Season 2, Episode 10: Sinking Deep
Long time, No see?
I figured since Lent concluded last Sunday, I should probably start analyzing how it went.
My plan (since I know I have a lot to say about everything I've been learning during this period) is to create five separate posts that chronicle the different "units" I divided Lent into: Love, Sadness, Courage, Prayer, and Joy. So here's Unit 1:
During the first week of Lent, I was terrified.
No, you didn't misread that.
I started contemplating what I wanted to do for Lent in early February and at the time had thought "oh, maybe I could pray for someone different everyday". But naturally, God decided to put a different spin on it. Somewhere in the month of February, the idea of praying with people came into my head, and it wouldn't let go. Then, a few days before the Lenten period began, a friend of mine shared a post from when she had done the same thing a few years prior (coincidence? I think not) and that was that. I certainly wasn't going to ignore a prompting, and so instead, I attempted to embrace it as best I could. I reached out to friends from high school, from middle school, from college, from camp, from Cru, from Sigma Kappa-I tested the waters everywhere. I let people know what was going on with a Facebook post about what Lent was going to look like for me (as if I knew, myself, what would happen).
I actually distinctly remember calling a close friend of mine (@kelly-thank you for this pep talk, I was in dire need of hearing what you said to me) and panicking over the phone.
"What if none of this works out? I don't have the guts to just ask people if I can pray for them-I'm not that bold, I'm not that eloquent- I don't even think I have 40 friends that I could contact to pray with!"
My friend, being the champion that she is, took all of this in stride, and stopped me mid-"what if", to ask me a question.
"You did say that you feel like God is pushing you towards this, right?"
"Yeah, I don't think I could've really come up with an idea that would've terrified me this much."
"Well, isn't sitting here questioning every step of the process doubting His plan for you? If it's His plan and His will for you, won't it fall together exactly the way it's meant to?"
To say I was "shook" might actually be an understatement. Mainly because she was right, and I hadn't even thought of it before. It was His desire to reach out to others that had started burning in me, therefore, He would make everything fall into place exactly the way it was supposed to. (Rom 8:38)
But that's not to say my fears just evaporated.
I went into "love week" (as I so called it) very nervous still. The first person I was to pray with was a woman that I had grown up with at my summer camp, who just-so-happened to be the daughter of a pastor. I was confident that I would get on the phone with her, pray, and have her say "You did everything wrong, you don't know how to pray, are you even a real Christian at all?" (Tab these thoughts in the back of your mind, they'll come back up in my last unit post).
Of course, she was nothing like that. She was gracious and open and content to be prayed for, and at no time did she demean my ambitions to pray with people, or criticize my style of prayer. I remember finishing up, and feeling relieved. I had made it!
From that point on, the prayers came a little easier to me, a little more naturally, and they felt less awkward. Almost all of them were born out of conversations I had with others, so when I sat down, I didn't feel like I was interrogating a person about their deepest secrets and thoughts, but instead felt as if I was beginning and continuing an organic narrative that we were co-authoring. It was delightful to get to pray with people that week. I wrote down a lot of the prayers that people had asked of me, and it's actually funny to me to see how many of their prayers were echoes of the things my heart yearned for as well.
That is where my journaling comes in. As I stated earlier, I set up "units" for myself, and as I went through this "week" (okay okay eight days, but still) I found myself studying love in ways that I had never expected.
I knew I had chosen to study verses and passages that focused on love itself, but what I didn't realize was that I would be focusing on love itself.
Maybe that doesn't make sense, so let me try to explain myself.
You see, I knew I was going to be reading things about loving God and loving people, but I suppose that's where I thought it ended. You can imagine my surprise when I began learning about loving myself in the middle of that. I didn't really think it was called for- I was to be the necessary sacrifice, others deserved my love and attention, but not myself.
Needless to say, God pushed me with this week. Every night, as I would go to study my chosen reading, I would come away with some new aspect of love that I had previously ignored. The first night, I found myself challenging myself to "exude love to people on campus" (this was actually the first of forty 24-hour challenges that I gave myself). The next day, I found myself walking on campus and intentionally not being irritated when people were walking slowly or stopping in the middle of sidewalks, and instead just smiling. The next day, I pushed myself to think beyond the bounds of the love language that I'm most comfortable loving others with, and found myself giving a lot of hugs over my usual compliments or gifts. The next day I was struck with the "love God, love others, and let others love you" part. As I stated before, this floored me, but because I had a few different people explain it to me in ways that I hadn't really heard before.
An example: I'm a big advocate for loving others by being attentive to their emotions and reacting in appropriate ways so they know that I care about them. In loving them that way, I'm doing my best to serve them, for two reasons: first, because I really do love them, and second, because as a Christian, I'm called to serve others. The thing is, many of the people that I care about have similar philosophies, whether they believe in Christianity or not. They believe in serving others, and when I hold myself back from others and don't allow them to love me, they aren't able to serve me well.
The basic concept is simple to understand-serve others, but let them serve you too-but I find it terribly hard because I don't like being a burden on other people or bothering them or asking too much of them. But what I was growing towards learning here was that none of those italicized adjectives are mine to claim.
It's like when you sit across from someone and start talking about your feelings about something and they finish your sentences for you.
"It was so neat to see that movie last night, I was just so-"
"Excited about the ending right? Wasn't it fantastic?"
"Well, no, actually. I was going to say that I was dis-"
"Disgusted by the battle at the end? Me too!"
And so on. But that's what I was doing every time I spent time and shared with someone. I was starting a conversation with them, but shutting down their opinions before they even had a chance to express them. I told them how they were supposed to feel about talking with me, the reaction that they were supposed to have, the way that they were meant to interpret my sharing with them.
None of that is my call to make though, and maybe everyone had just been too polite to tell me. Or maybe they had told me, and I just ignored it, in my usual stubborn fashion. I wouldn't be terribly surprised, I hate to say. This was big though. I need to be rooted in Christ's love of me if I want to love others fully and better, and evidently, I can't love others fully if I can't let them love me.
The craziest thing about this was that I saw it happen during the week. As I had mentioned in my last blog post, I was right in the middle of big-little reveal week, and I had no clue as to who my big was. There was an incredible girl from Cru named Nina who was also in Sigma Kappa, and I was hoping she was my big, but my roommate had flat-out told me that she wasn't, and I, knowing that Kate is awful at lying, believed her. In the end, my big was Nina (SO HAPPY STILL), but I had been completely surprised by it, which is a pretty big thing for me.
I'm notorious for spoiling surprises, I'm a pretty observant person, and I tend to pick up on things that are out of the ordinary and investigate. I've spoiled countless presents and parties for myself, and I haven't really minded, but at the same time, I've always subconsciously associated the failed surprise with a lack of caring on behalf of the planners. My thought (for some reason) was that if these people knew me well enough to want to plan a surprise for me, they should know me well enough to know that I would investigate any loose ends, and would be cautious accordingly.
This though...I spoke with Nina about it afterwards, and discovered that a variety of people from Cru knew about it, and helped keep the secret, and honestly, I haven't felt so loved in a very long time. It was more than just keeping the secret, it was keeping tabs on how I was feeling about it during the week, it was knowing what my favorite worship song was so Nina could play that instead of a secular song (since the reveal was on the third day of Lent, and I had given up secular music). It was knowing all of these things, these seemingly insignificant facts about me, and being able to help her surprise me, and when that all hit me, I cried.
I remember telling the worship team that on our Sunday rehearsal for that week, and I think they all assumed I was just exaggerating (I do say *cries* a lot, so it's not that surprising hahah) but I'm so serious. I got back to my dorm that night, and texted one of the culprits involved saying " I'm anything but a surprise person, so I was really nervous, and it was incredible to find out that a bunch of other people had either helped out or knew-especially when that was the end result that I had wanted so badly 😊" It was crazy and wonderful, and I felt so loved, which was incredible and completely unexpected and honestly... It was beautiful.
So that was a pretty big week in terms of realizing things. (March 1st-March 9th, the week of realizing things- Kylie Jenner, probably)
BUT DON'T WORRY THERE'S STILL ONE MORE BIG THING FOR THIS POST!
An unfortunate side-effect of being an out-of-stater here at UMD has been my not having a car to drive around, which in itself isn't awful, however for me, this meant I didn't really have a church to go to. Now I know what you're probably thinking- Why didn't you ask someone to drive you?
To make a much longer story incredibly short, it goes back to the whole inconveniencing others with my presence thing. I didn't want to be a bother to anyone who felt forced to cart me to and from church every week. So I felt a bit stuck there first semester, but by second semester, I realized that I desired to be a part of an actual church community, not just my own studies and the ones through Cru. So I started to do research on nearby churches, and as I researched, I narrowed it down to two that seemed close enough that someone from Cru had to be attending one of them, therefore, I'd be able to get a ride. This determination was realized the week before Lent started, and so God being God, decided to not give me a chance to waver in my decision. That Sunday (the Sunday before Ash Wednesday), I sat down to rehearsal with Cru's worship team, and as we were waiting for members to show up, one of the other women asked all who were present where they go to church, as she was trying to find one to attend that was closer to UMD than her home church. When it got around to me, I rather sheepishly admitted that I hadn't been able to find a church yet because I didn't really have a way of getting off campus, to which our worship team leader responded that he drives people every week, I should've told him sooner, and to be outside my dorm at 8:30 the next Sunday.
I was a bit worried to be honest, because I hadn't really experienced any other church like the one that I was a part of back home, but the moment I stepped foot in the building, it felt like home.
The design of the church (who would've thought interior design would make it into these, huh?) was vaguely reminiscent of my home church, which put me at ease to begin with, but then when the pastor started talking and revealed that they were about to start a unit on the book of Judges, I was floored. As a high-schooler, I had studied Judges at my summer camp and loved the stories within it, of regular men and women leading the people, of the people failing to love God well but God responding with mercy again and again... It's an incredible book (11/10 would recommend, really) full of incredible stories, and when the pastor began speaking on it, I thought I might cry. The sermon was filled with references, both scriptural (which I LIVE FOR in church services) and pop culture. During the worship service, they played two songs that have been delightfully impactful on my life, and then they closed the service with one of my all-time favorite verses, which I imagine is how I'll finish this post as well. It was incredible on about 900 levels, and I'm so glad to have a God who knew what I wanted and what I needed and took care of me like that, in such a way that could've been easily disregarded.
It was quite a week (eight days) to say the least, and I hope you've enjoyed reading about what I've learned. There's still plenty more to come, and I can't wait to share it with you.
"Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
-Hebrews 12:2
Signing off,
Amanda
I figured since Lent concluded last Sunday, I should probably start analyzing how it went.
My plan (since I know I have a lot to say about everything I've been learning during this period) is to create five separate posts that chronicle the different "units" I divided Lent into: Love, Sadness, Courage, Prayer, and Joy. So here's Unit 1:
Love.
During the first week of Lent, I was terrified.
No, you didn't misread that.
I started contemplating what I wanted to do for Lent in early February and at the time had thought "oh, maybe I could pray for someone different everyday". But naturally, God decided to put a different spin on it. Somewhere in the month of February, the idea of praying with people came into my head, and it wouldn't let go. Then, a few days before the Lenten period began, a friend of mine shared a post from when she had done the same thing a few years prior (coincidence? I think not) and that was that. I certainly wasn't going to ignore a prompting, and so instead, I attempted to embrace it as best I could. I reached out to friends from high school, from middle school, from college, from camp, from Cru, from Sigma Kappa-I tested the waters everywhere. I let people know what was going on with a Facebook post about what Lent was going to look like for me (as if I knew, myself, what would happen).
I actually distinctly remember calling a close friend of mine (@kelly-thank you for this pep talk, I was in dire need of hearing what you said to me) and panicking over the phone.
"What if none of this works out? I don't have the guts to just ask people if I can pray for them-I'm not that bold, I'm not that eloquent- I don't even think I have 40 friends that I could contact to pray with!"
My friend, being the champion that she is, took all of this in stride, and stopped me mid-"what if", to ask me a question.
"You did say that you feel like God is pushing you towards this, right?"
"Yeah, I don't think I could've really come up with an idea that would've terrified me this much."
"Well, isn't sitting here questioning every step of the process doubting His plan for you? If it's His plan and His will for you, won't it fall together exactly the way it's meant to?"
To say I was "shook" might actually be an understatement. Mainly because she was right, and I hadn't even thought of it before. It was His desire to reach out to others that had started burning in me, therefore, He would make everything fall into place exactly the way it was supposed to. (Rom 8:38)
But that's not to say my fears just evaporated.
I went into "love week" (as I so called it) very nervous still. The first person I was to pray with was a woman that I had grown up with at my summer camp, who just-so-happened to be the daughter of a pastor. I was confident that I would get on the phone with her, pray, and have her say "You did everything wrong, you don't know how to pray, are you even a real Christian at all?" (Tab these thoughts in the back of your mind, they'll come back up in my last unit post).
Of course, she was nothing like that. She was gracious and open and content to be prayed for, and at no time did she demean my ambitions to pray with people, or criticize my style of prayer. I remember finishing up, and feeling relieved. I had made it!
From that point on, the prayers came a little easier to me, a little more naturally, and they felt less awkward. Almost all of them were born out of conversations I had with others, so when I sat down, I didn't feel like I was interrogating a person about their deepest secrets and thoughts, but instead felt as if I was beginning and continuing an organic narrative that we were co-authoring. It was delightful to get to pray with people that week. I wrote down a lot of the prayers that people had asked of me, and it's actually funny to me to see how many of their prayers were echoes of the things my heart yearned for as well.
That is where my journaling comes in. As I stated earlier, I set up "units" for myself, and as I went through this "week" (okay okay eight days, but still) I found myself studying love in ways that I had never expected.
I knew I had chosen to study verses and passages that focused on love itself, but what I didn't realize was that I would be focusing on love itself.
Maybe that doesn't make sense, so let me try to explain myself.
You see, I knew I was going to be reading things about loving God and loving people, but I suppose that's where I thought it ended. You can imagine my surprise when I began learning about loving myself in the middle of that. I didn't really think it was called for- I was to be the necessary sacrifice, others deserved my love and attention, but not myself.
Needless to say, God pushed me with this week. Every night, as I would go to study my chosen reading, I would come away with some new aspect of love that I had previously ignored. The first night, I found myself challenging myself to "exude love to people on campus" (this was actually the first of forty 24-hour challenges that I gave myself). The next day, I found myself walking on campus and intentionally not being irritated when people were walking slowly or stopping in the middle of sidewalks, and instead just smiling. The next day, I pushed myself to think beyond the bounds of the love language that I'm most comfortable loving others with, and found myself giving a lot of hugs over my usual compliments or gifts. The next day I was struck with the "love God, love others, and let others love you" part. As I stated before, this floored me, but because I had a few different people explain it to me in ways that I hadn't really heard before.
 |
| *those bangs though* |
An example: I'm a big advocate for loving others by being attentive to their emotions and reacting in appropriate ways so they know that I care about them. In loving them that way, I'm doing my best to serve them, for two reasons: first, because I really do love them, and second, because as a Christian, I'm called to serve others. The thing is, many of the people that I care about have similar philosophies, whether they believe in Christianity or not. They believe in serving others, and when I hold myself back from others and don't allow them to love me, they aren't able to serve me well.
The basic concept is simple to understand-serve others, but let them serve you too-but I find it terribly hard because I don't like being a burden on other people or bothering them or asking too much of them. But what I was growing towards learning here was that none of those italicized adjectives are mine to claim.
It's like when you sit across from someone and start talking about your feelings about something and they finish your sentences for you.
"It was so neat to see that movie last night, I was just so-"
"Excited about the ending right? Wasn't it fantastic?"
"Well, no, actually. I was going to say that I was dis-"
"Disgusted by the battle at the end? Me too!"
And so on. But that's what I was doing every time I spent time and shared with someone. I was starting a conversation with them, but shutting down their opinions before they even had a chance to express them. I told them how they were supposed to feel about talking with me, the reaction that they were supposed to have, the way that they were meant to interpret my sharing with them.
 |
| me realizing the feelings others have about me aren't my decision |
None of that is my call to make though, and maybe everyone had just been too polite to tell me. Or maybe they had told me, and I just ignored it, in my usual stubborn fashion. I wouldn't be terribly surprised, I hate to say. This was big though. I need to be rooted in Christ's love of me if I want to love others fully and better, and evidently, I can't love others fully if I can't let them love me.
The craziest thing about this was that I saw it happen during the week. As I had mentioned in my last blog post, I was right in the middle of big-little reveal week, and I had no clue as to who my big was. There was an incredible girl from Cru named Nina who was also in Sigma Kappa, and I was hoping she was my big, but my roommate had flat-out told me that she wasn't, and I, knowing that Kate is awful at lying, believed her. In the end, my big was Nina (SO HAPPY STILL), but I had been completely surprised by it, which is a pretty big thing for me.
 |
| SO MANY HUGS |
I'm notorious for spoiling surprises, I'm a pretty observant person, and I tend to pick up on things that are out of the ordinary and investigate. I've spoiled countless presents and parties for myself, and I haven't really minded, but at the same time, I've always subconsciously associated the failed surprise with a lack of caring on behalf of the planners. My thought (for some reason) was that if these people knew me well enough to want to plan a surprise for me, they should know me well enough to know that I would investigate any loose ends, and would be cautious accordingly.
This though...I spoke with Nina about it afterwards, and discovered that a variety of people from Cru knew about it, and helped keep the secret, and honestly, I haven't felt so loved in a very long time. It was more than just keeping the secret, it was keeping tabs on how I was feeling about it during the week, it was knowing what my favorite worship song was so Nina could play that instead of a secular song (since the reveal was on the third day of Lent, and I had given up secular music). It was knowing all of these things, these seemingly insignificant facts about me, and being able to help her surprise me, and when that all hit me, I cried.
 |
| nbd EXCEPT THIS IS A BIG DEAL |
I remember telling the worship team that on our Sunday rehearsal for that week, and I think they all assumed I was just exaggerating (I do say *cries* a lot, so it's not that surprising hahah) but I'm so serious. I got back to my dorm that night, and texted one of the culprits involved saying " I'm anything but a surprise person, so I was really nervous, and it was incredible to find out that a bunch of other people had either helped out or knew-especially when that was the end result that I had wanted so badly 😊" It was crazy and wonderful, and I felt so loved, which was incredible and completely unexpected and honestly... It was beautiful.
So that was a pretty big week in terms of realizing things. (March 1st-March 9th, the week of realizing things- Kylie Jenner, probably)
BUT DON'T WORRY THERE'S STILL ONE MORE BIG THING FOR THIS POST!
An unfortunate side-effect of being an out-of-stater here at UMD has been my not having a car to drive around, which in itself isn't awful, however for me, this meant I didn't really have a church to go to. Now I know what you're probably thinking- Why didn't you ask someone to drive you?
To make a much longer story incredibly short, it goes back to the whole inconveniencing others with my presence thing. I didn't want to be a bother to anyone who felt forced to cart me to and from church every week. So I felt a bit stuck there first semester, but by second semester, I realized that I desired to be a part of an actual church community, not just my own studies and the ones through Cru. So I started to do research on nearby churches, and as I researched, I narrowed it down to two that seemed close enough that someone from Cru had to be attending one of them, therefore, I'd be able to get a ride. This determination was realized the week before Lent started, and so God being God, decided to not give me a chance to waver in my decision. That Sunday (the Sunday before Ash Wednesday), I sat down to rehearsal with Cru's worship team, and as we were waiting for members to show up, one of the other women asked all who were present where they go to church, as she was trying to find one to attend that was closer to UMD than her home church. When it got around to me, I rather sheepishly admitted that I hadn't been able to find a church yet because I didn't really have a way of getting off campus, to which our worship team leader responded that he drives people every week, I should've told him sooner, and to be outside my dorm at 8:30 the next Sunday.
I was a bit worried to be honest, because I hadn't really experienced any other church like the one that I was a part of back home, but the moment I stepped foot in the building, it felt like home.
The design of the church (who would've thought interior design would make it into these, huh?) was vaguely reminiscent of my home church, which put me at ease to begin with, but then when the pastor started talking and revealed that they were about to start a unit on the book of Judges, I was floored. As a high-schooler, I had studied Judges at my summer camp and loved the stories within it, of regular men and women leading the people, of the people failing to love God well but God responding with mercy again and again... It's an incredible book (11/10 would recommend, really) full of incredible stories, and when the pastor began speaking on it, I thought I might cry. The sermon was filled with references, both scriptural (which I LIVE FOR in church services) and pop culture. During the worship service, they played two songs that have been delightfully impactful on my life, and then they closed the service with one of my all-time favorite verses, which I imagine is how I'll finish this post as well. It was incredible on about 900 levels, and I'm so glad to have a God who knew what I wanted and what I needed and took care of me like that, in such a way that could've been easily disregarded.
It was quite a week (eight days) to say the least, and I hope you've enjoyed reading about what I've learned. There's still plenty more to come, and I can't wait to share it with you.
"Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who, for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."
-Hebrews 12:2
Signing off,
Amanda
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