Up Down All Around

It's been a roller-coaster week.

Sunday was the last worship service (for this season, anyway) at the Boston site of my church, and it was both wild and wonderful and really sad.

Work has been both insanely quiet (with most of the people I support out of the office for various reasons) and insanely busy (as people have prepared both for being out of the office and potential new business).

My time with God has both been up (Thursday morning reflecting on my dating life and some of the ways God is maturing me both in that and on a bigger level) and horribly down (that same day, not dealing well with the life stuff I've been facing for longer than I really wish).

Up and down still seems better than the evenness (read, "shut down") of my earlier years.

Killing Me Softly...

Friends from all parts of my life have remarked on my (super)ability to match up the prevailing mood with an appropriate song (also from all parts of my life). Don't know how to harness it fully for the good of mankind, but today it's serving as inspiration for my next post.

Killing Me Softly seems to be the theme of what God is doing in my life lately. I had another little death today as I had to weigh out whether 'tis better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (or, in my case, to sit on how I was feeling about a particular situation and person contained within said situation) or to swallow my fear and general unwillingness to confront unless provoked and own up to needing to talk things through.

Many reasons why this is hard, even though I can be pretty gutsy otherwise, but today it was feeling like I already sensed what may be the reasons for said situation and could live with where things stood. But my tears anytime I thought about the situation spoke otherwise. So, I bit the bullet and had a really nice conversation, where now feelings have been aired, situation has been talked through, and we're both in a better place of understanding of each other. Really, there was no real reason why things would have been any different, since this person is amazing at all things regarding a good talking-out. Chalk it up to a great many more people who really aren't.

With death comes resurrection. In more ways than one, here. Pride and fear gave way to deeper friendship and understanding, and hope for how things will go in the future.

The ups and downs of trips

Is it lame to say that I need to start all over again?

Here's the scoop:

Got back from my trip to Haiti in September, where I had learned tons of interesting ways the non-profit community are reaching out to high-need areas (and that Matt Damon was also in the mix; go figure). Could see some ways our church could get practically involved. Met with a pastor who asked if we could slow down a bit and see where this was going. Huh?

Turns out that a couple of other worthy initiatives were just starting to take off which were a bit more closely linked with members of our church, and sure enough, those initiatives quickly gathered steam and WHAM-O! Haiti has been set aside, at least for now, at least for me.

This is all part of the rollercoaster that is following God. It's taken a while for me to let go of this. At first I was going to plan a trip that would be a closure sort of thing- follow through on training for a church we met up with. That idea just recently got reexamined as it's been a hard spring with a death in the family, a death in the workplace, and the demise of a ministry in the church.

With death comes resurrection, at least in God's take on reality, and I'm hopeful that I'll be shown what my next steps are. Needless to say, pursuing practical ways to love the poor has reshaped my thoughts in terms of loving the world at large.

Now we return to our regularly scheduled programming

As a group, the Haiti team decided to take a week or two off, since life was getting busy toward the end of summer. In the interim, I've managed to connect with two NGOs and finagled dates and an offer of chauffering help around Port-au-Prince. Wow!

We've raised about 1/10th of our needed funds. Wow!

Most of the consultants where I work are back now from various vacations, so I'm faced with the normal Monday deluge, which has left me feeling cranky. Boo!

Summer's almost over; in fact, up here in New England, the temperatures will be somewhere around the early autumn normal temps. Boo!

Wanted to write about something witty and urbane, but inspiration has been very fleeting over the past few weeks. Boo!

I definitely need to boost up the Wow factor...

On the move...

So, the letters are in the mail and now we're in the process of actually planning the trip, as in, where do we go? Who do we see? I feel overwhelmed, even though Ezechiel's worked with the UN in Port au Prince and seems to have crazy contacts there.

I was flipping through a book I bought for my sister (and have so far neglected to actually give her) written by Tony Campolo, one of the more recent Christians to have brought social justice into the language of evangelical churches, and came across story after story he shared about work he and his organizations do in Haiti! Intrigued, I went on the website and discovered, sure enough, that www.beyondborders.net has a thriving ministry that seeks to help people come alongside the poor and learn from them while helping them. They do all sorts of relief work and even offer the opportunity to live with Haitians for a while. All very exciting.

I emailed them this morning, got an immediate response, so we're off and running. Apparently, they have a gathering in Jacmel the Sunday right before we arrive, so I'll have to see what to do about that.

Exciting...

The letters are in the mail!!!!!

It's been a long time in coming, but the support letters are in the mail. It's official- we're going!

It's been a journey, to say the least. We've finally settled on an exploratory trip, keeping it small this time and focusing on connecting with NGOs in Port au Prince, while making connections with people in Ezechiel's church, so we can better understand what it is they need and how we can help out. We'll be doing this at the end of September.

We'll also start up a focus group in October to pull people from all over the church together in to take what info we've gathered and to help us shape a trip for next summer. I'll start a Facebook group to that effect.

If anybody's interested in keeping up with what's happening in the trip, I'll be posting on this blog what we're up to. If anybody's interested in supporting us, let me know and I'll send you info.

Millennium Campus Conference

For those who want more information about the Conference that happened back in April, here's the website for the group who planned and executed it:

www.millenniumcampusnetwork.org

They're posting the ongoing dialogue that started with the conference, and have articles and pictures from the conference.