Psalm 145

Today I woke up with Shane & Shane's rendition of Psalm 145 in my head. That was good background music for my jog down Overland Trail to Southwest Community Park / Inspiration Playground. The sun was coming up (yes it was early; I heard one of my roomies waking up rather early) and the sunrise against the clouds & mountains was amazing!

My quiet time consisted of meditating on the verses, "The LORD is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.The LORD is good to all; He has compassion on all he has made. ." Ps 145:8-9.

He has made these amazing foothills that I, and all of Fort Collins sees every day, and the even more majestic mountains behind these hills that reflect His power and greatness. He is faithful to make the sun rise every morning, and reveal His beauty through the sunrises. He gives food to every creature. Even people who are starving, they still eat at least something. He provides shelter to us, and in Fort Collins, most people have fairly nice houses / apartments. He has provided open spaces within the city for us to enjoy, and for children to play in. He has allowed workers with talent to built playgrounds, especially Inspiration Playground to be accessible for children of all physical abilities.

For Israel, since I have been reading Deuteronomy and Isaiah, God pulled them out of slavery and out of captivity numerous times. He has brought forth the Savior from the nation of Israel, He has stopped 1 nation from eliminating the Jewish race from Europe, He has recently given them parts of the original promised land back, and for now, He has allowed relative peace to be in the region.

For myself, God has allowed me to return to Fort Collins, earn a Master's degree, influence students while in grad school, and influence the next generation of Christians in Children's Ministry / AWANA. He has grown me through two Infusion programs, and given me numerous sunsets/sunrises, friends, flowers, provided for my needs every day, allowed me to climb a 14er, and recently allowed me to live with 11 amazing Christian women :) :) :) among all little blessings that I might not even be aware of!

Focusing on God's blessings have helped me wait on the Lord for a job. I believe He has called me into academia (again), and I am waiting on that. Knowing He is good and knowing He grants desires to all things for His glory assures me that whatever He has in store for me is for my good and ultimately for His glory.

The hardest parenting class ever

In undergrad, I slacked off during my HDFS parenting class in because I had the MCAT to study for. In graduate school, I took classes on parenting interventions and learned how parents (and society) can screw things up for kids, and how us interventionists were sent to fix them. Then during Infusion, I learned from amazing Christian parents how Christ can be their perfect interventionist so He flows out of their parenting in an imperfect world.

God decided that He would add a lab component to my "parenting classes." One of the single parents at church needed a nanny for 2 weeks before her two children (boy & girl, 6 & 5) went to school. My HDFS side began to start labelling them by socioeconimic status (SES), high or low risk, and began looking for possible defecits in the kids. This isn't necessarily wrong, but God reminded me to look at more than what my HDFS side could see, and view them not as 'cases' but as children in need of His care.

Thus has followed nearly 2 weeks of being their stand-in mom. I know I'm not perfect. More importantly, it's showing me how far my degree can go, and how much I need God's grace to cover the rest. For instance, today, the kids were tired and they wante to swim, and I wanted to wait until it was warmer outside. Thus tantruming more than usual ensued, and somewhat 'climaxed' into both kids getting sent to their room. I asked God what was the deal. What did He want to teach the kids and myself, and was I being power-hungry or really in the kids' best interest for not giving in. God revealed that they were learning patience and I was learning that even though I had to discipline and seemed mean, I could then give grace and repair the relationship. God gave me the verse from Hosea 6:1-2 where it basically says that God does tear down and injure temporarily, but in love because He is love (1 John 4:8) and that He repairs the relationship when His children come back. That is what happened. After the kids were done with time-out, I was able, through Christ, to love these kids and enjoy their company. I then prayed that the relationship was repaired.

However, the most important thing I have learned was that, unlike what the HDFS department teaches, I am not above the moms I serve. In fact, I still have a lot to learn. Just by serving me even though she can't pay for my services is teaching me about being creative with gratitude. And she has taught me that it's ok to be transparent about not having life or the Christian walk together, because it shows that God is truly active at the present. God has used the conversations before and after my hours to encourage me, and I pray to encourage her.

From this, I'm learning that parenting is rough. Laying in bed knowing another day is ahead of me, making the choice to parent in my flesh and HDFS knowledge or in Christ is one of the roughest decisions to make. However, God has shown me that loving the children through the love and grace He has first lavished on me and wishes to show these children is the best way. His love and grace will cover any of my mistakes, their times of disobedience, and hurts these children may experience in this world.

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