Friend of God

Isaiah 42:16

It's been years really since I've blogged. Will I continue blogging? I don't know. Blogging is an interesting thing. You write these random letters to the world. I guess it is a public diary. Do I share my thoughts with the world? Lets see if I end up posting again :)

Whatever your first step may be, remember this: The journey may be difficult, but it is worthwhile. Knowing yourself and enjoying the freedom that comes from that knowledge is a priceless gift that you can give yourself. You never know what life is going to bring you, but you can rest in the knowledge that you are a beloved creation of God and that He is walking the journey with you every step of the way.

From: Finding Myself: My Journey Toward Emotional and Spiritual Freedom

It's amazing how God shows you exactly what you need to hear.

I watched the movie "Amazing Grace" for the first time last night. It is horrific how awful people can treat other people. Africans were taken from their homes and countries and chained in the holds of ships, with no where to move, not even to go to the bathroom and it was never cleaned up. Two thirds of the people would die before they even got to their destination.

Recently I read the book "To Love Anew" by Bonnie Leon. It had a similiar tale of prisoners being kept in similiar conditions, but atleast they were able to dump their waste over the side of the ship occasionally. Not that their conditions were any better. Some of these people were falsely accused of their crimes, or given a lot more severe punishement than the crime deserved. Actually no one deserves to be treated like that. I know this was a fiction book, but it was based on history.

What this movie and this book did show though, was the hope you can have when you trust in God. In the movie, it took 17 years to abolish the slave trade in England, but because they never gave up, they were able to do it. In the book, God brought them to a place where the characters got their lives back, they still had the scars of their pasts, but they had hope for their futures.

In our country, we don't have slaves, and people are treated humanely in prison. We think that this is true. There is this group that started in my church that is fighting against human trafficing. It is called the "I Am Coming Campaign". This awful stuff does still happen in our world. I pray that this changes. I pray that people become more aware and don't stand by and let it happen.

As God often does, He answered my prayers in a way I never expected. He began to open my eyes to see things from the other point of view. Friend after friend revealed her own frustrations and struggles, and I realized we all had the same problems and the same desires.

One night, I was reading from John and Stasi Eldredge’s book Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul (Nelson Books). Stasi happened to touch upon the very issue I was dealing with: “Friendships need to be nurtured and guarded and fought for. We need to call one another without waiting to be called first. We need to ask how our friends are doing and really listen to their answers … we love our friends by pursuing them.”

This brought to mind a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The only way to have a friend is to be one,” and I realized that there was only one thing in this situation that I could absolutely control: me. My griping and complaining had accomplished absolutely nothing, except to possibly make me an irritating person to be around. So instead of focusing on why my friends were letting me down, I decided to learn how to be a good friend myself.

From: The Fight for Friendship by Kristin Markham

This is a picture of my nephew Jamie and my niece Emma. Jamie was born on Feb 16th. Wow he's already a month old!

Another teacher was telling me about how a kid in her class had to look up the work vegetable, and found out that a tomatoe is actually a vegetable and not a fruit. I decided to google it and found out it was both. Botanically it is a fruit, but legally it is a vegitable. Here's the site I found.