1. Touched an iceberg
2. Slept under the stars
3. Been a part of a hockey fight
4. Changed a baby’s diaper (kind of. I don’t know that I did very well.)
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity (sort of? In the context of my lifestyle and beliefs I decided I could afford it, but most people would have been like, O.o thatswaytoomuch.)
7. Swam with wild dolphins
8. Climbed a mountain
9. Held a tarantula
10. Said “I love you” and meant it
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Stayed up all night long and watched the sun rise
15. Seen the Northern Lights
16. Gone to a huge sports game
17. Walked the stairs to the top of the Statue of Liberty
18. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
19. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
20. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Bet on a winning horse
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Taken an ice cold bath
28. Had a meaningful conversation with a beggar
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Ridden a roller coaster
31. Hit a home run
32. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
33. Adopted an accent for fun
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
35. Felt very happy about your life, even for just a moment
36. Loved your job 90% of the time
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Watched wild whales
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Gone on a midnight walk on the beach (and got called a hellion!!)
41. Gone sky diving
42. Visited Ireland
43. Ever bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited India
45. Bench-pressed your own weight
46. Milked a cow
47. Alphabetized your personal files
48. Ever worn a superhero costume
49. Sung karaoke
50. Lounged around in bed all day
51. Gone scuba diving
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Done something you should regret, but don’t
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business
58. Taken a martial arts class
59. Been in a movie
60. Gone without food for 3 days
61. Made cookies from scratch
62. Won first prize in a costume contest (I got third, does that count? I was a one eyed one horned flying purple people eater. Not even joking.)
63. Got flowers for no reason
64. Been in a combat zone
65. Spoken more than one language fluently
66. Gotten into a fight while attempting to defend someone
67. Bounced a check
68. Read – and understood – your credit report
69. As an adult, played with a favorite childhood toy
70. Found out something significant that your ancestors did (my great-great-great grandpa was stable-hand to the king of Prussia?)
71. Called or written your Congress person
72. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
73. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
74. Helped an animal give birth
75. Been fired or laid off from a job
76. Won money
77. Broken a bone
78. Ridden a motorcycle
79. Driven any land vehicle at a speed of greater than 100 mph
80. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
81. Slept through an entire flight: takeoff, flight, and landing
82. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
83. Eaten sushi
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read The Bible cover to cover
86. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
87. Gotten someone fired for their actions
88. Gone back to school
89. Changed your name
90. Caught a fly in the air with your bare hands
91. Eaten fried green tomatoes
92. Read The Iliad
93. Taught yourself an art from scratch
94. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
95. Apologized to someone years after inflicting pain
96. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
97. Been elected to public office
98. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
99. Had to visit someone in the hospital
100. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
101. Had a booth at a street fair
102. Dyed your hair
103. Been a DJ
104. Rocked a baby to sleep
105. Ever dropped a cat from a high place to see if it really lands on all four
106. Mowed a lawn
107. Made a snowman
108. Rode the subway
109. Worn a mood ring
110. Ridden a horse
111. Carved an animal from a piece of wood or bar of soap
112. Cooked something and someone asked for the recipe
113. Buried a child
114. Gone to a Broadway (or equivalent to your country) play
115. Been inside the pyramids
116. Shot a basketball into a basket
117. Danced at a disco
118. Played in a band
119. Shot a bird
120. Gone to an arboretum
121. Tutored someone
122. Ridden a train
123. Brought an old fad back into style
124. Eaten caviar
125. Let a salesman talk you into something you didn’t need
126. Ridden a giraffe or elephant
127. Published a book
128. Pieced a quilt
129. Lived in a historic place
130. Acted in a play or performed on a stage
131. Asked for a raise
132. Made a hole-in-one
133. Gone deep sea fishing
134. Gone roller skating
135. Run a marathon
136. Learned to surf
137. Invented something
138. Flown first class
139. Spent the night in a 5-star luxury suite
140. Flown in a helicopter
141. Visited Africa
142. Sang a solo
143. Gone spelunking
144. Learned how to take a compliment
145. Written a love-story
146. Seen Michelangelo’s David
147. Had your portrait painted
148. Written a fan letter
149. Spent the night in something haunted
150. Owned a St. Bernard or Great Dane
151. Ran away
152. Learned to juggle
153. Been a boss
154. Sat on a jury
155. Lied about your weight
156. Gone on a diet
157. Found an arrowhead or a gold nugget
158. Written a poem
159. Carried your lunch in a lunchbox
160. Gotten food poisoning
161. Gone on a service, humanitarian or religious mission
162. Hiked the Grand Canyon
163. Sat on a park bench and fed the ducks
164. Gone to the opera
165. Gotten a letter from someone famous
166. Worn knickers
167. Ridden in a limousine
168. Attended the Olympics
169. Can hula or waltz (I can waltz if the boy’s a good lead.)
170. Read a half dozen Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books
171. Been stuck in an elevator
172. Had a revelatory dream
173. Thought you might crash in an airplane
174. Had a song dedicated to you on the radio or at a concert
175. Saved someone’s life
176. Eaten raw whale
177. Know how to tat, smock or do needlepoint
178. Laughed till your side hurt
179. Straddled the equator
180. Taken a photograph of something other than people that is worth framing
181. Gone to a Shakespeare Festival
182. Sent a message in a bottle
183. Spent the night in a hostel
184. Been a cashier
185. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
186. Won a trophy
187. Donated blood or plasma
188. Built a camp fire
189. Kept a blog
190. Had hives
191. Worn custom made shoes or boots
192. Made a PowerPoint presentation
193. Taken a Hunter’s Safety Course
194. Served at a soup kitchen
195. Conquered the Rubik’s cube
196. Know CPR
197. Ridden in or owned a convertible
198. Found a long lost friend
199. Helped solve a crime
200. Shopped at a garage sale

I love how you can go over your old question marks in the Bible and find that the Lord has been making them clear in the meantime.

***

The Lord has been showing me today more clearly my position as one unbaptized.

This “not knowing,” or having misgivings about where I stand with God has been with me all along as a vague Hmmm, and a wrinkle of hte brow, but it’s only really within the past week or two–really, it began to cement on Sunday–that things have begun to come clear enough to articulate.

If I am not yet baptized into the name of Jesus, can I pray in Jesus’ name? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but I have only just been able to realize the correlation. It seems like every evidence I have (and, oh! they’re great!) of God hearing my prayers and answering them is a gift and a mercy beyond measure.

“Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” Romans 6:3

“For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin–because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.” Romans 6:6-7

So. If I have not been baptized, I have not yet been baptized into Christ’s death. If my old self has not been crucified, then I am still a slave to sin. Alive to sin, and dead to God. It is a maddeningly easy logical flow.

But I am still a little curious about my own position. Am I saved or not? At first, I was regarding baptism as a seal, but now it looks more like an opening flourish. Does the fact that I’m going to be baptized mean I’m as good as baptized right now? Rationally, it kind of seems not.

God most decidedly said that I’m to be baptized on April 23rd. At first, I was puzzled by the long wait, but content and satisfied to obey his (mysterious) will. I am coming to realize, though, that this wait has been to more clearly reveal what is gained by baptism and how bereft I am without it.

It mystifies me, though, to think of how gracious God has been to reveal Himself to me already and hear my prayers though I’m, quite frankly, dead. (This would be a harrowing thought without the promise of April 23rd!) It seems like I have had a level of communion with Him greater than my situation ought to permit.

Can the Holy Spirit come to you before you’ve been baptized? If I have not yet died with Christ, I can’t be alive in Him, or Him in me, can I? Certainly, He can operate outside of a person to influence them, but can He indwell someone not yet baptized? Again, it would seem not. So I can only marvel that what I’ve tasted already is only the faintest, faintest hint of what is yet to come!!

“You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourself with Christ.” Gal 3:26-27

If I am not yet clothed in Christ, how can I dare to come into the presence of the Lord? I am as naked as Adam and Eve. 2 Cor 5–I was reading the other night about being clothed with our heavenly dwelling.

I have been in the habit of reading the Bible as if it were addressed to me, but the Epistles, especially, are addressed to those “in Christ”–the elect, the saints. Those washed in the blood of Christ.

If I’m not yet baptized then. . .I must still be on the outside, right? To know you are on the outside, and only the great, unfathomable love and mercy of the Father and Son can bring you inside–this must be what it is to work out your salvation with fear and trembling–to begin to, anyway, for it says we are to continue even as we live as Christians.  I don’t know how that works, though, because I obviously haven’t gotten that far yet. . .

I long for baptism now. I would run over to Ellerslie  this instant and insist upon it immediately to be removed from this false position. And yet, God has said April 23rd, so I am constrained to wait. He must have more to teach me. I long for the day, and yet I am content to obey His will.

It does merit questioning, though. How am I to act until I am baptized into Christ? I can’t very well go on in this boldness while I am still on the outside. Only in Christ can we dare enter the presence of the Lord, right?

How can I pray? Only with the deep humility of the Syrophoenician woman who begged the crumbs from the master’s table.

So. Christians commonly use the rhetoric, “is so-and-so saved?” Quite simply, I find that I am not. I’m not saved.

It is the most obvious thing in the world, and yet the hardest to accept, especially being brought up as a Christian. Suppose I died before April 23rd? What would happen?? But that’s a silly devilish whispering, for what the Lord has ordained, He will also accomplish.

I think I must drink deeply of the abjectness of being at the gate and yet on the outside, of being bereft for this time. (How can God stand to look at me while I am still so dead in putrid sins without being washed in Christ?? It’s a miracle.) My soul has to shudder in its naked, filthy state. And then, how much more highly may I be able to esteem life in Christ! How sweet and precious will it be to be washed clean in His blood and clothed in Him.

Or anyway, very few people. And if they’re male, they are either weird or senior citizens, or both.

“The man who says, ‘I know him,’ but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” I John 2:4

“No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him.” I John 3:6

“In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” Hebrews 12:4

There is no such thing as putting up too strong a resistance against sin. But what I’ve been thinking about is this: So suppose you are saved. And then, suppose this same-old, same-old temptation that used to plague you comes up again. It can be a sinful thing to do, a sinful thing to say, a sinful attitude to entertain. . .And you hear God whisper, “If you love me, you won’t do that.” And oh! you resist! And feel His Spirit within you, in fact, spurning the sin. And yet, in your flesh, you just don’t resist enough. You fall. And you feel disgust and contrition over the sin even while you’re commiting it,–but it doesn’t stop you. You do the sinful thing, you say the sinful thing, you keep the sinful thought as your guest, enjoying it even while you hate it. It’s disgusting. And once it has run its course and/or been ousted, you are left bereft. What now? Failing to resist strongly enough when you could have is the same thing as deliberately sinning, it seems to me. It is as though you sat twisting the nail in Jesus’ hand. How can this guilt be borne? How can we expect mercy now, when we have trampled the sacrifice that was to save us underfoot?

“It is impossible for those who have once been enlgihtened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.” Hebrews 6:4-6

How can we continue to hope, if we fall under the thrall of sin again even for a moment, knowing what we know? If we say to ourselves, “Well, even if I am condemned, I will still try to serve Him with my whole heart and mind and soul and strength, just because He is worthy. Even if I can’t be saved, maybe others can, and I will strive to serve Him still even if I go to Hell at the end of the road,” does that change anything? Or since sin has crept in again, are we barred from pleasing God in any way from here on out? For no righteousness originates witih us, of course, only with His Spirit when we are governed by Him. We can do no good thing by ourselves, unaided by Him. So how does that work? Is there any hope left?

*******************

Not quite relatedly, I sometimes struggle with the selfish knowledge that one can’t be everything to everybody. (Or anyone, actually. Anyway, you shouldn’t; you shouldn’t even try or want to be.) You can love someone without limit, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be the first person they turn to. It doesn’t even mean you necessarily make their list of people to confide in. And there’s a part of me that struggles–always getting knowledge second-hand, never being the one trusted with confidences from so-and-so. I mean, you’d think I’d be near the top of this person’s list, but I’m not even on it.  I guess there’s a lot of these types of relationships in most people’s lives. And I guess family members are most often the mysterious, aloof parties. And I wonder, are there people in my life that I’m hurting this way? I try not to.

Whenever I am tempted to rankle at a person for this, I absolve them by acknowledging that after all, you can’t really help who it seems most natural to turn to when you’re confused or troubled or hurting. And so the fault lies with me–not the other person–because if I wanted to be trusted perhaps I should have done a better job at reaching out and building trust in the first place.

(It seems like everything always comes back to me and my failure to reach out and connect to people. This may be perfectly just, but justice can be a hard and solid word sometimes–especially when it smacks you around.)

*******************

The desire was born in me that I want to be a foster-mom.

It would be so, so hard. But so, so, so worth it.

- I dropped out of college in January and
- I moved halfway across the country (almost) by myself .
- My roommates got me a job at a coffee/ice cream shop in March because I couldn’t get a job by myself;
- And I was, not for lack of trying, entirely unable to find any other source of income the whole year through, though to begin with I’d meant the coffee shop to be a temporary gig.
- My roommates and I moved twice more: once a distance of five minutes, and the second time a distance of more like half an hour, and I was selfish and resistant both times.
- I totaled my car in September and have had to rely be a burden on my roommates for basic needs and transportation to and from work ever since.
- I turned 21 in October and was depressed and angsty–unrelated incidents, but close in sequence.
- In November, two days before I was going to buy another car, I slipped on the ice and broke my elbow badly enough to need surgery.
- My finances have been decimated by medical bills, and my job no longer pays enough for me to live on. The job hunt continues to be ridiculously unfruitful.
- And a collection of careless, selfish, self-pitying, and largely avoidable thoughts and feelings due to my perpetual singleness and seeming invisibility wrung my heart severely in December.
- There did, however, appear some wonderful people on the scene who were willing to let me buy a car from them for really cheap, and the details of that are presently working out.

Does that sound crazy, awful, heart-breaking, discouraging, stressful, and frightening or what? (Except for that last glimmer of hope, anyway.) I write this down not out of bitterness, but with incredulity, laughter, and a fair amount of sheepishness. Yeah, most normal people would stretch that out over a few more years. How good that we don’t have to rely on the bare, worldly facts for a true reading of things! Because, you see. . .

It’s been the best year of my life.

More later (because I’m apparently all about two-part posts.)

What actually put me in a bloggy frame of mind, though, was that I’ve come to the decision that I need to stop watching movies, and I remembered how I’d written before of unintentionally giving up reading fiction.

I randomly stopped reading fiction some time this past spring or summer. It wasn’t a choice; it just kind of happened when I started focusing on Christian non-fiction—–and this was Really Weird because I used to be an English major. All through my lonely childhood, books were my best friends. I downed Jane Eyre at the age of eight, and bolted through Brian Jacques twice as fast as his books came out, and during my senior year of high school on top of AP courses and college applications and all of that craziness, I read massive books for fun–Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, A Pilgrim’s Progress and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are just a few of the many I remember reading that year. A lot of my reading happened before school or over my lunch hour, because I had no one to sit with or talk to. By that point I didn’t even mind, though. I was inured to loneliness and would have been sad to lose my reading time should other opportunities have arisen–I revered the written word: the concise expression of people’s minds and souls, the pithy phrase that hit right at the center of an idea.

Reading was almost central to my existence. So for it to suddenly be peripheral at best was astounding to me, and a sign of great moving and shaking within my inner make-up. I picked up the next book in Jasper Fforde’s Eyre Affair series at one point over the summer, because I’d always meant to get round to finishing it and had greatly enjoyed the first, and after all, there isn’t any inherent harm in reading fiction: I’m not such a puritan as to propound that. But I didn’t get past the third chapter. It couldn’t hold my interest and seemed such a reprehensible waste of time when I haven’t the mastery of the Bible and there are so many great Christian thinkers that I’ve hardly looked into. (I mean, A. W. Tozer or Jasper Fforde? E. M. Bounds or J. K. Rowling? Can there even be any contest as to who deserves more attention?) I re-read Anne’s House of Dreams by L. M. Montgomery in October–it was an old friend that wanted re-visiting. But aside from that, I have been fiction-free for nearly six-months.

I’m thinking that fast may have run its necessary course now, though. In the week I was laid up with my arm, I read Hannah Hurnard’s allegory, Hinds’ Feet in High Places and it was exactly the right thing at the right time; and I cut my teeth on some George Macdonald and it reminded me that behind novels are authors, and just as we encourage each other in our walks with the Lord, Christians from times past might encourage and share with us today in stories they’ve sent down the line. I might pick up The Pickwick Papers or Crime and Punishment and see whether there’s anything in them. I’ve been thinking about Russian literature lately, and how filled it is with searching and stumbling and suffering–and to me that sounds like the sort of path of people who are looking for the Lord but don’t know it or haven’t found Him yet.

However.

It is definitely time for movies to get out of my life. I’ve felt like this before–if a movie’s any good at all, it sucks you into its made-up world and distracts you. Most of the time, after watching a movie–even if it’s good and has a lot to say–I just get into such an abstracted moral void. Yesterday (Saturday) I was convicted that on Friday the Lord had directed me towards Nehemiah and I had been supposed to be reminded of the builders who worked diligently and vigilantly with their tools in one hand and a weapon in the other in case of enemy attack, and even at night they didn’t go home or outside the city limits: they stayed in where it was safe around the clock until that wall was up. I didn’t take the lesson to heart and wasn’t vigilant, and went out of Jerusalem, and the enemy was sneaking up on me. So Saturday afternoon I became mindful of this and repented and prayed and resolved–and Saturday evening we watched Up! Now, I love that movie and it’s absolutely adorable, but it distracted me, and various temptations snuck in and were given way to in such a way that was even more pernicious than what I’d repented of mere hours before. I had completely forgotten most of my resolves somewhere during the mind-blankness of two hours of movie-watching, and so I didn’t keep them.

I can’t afford that kind of distraction. So now, for an indeterminate time, I’m not going to watch movies. This time it’s a conscious choice.

And I just felt like writing all this out, because it occured to me how odd it is that some things are sin to some people while completely harmless to others. And also, I don’t want my roommates to think I’m being antisocial when I purposely miss out on movie nights.

P.S. Before Wednesday, I don’t think I’d ever read Nahum or Haggai. They are treasures.