Why the Sick Need the Great Physician

I haven't written in this blog since I have been busy in El Paso doing service projects, working, and sharing the Gospel for Christ.

Recently, one of our HDFS professors has fallen very ill. She is recovering, albeit slowly. Her family and friends in and out of the HDFS department have organized a website to record her progress and for her to read well-wishes people have sent to her once she is awake enough to stare at a computer monitor for decent amounts of time.

Most of the well-wishes were very characteristic of the HDFS department - wishing for general goodness to come her way, "Sending loving thoughts and healing energy / karma / positive feelings" your way. Those sentiments are not bad, and they can generally be encouraging.

However, they are not enough. One's thoughts cannot traverse time and space, they are confined to the cognitive pathways and neural circuits in our brains. The only Person who's words traversed space and time to create the darkness, light, and every living organism to the streptococcus bacterium, the amoeba, the diatom and to the enormity of galaxies is Yaweh, by His Son Jesus Christ and the Spirit of Life, the Holy Spirit.

This is what is missing from the guest book. From my friend's thoughts, and that is vexing me almost as much as the fact that my professor could still not make it out. The fact that God may allow this for this department to seek Him to find Him - the source of Truth, the source of all Good that He can truly give across space and time.

I plead with you, HDFS students, faculty, staff, in CSU, in VTech (where this professor got her degrees), and friends / family that know her: You need to pray to God. I plead for you to to acknowledge the supremacy of Christ - not just 'feel good' thoughts. I plead for you to understand that the God of this Universe is holding our professor in His sovereign hands that were pierced on Calvary for her and all of us. I pray earnestly that you understand that you need to encourage our professor with Truth from His lips, His Word, His healing Word. That is what is true hope. Not vauge notions of thoughts floating through space and time, of good karma, or positive energy, but the Spirit of the Sovereign Lord who has made her and us lovingly, atom by atom, DNA strand by DNA strand.

I pray this so that you will turn to Christ and accept His salvation and truly worship Him whether He heals this professor or takes her from this world, and I do earnestly pray, with tears at times, that He will preserve her life, lead her to the Cross, so at the end of her life, she may join worshippers - from our ranks and from every nation tribe and tounge to worship our true Lord in Spirit and Truth.

Jobless in El Paso

So yes. Ye olde blogger is without a job. :( Been fishin' but nothin's bitin'. What's a grad student to do? I could despair easily: "Dang, I can't even get an interview at McD's and I went to grad school." But in El Paso, they look for more permanent people, and we're seasonal workers. So, therein lies much of our problems.

I've been on somewhat of a short circuit today. Kinda impatient & had to appologize several times for beginning to be snappy. However, I realize I have not reached melt-down stage because God and I have had a talk. Once I was upset and stuff and Indescribable came on the radio. God used that moment to calm me down by reminding me, "Katie, I am Creator. You are in the car with the guy who's dad talks about it every other day. Who am I in the midst of this job search?" I said, "Yes, God. Thank You for reminding me. You are I AM." Pause. I was open with the sisters I was job-searching with about my frustrations and a group hug was needed :)

I still struggle whether to stay or to go because all practical career-center, Mom, Zeynep advice would be to go back to FoCo and look for jobs there while searching out a permanant grad-school worthy job. However, I am invested here. To encourage the Believers and to be a 'coach' to the little kids in the Sports Camp we are running soon. I already signed up for dealing with the little people i.e. 1st graders. I have money in savings to tie me over until I get back to The Fort.

So, I walk this balance in being diligent with the job search and trusting in God and when I lean in God and He helps me, I stay calm. When I do not trust in God, I plan my going back and worry about stuff.

I know God is teaching me something. Just what exactly besides provision, I have ideas, but won't really know until it's over. What I do know is that I'm feeling like I'm walking on water, and no matter what happens, I can be caught by a God who's hands were pierced for my sins, Jesus, who is good.

Thesis Issues: For the Gospel of Christ!

Yup! God is using my last week - my last few days in the Grad Student Housing for His glory!!! :) It started with my roommate being friends with our neighbor downstairs. Our neighbor is from Thailand and is a grad student in the Animal Sciences department. She came up to our apartment to ask my roommate to proofread her methods section of her thesis. My roommate, an English As a Second Language instructor from Russia looked at it and said, "Well, my roommmate Katie wrote a thesis. Maybe she can take a look at it." Dum dum dum!!!! :) In comes me. I asked our neighbor some questions about her stats and stuff, and she asked me if she could come to me with more of her thesis. I was wrapping up my grad student awesomeness, so I told her that she could.

This led to several email exchanges, and times where I was at her house or she at mine working on her thesis. Through these times, she began confiding in me about issues with her committee, her advisor, grad school life in general, and other things. God prompted me with 1 Peter 3:15 to show her how I handled it in light of the hope I had in Christ. Through God, I did :) EEEEEEEEK! :) My neighbor told me that she knew God was there, in a general sense, and that He had helped her through her first year here with all its stuff.

God prompted me this week to have tea with her and give her a Bible at the end of the tea time. That happened :) EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK :) :) :) All to God's glory, because it's actually harder for me to share my faith with friends because I have a fear that they won't be my friend if they disagree. Well, God is teaching me more and more and giving me more power to live out Romans 1:16.

ANWAY, something I realized was this: God uses everything, and I mean everything. Even writing my thesis. I thought that the Gospel going out with my thesis ended with me sharing with my committee (post-defense) that God helped calm me down during it. Nope. I mean, He used that, but I never dreamed that He would use my ordeal of editing, editing, and editing again (after Zeynep had looked over my thesis and edited it so much that every other word was in 'track changes') to help someone else, and to share with them the Gospel.

Lesson in point: God uses anything and everything for the Gospel if we let Him, and ask Him, "What do You want from this?" I could've just edited her thesis and wished her luck and went back to wrapping up the grad school life. But God wanted me to invest more time in her. He saw more than a fellow master's student needing a thesis looked over. He saw someone in need of Jesus. And He allowed me to see that.

As I go with my life, I can get consumed with this transition of moving into a job of some sort post-graduation. I need to continuously ask God to help me see things not just in light of my future job or what I am doing at the current time, but in light of the Gospel. I need His help because I don't normally see this naturally.

Praise God that the Gospel does not return void, and that God uses ordinary stuff in my grad school life & other things to reach His people whom He loves.

Fear's Effects on Families and my Plea for an Intervention

Today at church, we heard this Mother's Day message. I cried within the 1st five minutes because our pastor spoke about how fear can paralyze everyone, especially women, because our role is entrustment of ourselves to another - whether it is a husband and/or God. He discussed implications of fear driving parenting: leading to harshness or intrusiveness. In HDFS terms, intrusive parents can create overcontrolled children who can express this in anxiety/depression or acting out.

Later, I read one of my other friend's posts about numbers of children / family declining in a recession and for government officials pushing family planning during a recession. Fear can effect a family by viewing the children parents are supposed to be raising for good as burdens that take away resources.

I have commented on that post saying that interventionists say that parents have a finite amount of emotional resources that have been built over time through their interactions with their parents, teachers, friends, their present marriage, and favorable circumstances in their lives. Unhealthy childhoods, marital problems, and unfavorable circumstances deplete this emotional tank, and the resources left must be distributed within the marriage, life in general, and parenting. In this view, if parents have problems in their marriage or are in constant poverty or crisis, experts must come in and help them fill their emotional tank and give advice on how to parent.

Support and advice outside the family are not necessarily wrong, and actually should be encouraged if this support and advice is followed with this Truth: That Christ came and died for our sins to bring us close to God. If we accept this, we have a strength that comes from Him, love that comes from Him and never runs dry if we rely on God to fill us.

This is true intervention because it comes from Truth, and its source is everlasting. He is a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows. He wants to repair marriages because He has ordained marriage to reflect His image on the earth.

This is why I pray that people in my field come to know Christ. Because they need His hope. This is why I cannot stay silent in my classes about the true hope people can have about about the hope the local church can and is bringing to families. This is why I cannot stay silent about hope having to come from outside ourselves rather than within. I have tried to draw on hope from within myself. It has always run dry. I either had to do anything I could to let out the pain, or shut down and block out the pain to keep going. With God as my hope, I lay my burdens at His feet and He gives me strength to keep going.

This is what I pray for when I think about families in my church, AWANA, or elsewhere. I pray that they can know God and God can be their true interventionist. This is also what I pray for myself - if God would have me marry and begin a family. I pray that we, along with other families will have a foundation in Christ. In Him, we have a reservoir of strength and love. In entrusting ourselves to Him, we have no fear.

Rediscovering Job 7 Years Later

Yeah! So this is pretty tight! In our D-Team women's Bible study, we are breezing through the Old Testament. Last week's lesson allowed me to skim through Job. With an amazing realization, I remembered that it was about this time seven years ago in my AP Lit class that I had read Job. However, I was not Chrisitian... actually... from about April 2002 to September 2002 is 5 months, and I became Christian late September. So... God was getting a hold of my heart in this way.

7 Years Ago our instructor announced that we would study Job because it was a rather poetic piece of the Old Testament. I think he chose the Old Testament because he was Jewish. Anyway, he handed out these hardcover Bibles. I forgot which translation they were. They may have been either New International Version or New King James. Some students chuckled & scoffed at reading the Bible, but I was excited. See, 9/11 had occurred 8 months earlier, and I was still having secondary PTSD ( which wouldn't be diagnosed until my Sophomore year of High school.) The short story of why I had secondary PTSD was that Mom was shaken up and angry about it, and did not have the emotional capacity to help me process my own reactions of fear, sadness, anger over it. My grandparents had been in New York during that time, and I was worried that they were in downtown at that point. Also, Mom needed someone to watch the news with her during the first few weeks after the event, so I watched, but I was left on my own to process things. Therefore, I turned to God.

Getting back to Job, I wanted to read the story. The instructor told us that Job was about suffering and God. I had a lot of suffering in my past and during the last 8 months, so I wanted to hear. I only had every other Sunday going to church and listening to the Word there when I would go to mass with my grandparents. You could say I was like David - a deer panting for streams of living water. When I got my somewhat tattered copy of the Bible, I opened it and was really glad the print was a decent size. My fear was that I would have to struggle through tiny 'Bible size' print - one reason I had shyed away from reading the Bible previously. I hadn't realized there were large print versions available.

I flipped to Psalm 23. We sang "Shepherd me O God" and it was my favorite psalm at that time. I also tried to find the Lord's Prayer before we started. We were to outline the book of Job by Job's speaking parts and his friends' parts and grab themes out of them. Much of it was confusing because I didn't understand that his friends were not speaking truths about God. Therefore, I was getting somewhat of an inaccurate view of God. That was, until I got to the end. I, like Job, realized God was sovereign over all things. I also learned from Job's example that it was ok to wonder why suffering happened, but clinging to God was the best thing to do.

I remember getting to class early and getting a Bible and finding Job but flipping around to look in other places. I was trying to find passages that would comfort me during the day. I did do this somewhat surreptitiously so I didn't appear 'super-religious' as some of my friends and Mom classified evangelical Christians.

Present Time I realize all this was my seeking after God. I had the Word, and I believe God really opened my heart to Himself and made me more apt to seek Him by exposing me to Job. However, I could never dream that five months from that time, I would pray to God to receive His Son Jesus as my savior. Of course, from September 2002, until now, I have endured a lot more suffering than just secondary PTSD from 9/11, but now I have God and I understand His word now since I have the Spirit of Truth to help me discern it. Like Job, the more I understand God, the more my suffering is more bearable, and the more I can still praise God through it.

I am thankful for Job. I am actually reading it and yes, outling it. This time with the knowledge of the Truth of who God is to guide me. I pray I learn much more about God through this, and I do praise Him for that day when He placed a tattered Bible on my desk in AP Lit. He was drawing me close to Himself.

"But their minds were made dull, for to this day, the same veil remains when the old covanent is read. It has not been removed because only in Christ is it taken away. ... But whenever anyone turnes to the Lord, the veil is taken away... And we , who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, we are being transformed into His likenness with ever increasing glory which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." 2 Corinthians 3:14, 16, 18

Whether in the Burbs or in the Hood, Problems Arise

For a lot of risk and resilience literature, researchers have focused on poor families because they have less resources to deal with life. However, researchers are also focusing on middle and upper-middle class children because they are discovering that these children have unique challenges. These challenges often include over-scheduling, being pushed to over-achieve, and being unsupervised because the parents are too busy to attend to them.

I was listening to Leeland's song Tears of the Saints. That made me cry because I realized that truly no one is immune from the effects of the world. People in a lower socioeconomic group may have stronger family bonds because they need to rely on each other more, but they are told by the society that they are lesser. People in upper class have to maintain their status and that becomes a relentless god they serve. Yet in both - acquiring or keeping resources - if that is the the sole purpose in life will leave all empty, all depressed, discontent, leading to less emotion to give to children and the family, which may lead to children having less of a future.

What's the solution? I would sound trite by saying it is Christ, but in a way, I do not. Hoping in a sovereign God will allow for less stress for a family making ends meet, for they know that somehow, God will come through to pay that unexpected bill. Trusting in the hope laid up in heaven makes the momentary troubles more bearable, and they know it is to tese their faith to prove it genuine. Hope in Christ for people in the 'burbs allows for less stress when the stock-market plummets. They also know their resources are not for themselves, bot to give to to others. Hope in Christ for all families allows the love He has to flow from them into their children, so the children can know Him and have a future set on His truth in this life, and everlasting joy in the next. So, yes. Truly, Christ is the solution - He is the I AM for all generations, classes, and the everlasting resilience factor.

Attachment to God

So, I just read in 1 Samuel about Hannah giving Samuel up to the service of the Lord. She weaned him before he was able to go to the Temple. I thought about this and I wondered, from an attachment perspective, how that must've worked.

At about 2-3 is where children learn obedience and have the verbal capacity to carry on conversations. He could also eat most of the food adults eat, so Eli didn't have to worry about formula or anything like that. Caregiving for Eli and the rest of the priests would consist of discipline and teaching him how to read and basically prepare him for his duities. Of course, they probably had times where he sat on their laps & they read to him, but I am guessing that he was a toddler when he went into their care.

So, he might have time to develop an attachment relationship to Hannah. I wonder how that went. He couldn't have been avoidant because he established rapport with the priests & the people. He probably wasn't dependent because there was nothing about hims struggling to adjust or him having anxiety about being away from Hannah. Of course, his first few weeks, even if he was securely attached were probably hard.

How did Hannah help Samuel maintain a secure attachment yet know she was going to give him to Eli? I think she loved him with the love God had for her, and she knew that His love would sustain her even upon giving Samuel up. I believe she also told Samuel about God from a very early age. This is where my HDFS speculation can begin :) When she sang prayers to him, I wonder if God was tugging on his heart. At 7-8 months, if he was crawling around and saw a flower, did he smile - really have a social smile toward his Creator? I bet Hannah taught him words like 'mama & papa' but also Yaweh. When I think about it, he could have learned to say it at around 12 months. This is where I can speculate that she probably prayed and trusted that God would speak to Samuel and he would respond even at a young age.

He then could have had an attachment to God - the anchor of his soul, and this securest of attachments could have seen him through that caregiving transition from Hannah to Eli.