I went to Cornerstone's (my church's) memorial day weekend retreat. Four days, three nights. I've gone every year for at least seven years. The past six years, I've gone as a youth though. This time I went to the adult track. I've never liked adults.
I should give some background. May fifteenth to the twentieth I went to Basileia, the Intervarsity end-of-year retreat for New York and New Jersey. Basileia was intense. The schedule was chock-full, and IV has terrific timing, so we went from one event to the next, without much of a break at all.
Basileia taught me a lot. It taught me old things in the same words, even, but the words struck a different chord this time. I guess I wasn't ready the first time I heard them. Greg Jao was the speaker. He's like God's megaphone. He also reminds me of Ben, from Lost. He's awesome. Anyways, he told us a short illustration, the same one he told us when he came to our chapter of IV at easter. He was telling his short term missions team about China, and he was getting them all worked up. They were getting more and more excited when he said, all you have to do is raise thirty-five hundred dollars. The atmosphere deflated. Greg Jao looks around and says, if you can't trust God with three thousand five hundred dollars, don't bother praying about a major or a spouse because they're too big for him.
And that was the lesson of Basileia. God is big. But I understood just a little better how big he is, and it's changed a lot. If we understood how powerful and loving God was, our brains would explode. But seriously, if we saw his power displayed, we'd fall to the ground shaking uncontrollably. If we saw his face and he let us survive, we'd never, ever stop worshiping him. And we're on his side, and he listens to us when we pray. There isn't a single thing we can do that would be more productive than praying.
Our chapter understood that a little better, too. We grew a lot, especially in prayer. There's no doubt, we left on a spiritual high. But I think a lot of us also left feeling permanently changed and really, really excited for fall semester and what God could do with us then.
That's the gist of what Basileia was about. It was so good.
So going into the church retreat, I was on a roll. Praying lots, feeling like I could conquer any difficulty. But also praying that God would continue to grow me, and especially that he would point out my weaknesses and teach me and humble me, because I knew I was too proud.
And that's what God did. I missed Basileia, of course. I don't think there's anything our church could do that could compare to it. I guess what I didn't realize is how important having my chapter was. Because really, there's nobody else I can rely on for spiritual support and openness. There's one other person, besides my chapter, and I didn't really have the chance to talk to her during the retreat. Gabe is Gabe. Talking to him is more difficulty than it is fun (that's my fault though. I've gotten too used to resenting him).
I love my church. But there's no doubt. We're not what we should be. Our fellowship lacks depth. We're not moving toward the same goal. And personally, I don't feel close enough to our members to change that, with a few exceptions. Micah and Haley. But I see them so much anyways, and I've been trying then.
It's my fault. I never bothered to deepen my friendships with anybody else. I'm familiar and comfortable with being around churchpeople, but I'm not close. I guess I'm something of an onlooker when it comes to socializing (I definitely used to be, at least) and it's tough changing that.
And I'm afraid of rejection. I'm afraid of being boring and a killjoy. I'm afraid of being serious. I'm afraid people will just ignore me.
And that's how God humbled me. He taught me I'm still a coward.
I also came out of Basileia ready to love anybody and everybody. Then God showed me I'm still not ready to love anybody and everybody. I disliked the speaker, but not for what he said. It was just his style of talking and preaching and teaching. He said a lot of obvious things, and he said everything as if it was some profound, amazing truth. He said lame jokes as if they were actually funny. I got a sense of pride from him, a confidence in his ministry and in his own words that I didn't like at all.
I realized I was being judgmental again. That's how else God humbled me. He taught me I still don't love people, especially the ones I find hardest to love.
I like everybody at IV, and that made it easy to love them all. At retreat, I was falling back into the pattern of judging everybody. I was judging the speaker, when his style of talking and teaching was definitely just a style. I probably just wasn't used to it because I'm so used to asian preaching. I judged my peers, watched them and sorted out who the losers were and who the winners were.
I also learned I have difficulty with fobs! Not because I dislike them. I just can't take accents. Heavy accents really tax my attention span. I dunno why. They just do. They make me tired and make it really hard to focus and really hard to care. Sheila was in my small group, and I was paired with her twice, and it was tough. It was especially hard because she overuses a lot of filler words that don't belong to any pattern of speech I'm used to, like somehow and like (it was weird to hear "like" being overused with a heavy accent) and probably and yeah. I had to figure out what to disregard and what to listen to.
That was frustrating.
So retreat was tough. I learned a lot, though, and I grew a lot too. Still a work in progress.
I could write more. But I've kinda written a lot. And I've gotten tired of writing. The end.
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Dang it, there was something else I wanted to talk about that I forgot. It's about thinking about God. I used to think about him once a week. The rest of the time I'd think about school and keeping myself entertained. Lately I've been thinking about God the majority of my day, or at least whenever I'm not doing anything specific. I think it's safe to say I've become obsessed. I try to polish everything I do and try to keep myself doing what I feel is good.
I can't help but think that most Christians still spend their time thinking about how to entertain themselves. And I can't help but think that that's just not what we're here for. I like spending money. I like playing video games. And it's not that I dislike them now. I just prefer feeding hungry people (by not spending on anything unnecessary) and praying and preparing myself for the future by building myself up.
I've heard the phrase wartime efficiency applied to Christianity, and that makes perfect sense to me. I suppose it was before our time, but I think how it went was that during the world wars and the other importanter wars, everything in the country was converted for the sole purpose of winning the war. Food was rationed, factories were converted into weapons factories, women and children pitched in to work, and people gave up leisure time and fun things to make the country a better war machine.
Soldiers of God?
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