions where we prayed for one another and I'm leading worship for chapel this afternoon with another teacher here.

So that's all for my update but I'm working on an article about Worship and My Favorite Heretic (Nestorius who called himself the Hammer of the Heretics and ended up becoming one)

Peace to you all
Adam

Oy Vey!

So today I went by the school and picked up yet another box of books for my classes that I'm teaching. I'm now offically teaching Chemistry, Anatomy and Physiology, 2 Biology classes and the 8th grade boys Bible class. But i had a fantastic conversation to day which i will recount here.

"Well we're having breakfast and lunch for all the new teachers tommarow."

"Great what are we having?"

"Its a supprise"

"Well Im just asking cause I dont eat pork or dairy"

"Oh cause your..." she nods at me as if waiting for me to fill in the word. "You know, like Hebrew"

Any ways I thought it was pretty funny.

-A

New Adventures

So if you havent heard, my wifey and I are going to have a baby!

And we're moving out of our little barn into a much bigger barn.

And I start my first day of school on thursday.

So theres alot of change going on right now for us. The easiest change mentally to deal with is moving. I've been moving all my life. If I stay somewhere too long I have to move all the furniture completely arround just so it feels a little diffrent. I like the process of going through things, throwing out the junk, and keeping the sentamental and remmebering the stories that go along with all the little keep sakes.

And right now my wife is doing most of the work for the baby. Sure I do a few more things arround the house but shes the one "climbing mountains" as people keep telling us. But were looking foward to raising our children together and helping them to grow up strong and capible in the ways of our faith.

And school, well, its a small private school so in teaching science, I am the only high school science teacher. So my corses are probable changing today as they go over the schedule due to low enrollment in one of my classes and high enrollment in some others, but Im just rolling with the punches and excited about doing something a bit more fufilling than planning out tract home neighborhoods.

So just a quick update, and Im off to start the rest of my day; transcribing, packing, and lesson planning.

My new Job!

So yesterday I went and signed my life away for the next year but Im pretty excited about it. I signed my contract for working at Cornerstone and will get my first paycheck on the first of September which will give us a working budget instead of constantly hopping from random job to random job though for the past two and the next two weeks I have and will be working for the Priors doing random work arround their house and God has been amazingly faithful in taking care of us throught this time.

So I will be teaching three science classes, a bible class and working with the worship band for chapel. I picked up some of my teaching supplies.

These are my teaching supplies for just two of my classes so I've got some lesson planing in front of me :)

Thursday Again...

My wife is out of town at what was supposed to be a wedding but turned into a fun girls weekend away due to some issues with the US consulate and a visa for the groom. So Sarah is in Connecticut and I'm batching it for the weekend.

But I got a call yesterday from a school that I had previously turned down due the course load they wanted me to teach and the compensation they were offering. So I met with the principal and they actually offered me less work and more money than before so we're praying about it but it looks like a good deal and it keeps me from driving down to Escondido everyday which is exactly 50 miles there and then 50 miles back everyday.

So I'll probably end up working there starting the end of August which is good but still means I am scrambling for work in the meantime but its okay.

-Adam

Thursday...

So I just got done mowing grass with my brother in-law and realized that I have been some what remiss in writing, its not that I have nothing to say but that most of what I have been learning is about doing.

Faith perfected through actions.

Its been an interesting and sometimes difficult couple of months for us. Most of my time has been taken up in looking for a job, since I lost my job about two months ago. I haven't found anything permanent yet, but have supplemented our family income through a lot of random odd jobs mostly involving some sort of physical labor. Which means I've got listening of different messages done and had lots of time to sit and think/pray.

Things I learned...

Walk in my gifting... When troubles come its easy to pull back from things and "wait and see" and really that's sin. Not to say that you shouldn't put some energy into providing for your family, just remember who you are and walk in that identity as best you can.

Remember my priorities... I got offered a job that progressively the conditions changed for the worse. At first it was full time, then fifty to sixty hours, then six days a week, oh yeah and they were going to nights for the next 4 months so I would have been working from 8 pm to 6 am seeing my wife for only 2-3 hours a day. And there were some who couldn't believe it wouldn't take it because it would have been so much money and i didn't have a job at the time. But I made a vow to my wife when we got married to do certain things that take more three hours to accomplish. She's a priority in my life.

Trying to reconcile relationships doesn't always work... But it doenst mean you shouldn't try.

Honor is a language rarely spoken... even in our Church circles. We forget the power of our words and when we rob people of honor, we acknowledge that and go back and restore that that honor to them. And if we see someone dishonored, and recognize it, then we ought to go and address those things.

Don't use pocket knives when you are tired... Which is why i now have an nice scar on my hand about 3/4 of an inch long and about 3/4 of an inch deep.

Family is important and I look foward to having our little family for a long time...


So tomorrow I have my third interview with Light and Life school in Escondido. We'll see what happens. The pastor has an integrated view of using the school to reach out and minister to families in addition to providing a Christian education to the students. If i get it, I'll commute for now, but who knows what the future will bring.

-Adam

Cars and Fridgadares

So on Friday I went home early from work, cause there really wasn't any thing left to do and decided to work on my car a bit changing out my brake pads and re-installing the factory stereo so i could jam to some tunes while I was cruising around.

So when I went to take off the passenger tire this is what i was greeted by...



So thank God it didn't like blow up on me some where. Theres a chunk of rubber missing and it is worn through the reinforcing wires under the tread.

Thats it.

I'm working on some other stuff but it's not ready yet :)

Man Camp

So following in the footsteps of the last few posts and the hope that the thought of a the week doesnt become a reality ("Awarness without change is worse than ignorance") I have been dealing with these issues of brokeness in my life.

In the last blog I addressed some issues with competance that I am working through. Most of them come from past experiences and while I still need to deal with my own hurts and injuries, this weekend these issues bubbled to the surface.

I went to man camp this weekend. Okay every body who didnt ride up in our car called it Men's Retreat, but by the end of the weekend we got a few others to call it that too. But unbeknownst to me, my step-dad also came up for the weekend. Okay well, Im 26 almost 27, I havent lived at home in 6 years, Im married and really, I have almost nothing of a relationship with him other than saying hi and seeing him at family events.

I came up with some younger guys and saw some guys there from other churches that I'm friends with so I didn't see him much. But then came along some "church" time where we got together as churches to talk about what we were learning/ dealing with over the weekend. He made some comments that were pretty mean, which I tried to ignore, but they really hurt. And I though, wow okay, maybe im just oversensitive right now, but 5 of the other six people took me aside in some way or another and asked if I was okay.

I think the one that was really eye opening for me was when one older guy came up and said, I couldn't figure out why he was being so mean to you till I realized you were his step son. He knew we were related but had forgotten because, as he said, he "couldn't even see any sort of relationship between us" and how if he had been up at camp with his son he would have been buddy-buddy running around and at least trying to do stuff together. So needless to say I was saddend. But it wasn't untill Buzzy got up and started reading "On God's Fridge" did I start crying.

God as the Dad I never had who hung up every thing I did on the fridge as a feeling of Joy and Pride over who I am and the life that I was living.

My hopes, my dreams, my heart, my passions, everything that wraps up who I am, held to the fridge with little colored magnets, excited about everything Im doing, and have yet still to do, celebrated at his kid, in all the glory of my twenty six years.

A Glimpse of Jesus

My wife and I recently started going to this 8-week marriage study at our church. Don't worry, our marraige isn't on the rocks or anything, we just would like to learn some good tools to keep us from ever getting to that point.

Anyways, I've been thinking about something that our pastor drew on a white board which I will try to recreate here.



He said from your same sex parent you get your sense of competency, from you opposite sex parent you get a sense of worth and from both of them you get your sense of belonging. We all probably have wounds in at least one of those areas if not all three. But in my particular case, I grew up with a mostly absent father, which means that to some extent I was missing out on a healthy helping of a sense of competency.

Now realize I’m not blaming my father or any thing for issues that I have. Rather I’m just opening a window on my though processes through the last couple of weeks as I've sought to root out some unhealth and to find healing for old wounds that I didn't realize were there.

My particular thought on that Tuesday night was, okay so dad wasn't around, I didn’t get this supposed dose of competency that I was supposed to get as a kid, but what are the normal compensation factors for that lack in a persons life and more specifically, in my own life.

I’m not sure what the normal ones are, but in my case, it’s a drive to be competent. At anything. It’s made me smart, cause I studied hard and read a lot of books. It made me good at a lot of weird things because I was always striving

But behind all of those outer doings, there has been an inner struggle over shame. I feel ashamed when something doesn’t work out or I can’t figure something out. There’s a feeling that if I just did “it” a little better some one might take notice of me and say something about it. Not that “it” was ever a fixed thing; just simply what ever I had happened to put my hands to that day. School was a perfect place for that. I excelled, I stood out, I got words of affirmation, and how God was going to do great things through me.

I realize that even though I'm seeing it more clearly, it has been about a two year process to get to this point, and the details aren’t important for this discussion but I ended up being in a place where as long as I was keeping up with and exceeding what I had previously done, I was praised, especially in ministry. And I found a lot of acceptance of my competence. As long as I kept up.

I think that’s maybe what hurts the most. When I stopped rushing headlong into the fray, almost every one else passed me by, gone on to take care of other things. Some of these relationships have been restored; others are coming around, and others still I have little hope for but in God’s power.

And its not like I’ve been healed from these feelings of shame. They are still there, I recognize them, some times they get me down, and I don’t always know what to do about them. I was supposed to be somebody, right? Did I, like the wayward son, squander away my inheritance? Did I miss some opportunity or do something wrong? And when I'm faced with not even being able to provide real well for my family, these feelings intensify.

In the last couple of months I have faced more rejection than I really care to think about with the job situation. Most people might get sad that they didn’t get a job or what ever. To me it feels like a personal rejection of who I am. I’ve always gotten jobs I’ve wanted. They fall in my lap. People desire me or at least my skill set to be apart of things they are doing. Maybe this is why I'm going through this, because its time to move on from this place.

I wrote last time about brokenness, God only moving when people were broken, and my wife asked me if I was broken yet, I had no answer because I wasn’t sure what I needed to be broken from.

It’s prideful self-confidence that masks itself through nonchalantness.
It leads to self-reliance and impatience to wait on the lord.
It leads to planning and scheming and trying to guess how to be ready for whatever life throws my way.

The key to brokenness as I see it is the careful application of truth to my life through the Word of God, implanted by the Spirit so that I might actually accept the Father’s love and acceptance without the feeling I must earn His respect, before He calls me son.


A Glimse of Jesus is a book I have started reading. He calls Jesus "the stranger to self-hatred" and calls us to be the same, to acknowledge our weaknesses and yet still walk in the truth of our position as sons of God.

“Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones…”

I was reading through the first couple of chapters of Exodus, where the Israelites are becoming more and more oppressed by pharaoh and the Egyptians. What were they doing? It seems they were making brinks and building cities. I’m not sure I follow Pharaoh’s reasoning in scripture, but he gets afraid at the copious numbers of Israelites in the land, that they might side with the enemies of Egypt in some future war, and decides to work them hard, get rid of the male children and put slave masters over them. So the people get oppressed and cry out to God. So God snaps his fingers and smotes the Egyptians right? Not quite. During this time a baby gets born, and through a set of unforeseen circumstances becomes Pharaoh’s daughter’s adopted child. Moses lives the Egyptian equivalent of the high life and pretty much is either ignorant to or indifferent to the plight of his people. At some point in his adult hood he gets caught killing an Egyptian who was beating an Israelite and flees the country. He marries, has children, and then God appears to Moses in a burning bush, 40 years after his escape from Egypt. After leaving Egypt, the people wandered in the wilderness for 40 more years and then Moses dies at the ripe old age of 120 just before the people cross into the Promised Land. (Just a side note, during the wilderness wanderings they had to, on average, bury eighty-two people a day- thanks Tony)

So it was early and I had to think about it but that makes Moses about 80 years old when he goes down to Egypt to set free the Israelites. And unless I missed something, the oppression that the people were crying out to God about had been going on some time before that. So for at least 80 years, but probably more, the people languished in despair.

“Then the LORD told him, "You can be sure I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard their cries for deliverance from their harsh slave drivers. Yes, I am aware of their suffering. 8 So I have come to rescue them from the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own good and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey-the land where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites live. 9 The cries of the people of Israel have reached me, and I have seen how the Egyptians have oppressed them with heavy tasks. 10 Now go, for I am sending you to Pharaoh. You will lead my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt."” Exodus 3:7-10

I imagine my self in the same situation. I’ve forgotten about my people, their needs their struggles or at least ignored them long enough for it them to become nothing more than a passing thought. I have a wife, I am on good terms with the in-laws, and even have some kids and sheep and land. I’m comfortable. Then God comes along and says, “I have heard their cries for deliverance”. What? Now you’ve heard their cries? Now, when I’m comfortable? I’m eighty, I’m supposed to be traveling around in an RV and collecting souvenirs from around the Sinai. Seriously God, go pick on someone else.

I’ve always heard the story of Moses conversation with God taught as, Moses was reluctant because he really wasn’t skilled or he was shy or humble. I think he was lazy. God please, please, please send any one else. And then he gave all these excuses why someone else should do it. Finally God gets mad and sends Aaron the Levite (wait how does Moses know who his Levite brother is)

But why does God wait eighty-plus years to bring his people out of captivity…
This is the question I kept coming back to in my head.

But first skip ahead a little bit. (Past the part about God going to kill Moses cause his son wasn’t circumcised, weird stuff but I have a thought about it for my next post)

Moses talks to pharaoh and pharaoh decides to make it harder on the Israelites not easier- didn’t we all see that one coming. And does Moses get thanked for trying to help them. Yeah right, they get their ropes in a knot. Then Moses cries out to God and God says that he is still going to help them (This is a short paraphrase of a chapter of Dialog)
Then Moses goes to the people and again tells them what God said

Chapter 6, Verse 9
Moses spoke thus to the people of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses, because of their broken spirit and harsh slavery.

And when I think back to question about why does God wait so long, it seems like at this point he has waited too long. The people have been broken by their slavery. Not just in bondage. Bondage implies oppression, and oppression often brings hope for the future, hope for release and hope for change. But the Israelites were broken.

I have all these biblical themes running through my head
Stories of Exile and Oppression by Babylon, Greece, and Rome
The waiting and the longing for a deliverer in times of trouble
The hope of a coming Messiah to establish Israel for good

And I even think, yes that gives me hope, God is going to come through; he’s done it before and he’ll do it again. And so I hold on to that last scrap of hope. But I think even that misses the mark.

I think God waits till people are broken to fix them.

It seems wrong, like God is almost a bad guy, and I guess I will have to untangle all my thoughts about it over the next couple of days, but I couldn’t escape my own thoughts.

God waits till people are broken to fix them.

God waits till I am broken to fix me.

Kenya

I remember my first night at the hospital. I had taken all the classes, learned the medicine and the only thing that I had left to do was actually put what I had learned into practice. I was 20 years old and for about the first hour of my shift I was pretty dumbfounded. I walked around looking, but not saying much. Blood, contusions, brokenbones, coughing, crying, moans. All of these thing were going on and I was slightly overwelmed. I rember the first thing that I did, I cleaned up the floor under a lady who had been shot. It wasnt the glamorus thing it was kinda gross, here i was with all my Emegency Medical Training and I was cleaning the floor. But it got me moving. It got me doing something and by the end of the night I had worked with all sorts of patients, drug addicts, criminals from the jail, done CPR 3 times and a bunch of other things.

And right now Im feeling that sorta dumfounded feeling again. As alot of you know I have been looking for work for the last few months. I applied for a job at ELI that seems like a great fit for me and Im eager to start, where I would, among other things, be a sort of short term missions team pastor helping with training and tending to thier needs spititually to prepare them for going to Africa and to encorage them and help them through the spiritual issues they might have at their return. I have already interviewed with the staff but have yet to interview with Don since he is in Africa.

The issue is that over night Kenya has erupted in violence. Churches have burned and the media is using terms like "ethnic cleansing". The last report I heard on Don is that they are trying to get him and his family out of the country, but that their centers in Kenya are becoming refugee camps for people who are excaping the violence, some with only the clothes on their back. If you are reading this please pray for peace in Kenya. Im not sure what else they might need from us. I have emailed the US office of ELI to see if they have physical needs. Im sure they will need money to rebuild that which was lost and to buy food since in times of unrest, the cost of everything goes up.

Here's ELI's Blog to read about what they are facing incountry.
http://empoweringlives.blogspot.com/

Here's another missionary's blog in kenya that highlights some detailed descriptions of what is actually happening in Kenya since the government closed down the news in or out of the country. http://www.dlipparelli.blogspot.com/