Sunday, August 12, 2007

Completely my style

Without further ado, I find it completely necessary to apologize for sporadic (at best) blogging. I have come to realize that the only time I feel the necessity to blog is when I am at some point in my life or not, contemplating that which is greater than me. So I guess this is a great time to introduce myself, perchance someone stumbles across this site. I am Jennifer. I am a Christian. I am a student, sister, daughter, friend, adviser, sinner, and klutz upon many things.
I guess what gives me the desire to blog today is my inability to express to someone in words the magnificence that has become my summer. The reason I can't express this to people is because although I have many friends who share a similar faith, I have yet to encounter someone who challenges me and questions me in it every day. And I hope to meet some of these people in my life.
Anyway, to my summer, which at one point I could perceive only as figuring out who I am, has caused me more confusion and emotional wreckage than could have been expected from my mindless planning. I began the summer by spending 3 weeks away from home traveling down to and working at a camp in Georgia. This camp was affiliated with Younglife, and was where I learned many valuable things about my life, my relationships, my perception of servitude, and most importantly my relationship with Christ.
Upon returning, I felt this intense pull toward God from the moment I arrived home. Now, I know people say that returning from an experience like that results in a spiritual high, and I did have some of that. But in a much deeper sense, I felt God moving in my life in a way I never before could have. This encouraged me to ask my friends to join me in a bible study. I wanted us to become closer as sisters and brothers in God, and come to lean on and understand each other in new deeper ways from the development of our own knowledge in scripture. However this ended up being a big mess, and we met two times, and both were not fulfilling.
It was this summer, that I learned that I work for my own spirituality. It is not something cultivated and challenged by others, but myself. And that has faced me with something very ugly and unexpected. Namely, myself. It is hard exactly to pinpoint when I realized that I indulge in an unacceptable amount of self-pity, and depression, and selfishness. But I have realized that to become a deeply spiritual person requires much discipline and focus, neither of which I say I have full control over.
For now I will just leave this book wide open to another entry by saying there are three major trials that have lead me to believe and realize the forementioned. The first would be my own relationships with my best friends, which have always seemed effortless before, but have since become a chore, and I wonder if it is my own realization of my internal ugliness that brings out the worst in me. Or if maybe this is just a challenge in my own life. The second is sickness and the thought of someone dying. There is one person in particular who I have looked up to for years for being a strong, intelligent, beautiful, loving, and spiritual people I have ever encountered. Short of my own mother, this woman embodies what is beautiful in life. And the third is a large confusing swirling cloud of confusion, fear, self, and future. It is hard to describe how they all fit together, but I promise I will do my best, and I just realized this summer was a hard time for me to know and love myself, figure out my future, while trying to figure out myself. And I learned remarkably little about myself which slides back into the confusion and fear of who I am. The only thing I have come up with so far is that I am God's child. Aside from that I got nothing. And that's what I am going to figure out.
In Him,
Jen