You live to die...rejected and alone.

...remember when we disected that song like we do so many others? If I remember correctly it was in the summer when everything was different. Before you went to the Phillipines, before Jesus reshaped my dream for the future (haha)...before we grew up in a large sense of the word. Amen?

So Chapter 2:
I thought this was perfect. A blessing indeed.

"Be still and know (experience) that I am God. My own journey bears witness to that. I mean simply that a living, loving God can and does make His presence felt, can and does speak to us in the silence of our hearts, can and does warm and caress us till we no longer doubt that HE is near, that He is here. Such experience is pure grace to the poor, the children and the sinners, the privileged types int he gospel of grace. It cannot be forced from God. HE gives it freely, but He does give it and has given it to such as MOses and Matthew, to you and to me. In fact, there is no one to whom God denies it.

...I loved it when he said that "the Word we study has to be the Word we pray." Grace taught me a lot about that...where we put pray in spirit and in truth and declare the word of God while we prayed...crying out to Jesus on behalf of what He already promised us.

AMEN to this:

"When we accept ourselves for what we are, we descrease our hunger for power or the acceptance of others because our self-intimacy reinforces our inner sense of security."

And to end with this:

..."In essence there is only one thing God asks of us--that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and forwhom God is ENOUGH. That is the root of peace. We have that peace when the gracious God is all we seek. When we start seekingsomething besides HIm, we lose it."
Isn't that perfect? Something I think I've been fighting for the last ....nine months. Kate, it has been nine months since I left England, 9 months since I moved here. 9 months since I said goobye to Rudi and had to accept change and moldation (if thats a word:) For the both of us, except quite a bit longer for you. How beautiful that we've been apart for nearly a year and yet here is Jesus working in us the same way He did this time last year. Praise God.

Last night I learned about "seasons" and the seasons of...happiness and joy...the season of sorrow and devastation...the season of mending and molding...He talked about how everyone of us is in a season and is about to transition into another one. What a wonderful way to look at it. The season will not last forever. We should read the story of Elijah. He talked about how he must have been on that spiritual high about conquering the bail idol...and then the next day he was in devastation, went into the fields and asked God to end his life. I wish you could have heard this guy, Kate. I feel silly rephrasing it all but it was incredible! He talked about how God took him through the desert for 40 days and Elijah had this alone, solitude time with God and mending. He mended from the heartache, from the trouble, and then God sent him back out there and said "you're ready to keep going, kid. Just trust in me." (obviously, God didn't use those words.) Anyway, I'll end here because I'll end up wording things wrong. I have to study my Russian but know that I love you and miss you. You are in my prayers, my dear sister.

What next?