Reflections

It's weird to think that I've only been back in Thailand for two and a half weeks now.  It really feels like I never even left.  The past two years in America feel like a distant memory, almost as if it were all just a dream.  But I look back and I know that without those two years, I would not be the woman I am today.  Without the heartaches, mistakes, loneliness, friendships, hard times, and good times I would still be the little girl who left Thailand when she was 18.  So excited to be moving on with her life and getting away from parents and being her own person.  I look back at that little girl and think 'how naive and dumb she was'.  But I guess that is all part of the growing up process.  I have grown and matured more both spiritually and mentally during the past two years in America than I ever did the 18 years before that.  Because of this, though they were the hardest two years of my life, I wouldn't trade them for anything in the world.  


However, despite all of this, that time in America still feels like a dream that I have to try really hard to remember.  I think about it and I wonder if it really even happened.  But I look around me now, in Thailand, and for the first time in two years I finally feel like I fit in and like I belong somewhere.




"I was on my way to a brighter day, I'm still chasing around, But somehow I believe that this is home, It's so good to be home" ~Alaska, Sky Sailing.

Vegetarian Festival and Judgment

It is that time of year here in Thailand.  The time of year where for ten days the Thai people give up eating any meet, wear only white and attempt righteousness.  It's the time of year where they do everything they can to appease and please the gods.  This includes (but is not limited to) piercing themselves with sharp objects, inviting spirits into their bodies and large parades all over the country.  It is quite scary and a big reminder of the firm hold that Satan has on this country.  They call this the Vegetarian Festival.

Here are a couple of websites that explain the Vegetarian Festival more in-depth for those who are curious: 

http://www.thaifestivalblogs.com/thai-festival-blogs/vegetarian-festival-in-thailand.html

http://gill-hart.suite101.com/thailands-phuket-vegetarian-festival-a63001 

At our Sunday meeting this past week a discussion came up about the vegetarian Festival.  During the processions of the festival many people will invite spirits into their bodies.  Of course, some people who invite these spirits in really do become possessed while others merely pretend to be possessed.  

Someone in the meeting on Sunday brought up the fact that there really is no way to tell who is genuinely possessed and who is only faking it.  The discussion then turned to how true that is in the Christian world.  So many things are done in the name of Christ that are actually from Christ while other times people do things in the name of Christ that are not really from or of HIM.  And just like we can not tell who is faking possession by the spirits in the Vegetarian Festival and who is genuinely possessed, we should not try to say who is genuinely doing something that God told them to do and who is simply using the name of God as an "excuse".

Of course, there are obvious things that if someone were to say "God told me to do this," we would know without a doubt that God did NOT tell them to do that just based on what the Bible says.  But on matters that are not specifically laid out in the Bible, who are we to judge what someone else does in the name of Christ?




"Judge not, that you be not judged.  For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you." Matthew 7:1 and 2

Update

Wow.  It has been a WHILE since I last posted anything.  Sorry about that, it's been a crazy month.  So this post is just gonna be an update on what I'm doing with my life at the moment (Though most of you probably already know all this).


September second my Grandma, who I was living with, passed away.  She had abdominal cancer and she went peacefully after a week in the hospital.  She was oh so ready to be with her Savior.


In just a few days my life changed drastically.  The woman who had been a part of every aspect of my life for over a year was suddenly gone, I no longer had a place to live, my dad came back from Thailand to help take care of things, and in less than two weeks I had decided to go back to Thailand with my dad.


It's been a weird last month for me... This is the first time I've ever experienced someone close to me dying.... I can't explain it....


Anyways... My dad and I will fly to Thailand on September 27th.  I only have a one way ticket.  I'll go and get certified in Teaching English as a Second Language and then see what happens from there.  It's an exciting time for me but I want to cower in a corner every time I think about it.  My life has never changed so drastically so fast.


I appreciate all of the many prayers my family and I have gotten from all of you this past month.  They have been greatly appreciated and much needed.


I will do my best to keep this blog up-to-date as I head back to Thailand and the life that awaits me there!






"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him." 1 Corinthians 2:9

Lazarus

I was reading in the book of John this morning and I came upon the story of Lazarus...


"Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. It was that Mary who anointed the Lord with fragrant oil and wiped His feet with her hair; whose brother Lazarus was sick. Therefore the sisters sent to Him, saying, "Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick." When Jesus heard that, He said, "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it." Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was." John 11:1-6


"Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.  So, when He heard that he was sick, He stayed two more days in the place where He was." John 11:5 and 6.


Am I the only one who finds verses 5 and 6 totally strange?  It says that Jesus loved Martha, Mary and Lazarus...but he stayed where he was at for two days before going to see them.  My thoughts on this? 'Sure, Jesus, You say You love them but then you sit right there on your butt and don't do anything about Lazarus being sick.'  


How quick we are to judge the Lord like that.  How often we ask for something and it seems as if God is sitting on his butt not doing a thing.  He seems to just sit there and let us die like Lazarus.  


Oh me of little faith!!!  


Christ went above and beyond what any of them could imagine.  Yes, he let Lazarus die...but then He brought him back to life!  Christ showed His power and sovereignty much more mightily than had he simply gone immediately and made Lazarus well.


Next time you feel that God is just sitting on his butt and not doing a thing, remember Lazarus.  Jesus did not do things the way I'm sure Martha and Mary were expecting Him to do them (aka, just go and make Lazarus well).  No, He did things the way HE wanted to do them and the way He knew would bring God the most glory.  By waiting two days he gave Martha and Mary a chance to grow in their faith and really learn who HE was.






"...This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it." John 11:4

Uncle Michael

I know it has been a while since my last blog.  To be perfectly honest, nothing really worth noting has happened.  That is, until this past week.


On Wednesday night, July 27, my dad's youngest brother shot himself at his home in California.  A concerned neighbor found him the next morning.  I won't go into the details of his life, but Uncle Michael had been depressed for a long time.


We are comforted though, in the fact that his family is confident that he had a relationship with Christ and is now in heaven at the feet of our Savior. 


Please keep my family and I in your prayers.  Especially David and Sammy, (Michael's brothers), Mary (his mother) and Chantel (his only daughter who is expecting her first child in about 6 weeks)




"And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying.  There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away." Revelation 21:4

Christianity VS Jesus

Sorry, everyone.  I know I'm probably beating this whole "Blue Like Jazz" thing into the dirt.  But this book is quite amazing and every time I read something that I think is amazing, I like to share it.


"In a recent radio interview I was sternly asked by the host, who did not consider himself a Christian, to defend Christianity.  I told him that I couldn't do it, and moreover, that I didn't want to defend the term.  He asked me if I was a Christian, and I told him yes.  "Then why don't you want to defend Christianity?" he asked, confused.  I told him I no longer knew what the term meant.  Of the hundreds of thousands of people listening to his show that day, some of them had terrible experiences with Christianity; they may have been yelled at by a teacher in a Christian school, abused by a minister, or browbeaten by a Christian parent.  To them, the term Christianity meant something that no Christian I know would defend.  By fortifying the term, I am only making them more and more angry.  I won't do it.  Stop ten people on the street and ask them what they think of when they hear the word Christianity, and they will give you ten different answers.  How can I defend a term that means ten different things to ten different people?  I told the radio show host that I would rather talk about Jesus and how I came to believe that Jesus exists and that he likes me.  The host looked back at me with tears in his eyes.  When we were done, he asked me if we could go get lunch together.  He told me how much he didn't like Christianity but how he had always wanted to believe Jesus was the Son of God.


For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.  Christianity, unlike Christian spirituality, was not a term that excited me.  And I could not in good conscious tell a friend about a faith that didn't excite me.  I couldn't share something I wasn't experiencing.  And I wasn't experiencing Christianity.  It didn't do anything for me at all.  It felt like math, like a system of rights and wrongs and political beliefs, but it wasn't mysterious; it wasn't God reaching out of heaven to do wonderful things in my life.  And if I would have shared Christianity with somebody, it would have felt mostly like I was trying to get somebody to agree with me rather than meet God.  I could no longer share anything about Christianity, but I loved talking about Jesus and the spirituality that goes along with a relationship with Him." (Blue Like Jazz p. 115-116)


How awesome is that?  How awesome would it be if Christians stopped talking about Christianity and religion and started talking about Jesus instead?  I do believe we could change the world.

Blue Like Jazz

Those of you who are my Facebook friend have probably noticed that lately I've been posting a lot of stuff from the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller.  I have only recently started reading it and I am not even finished with it yet, but I highly recommend it.  I wanted to share an excerpt from the book that was too long to post in a Facebook status.  So here it is:

     "When Penny and Nadine first met, Penny wasn't a Christian.  They had both spent their freshman years at Reed but never knew each other.  Individually they decided to study at the same school in France during their sophomore year.

     
     Penny wanted nothing to do with religion.  Her perception of Christians was that they were narrow-minded people, politically conservative and hypocritical.  Penny dislike Christians because it seemed on every humanitarian issue, she found herself directly opposing the opinions held by many evangelicals.  She also felt that is Christianity were a person, that is all Christians lumped into one human being, that human being probably wouldn't like her.

     
     ...During those first three weeks in France, it was comforting for Penny that Nadine cared so much about her past and her story.  This helped Penny listen to Nadine's story, and one night while walking on a beach in the south of France, Nadine explained to Penny why she was a Christian.  She said that she believed Christ was a revolutionary, a humanitarian of sorts, sent from God to a world that had broken itself.  Penny was frustrated that Nadine was a Christian.  She couldn't believe that a girl this kind and accepting could subscribe to the same religion that generated the Crusades, funded the Republicans, or fathered religious television.  But over the year at Sarah Lawrence, Nadine's flavor of Christianity became increasingly intriguing to Penny.  Penny began to wonder if Christianity, were it a person, might in fact like her.  She began to wonder if she and Christianity might get along, if they might have things in common.

     
     ..."Nadine and I would sit for hours in her room," [Penny] began.  "Mostly we would talk about boys or school, but always, by the end of it, we talked about God.  The thing I loved about Nadine was that I never felt like she was selling anything.  She would talk about God as if she knew Him, as if she had talked to Him on the phone that day.  She was never ashamed, which is the thing with some Christians I had encountered.  They felt like they had to sell God, as if He were soap or a vacuum cleaner, and it's like they really weren't listening to me; they didn't care, they just wanted me to buy their product.  I came to realize that I had judged all Christians on the personality of a few.  That was frightening for me, too, because it had been so easy just to dismiss Christianity as nuts, but here was Nadine.  I didn't have a category for her.  To Nadine, God was a being with which she interacted, and even more, Nadine believed that God liked her.  I thought that was beautiful...So she asked me if I wanted to read through the book of Matthew with her, and in fact I did.  I wanted to see if this whole Jesus thing was real.  I still had serious issues with Jesus, though, only because I associated Him with Christianity, and there was no way I would ever call myself a Christian.  But I figured i should see for myself.  So I told her yes." 

     "So then you started reading the Bible?" I asked.

     "Yes. We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me...We started reading through Matthew, and I thought it was all very interesting, you know.  And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward.  He wasn't diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me.  Don, I can't explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me.  I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio.  I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me.  But it wasn't like that with Jesus.  There were people He loved and people He got really mat at, and I kept identifying with the people He loved, which was really good, because they were all the broken people, you know, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcast or pagans.  There were others, regular people, but He didn't play favorites at all, which is miraculous in itself.  That fact alone may have been the most supernatural thing He did. He didn't show partiality, which every human does."(Parts of Chapter 4)

Penny's story really got me thinking.  How sad is it that Penny felt that Christians wouldn't like her.  I think that Christians get so caught up in the fact that we are supposed to hate sin that we come across as hating the sinner as well.  We need to be careful of this.  There is a fine line between being accepting and loving of people, while at the same time not loving or endorsing their sin.  This can be a hard line to walk, but Jesus shows us how to do it.

Open Doors

In case anyone was doubting, God really does open doors and lead the way.  And sometimes He speaks so clearly that you wonder if you hadn't just talked to him face to face.  I've been trying to figure out what my next step in life is going to be and now I'm pretty sure I know what it is.

I've been considering Teaching English as a Foreign Language, and I've been looking around for ways to get certified.  Well, two days ago my Dad (who is in Phuket, Thailand) was talking to a British man whom he had just met.  He discovered that this man is the owner of The International TEFL Corporation (www.teflcorp.com).  They have schools all over the world that certify people to teach English as a foreign language.  The program is a 4 week, intensive course and cost around 1500 dollars.

So my dad was talking to this man and telling him how I am about to graduate college and how I'm interested in getting my TEFL certificate and this guy, whom my dad had just met, said, "If your daughter will come to the school here in Phuket, then I'll let her take the course for free."  Just like that: a 1500 dollar course absolutely free.  Still doubting that God leads and directs and opens doors?  I'm not.

Details are still to be worked out, but I am quite excited about this amazing opportunity.

"I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will guide you with My eye." Psalm 32:8

Loneliness

Loneliness is an interesting thing.  It's weird how at times, you can be all by yourself and not feel lonely at all.  Then other times, you can be surrounded by tons of people but still feel like you're the only one on the planet.  What prompts the feeling of being lonely?  I guess loneliness comes from not having someone you feel you can talk to and share things with.  Not knowing that there's someone or a few someones who care about you.  I'm not just talking about a "significant other", I mean anyone, family or friend.  

I struggle with the feeling of being lonely a lot.  (Now let me say right here, that I am not writing this to get sympathy or for people to say "poor Alena" or anything like that.  This blog is about my ramblings, opinions, and thoughts and that is all that this is. It's ROT)  Now the dictionary definition of the word "lonely" is "Sad because one has no friends or company".  I guess that is an accurate definition except that I do have friends and I do have people who I know care about me.  So, based on that, I shouldn't feel lonely. Right?  I don't know. 

I guess it just goes back to what my parents are always saying.  "Feelings are just that, feelings.  You can't base anything on your feelings."  So while I may feel all alone, the reality is that I have friends and family (granted, they are all over the world and far away) who do care about me.  And ultimately, there is no reason why I should ever feel lonely because I have a loving Saviour who is always with me whether I can "feel" Him or not.

"And He said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you..." 2 Corinthians 12:9a

Trusting God

Well, I found out today that I did not get the job with CollegePlus!.  Everyone is saying how sorry they are, and while I am kind of disappointed, I really have complete peace about not getting the job.


Since I was 14 I've been trying to plan out my life and figure out exactly what I would be doing.  I've done that all the way up until a few weeks ago.  Then something major happened and Matthew 6:25 took on a whole new meaning. "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on..."and it could go on to say nor about what job you will have, nor about where you will live... I finally realize that when it says not to worry about all of that stuff, it really means that you don't have to worry.  Simple right? lol.  I have come to not only realize that I don't have to worry or be anxious about my life, but I have come to be able to really implement this verse into my day to day.  I have learned (and am still learning) to simply rest in the fact that God DOES have a plan for my life and that He WILL lead me to it.  So while I continue to look and feel around for possible ways I could go, I'm no longer anxious about what the end result will be.  I am perfectly content in being right where He has me and I'm at peace knowing that God's going to close some doors and open some windows and prod me along in exactly the direction I need to go.


"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him." 1 Corinthians 2:9

Marvelous Monday

It is finally Monday.  A few of you have asked what exactly is happening on Monday that would warrant such excitement from me.  Well, today two big things happened.  And I suppose now I should tell you about them.

The first big thing that has me jumping up and down (not literally, mind you. I am much too mature for that. Stop snickering.) is the fact that last week I was looking on the internet for riding stables.  A bit of background is required here... I have always loved horses and have had dreams of working with them, but I've never had the opportunity.  Last year I discovered (through lots of online searching) that there is such a thing as therapeutic horseback riding.  They use horses to help people with physical, mental and emotional disabilities.  From the second I learned about it I've been interested in therapeutic riding.  What a great way to combine ones love of horses with ones love of people.  And what a fantastic way to help people with disabilities.  Needless to say I was instantly searching for a way to somehow get into that field.  I discovered there are therapeutic riding stables all over the country that are accredited by the NARHA (North American Riding for the Handicapped Association).  Most, if not all, of these stables are non-profit organizations and rely largely on the work of volunteers. 

So, last week, I searched for therapeutic riding stables in the area and found one about 40 minutes away from me.  I immediately emailed them about their volunteer opportunities.  So today, this fateful Monday, June 13th, 2011, I drove up to Eden Farms in Marietta, SC and went through a volunteer orientation.  I will begin volunteering with them this Wednesday.

My hope is that this could possibly turn into something much more than simply volunteering and perhaps I can become certified as a therapeutic riding instructor.  But I don't want to get ahead of myself here.  So for the moment I am just happy for the opportunity to work with the animals I love and perhaps help make a difference in the life of someone less fortunate than I.


That was the first big thing that Monday brought along.  The second big thing was a follow-up interview with CollegePlus! for the part-time position of Accountability Mentor.  It went super well (I thought) and I will know if I've been hired come this Friday.

And now you all know why Monday has been such a big day for me.


"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him." 1 Corinthians 2:9 

Hello There

Hi,

So...I've never had any intention of writing a blog.  I'm not one to say profound, amazing things and I'm not a particularly good writer.  When my mom suggested that I start a blog my first response was "Who'd want to read what I write? I have nothing to say."  But while I still don't have an answer to the first question, I have begun to realize that, though nobody may want to read what I write, I do, in fact, have things to say.  So much has happened to me over this past year and I've learned so much that I really must share.  And I can feel that so much more is going to happen to me in the coming months.

As the title of my blog states, it will be filled with ROT.  Ramblings, Opinions, and Thoughts of my life.

I invite you to come along with me as God reveals His will for my life and I step (often timidly) into the next chapter of my book.

Alena 

"Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him." 1 Corinthians 2:9