Crazy Day

So today's been pretty eventful

I started the morning with a phone call from a woman from the financial aid office at Warren Wilson telling me that I've been awarded a $4,000 transfer honors scholarship, which is awesome, but it's not even close to the $18,000 I was hoping for, so while I managed to sound very excited on the phone my first thought was "Oh crap". I immediately jumped into thinking "What am I going to do? What should I do?" Because I now have no money to pay for my super expensive dream school and no plan b, because I couldn't afford the application fees to anywhere else. After a few minutes of this I remembered that God had control of the situation, but I didn't really feel it and still spent all day trying to have faith but still on the brink of mentally hyperventilating. I'm very disappointed in myself, because a year ago God completely pulled the rug out from under me and when I found out I couldn't go to the school I'd already committed to go to I didn't even blink, I just said "What are you doing to me God? Where am I going?" and this time it took me most of the day to calm down. Perhaps part of that is due to the fact that I had to work today, so I didn't have time in the morning to sit down and pray, but when I got home in the afternoon it only took a few minutes of prayer for God to really calm my heart and remind me that he's got it under control. After that I was just annoyed with myself for my lack of faith. How did i end up going backwards in a year? How does that happen?

Which brings me to the second event, where God was cool enough to explain the whole thing to me at an awesome bible study I went to tonight. A few weeks ago, my friend Kat told me about "the hippie bible study", which is what she calls it but we're not supposed to call it that when we're there cause that's not actually the name of it. I've been trying to go since she told me about it but things kept coming up, but I guess that's the way it was supposed to happen because tonight was the perfect night for it. I met a few girls from my small group at Starbucks and then we all carpooled to the strip center that the church is in. I could see why Kat called it the hippie bible study as soon as I got it, because the floor of the small room was covered in rugs and there were couches in a semi circle around the room. There were two guys leading worship, one with an acoustic guitar and one with an electric bass. Both of them had dreads and the bassist had gages and a crazy mountain man beard like I have never seen before. The worship was great. I've never seen worship in a setting like that, so laid back with just the guitars, nobody standing, so much more quiet and intimate than a big crowd standing and singing. It was wonderful. I haven't been able to focus like that during worship in a while. I think I've gotten so used to the way worship is usually done with the band and everyone standing and acting excited that I've started to tune out and just get really easily distracted, which is frustrating but God's been helping me work through it by doing different things like stop singing or sit down during worship, which makes it easier to focus cause it's like dropping down beneath the layer or noise to a more intimate place. Anyway, after the wonderful quiet worship the guitarist (who I later found out is named Chris) began to teach. I've never seen anyone teach like that before. He just took a passage from Colossians 2 and read through it, then read it again unpacking it as he went, which isn't too crazy, it was a bible study after all, but he was so energetic and funny. His teaching was so serious and true but at the same time he wasn't serious about it at all. He kept cracking jokes and coming up with all these crazy metaphors. It was all very striking and I learned a lot, but all I'm going to write out here is God's answer to my question of how I managed to go backwards in a year so that I couldn't immediately and unquestioningly trust God in a crisis like I did a year ago. What Chris said was this: we tend to treat Christian knowledge like academic knowledge, like ok I've got the basics now on to deeper and more complicated stuff. The thing is, if you're not constantly savoring and contemplating the basics of Christianity, you're more complicated stuff becomes empty and you end up turning into a faker without even realizing it. I'm afraid this is what I did. In the last few months I got to this point where I was thinking "Ok, I've been a Christian for a while now, I need to be growing more now" I felt that it was time for me to focus on developing better Christian disciplines, like reading my bible more and asking God to break me of my pride and help me focus more (there are moments when I seriously wonder if I have ADD), and while those things are all very well and good, my relationship with God should come first, and the desired discipline and focus will be a byproduct of that. I don't have to worry about growing, because God will grow me. I never thought I would find this truth to be so tough, but as I'm writing this my human nature is protesting that I don't want so much to be out of my control. Did I always have a problem with surrendering to God? I don't think so. I guess over time he asks us to surrender more, and it gets harder to do so. It's ironic that my desire for growth caused me to not grow. Fail. Haha but I guess that's all part of the journey, right? We learn how to do things, and God tells us where we go wrong and gives us another chance to get it right, and another, and another.

So that's my day. I have been both majorly discouraged and majorly refreshed and reawakened in that very uncomfortable sort of way that only God can manage. So, I think I'm still going to Warren Wilson, I'm probably going to just end up taking out loans to pay for it. We'll see. On the bright side, in order to get the merit scholarship I wanted I could only get one B this semester, so I was seriously stressing out about my grades. Now, it doesn't matter so much : ) I don't have go get A's in everything, I just have to pass them all. I've been stressing about keeping my grades up for so long that this doesn't seem real yet. I hope the reality of this relief sinks in soon so finals will be a little easier.