1. am so so so so so very glad that the Ignyte's Got Talent drawing went off without a hitch (and that Jesus was looking straight). If I may say so myself, I think Jesus was rocking a pretty awesome 'stache. And now that it's over, I'm no longer 'sworn to secrecy'! CAN I JUST SAY, charcoal is really freaking hard to contain. It gets on everything it touches. Annoying to a fault. Also: I have loads of extra papers in my house containing that one sixth of Jesus' face. Ah well.
2. MIT MIT MIT MIT MIT WHOOOOO. 30th November till the 6th of December. I am honestly so very very excited and happy about it :D I enjoy times where God uses me. My expectations are pretty simple: Be used by God. Have to be uncomfortable. But it's (as always) very very worth it.
3. Doing a flashmob in church would be awesome.
4. I realize I have a tendency to lament on how I spend my time. I blame it on my brain's natural tendency to whittle things down into numbers and figures.
5. Sitting in His presence after service (or as I like to call it, the Lingering) always brings cool revelations. Like why I love His Lingering Presence so. Because those moments are where we really don't have to push or press in. Where it's not that roughness, that hardness of determination, but it's a softness and quietness of His graceful presence. And that is just awesome cool.
6. I think God prefers to work out our issues of pride just between us and Himself. All quiet like. There's a world of difference between humility and humiliation. Humility means not having false pride or overstated pride, whilst humiliation means losing self-respect. And although humiliation can lead to humility, humiliation is not humility, and the road between the two is really quite painful. So unfortunately, sometimes He does have to give us the swift kick to our behinds in view of others. More often than not, it's because that 'self-respect' that we need to lose might be the 'false pride' that's slowly killing us. The main point is: humility is never fun when we're being arrogant.
7. I do struggle with pride sometimes :/ which also means it's something I think alot about. I think I could write alot about pride. But not now.
8. I haaaate the lie that tries to confine God to one area of my life. I think I lived something like my first 12 years of church like that. Which is one of the good things about ignyte: it reminded me that God is God over my whole life, not one segment. God cannot be tamed. Or owned by religion. If you're worshiping God whilst keeping Him in a segment of your life, it's not wholehearted, and it's not everything that He wants. The more we try and tame God to one section, the more we stop worshiping God, and the more we start worshiping this imaginary, tamed object of our imagination. But trust me, that revelation when God begins to take influence in the rest of your life? When He starts to really, really take root in who you are? Best feeling.
9.
"... [this] idea of God "making religion simple": as if "religion" were something God invented, and not His statement to us of certain quite unalterable facts about His own nature.
-C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity
10. Yea, I've been reading that book.
11. I really think it's quite scary when you realize that fact. That God is unalterable, eternal. He deals in absolutes. That's Him. He deals in Eternity. Where things remain the same. Absolute. That's what He should be dealing with. An Eternal being should deal with eternal things. Yet when He begot Jesus, He made Himself fully man as well, meaning He became a creature of time. The One who dealt with absolutes dealt with the flimsy, the fickle. And the Eternal God is willing to work with something so prone to change as human choice, or free will, or, most bafflingly, grace. Grace is illogical, and that's what makes it so very beautiful.
12. I love the loud moments I spend with friends. And I love the quiet moments I spend with God. I am very very very glad that He has taught me how to enjoy being alone with Him. I do think that is the point of the occasional loneliness; after venting out all our frustrations over not being able to be with others, we suddenly realize that His company is actually pretty awesome. Then we start dwelling in it more, and that foundation of love for Him (built upon the even stabler foundation of His love for us) is where the rest of our ministry can be built upon.
13. So long as one regards love as emotion, then it becomes something temporal. Subject to change, to moods, to times, to seasons. Passing fancies for, say, a particular dance craze or a song change often enough that entire industries are built on that. And if love is a feeling, then you can fall into it, and fall out of it. But if one regards love as a choice, then it becomes something more than emotion. It becomes something stepped outside emotion. And if that choice is reinforced with determination, it becomes something eternal. Once one applies determination to an emotion, it becomes a choice, for it is a conscious decision to apply that determination. Choices, on the other hand, can be made into something more persevering, something stronger, more durable, when we strengthen it with our determination. And that's how I understand love. As a choice.
14. Consequently, I do believe that infatuation is to love what anger is to hatred. It's the difference between an emotion and a choice. Being angry with someone can pass in time. But once one applies that determination to sustain that anger, that is the point that it begins to turn into hatred. And in the same way that the strength of that hatred is dependent on one's determination to be angry, the strength of love is dependent on how determined you are to sustain it.
15. I really really really want to sleep. I need my sabbath, my rest day. 5 in a row in church, it can get a little tiring. And after this Day of Rest, comes another 6 in a row. But it's my choice, my decision, my expression of love. All for Jesus luhh.
ALSO, I know most of the people that read this blog probably don't have the kinda cash to throw around, but if you've got some, please donate to Stuff Christians Like, they're trying to raise funds to build a kindergarten in Vietnam. We have the benefit of a good education system, please help the people there. If you're worried about it being a scam, well, I've checked it out and everything looks in order, so it's got my personal guarantee that the money will go where is should.
Please donate if you can.