What day is it?

I woke up this morning excited to have a cup of coffee and go to class. This has happend only one other monday in my entire life. I have been thinking about this day for a 2 years now...but up until today I always forgot about it when it came around. I guess that is probably because April 30 is usually pretty busy around Dordt, but still...I felt a little bad.

I saw probably three other people wearing orange today besides me, but I don't know if they knew the significance of the color on this day.

That is my only clue......

what day is it?

Pseudo-ness ONE

I muse.

Not lonley.....desiring.

Blinking, wondering, seeking......You.

Not the thought of you.

Not your typing, not your words.....Your embrace.

Your delicate embrace.

Your voice.....your eyes, finding my own.

A connection.

No simple dialog.

A grateful, gracefilled, beautiful......Unity.

No simple bond.....complexity.....the wonder of knowing well enough that I cannot know you.

I long for it.

A gasp.

A whisper.

Heartfelt.....meaning.

Need.

ONE.

We are....ONE.

Infinity -1

infinity -1

experience of desire.

essence not found

comprehension -2

lust for embrace

memories revive

questions -3

same? never

joy? definitely indefinate

peace.... -4

realization

understanding a lack of understanding

lost wonder.....found in its lostness.

no word will find justice.

no thought will capture.

no meaning will satisfy.

its all useless.

GRACE

I LOVE YOU.

Locked up a job in DENVER!

woohooo,
I just got off the phone with Jason my contact at Bri Redevelopment in Denver and he said I have a job for the summer. The contract is in the mail! I have been to future living quarters a few times already, and every time I have been there I have had a blast. Plus, I get to live close to Angie and John which is sweet since I do not get to see them often. Hopefully I will be able to go to some colorado arsenal games, some professional lacrosse games, and whatever else comes up...which is quite a bit more than I could ask for in Sioux Center. I am hoping that a fellow Dordt student Nate Degraf will be on the team as well. I talked to him about it a while ago and said he was trying to get things worked out.

^This is a Denver Outlawz lacrosse game that I went to last summer.

^Hiking Mt. Elbert

^The apartment I am probably going to live in

now all I have to do is finish school.

The Tale of The Lost Dordt Students.

Last night I set my alarm for 930 so I could wake up and go to Bridge of Hope. I have not been there in a while and I really wanted to go. Being that I do not carpool or "go" to church with anyone anymore I ended up getting over to the high school about 15 minutes late. I had a hard time waking up...and I took my bike (lost my car keys) , but I quick threw some jeans and a tshirt on a figured I would be fine. I walked in to the high school with my flip flops on and noticed an old guy wearing a nice suit. Though I thought it was a little strange since most people at bridge dress a lot LOT more casual than that, I figured he was visiting. As we passed each other I said "good morning", but he just kindof kept his head down. Weird. hmmm.....so, I walked up to the side door, peaked in, and noticed that I was definately the odd man out. Everyone in the whole place was wearing a nice suit or a dress or dark clothes. I saw people look over at me and I almost jumped back. Confused, I slowly turned back and walked to the cafeteria where i saw another straggler also looking puzzled. I don't know the girl, but given that she was wearing a pink skirt and white shirt I figured we were probably in the same boat. We looked at each other and I asked "what the heck is going on here?"
"I don't know...these are definately not Bridge people though" she responded.
"yeah, No doubt. I feel a bit underdressed".
"NO KIDDING...compared to these people they probably think I look like a total slut"!
I giggled and we walked away from the auditorium shaking our heads. We split ways at the door, since I had my bike, and wished each other well.

The thing is......had that dude had come to Bridge with a suit on he would have felt dumb too. Acceptance/lack of acceptance in church is such a weird thing. I ended up reading a book behind SouthView for morning church...at least behind there I don't have to worry about fitting in.

I little busy...yeah you could say that.

I'm a lot overwelmed with school right now. Not that I want anyone to feel bad for me, but this is whats up at the moment. I just finished a 15 page history paper and have another one due monday along with a 2 book reviews tuesday and thursday (I haven't read the books yet either). Oh then another two major papers the next week.



^ This is the face that comes over me when I think about all the stuff I have to do.

SUMMER COME SOON!

I mowed that lawn before you even knew where Sioux Center was!

One of my buddies Steve, who I played soccer with and attend Bible study with, planned a suprise birthday party for his wife, vanessa's 23 birthday. Beings it was a saturday night I figured i could step away from my homework for a while to celebrate. A few folks, including josh jess and I, made the drive 1 block off campus to attend. But before we took off to their apartment Jess said that she used to date a guy that lived in that place....so she knew where they lived. Not to be out done in my hometown I contended...

" ok, well, I probably know a little better since I have been driving down that street since I was 15 years old, but you know, its not a big deal or anything".

A little shocked, she took a step back and rolled her eyes...."yeah, well, I used to go overthere and hang out like every night".

That did it for me....I knew i had to pull out my secret weapon. "Jess, don't start with me, I mowed that lawn before you even knew where sioux center was. Before you had even heard of Dordt College.... I was walking lines on that lawn".

"yeah right, I bet you did" she snapped back.

"I did!! and I got paid ten dollars for a half hour of mowing"! I yelled and sealed my victory with a large grin.

(please do not copy this story without written consent... its a good one)

The party was a lot of fun too. We went to "La Fiesta" the local mexican joint which was very good that night, and the following afternoon. After supper we went back to the shannon's and watched 'Persuit of Happiness'. I thought it was a really good movie, with the exception that the moral of the story was that money would make people happy. owell...can't win em all.


^ Vanessa opens her gift from Steve.


^It rained a lot while we were at their place.

Nope, not Arnold.

Like most tuesday's I went to the rec center to work out with Noah. My regular scheduled body sections to lift was chest and triceps. I stuck to the plan and everything was going swell until I decided to take a closer look at an ab workout that some fellas were doing on the decline bench. These guys were no arnold schwarzaneggers, so I figured I might as well try it with them. Brett Kroeze, one of the non-arnolds, warned me that my abs would hurt for a week, but I figured I could take the pain. So I did the work out with them which didn't hurt all that bad at the time. Basically we took a 6 pound ball...leaned our backs parallel with the ground....swung the ball to the left and to the right 6 times....went all the way down on the bench and then all the way back up, then repeated. You probably would need to see it. We finished three sets and called it good.


Yesterday *wednesday* I felt a bit of the sting in my abs. They hurt quite a bit, but it was bearible. It helped that I didn't lift any weights because it was my day off, but I did play an intense intermural basketball game at night. However, the pain increased today...which I really did not expect....and when Noah woke me up to go to my Coaching track and field class....I yawned and tried to get up at the same time....and I cramped up something fierce. I have not been able to walk straight up, laugh, sleep, or do anything normal with out my lower left pelvic ab hurting like hell. I couln't even go to track class....


I guess it just goes to show that I am no arnold either.

Byahhhh Birmingham

Last week thursday 9 students from Dordt including myself headed to Birmingham, Alabama to Put Love Into Action at New City Church and the Center for Urban Missions.



We left around 2 in the afternoon and got in about 8 in the morning, slept until noon. For some reason most of us forgot that we were going to be in the city, but as it turns out 1 million people (suburbs included) is a lot of people. Only a few blocks down was the campus of UAB (University of Alabama Birmingham) which was very nice, and the skyscrapers were pretty much right next door to the church. We slept on the third floor of the church which was the dining/kitchen/youth group/ sweating in the spirit area.

Saturday we started work on the lower level of the church which had a bunch of flood damage and was a big mess. The girls did most of that and the guys moved furniture out of a room and prepped it for painting. The only thing that took a long time was the big hole in the wall from the door. Other than that I drove to Home Depot a couple of times to get supplies. Venessa Brown, a church staff member and amazing women, took us to the five points starbucks (no, I didn't drink any coffee - tea instead) then drove around UAB's campus. After staying up really late and having some good conversation about Soulforce we finally went to bed. Waking up was a lot harder to do.

I went to the mens Bible study at 9 with two other group dudes. We were the majority of the people for the first 45 minutes. Guys trickled in until 1030 when the actual church service started. I was taken back by the wisdom by many of the men. It wasn't just a formal meeting, guys opened up and shared many stories where God showed them many things. Unfortunatly i was not completely tuned in because of the lack of sleep from the night before. Its a good thing the service was extremely charasmatic (by Sioux Centers standards). I had no problem staying awake with all of the crowd participation either.... AMEN!!! Preach it brother!!! Say that!!! Hallelujah!! It was nice. Also, to my suprise the pastor used TULIP in the sermon. There denomination is Evangelical Covenant which I do not know anything about, but honestly, I thought there would be more differences in doctrine just because the church is inner city and African-American. I'm glad I now know how dumb that thinking is.

Our work stayed the same most of the week....except the guys took out some cinderblocks and moved a bunch of dirdt (thats the Dordt kind) that surrounded the church. We ran into afew problems moving it, but we got the job done.


^ Inspecting the questionable tire.


^ Finding out we were wrong



^ Movin Dirdt and bricks


^ the new trailer we got! much better.



^The civil rights museum.



^ Sixteenth Street Baptist Church (which was bombed, killed four little girls, and made people really feel empathy towards racism.



^ This is a statue of "nigger" Bull Conners mean dog that liked to bite people.


^ The park where the Childrens March took place in 1963.

Hotlanta (actually Atlanta, but many people call it that (not pictured). We drove by Talledega speedway. Ohh yah and somewhere in there I shaved...then turned 22.....then got asked if I turned 18 or 19.


^The team in front of the church right before we left. (Andrew, Rachel, Adrianna, Avery, jon, sara, me, ashley, and jimmy.

"I am - Here I am"

Another thought provoking contemporary philosphy class prompted me to blog. So here it goes....

I keep hearing in church/chapel that we need to be agents of change in the world. This is one of the foundational missions of Dordt itself...to prepare people to change the world. Don't get me wrong... I think this idea is a good one as long as we do not let oursleves think along the lines I am going to describe.
-
When we understand ourselves as the "agents" of change it tends to make ourselves the center of the idea. It can be seen as thinking---"what I recieve I redirect to others". To put it simply we have talents and we can use them or we can not use them. Honestly, I find myself thinking this way quite often. It really doesn't sound all that bad. I mean God gives us gifts and we share those with others right?
or...
-
We can understand that "I can only recieve what I recieve for others". In this way there is a proir devotedness to others. That makes things a lot clearer to me because before we are anything..... we are called to responsiblity. We are not just recievers and redirecters, but recievers. A qoute that quarelates nicely is "To find yourself is to find yourself devoted" (Levinas) Well, Once again my pride takes a hit...its not me...God is setting things in motion.

Interestingly all this stuff stemmed from a conversation about prayer which is equally fastinating.
-
We read an article that examined prayer as the posture of a decentralized self. One part of the article talks about how hard it is to praise in prayer; the other 4 types - thanksgiving, confession, petition, and intercession (for others) - are not as hard because they involve using "I" "Me" or "We". These are much easier to pray because we can benefit from them. Especially in public it seems like we have a hard time praising and adoring God...because we do not want to feel arrogant. Basically what I took out of the article so far is that the real test of prayer is when I am in my room alone with God. From there I can have a stronger sense of peace about praising God in front of other people.

Sorry, this is a long post.

One more thing....I was searching some blogs the other day and I ran into something that struck a chord with me. Travis Burgers wrote (after you click scroll down to july23 04 "givin it my all") this....
Ok Im done now. good night

Man Im restless...good wedding though.

It always seems like the beautiful weather comes right at the times when I have the most stuff to get done. Today is the perfect example...65 degrees, no wind, clearly the nicest day of 07' and what am I up to>>>Writing a major history paper and studying for a Veenstra test on wednesday. All day I just felt pent up...and I feel as though the majority of Dordts campus is Longing for Spring Break! Its all the more powerful now that there are only 3 days left til we get out of school. arggg...I need to get away from this campus! So soon yet..so far away.

On a similar topic, Dan and Steph tied the knot last weekend. It was a very nice wedding, but it made me feel old. Those dang videos with pictures of them growing up and comming together seem to make life seem so short though. Either way..... good people - good times.

Hindsight

I had some good reflection time sitting in the History of American Evangelicalism class today . Krygsman was talking about how people during the beginning of the second great awakening read the Bible basically using reason and even moreso common sense philosophy. I'm not sure what he said about that sparked my thought, but I remembered back in late high school when I started reading the Bible on my own. I kind of told myself that I would not read any commentary or the life application stuff the first time I read it...as to not add outside influence to my understanding of the scripture.

I sat there and kind of smirked as I thought about how rediculous that sounds to me now. Its funny that I didn't realize how deeply my Calvinist/ CRC roots effected my thought and my perception of scripture. Even something as simple as "Jesus loves me..the Bible tells me so"(not distinctly crc) has a message that effects the way I think, live, and believe. Most of the things I learned growing up came from a distinct perspective that influences my "glasses" to seeing the world. (friken even that idea is calvinist).

Moral o story is: To think I could read the Bible with out outside influence was crazy...Ive been raised to read it (and everything) a certain way...Calvin/Kuyper/a host of theologians/Christian Reformed Church/Dordt College/ Nibbelink Family....you get the point.

Just a little muse from class.

Birmingham, Alabama

Its official, Birmingham Alabama is the destination for our PLIA group this spring break. Already next week the 11 of us will take off from Dordt and drive 16 1/2 hours to The New City Church in downtown Birmingham (I have not even talked to the contact, but I googled her and I am pretty sure this is accurate). I am not sure what we are going to do, but I am confident that this is the place our group is suppose to be. Situations like this (going from brooklyn to rehoboth to birmingham) don't just happen. I am getting really excited to see what God has for us there!


on a completely different topic:
I took some photos of the Blizzard effects.

Snow much fun!

Last night my roomate noah and i went over to our neighbors in southview (darren, daniel, and chris) to play pictionary with the other neighbor girls (abbie, jill, and brittney). We played men vs women and almost got into a fight between the sexes...this is pretty funny to me now, but last night I was PISSED. It didn't help that we had a great combination of the most competitive and most stubborn people in our class. Anyways, after we got done playing we went tubing behind westra's truck in the all seasons center parking lot and had a blast doing it. He had his tahoe full of people in the seats and in the back..with the back window open so we could see the tubers. As he wipped around the lot the people in the tube got snow pretty much everywhere, but it was definately worth it. When we finally decided to back inside everyone was frozen from the snow and sore from the windburn.


It was definatly worth it though....who says blizzards are all bad. No school for everyone but Dordt college, yet..we still manage to find the joy in the massive amount of snow.

Just Kidding...

Well, I "figured" to soon. I called Rehoboth today (though I thought the PLIA planning/committee would have done it) and they said that they already had two groups comming and no place for us to stay. soo...we still don't know where we are going, and we leave in 2 weeks. Normally I would be excited for the adventure of not knowing, but now that I am a leader of 11 I am getting pretty stressed out about the whole thing. Keep praying that God gives us direction in finding a site and we will keep listening and searching. word

Leader of the group formally known as Brooklyn.

PLIA has been a pretty sweet part of spring break for me in college. The short term mission projects have been nothing but growing experiences for me. I Put (ing) Love Into Action in Atlanta my freshman year, and lead a group to Inez, Kentucky, last year. Organizationally (from a leader point of view) things have run very smoothly as well, that is.... until this year.

Since I loved PLIA in the past, I thought it would be great experience to lead a group again, this time to Brooklyn, New York. I partnered with Ashley, a sophmore from Montanta, and we went to work getting things figured out for our group. We even gave a short presentation on what we would do in Brooklyn in order for potiontial PLIA members to find where they would best fit. We contacted the site a few times and got some genereal information from them, which was nice to share with the group as well. (Group makeup- 5 guys four girls)

Things were going pretty well with the site and setup until last week saturday. Ashley got a call from a different contact in Brooklyn. Jon (we'll call him jon) is the pastor of the church, and raised many interesting questions to us about our team. (Jon sounds EXACTLY like Nicholas Cage....it enthralled me for the first five minutes of his conversation). For example he asked if our group members had the faith it took to work in the very dark spiritual place of Brooklyn. Another issue was finding a place for us to stay...they were suppose to have some construction done, but there was only one room for our group. We figured out a way to house everyone be accomodated, then the issue became not kitchen for the guys who would be staying at the church (the girls at the pastors house). After a conversation with the "director" of PLIA, I decided to ask the site if they actually wanted us, or if it was not going to work. Jon said that it would not....thus I am not leading a group to Brooklyn. (they did want us, but apparently couldn't get things figured out)

I contacted the 'director' of PLIA and told him what was up...and by the afternoon I had a list of new sites on my computer. Ashley and I conviened a emergency meeting with the group and gave them the options for new sites. So...I am now going to lead a group to Rehoboth, New Mexico (well.. hopefully, we are not positive quite yet). There is a Christian community (with a school...etc) in an indian reservation there and we will hopefully do light construction and work with the kids from the school. I am pretty darn excited to see what God has for us there...Wherever we go we will know that God had a plan to bring us there that we never would have imagined. word

Dang it....I thought I knew so much!

One advantage of having only 9 credits as a senior in college is being able to choose some classes that I want to take. I chose Interpersonal Communication and Contemporary Philosophy. Where IPC is a great class and I have learned a lot already, Contemporary Philosophy has officially blown my mind.

Today we discussed conceptual idolitry which is essentially puting a concept of God in the place of God. This didn't sound all that bad until I realized the implications were pointed at everything I know (or knew). Is my understanding of God an idol that seperates me from the true God? When I pray, do I pray to the God that I have been taught to know...that I have developed through out the years? How can I worship God if the god I worship looks more like my creation of god than God. What words can I say to worship him? The language I use to describe God is inadequate...when what I seek to describe is unfathomable can words do any thing? Maybe silence is more appropriate than making God fit into language (much less my small knowledge of it). Its like trying to use words to describe the Holocaust. You can't. Anything word you could think of would not do it justice. There are none.


So we looked elsewhere to find some hope...and find that even C.S. Lewis this amazing Christian author and evangelist wrote that everything he "knew" of God was a house of cards and when it came down to it (the death of his wife) the house blew over. However, instead of constructing new concepts of God I could try to test and break down the skewed ones. Yet...in the process I create more conceptual idols of God..and not really God. This probably doesn't make as much sense as it does to me, this is partly because I suck at explaining things, and partly because this stuff is soo deep and it is so world shattering.

Anyways, back to the confusion. At this point in the class we took a break and let the unsettling stuff be unsettled. It felt shitty but before I knew it we were back to it. Having never spoken in Contemporary Philo yet this year, I was very hesitant to ask the huge question weighing me down: What then can we do? How can we know God with out making an idol out of the image we create? yet...my stuper must have been pretty obvious because he called on me. I asked and he responded.... that the best we have is the Experience of Liberation from the conceptual gods we create. The best we can know God is the experience of getting rid of our false gods. This journey or movement of liberation is the part where we get the best sense (or whatever word you want to use) of God (yet I hesitate to say that for fear of starting over at the beginning ((again)) ).

Ok, I have probably made no sense to anyone but myself here. So let me try it one more time.

The whole problem here is that we think we know God....We think we have him all figured out and we can explain all these things about him....but when we think like this.....we have made this image of God an Idol which seperates us from the true God.

Newest Arrival

Caleb Wallace Fey getting ready to go grocery shopping for the first time. (Kyle and Lori's firstborn son--my Nephew) He obviously has a lot of stlye!

Senior Year

Here are some pics from Senior Year at Dordt.

-First, of course, is Soccer season. Hanging out with the fellas, and watching the girls last game.

-November 16 brought me on a trip to Cincinnati for the national youth workers convention. (youth specialties). Our group of Dordt students got to see quite a bit of the city. (and Newport, KY, which is right across the river). On the way back we stopped in Indianapolis at Burger King. The significance here was an amazing conversation and testimony given by one of my friends. During her testimony, I stared out at the sun shining through the clouds and was taken back by the awesomeness of God's grace. I nearly went blind, but my spirit was full of joy.

-thanksgiving brought some pumpkin carving and some running around East Campus apartments with friends.

-Lastly, Heather and I flew out to San Diego for Aslan's wedding (where we were chartered to the reception) and later in the trip got to go to Del Mar, Carlsbad, Huntington Beach, Chino/ontario, and a bunch of other places in San Diego county.

This is basically the highlights (well....the ones i have pictures of) of first semester senior year at dordt.

Alaska O6"

Matt, Eileen, Jessica, and I packed up all our camping gear, piled into the Ruters minivan, and headed off to Omaha to catch our flight to Anchorage in June. On the flight we took a little detour and flew over mt Logan (19,950 ft) the highest point in Canada. The plane was only about 10 thousand feet above the mountain on a clear day, so the view was astounding. The first thing we saw when we walked into the airport was the world record grizzly that was about five times the size of me. A lady from church picked us up, drove home, and gave us the van to take up to camp about 2 1/2 hours away. We got to camp and slept hard. The next morning we met the other camp leaders Matthew, Lesslie, Bridget, and the Camp director Duane. We also got some time to walk around camp and get a feel for the beauty and ruggedness of the area. I moved into a pop-up camper next to a serine lake surrounded by mountaines. The other leaders lived in fifth wheels next to my "bachelor pad". EagleCrest ministries is on a hill about a mile up from our campers which were in the guest section of Victory Bible Camp. (vbc is a huge camp for Alaskan kids with lots of fun activies like horsback riding, watersports, hiking, and other outdoors things).

It took two days to comprehend our surroundings then Jessica, Bridget, and I took off for Fairbanks in "Red" (Eaglecrests 92' dodge fullsize van) to pick up "blue" the 94 dodge fullsize. The crazy roads (and crazy driving by me) caused us to hit our heads on the ceiling a few times, but we made it up to camp Li Wa (living water) in about 8 hours. We decided we could drive back through the night so we left Fairbanks at 10:00 at night (of course it was still light out..so it didn't feel that late). However, when the battery of blue decided to start acting up we experienced many problems. Our first problem stop (and Jump Start from an Alaskan) was the gas station right in fairbanks. Then I drove blue to North Pole, however she died there too. Soo..we decided to rest in red at the local groecery store. The only problem with this was the killer population of gigantic mesquitos who snuck in through the vents. We experienced hell for about 2 hours then decided that we needed to get out of North Pole (it was not nearly as awesome as I pictured it as a kid)..............to be continued.