October 15, 2012
I am officially an upperclassman! Man that’s weird to think about. I am now in my third year at IHOPU. I had a restful summer and was super blessed to come home for 2 weeks to see my friends and family…and so many babies!!! Then my mom came back with me for the week before school started. I was actually worried that it was going to be hard to switch back my schedule to nights, but the Lord totally gave me and my mom grace and I had no problem sleeping. My mom is a champ. She switched her schedule and did 2-6 am in the prayer room with me every night. All my friends were impressed. We had a really nice week and I think she left rested and encouraged.
I am officially an upperclassman! Man that’s weird to think about. I am now in my third year at IHOPU. I had a restful summer and was super blessed to come home for 2 weeks to see my friends and family…and so many babies!!! Then my mom came back with me for the week before school started. I was actually worried that it was going to be hard to switch back my schedule to nights, but the Lord totally gave me and my mom grace and I had no problem sleeping. My mom is a champ. She switched her schedule and did 2-6 am in the prayer room with me every night. All my friends were impressed. We had a really nice week and I think she left rested and encouraged.
I cannot begin to tell you
how the Lord has blessed me in the area of finances. I am still tutoring my
sweet little Korean girl over Skype. I do this 3 times a week at various times between
4-6 in the morning depending on the day. We had some technical difficulties at
first, but we have worked out all the kinks now. I really enjoy that little
girl! I am also officially certified to be a substitute teacher. I had never
thought about it because on the old schedule it would have never worked, but on
this new schedule my mom brought up the point that I have all day Friday open.
Plus we get 2 Sabbaths as students and since one of mine is Saturday, I can
always sleep in if I have to stay up a little longer. I had to fill out a bunch
of paperwork and get fingerprinted but I officially turned in my application
last week. If I do it once a week that will be an extra 400 a month! Since all
the paperwork is basically the same anyway, I am also going to go ahead and
just get Missouri certified because you never know what I might need in the
future.
There
has been much transition in my actual house as well. We had a new chick move in
to our house this year and she is a 1st year music academy student from Norway. So far
things have been good with her, although because of our different schedules I
really only see her on the weekends. But since she is international she does
not have a car. It has worked out really well because my car just sits in the
driveway after I go to sleep at 4 pm so I told her she can use it any time
after that she wants. We had talked about just splitting gas because that’s all
I pay, but she has been so blessed by me letting her use it that she is just paying
all the gas herself so that’s an extra $100 a month I don’t have to worry about
at least for the next 10 months. Man it’s so encouraging to finally see some
breakthrough and answered prayer in that area!
On a super sad
note, my roommate Dia, who I have lived with since I moved here is officially
moving out at the end of this month. =( She got a new job that is farther away
and she found a place that was much closer to work. We are going to set a
weekly get-together time but it won’t be the same. This is the longest I have
ever lived with someone who wasn’t family, and she has basically become like
family. Please pray for grace for my heart in this transition.
This first
quarter I had 2 classes. Theology of Suffering and Justice with Stuart Greaves
and Shelley Hundley and the Pauline Epistles with Wes Adams. So far the justice
class has been my favorite. Stuart taught the 1st half and now Shelley taught
the 2nd half. We got to do a video group project and we had the
choice of either making our own group or waiting after the groups were made to
assign ourselves to an open place. I decided to use it as an opportunity to put
myself out there and meet new people so I waited to be assigned. My group was
so fun because they were all internationals. They were from Holland, Austria,
Bolivia, and Germany so it made for a fun get together. Our assignment was to
pick a social justice issue and we had to come up with a list of interview
questions and then go around and video tape random people answering the
questions and then put together a 5 minute video. We chose the issue of a
fatherless generation and the effects it has on the household as well as
society in general.
Then Shelley taught us on the heart of Jesus as the Judge.
This is the part I was both excited about as well as terrified about. She said
that she is taking the class list and praying for each of us by name that God
will reveal and bring up an issue of pain on our own lives that He wants to
deal with. She says we can’t comfort people with a message we haven’t been
comforted by ourselves yet and we can’t give anyone Jesus as Judge until we
have encountered Him as our own personal judge in our own circumstances. This
is an answer to many of my prayers. I have been telling the Lord I can’t give
away what I don’t have. I can’t comfort anyone when I have yet to be comforted
myself. So it’s exciting but also terrifying because I don’t know what He might
bring up. Our first assignment was a silent day. Class was cancelled and we had
to take an entire day away from people and internet and cell phones, basically
any distractions and just get silent before the Lord and wait for Him to speak.
It was a wonderful day! I decided to spend the day outside in nature. (Now that
the Lord has healed my allergies I am discovering that I LOVE to be outdoors…who
knew!) I found this place called the Overland Park Arboretum. It was free and
open to the public. The day before the weather looked like it was supposed to
be terrible- windy, cold and rainy. So I asked the Lord if He would change it for
me because I really wanted to spend the day outside, and He totally did. It was
the perfect day. It stayed in the 70’s the whole time! I was wearing a tank top
and didn’t even need a hoodie and there wasn’t a drop of rain. He was so kind!
I spent the day just walking around and enjoying the different gardens. There
were like 8 different ones (The picture above was from one) and my favorite was the water garden. There were
waterfalls everywhere! I spent the entire day there and alternated between
praying, reading my Bible, people watching, reading my book for class and just
taking in the beauty. Then I ate my picnic lunch I packed and headed home for
bed.
 |
| This was my favorite waterfall! |
It was really interesting because Shelley routinely
incorporates silent days into her daily life and she has been through a lot of
traumatic life circumstances, but she told us that this last time she did the
silent day she was surprised by what the Lord actually brought up and wanted to
talk about. Out of everything she’s been through He wanted to talk about the
time when she was 12 years old and her family told her they were going to be
moving where she lived to America. The Lord wanted to talk about her heart in
that situation. She was surprised but I was super encouraged because the fact
that He remembers that she was upset as a 12 year old because she didn’t want
to move shows me that God really does care about our hearts and even the little
things that we may have forgotten or just brushed aside, He never has. So I was
curious to see if He was going to bring anything up. If He did, I didn’t hear
Him. Oh well. It was still a lovely day. We were also supposed to have a 10 on
1 with Shelley this quarter where we meet with her in a smaller group of about
10 people to have more of a personal time where we can ask deeper questions
than we could in class. Mine got rescheduled though and it won’t happen until
the middle of November. Haha what can you do?
The Pauline Epistles class is kind of a funny story. When we received our class choices and the descriptions the description of the class talked about 1 and 2 Peter and how they are overlooked books. I love Peter’s books and I was super excited about a class about them. Well Pauline Epistles is actually all of the letters of Paul, not Peter. So I thought it was kind of weird but figured they had misnamed the class. Then over the summer when the book list came out, all the books were about Paul. So I emailed and asked about the description talking about Peter and get this, they said they don’t even know where the description came from, they are not offering that class even in another year and don’t have any thought of it being offered anytime soon. So apparently the Lord really wanted me to take this class and He knew the only way I would do it was by signing up thinking I was taking a different one. It wasn’t my favorite class because Paul led a hard life with lots of trial and suffering and I am having to fight offense in my heart towards the Lord for His leadership. I did like the class because we focused more on his life as a person, more like a biography, and everything culturally and contextually that was and would have been going on around the time he wrote each of the letters. That part was really good because I so quickly forget that the people in the Bible were real people who lived real lives so I really enjoyed that part of it. Plus it was kind of a continuation of the Acts class and taught by the same teacher, so it was easier to follow the different journeys Paul took knowing the background I learned in the other class. My favorite thing about the class is that at the beginning of each class our teacher Wes gave a devotional, just basically whatever he felt was on the Lord’s heart for us. Those were always very encouraging.
The Pauline Epistles class is kind of a funny story. When we received our class choices and the descriptions the description of the class talked about 1 and 2 Peter and how they are overlooked books. I love Peter’s books and I was super excited about a class about them. Well Pauline Epistles is actually all of the letters of Paul, not Peter. So I thought it was kind of weird but figured they had misnamed the class. Then over the summer when the book list came out, all the books were about Paul. So I emailed and asked about the description talking about Peter and get this, they said they don’t even know where the description came from, they are not offering that class even in another year and don’t have any thought of it being offered anytime soon. So apparently the Lord really wanted me to take this class and He knew the only way I would do it was by signing up thinking I was taking a different one. It wasn’t my favorite class because Paul led a hard life with lots of trial and suffering and I am having to fight offense in my heart towards the Lord for His leadership. I did like the class because we focused more on his life as a person, more like a biography, and everything culturally and contextually that was and would have been going on around the time he wrote each of the letters. That part was really good because I so quickly forget that the people in the Bible were real people who lived real lives so I really enjoyed that part of it. Plus it was kind of a continuation of the Acts class and taught by the same teacher, so it was easier to follow the different journeys Paul took knowing the background I learned in the other class. My favorite thing about the class is that at the beginning of each class our teacher Wes gave a devotional, just basically whatever he felt was on the Lord’s heart for us. Those were always very encouraging.
Last
week was the end of the first quarter and definitely the most hectic week so
far in terms of assignments. For Shelley’s class I had to write 3 different
sermon outlines. One on Jesus as Judge, one on suffering and one on justice. I
actually kind of lucked out a little because the sermon I wrote for the
teaching/preaching practicum last year was on the suffering and the Judge. So I
just combined that into the one sermon and fleshed it out because each had to
be 4 pages, so that one since it was combined was 8 pages total. I am pretty
proud of that one. Then the justice one is by itself. Then in Wes’ class I had
to do a commentary final project. At the beginning of the semester he gave us
an outline of each of Paul’s letters. We had to choose one of the books and use
3 commentaries. He said his outline was like the skeleton bones and he wanted
us to put flesh on it. I really enjoyed that assignment. I chose 2 Corinthians
because he made a comment in class that it was one of the most misunderstood
books, so I wanted to understand it. It was a very time consuming project and I
practically lived in the library while I did it, but I had never really used a
commentary before and I found it really helped me to understand what I was
reading in the Bible.
Today
I start a new quarter. My classes will be Romans with Dave Sliker and Theology
of Israel with Wes Hall. Man I love school!
Grace
and Peace!
