Phew

Retour

The highlight of returning to a less than ideal reality: getting my hands on books I ordered while I was away. Three of them by Tim Keller.

Blessings beyond compare

I feel like I lived several different lifetimes in the last few months. Not all of has been easy, but I can say that God is still good. I couldn't have planned the last few months the way they have unfolded. Sure, I would get rid of the hard parts, and that's probably why God wouldn't let me plan my life.

What will the next few months look like, I wonder?

Croatia

The water is so clear you can even see to the bottom at night.

Mediocre dinner because my mom got impatient so I sat down at the nearest restaurant. Worst food I've ever had in Italy....

Death and life

I didn't know this until this year when my dad told me about the tree outside our house. It sheds its leaves once every two years and looks like it's about to die. But after a few days, it grows new leaves again.

This feels so much like our walk with the Holy Spirit. What often feels like a death could be the beginning of new life in us.

The story I will tell

Storyteller (feat. Jamie Grace & Morgan Harper Nichols)

https://soundcloud.com/prettyfreshman-23/storteller-feat-jamie-grace

Goodbye Goettingen!

Almost gone

It's almost goodbye, now!

I haven't been here long enough to feel settled, but I've been here long enough to need closure.

I've enjoyed the mostly good weather we've had this summer. I like having a mostly private office thanks to an office mate who drops in very infrequently. I've enjoyed apfelsaftschorle and flammekuchen and spaetzle, but not much else of German food.

I'm not sure I'd want to come back to travel in Germany. Maybe Bavaria. Germany seems oppresively quiet to me. I'm not sure what it is. And it's so funny that everyone keeps asking me if I want to stay or come back. Maybe my stay was too short for me to feel deeply about the country.

If I had been based in Budapest this summer, I probably wouldn't have gotten anything done. A quiet German town? There's not much else to do but work. And rest after work.

God showed up. But the God we worship is not a ribbons and fluffy lace kind of God. His holiness is terrifying. So who knows what He'll do next?

Well, I'm praying for journey mercies as I close things out here and head out for a much wanted vacation.

"You want to know because you don't want to trust."

-- Jeremy Treat, sermon on Job's conversation with God



Ouch.

Routes

Moved to a larger apartment in the old town so that mom can be closer to the shops. This is what my walk to work looks like. I'm thankful.

I don't think I understand this

There is a language of loss that we share as humans, though many of us need help remembering how to speak it–and grace to offer others as they learn to remember it too. Rediscovering the memory of sitting in a bookstore on the anniversary of a death that seemed hard to believe, I am struck with this thought. We need the language of lament. We need permission to voice the broken hope within. We need to know lament is a song we are allowed to sing and that we are not alone in singing it.

In the preface of Lament for a Son, author Nicholas Wolterstorff relays a brief interchange with a friend who told him that he had given copies of the book to all of his children. Confused, Wolterstorff asked why he would want to give away a book of so much despair and pain. “Because it is a love-song,” came the reply. Returning to the preface, Wolterstorff writes, “Yes, it is a love-song. Every human lament is a love-song.” And then he asks a question that begins the outpouring that is the entire book: “Will love-songs one day no longer be laments?” Gracious God, please, let it be.

A story recounted by a therapist raises a similar prayer for human lament. A woman who had a history of abuse and a difficult past had been coming for treatment and had been showing signs of healing. Yet one day the woman came in and announced what she felt was another sign of her brokenness that needed to be addressed. She described her recent tendency to cry in the presence of her physician as he showed concern for her as a person with significant health problems. She felt as thought her tears must be an indication of something more that needed to be examined.

The counselor immediately thought of the woman in the gospels who responded to Jesus with weeping, even washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Luke writes, “[A]s she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them” (Luke 7:38). In this story, the woman’s tears were not simply an illustration of her brokenness; they were an expression of life. She was marking in gratitude the feet of the one who gave voice to the lament within her, the value within her, the humanity she uniquely bore—in the context of a love-song. The woman in counseling identified immediately with this reaction to Christ, eventually learning to see her own tears as a shared lament for a world marked by suffering and a sign of the God who knows all too well its sting.

The lament within the gospel story inasmuch as the hope of the gospel story is powerfully relevant to a weary and broken world. Aware or unaware, we live before a God who gives us permission to utter the words of loss and weariness and despair in the pits of our stomachs, even as Christ himself weeps among us. In his humanity, we are given both a mandate and a voice to decry cancerous narratives that suggest there are some less created in God’s image than others. In his invitation to take up our own crosses, we are given the way to denounce the structures of sin that keep injustice and racism and despair at play and the directive to stand with the abused and the persecuted. Yes, if human lament is a long and labored love-song, Jesus is singing there in the midst of it, perhaps at times using our own tears to call us closer to his own broken body on the cross and the promise in his scars. This song, too, shall one day be a lament no more.

 

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Wilderness

Rest

No travel for the next 11 days because I need to rest....

Wild fruit

Raspberries and something that looks like a teeny tiny strawberry full of flavor.

Black forest

My mother is refusing lunch and sitting at the other end of the table as if we're strangers because the sun is too hot for her.

This was the most comfortable hike I've been on--when the wind blows, the air is filled with the scent of pine. 

Black forest

Our hotel is on a hill overlooking the valley of Hornberg.

Friends are the people who are supportive when you have to make a hard decision that they don't necessarily like.

Thanks, Mar.

Isaiah 30: 15  

This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: "Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved. In quietness and confidence is your strength. But you would have none of it."

a picture of Us resting under god's shadow

After my trip, I showed this picture to the administrator of the program, and he thinks it's a linden tree, and he said that the linden tree is special to German culture and history because court would sometimes be held under the tree in the past. 

What are the chances?

Who knew this would be possible?

Sometimes we need friends help us think things through.

Yes, I wish work has been easier and quicker for me. But maybe I need to accept that it wasn't, and that God in His infinite mercy and wisdom will redeem even that suffering.

Crawling to the finish line

Jesus, have mercy.

At least we're doing it together.

Memory

A memory from my sister's wedding suddenly popped into my head. Me and a couple of cousins from my mom's side were talking about how we have low blood pressure and can't stand up too quickly or we'll feel dizzy. My cousins who are older than me said that they no longer have this problem, and the guy cousin said: "It's because now fat already cannot stand up so fast."

I laughed so hard I almost fell off my chair.

Life goals

It must be really bad when the people who know you best say so....

Rose patch

Smells amazing when I walk by on the way to the school gym.