PRAYER

So it is about 11:30pm and I am sitting here wishing I was smart enough to go to bed early, especially since I was up until 3am writing a paper. But I am not, what can you do?

I only have 1.5 papers left to write and 1 lab report, the end is in sight. I am almost giddy at the thought of being done school (until I remember that I might be back at it in September). Now that the semester is coming to an end and summer is fast approaching I am feeling the pressure of having to decide what I am doing this summer.

On the job front I am in an unusual position of no longer being a summer student since I am graduating, but I am also not looking for a full-time permanent job because at the very most I will only be here until the end of august. There are not too many jobs in a university city for people like me. I thought about registering for school for next semester to keep my "summer student" status, but that would be dishonest. I also thought about applying for a job and just lying when they ask me how long I am staying. Again, dishonest. So I am expecting God to do big things since I an trying to do the right thing. Are you reading this God? :)

I have about a month to try to figure out my summer. I am looking at a few different options, but it is difficult since I don't find out about med school until May 15th, although I am not sure if that really matters. This week I am leaning more towards the no department. I would really appreciate your prayers, and possibly advice, if you make it good. Here are some things that I am looking at for the summer.

~ Taking a break, going to Vernon with my family for a week. I could really use a break, I can't believe I made it out of this semester alive.

~ MarkWest in Lethbridge beginning of May, a 1 week intensive Scripture study of... you guessed it, the book of Mark

~ Just sitting around here working. Possibly at the day care, but that pays barely over minimum wage, which is not helpful for someone with a big student loan.

~ A two month Linguistics study run by Wycliffe Bible translators, at Trinity Western in Langley. This isn't for any particular language, but it is general overview of language and will help me to learn another language with less of a foreigner's accent. ie) I won't sound like such an idiot when I speak Khmer, and will be accepted more readily into the culture and community.

~ If I don't do medicine, I will get to Calgary ASAP to start that chapter of my life with Servants Anonymous.

~ Perhaps some other opportunity that I am yet to discover.

WHY?

I am not in med school yet, but I wouldn't be surprised the way things are going if I got in. I don't mean that to be arrogant in any way at all. My marks weren't that great and I made a mistake on my application, so it is all God that I have gotten this far. I might not get in either, but either way God did this and I am trying to figure out why. Here are some of the reasons I have come up with or friends have suggested:

God is testing whether I have really given up my own selfish dreams to follow Him into the great unknown.

God is going to give me my dream then ask me to give it up.

Maybe this has been a test, maybe medicine was my Isaac, and God saw that I could give it up and now he is giving it back.

It doesn't really matter to God what I do.

God is choosing to bless me for some unknown reason by allowing me to live my dream.

I have misunderstood him the last few months and I was never really going to Cambodia.

An answer to prayer. I prayed many times over the last few years, that God would give me the strength not to cheat or take the easy way out just to get into medicine, and that, if he was pleased with how my morals stood up that he would grant me the desires of my heart.

If you have any wisdom that you could lend me that would be great, seeing as how my wisdom well is dry.

After all that, I close with the word from an Aaron Shust song,

"I am not skilled to understand what God has willed what God has planned."

WHAT DO YOU DO ABOUT CULTURE?

As someone who intends on entering into cross-cultural, I think a lot about the potential problems and conflicts that might arise. I see things a certain way, and sometimes I don't even realize I am seeing them that way. It is so ingrained in my mind I just don't give it a second thought. I even more hidden from my consciousness is why I think or do things like I do. This inlcudes my ideas on education, leadership and government, health care, church culture, etc.

The questions one has to ask when in a different culture is, are the things they are doing actually wrong or just different? Why are they wrong and why are they doing them? How can I allow them to keep as much of there culture? How can I make Jesus applicable to that culture? I have been taking a class which has really been helping me to understand how to cross cultural barriers and I stole the examples from last nights speaker.

We just kind of take for granted that when we are sitting around the campfire that it will burn until the wood is eaten up. To us there is no other logical way to see the situation. But to a tribe in Africa it is the other way around, the wood eats the fire.

To a people where treachery and deceit is highly valued, where the best thing you can do is to trick a man into thinking your friends then betray him, Jesus looks like the biggest tool and Judas is the hero. That is completely opposite to what we want to communicate.

Or think of how we as North Americans do church. We have a lead pastor, and then elders who do the majority of the decision making for the body. To others in cultures where community is highly valued, to allow one man to hold the power is absurd. When decisions are made the whole tribe gets together to discuss it.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post. I read an article this morning that made me think, "Where do you draw the line?" Does maintaining culture take precedence even when practices are extremely harmful or potentially life threatening? What if the "victim" of a practice is a child who is not able to make the decision for themselves.

I am refering to FGM, female genital mutalation. Click here to read the article. Several human rights and health organizations have working to end the practice in Africa. It might be shocking to some, it was to me, that women would fight to maintain this oppressive practice. To me there is so many things wrong with this, it's incredibly dangerous from a health perspective since the tools are unsanitary, you are making a girl vulnerable to infections for the rest of her life because everytime she has sex she will be torn again, when she has a baby it will be absolutely horrendous. The purpose as far as I understand is for the pleasure of man and to ensure that a women will stay faithful to their husbands. The girls who are forced to undergo this "operation" are very young, about 8, but could be younger. They have no say. They do not get anesthetic or pain killers.

So what do you do when something seems so wrong but the ones who suffer from it want to keep suffering?