HONESTY (BRACE YOURSELF) [RATED 14A]

So I was not sure if I should post it, but I definitely had to write it. I am sitting here bawling my eyes out. I am not sure how to describe how I am feeling. Pissed off, overwhelmed, disappointed, horrified, powerless, disgusted, unsatisfied, burdened, and many other things.

I have recently finished reading a couple of books about the injustice in the world and just watched Hotel Rwanda. Our world is really FUCKED. The things that happen are so unbelievably repulsive. It is hard to believe how someone can harbor so much hatred against another human being. I don't think I will ever understand how a human being can be looked at as disposable, as just a commodity, unworthy of life.

I really can't think of another word to describe where I am at other than,

FUCK! AAAAAAAAAH! GRRRRRR!

Our world boasts an astounding list of civil wars and genocides in just the last 60 years or so, many of which people don't care enough to get informed. Everyone knows about The Holocaust and many know about Rwanda, which I think is mostly due to Hollywood choosing to give it some attention. But what about Somalia, Cambodia, Burma, Sudan, Darfur? The kind of disgusting things that happen make it hard to believe in God.

And even if you can keep the faith, you wonder where the hell he is? How is it that he cared enough to die for us, but can just sit back and watch almost millions of people die under circumstances to which there is no word strong enough to describe, torturous doesn't even come close.

Again, FUCK.

Where the hell is God when
a toddler is seeing his neighbor slice his parents and older siblings with machetes?
thousands of innocent people are running from guns and bombs?
the rich west sits back watching this happen because these countries have nothing to offer?
his people, one who call him Abba, are hiding in the jungle hoping to live another day?
a 4 year girl is forced to watch pornography and being taught how to perform oral sex?
a 9 year old boy is forced to kill his bestest friend in the whole world?
men, women and children are gasping for the last bit of oxygen in the "shower rooms"?

Don't give me any token answers. They aren't good enough and I am sick of them. I went to Bible college, I am sure that I know them all. God cares about each one of them and knows them all by name. He feels there pain. I am not so convinced anymore. Evil exists because people chose to disobey God. Since when is evil more powerful than God? If God is the same God revealed in the old testament, an army of rebel soldiers should be no problem. We can't see the big picture. His thoughts are not our thoughts, his ways not our ways. I am not so sure I like his thoughts or ways right now. "Hmmm I think I will let just sit here and watch people die horrible deaths, but I will be angry and feeling badly for them." Doesn't sound like a good thought to me. And it seems that Christians are taking their cue from God, sitting back and feeling bad about what is happening, but still letting it happen.

So what is it God? Do you not care? Do you not see? Do you not have the power?

Again, FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUCCCCKKKK!

I am so sick of this sweet little Christian girl role that I have been playing, so there it is. I can no longer say that I have never said the F word. I am giving myself permission to just be. To be angry, honest, heart broken, burdened, overwhelmed, whatever being entails. I am not sure if it is right or wrong. It is probably more wrong than right. I could hold it altogether if I wanted to. I didn't grow up in the church culture, but I have seen enough to have learned how to play the part. I bet Hollywood could find some of the best actors inside the walls of a church. I can't just keep accepting the world as it is and say, well God will explain everything in the end.

It doesn't seem like I got that far in the last few years of being little miss christian, repressing what I was feeling, bottling it up and convincing myself that the truth will eventually be revealed. God will explain everything in the end. The world is FUCKED up now. People are hurting now. Evil is winning now. I don't know how much longer I can do nothing. But what can I do? The church girl role isn't cutting it. Western christianity makes me want to puke. But it is all I know.

This is my new experiment. Unrefined honesty. Some may be shocked. Some may be disappointed. Some may judge. I may fail beyond recovery. I may have regrets. I may find what I am looking for.

It may seem that the F bomb flowed easily out of my mind to my fingers and then the keyboard, but I do feel the loss of innocence. I feel uncomfortable. I feel bad. But I think I am more hurt by the fact that I lost my perfect F-free record rather than a feeling the genuine regret of "sin" (if that makes any sense).



Yet I will praise Him at all times.

TENTATIVE SUMMER PLANS

So today I discovered the deadlines for the various opportunities open for me this summer are sooner than expected. For the Mark study I need to know by Friday, yikes! I wasn't planning on making any decisions until at least mid April. Oh well, I guess the pressure is good, I will actually make a decision.

So the tentative plan is to go to the week long study of Mark, May 1-7. I am really excited because a women who has been a mentor to me here and there when I needed someone has offered to pay for the cost of the study, I just have to pay for travel. That cost won't be too bad, because the study is just in Rocky Mountain House. I will probably swing through Calgary, Lethbridge and Med Hat before coming back to Saskatoon for about a month. That will give me some time to visit friends and family in around here. Then I will head to Trinity Western to do the Linguistics and Culture summer program from June 15 - August 15. Then I will be back in Saskatoon and will be packing up my life and heading to either Calgary or Edmonton.

So if you are into praying I would muchly appreciate you throwing a word up on my behalf.

~This is going to put me in a tight spot financially. Not only does the summer course cost about $4000 for tuition, books, room and board, but I will not be working much over the summer. I need the largest bursary possible from TWU ($1500), a job from about May 15-June 14, and a seat sale on plane tickets. There is already a sale from Sask to Abbottsford, but I need one on the way back.

~I need energy, I am not sure how I will do filling my break from school with more school.

~Mostly peace about the decision. I don't have peace, but I am experiencing less anxiety about this decision compared to other options. I'm not sure I will be at peace until things actually happen because I am scared that everything will collapse like it did last summer.

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?