Remember that time . . .

when a family of dwarfs set up shop in my throat and decided to turn my tonsils into barn swings thus rendering me voiceless?

Oh you don't, well today is a repeat of that exact event. I'm bordering on having no voice but in the meantime I can take heart in knowing that for the moment I can communicate with my fellow humans without the assistance of a dry erase board or spastic hand guestures (because I only know the proper signs for the words of the songs I lead at sunday school with kids and I'm not sure if those will get me through a real conversation). But as I use of the last bit of my voice I realize that I sound an awful lot like Barry White if he was a blonde, pasty-white woman with a twinge of a southern accent who sounds like she just chain smoked for 12 hours straight and chased it with a gallon of jack daniels. Whee, those dwarfs sure know how to make my day fun.

So if you see some crazy lady guestering wildly with her hands and trying to communicate through the raising and lowering of her eyebrows and lots of winking then you know its me and I've lost the last shred of my barritone voice.

Oh and I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.

And so it begins . . . .

The mental conversation in my head of late has gone something like this:

Uhhhh, you work in ministry full time now.

Really?This is what I get paid to do?

Yep, this is your job, your profession, you know . . . your work.

No way, I get paid to do something I love?

Yup.

SWEET.

It's crazy. CRAZY. I'm doing ministry . . . full-time . . . for my job. Really people, I'm tripping out on this. I mean if you talked with me a year ago this is not at all where I thought I would be, oh it is exactly where I wanted to be but heck no I didn't think that I would actually get to do what I want, what my heart wants. And now I do . . . I'm in ministry . . . me. And yes, I know some of you will think, well of course, we knew that, but I didn't and I kinda still don't. I'm so thankful for it and I'm so blessed by it but I'm still trying to make sure that this isn't some extended dream sequence that I will wake up from and have that sinking feeling that it was all just a dream.

Ok, sorry I'm still a bit in a daze of realizing this is now my reality and getting settled in all the new stuff. I plan on getting back to the "You shaped Me" post that I mentioned a few back, it's all up in my head but just needs to get down on paper, or screen as it may be.

On another note, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and fill yourself with all kinds of yummy treats and get some good time with family and friends.

Somebody pinch me

Ok, I'm in the new apartment, job, town, etc. and wow it's just all so "new". The good, shiny, good smelling new, much like a new car with the new car scent where you want to live in your car because it's NEW and SHINY and SMELLS GOOD and it's NEW and that is just so exciting.

So I'm here, I'm learning all the new ropes, and new roads, and just new. I still have a long to-do list that includes buying a computer and an internet connection because hello I miss all my internet buddies.

Ok, well this was really just a quick drive by blogging to let you know that I wasn't attacked by a band of roving cowboys or longhorns cause I'm living in cow-town now.

Moving

I'm moving . . . homes, jobs, cities, and probably more importantly on this thing we call life.

I move into a new apartment tomorrow in a new city to start a new job on Wednesday.

And uhhh I'm a bit overwhelmed by it all . . . a equal balance of fear and excitment.

As I sit in my old office at the school packing up a box of my "stuff" I realize that this small box won't fit all the things that have meant the most to me in the last season of my life here at the school. The kids that I've watched grow up don't fit in the box, the families that I've come to love don't fit, the relationships that have made me laugh, cry, and most importantly showed me the overwhelming goodness of our God don't fit. My box will only hold the "stuff" but it's all the rest that I sit here wishing I could pack up and take with me. I am so amazingly thankful for the last six years at this school. They have encompassed moments on the mountaintop and time spent in the valley and yet this whole journey has been so worth it because it's brought me to this exact moment where my path takes a turn and I start a new journey in a new place.

You can't say goodbye to a place like this, to the people that have impacted my life, to the moments that have shaped who I am today. So I almost find it a bit fitting that I'm sitting up at school late at night typing away on a blog post (which I've done oh so many times) and tomorrow I begin a new adventure that I'm sure will be chronicled in many more posts.

But for now I'm going to be out of pocket for a few days as I get situated on this new crazy adventure of full-time ministry. Wait who am I kidding, I've been in full-time ministry for a while now it just didn't always fell like it.

On Wednesday, I start as the Children's Ministry Director for Trinity Chapel Bible Church of Ft. Worth Texas. Me . . . full time ministry . . . for kids . . . . only God could have made this happen.

I'm a bit scared and feeling very unworthy but throughout this whole last month or so I've see the hand of God move in my life to give me a desire of my heart that was hidden for so long. And I trust Him to walk beside me through this new season and when I need it (and oh I will need it) I trust Him to carry me when I can't make it on my own two feet.

So Kpinion will be silent for a few days, but I'll be back and I'm working on the follow up to my last post. Feel free to comment with wild abandonment in my absence.

A me shaped You

I love the questions little kids ask. These questions often stump us adults because we have to admit that we don’t really know the answer. Oh we know all kinds of answers but not “the” answer that will suffice for the wonderment of a child. Why is the sky blue? Where do freckles come from? What does God look like? Try to give a real answer to any of those and see how far you get.

But let’s take an adult look at one of those questions, and no it’s not “why is the sky blue”, but a tougher one “What does God look like?” Have you ever tried to visualize God, to give him a figure and image that you can picture in your mind? It’s tough, He’s God, and there isn’t a pattern to apply for His image. So when you don’t know what someone looks like visually and yet you want to describe them you fall back on their qualities, their actions, and there an image emerges that you can call His shape.

But a funny thing occurs when you start to try to give a shape to God because you naturally think He looks a lot like you. Often times I will think of God in terms of me, of my limitations, my faults, my abilities and inabilities, I think of God through my own vision of who I am.

And so God takes on the form of a man, of me. The ability to love . . . . but a conditional love that must always be maintained. The ability to forgive . . . . . but only those things that I’m willing to say don’t matter and haven’t hurt me deeply. The concept of grace . . . . . . but only as far as I’ve been extended the same grace. The ability to do amazing works . . . . . but limited by the strength of my hands and the ability of my talents.

So as I begin to picture God I realize that really I’m picturing Him as myself. I know enough to realize that God doesn’t fit in a box, but I’ve put Him in a me shaped mold. I’ve made Him into a Me shaped You.

And then the next step is that I begin to think that if God is just like me, with the same qualities as me then He relates to me as I sometimes to do Him. His love isn’t overwhelming; instead it’s just an emotion that is conditional on how good I am. His forgiveness isn’t complete; but something that comes and goes with the state of my own actions. His grace isn’t enough; I must earn His favor by all the stuff that I feel I must do to be in His presence. His works aren’t miracles, but the direct result of a specified work that my own hands have completed.

And then when I begin to see God as me, I begin to think I can do things better. Since He’s just the same, my way might be the better way or my thoughts might be higher than His. And I look in the mirror and I see my own god, me. Because I’ve taken the Almighty God and I’ve turned Him into a Me shaped You.

And yet, didn’t Christ take on our image for the exact opposite reason. Not to become man with all the faults and limitations, but to become a man so that we might become like Him. He took on our flesh, our frame, to burst from the trappings of that same flesh, to become the man what we were always supposed to be. He came so that I might become a You shaped Me. That through a relationship with Christ I might begin to look more like Him, like God, not becoming my own god, but turning from this image I see in the mirror into the image of Him who took on my flesh to give me the divine shape of His image.

More to come later, specifically about what a You shaped Me looks like. This is still churning in my head but I needed to get it down and figured I should share the work in progress. Any comments or thoughts are wonderfully appreciated and encouraged.

Weird just weird

Today is my last day of elementary school and tomorrow is the last day of secondary. I've seen some of these kids grow up from little seven and eight year old to teenagers. It's just a little weird hard.



*Also have something brewing in my mind for a thinking post. I'm not sure what my internet access will be like for the next week or so because of the move and job change so I feel like I need to having something of value before an extended break. So I'm working on it and we'll see what comes out.

VOTE

The first Tuesday after the first Monday in the month of November is . . . . Election Day.

Get up, get out, and vote. I'm not here to try to convince you one way or the other on who to vote for, but that you should vote, you should participate. I know who I will cast my vote for but I want our government to be representative of our nation so that means that everyone has to be heard, therefore everyone has to speak up.

And if you go vote you get a nifty sticker.

Vote.

High/Low

The High/Low game is where you get to announce your specific high and low from the last 24 hours or so. This allows for a bit of venting but also some good stuff to put everything in perspective.

So today I thought I would share with you my High/Low:

HIGH:

Going to the GAP to buy a new pair of jeans because your old pair is about to fall off of you making for a very embarrassing moment (unless of course they fell off and that caused me to fall down, because well that's pretty normal in my world, the falling down, not the falling off, but back to the story), so I ventured in the the land known as denimn purgatory anitcipating buying a pair in a smaller size (already a high) and as I came out of the dressing room to evaluate the cut and fit of said smaller size in the public viewing area where the only decent size mirror resides, the nice teeneage sales attendant guy took one look at me and said "You need a smaller size in those".

I'm sure my face was a combination of disbelief and love at first sight, because who needs roses or a nice dinner, tell me i need a smaller size in my pants and I will both hug and kiss you. And so he came back with an even smaller size which actually fit. So I got new jeans and they were two sizes smaller than the ones I wore in. Definite HIGH.

LOW:

I want to preface this story by stating that I L.O.V.E. sleep. I'm not a lazy person but I just really take pleasure in those hours of blissfull rest under my down comforter snuggled into a ball. So it is often a rude awakening when my alarm (my very loud and obnoxious alarm) pulls me from that perfect state. There are a few occasions where I will wake before the alarm but those are often outweighed by the times that I turn off the alarm and continue my sleep until I cause serious injury to myself (see here).

So this morning I woke on my own and began my day with the morning shower. Now I have the whole morning process down to a science because I want to eeek out every single minute of sleep I can so my routine is precise. I often shower before I reach a real state of consciousness as I did this morning. And as I stepped out of the shower my eye caught the nice little travel clock I keep in the bathroom to make sure my routine is running on time. And in that state of semi-consciousness I noticed that the 7 didn't really look like a 7 but more like a 1. Moving closer I read the numbers but could not believe what they were telling me so I walked to my bedroom to consult the clock there.

This is where the LOW comes in. It was 1:12 . . . A.M. a mere 2 hours after I have gone to sleep. Now I'm not sure if I dreamed that it was morning and thus started the whole waking up and getting ready routine or if I somehow slept walked into the shower, but all I know is that I was not happy as I stood with just washed hair and shaved legs looking at a clock that mocked me with its time. LOW, definite LOW.