[This blog is part three of a 3-part update posted today, but is part TWO of a 2-part post I call "Consistent Inconsistency." For full understanding, please scroll down and read part one first.]
continued update ::PART THREE::
Unrelated to Facebook, the Lord has blessed me in other areas of free time as well. Krystina and I get up Monday-Friday (as regularly as possible, at least) to go jogging. We experience the breathtaking beauty of the English countryside and the baby lambs waking up and calling for their mamas. We see the early sun beam down on the endless hills of fresh grass, as well as the horses and cows in surrounding pastures. Sometimes Krystina and I choose to just walk and talk - laughing and sharing and learning about one another. It has been, hands down, one of the biggest blessings I was not expecting.
The sheep are everywhere, sleeping and grazing under the massive trees that hold beautiful leaves and loud birds (especially first thing in the morning), and that’s what Krystina and I walk and jog through in complete amazement. God’s creation is simply unbeatable.[written wednesday, may 11, 2011]
Today marks halfway through the term. It’s been 4 weeks, and we have another 4 yet to go (which feels like nothing when I think about the six whole months I spent doing this in Germany). But, that also means this upcoming weekend is Travel Weekend, which of course makes today a Prayer Day/ Day of Reflection. And there ya go – the reason for the update :P Well that, and my dearest boyfriend wrote a little “ps” in one of his sweet letters that said I should get back into blogging. Aw, he actually takes time for my online diary :D And for the record Joel, I think it’s awesome you work at Cougar Country. Just know that my friends will all be asking you for fries and shakes from now until you quit ;)
The lectures at Spring School are on a variety of subjects, alternating between guest speakers and Capernwray staff and are sometimes a joy to sit through, while other times prove to be a bit harder to stay focused. Already, we’ve been through several series including Ephesians, Deuteronomy, 1 John, Revelation, 1&2 Kings, highlights of Isaiah, and last week we had Peter Reid (our principal at Bodenseehof!!) here speaking on Joshua. It was SO great to see a familiar face and hear a familiar lecture style. The kids here at Capernwray absolutely LOVED him – and rightfully so. God truly speaks through Peter’s humble and transparent personality. It’s great :] The assignments here, as my previous update mentioned, have much more precise and strict requirements. Our first paper was due yesterday (and we now have another due each Tuesday for the next two weeks), our first test is Thursday, and no one really knows how to get everything done. We’re reading through the New Testament this term, and I’ll admit I’m a bit (ok, REALLY) behind in that area. Thank goodness I’m not traveling this weekend like the rest of the school so I can have the peace and quiet my heart is craving to catch up on LOADS of NT reading!
The only thing I have left to mention in this update is the addition to my testimony (which I noticed only today as my roommates and I went around sharing testimonies and praying for one another). I used to struggle with the concept of a “testimony” because I grew up thinking everyone (including myself) admired only the crash-and-burn stories. The stories that were most effective, in my opinion, were the ones where the Lord had intervened someone’s crazy life and had pulled them out of their mess and they now claim to know the Lord personally and can look back on their past for evidence of God’s grace and love for us. My own testimony… not so exciting. I grew up in a Christian home, parents raised me in the church, went to summer church camps where I accepted Christ at the mature and sophisticated age of 9, been living the same life every since. See? Yeah, not as thrilling as the story of the kid next to me with tattoos who was once suicidal and addicted to drugs, but now serves the Lord daily as he prepares to spend his life on the mission field. Ok that’s a bit extreme – but I hope you sense what I’m getting at. My testimony has been something I’ve prayed about for many, many years – literally asking the Lord to GIVE me a tragedy so I can depend on Him and bring glory to His name (let’s be honest – I was looking to glorify MY name with the attention that kind of story would get). Needless to say, I have yet to experience such a tragedy. However, today the Lord revealed something to me that I hold very close to my heart because it cuts right into the core of my identity. I do have a struggle, and we can call it the struggle of “the balance.” This balance, of course, is the balance between love and law. I have struggled my ENTIRE life with identifying myself with both love and law, and properly executing the balance so the world can see the character of Christ in me. This may sound like an everyday struggle that all Christians have (and that’s probably true) but mine is on a level that has actually determined who my friends are, who I am TO these friends, how I see the world and how the world sees me. I like to think of my Christian walk in regards to this struggle as a long line with an extreme on each end. On the one end you have the “righteous high-horse legalist” which I rode for the first eight years or so of my faith because I didn’t know anything else. This, I could tell pretty early on, was not the fastest way to make friends. But because I never studied the Bible at great enough length, I clung to the only thing I knew – the rules. I understood them, so I preached them. When my social life became too important to give up for something as arbitrary as faith (at that age, anyway), I became very quiet about what I believed. I knew in my heart of hearts what was there, but felt absolutely NO need to share it with others. This would explain my “public school apathetic faith” occurring at the same time as my “super involved with my youth group and lovin it faith.” I genuinely loved the Lord, but was too reputation-focused to truly live it out. When I was about 16 I began to soften to the idea of love instead of law, and I started using God’s unconditional love and forgiveness as a means to justify disobedience to His law. So I started a slow motion downward spiral across the spectrum to the opposite end, which I call the “loopy liberalist.” Everything was about how Jesus loves me no matter what, and this life is too hard to do perfectly, so give yourself (and others) grace! Because it was such an opposite extreme, it took me a while to fully adopt this mentality, but about six years later I was at the absolute worst stage of hypocrisy I have ever reached. I see now how much sin I was condoning in the dirty lives of those around me by way of the sin I was living in myself. I was living two lives, claiming to love the Lord but proving to the world the exact opposite. I was a walking, talking, living lie. I was an especially great liar to myself, living in complete denial. In fact, the only reason I can say these things today is because of God’s revelation and grace in the last eight months. Admittedly, I would occasionally have moments of slight recognition that my life was a mess, but I refused to change much about it. I didn’t want to become legalistic again and lose friends (nor could I say confidently that I desired the laws anymore), so I stayed temporarily satisfied swimming in my big pool of sin. My heart still belonged to Jesus and I could feel Him tugging at times, but I was far too stubborn to acknowledge it outwardly. See, I never once denied my faith. I always new at my core that I wanted to live for Him – I just drowned myself with things and feelings of this world, I couldn’t ever pull myself up out of it, and I had WAY too much pride to ask Jesus to do it for me.
So that’s it – my life up until September 2010: a slippery slide down the line between two extremes. And although my coming to Bible School eight months ago did remove me from the situations of my old life, I still struggle with this balance every day. Depending on the issue, I can’t ever react with consistency. I either hop on my righteous high horse and come at it with extreme legalism, or I’m too afraid I’ll offend someone so I get passive and justify the liberal and care-free response. The best way I can describe my walk with Jesus in the last 13 years: Consistent Inconsistency. I’ll probably title my first book that, if I ever write one. My life is in more dependency of Him now than it ever has been. Clearly, I can't do this life alone.
"Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act." -Psalm 37:5
Two weeks ago tomorrow Joel graduated from Washington State University with his degree in Criminal Justice and a double minor in Political Science and Sociology. I missed the big day and while I wished more than anything on that Saturday afternoon that I could have been with him to celebrate, I am happy to know that his friends and family made that weekend special for him. He had his immediate family there, plus a number of extended family members who were there to support him as well. I'm so very proud of him and all the work he's done the last 4+ years to get to where he is today. This time next year (Lord willing) I will also be two weeks graduated and well on my way into the real world with a great job and a bright future. 
wonderful days on the island, it was time to say goodbye to two members: Derek and Emily. Their travels would take them up to Paris then Portugal before separating - Emily would go home to Canada and Derek would head to spring school in Austria. The rest of us headed ba
We landed i
