the meter marks 'okay'.

To those curious few of you who would like to know details of my life's current goings on, I shall grant you this small update:

• I have moved off of the World Hunger Farm.
• I live downtown in Waco in a beautiful historic house with a family of four. I know the Bridgewaters, my new family, from the Mennonite church I commune with. They are great.
• As told in a previous post, I have multipe jobs. My favorite one right now is running child care at the homeless shelter, but sadly that job comes to a close today.
• Monday comences my first professional, high pay, low excitement, perfect schedule, temporary job. I am nervous but this will be very good for me.
• Once upon a time I was denied fulfillment of a dream and calling which was very much within my grasp. Today is the one year mark of that sad time for me. So tonight I'm having a party.
• I have been quite hopefull for so long of a future in overseas kingdom work and was pursuing such through the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I found out this week that this hope will not be fulfilled in my near future. So tonight I'm having a party.

In the past year, my hopes and plans regarding things big and small have been thwarted over and over again. I have struggled long and slow through many disappointments. Family and close friends say that surely I've paid my dues, that my time of suffering had better be over by now, that a season of mercy and grace is bound to be coming next.

In this season of lent, suffering is at the forefront of my mind. Suffering is terrible and also inevitable. But suffering is not holy. He who suffered is holy and worshiped not because of His suffering and death, but because of His power which overcame suffering and death. Suffering, mine, yours or Christ's, is dreadful and evil. To seek out suffering, or even to accept it while glorifying it as a tool for the attinment of personal piety is folly, is indeed self-love masked as self-abasement. Yet also, the mere acceptance of the suffering life brings has great potential to darken, harded and callous. This too is an evil of suffering. It is only by accident that we take suffering and turn it into the Father's glory. It is through humility and trying to trust and love God through pain that His glory dawns in this dark place. Today let my suffering serve as a reminder of another, more real residence, glorious and eternal, that is to come.

Shalom