I am starting to get back into liturgical mode, I think. I went to the traditional (liturgical) service at my church last Sunday and it fed me well. The contemporary service was good today but I think I would have gotten just as much out of liturgy. Wednesday night is sort of liturgical but not quite what I need so I am really thankful for chapel these days where I can do Morning Prayer communally.

I am starting to think that I might have to start doing Compline on my own at night or go to Compline next quarter. Jane and I are leading Holden Evening Prayer on Wednesdays and Jane is doing Compline that night as well. I will also have to start going to LBW Evening Prayer with Jon on Tuesday nights. It’s crazy — Jon is super liturgical and it’s hard for us to do devotions together because we are so different; but I’m really starting to become like him now.

We did the litany last Friday in chapel and it wasn’t as good as it was on September 12 when we did it acapella before Eucharist because of September 11th. It was still meaningful however and I honestly would not mind chanting it more frequently. (For those who are wondering, it’s a litany based on the Kyrie which is the prayer in which we say in Koine Greek “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy”. (The Greek is Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison.) It is especially good during Lent because this is when we are atoning for our sins.

C/S

I was going to re-design this tonight but I realized that with a take home final due this weekend and quite a few papers and things due this upcoming week, it would probably be good for me to wait until Thursday morning.

Mea culpa, mea culpa! I have to confess that I am really spiritually dry at this point. I have been letting my devotional time suffer in order to get massive quantities of schoolwork done and I really need to stop doing that. Jon has been having major depression problems this week and I have not had the emotional or spiritual energy to bear them. (Then again, I also have to remind myself that I am his fiancée, not his therapist.) I am so burned out and this is making it really hard to get my papers and projects done. I have 4 days until the quarter ends and quite a few things to do before it finally ends like my Church History final (which is due tomorrow) and my Old Testament Project.

I confess that I have also let my nighttime prayers succumb to my sleepiness though I’m not falling asleep until probably 12:30, even on nights when I have to be up at 6:30 the next morning so that I can shower and go to class. There is so much stress on me with the wedding and school right now (including the fact that I need to pack up my room) and I am experiencing insominia. I should probably stop watching “World’s Wildest Police Videos” to go to sleep and start talking with my Shepherd about the state of this lamb here.

I am starting to long for forest land like the redwoods of UCSC where I went to college or the forests of British Columbia where I spent my summers. (My grandparents have a cabin on the mainland across from Campbell River. It’s about an hour from there by boat.) I was alawys spiritually fed by the world around me as I walked through forests of pine and fir and gazed out on the Pacific Ocean. Now I am stuck in the city of Columbus which is pavement and grass. Hardly a feast for my Celtic senses of spirituality.

C/S

I know that I have waaaaaaaaay too much to do when I get the urge to redo this journal. I’ll redo it when I get back from California after the wedding.

Last Thursday, the president of our seminary talked about his faith. I’m not going to go into it here because I’m not sure Dr. Ramseth would be OK with it. (Let’s just say that it was really interesting.) It made me think a lot about my own faith and how I express it. Since I’ve finished the narrative part of my call experience (yes… there is a story within that story just as Lutherans have a canon within a canon), I thought I’d go into how I view my faith and how it impacts my life.

Like Leenie, I am a very liturgical person. I can survive almost anywhere but liturgy, especially the liturgy of the Episcopal church, centers me. I am not sure why it centers me this way — perhaps it is the fact that it is a fairly orderly way of doing worship and the J in me loves it. Perhaps it is the fact that I identify it with home because my home church throughout college was an Episcopal church. Perhaps it is my conditioning because daily chapel is *always* liturgical without many exceptions.

My prayer life is varied and I never know how many times a day I will pray. Part of it is that there is always the question of what counts as prayer. Does Liturgical Choir practice count as prayer? Does Worship Team practice count as prayer? Does this journal count as prayer? Does the communal prayer done in Chapel count as part of my personal time? I’ve liked the idea that all we do should be a prayer and that our actions should all glorify God. I believe that praying by my bed at night is just as important as running through a field of wildflowers and drinking in God’s beauty and rejoicing. I believe that a cathedral ring in a redwood forest is just as beautiful and reverent as a place of worship as a quiet stone church in Ireland and both have wonderful opportunities for prayer — one for the majesty of God’s creation and the other for the inspiration given to the hands that hewed the stones and cast the glass in the church.

How do I view God? I view God as my Heavenly Father. I do not think that the Father aspect of God is necessarily supreme above the other Persons of the Trinity but I do pray to a Heavenly Father. Heavenly Mother doesn’t cut it for me because Jesus never used it to address God while He was on earth and I’m all about following His example. I have a loving relationship with my Abba (not the Swedish rock band — the Hebrew diminutive for “Father” which is like saying “Daddy”) and my resting place is in His arms.

The Eucharist is high on my list of things. Tonight at the midweek service, Pastor Tom asked me to be one of the people distributing the bread. I was going to take the cup and let him do the bread since he was the pastor but he let me do the bread instead. It really brought home the fact that the bread *is* the Body of Christ given for us because God loves us so very much. It also felt like he was affirming my call to ministry. It just still amazes me that God loved us so much that He gave His only begotten Son so that those who believe in Him would not perish but have eternal life.

One of the people in my I-group (a group of people with the same academic advisor told me that I might want to start learning to share my call story. Here is my first shot at some of what is leading me to become a pastor. This is going to be a story in installments, so stay tuned to this journal. 🙂 (By the way, I am really open to dialoging with people about this, so please email me if you have questions or [civil] commentary.)

I guess that this is the really meaty part of this: MY CALL TO MINISTRY!!!!!!!!!!! I didn’t receive my call through a theophany, that is, a divine visitation by God or by anything major. Really, people would think my story crazy if they heard it and did not have the same understanding as I do of how God speaks to us.

The last night I was at Urbana, we were singing “O Come O Come Emmanuel” and the experience moved me. The refrain, “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee O Israel” meant something to me and it was just the most awesome promise of hope. “Emmanuel” means “God with us” and the promise of God coming to dwell with us brought me to tears because it is something that we do not deserve but happens because God loved the world so very much. I felt a calling to spread this Gospel and I wondered where the Lord would send me.

When I returned to school, it was a shock because people were so angry and so rude to each other, unlike the people I encountered at Urbana. In my Anthropology of Religion class, I talked to people who told me the bad experiences that they had found in their churches and why they would never go back to church again. As I listened, I realized that the people of my generation were not hearing the Gospel because the mainline churches were being lax about preaching it in a way that people could understand it. A year earlier, I had spent a weekend or two at Camp Maymac, a camp run by Cityteam Ministries for inner city kids. It had been an amazing experience because I saw kids who really needed to hear the Gospel and for which the Gospel would make a huge difference.

In January of 2001, God put it on my heart to apply to seminary. My reaction was something to the tune of “as if!!!!” I was planning on taking a year off after I graduated from college but the idea failed to disappear from my heart. I finally applied for the MTS program, thinking it was a shot and I probably wouldn’t get accepted in the first place. My deal with God was that if I got accepted, I would think of going. Well… I got accepted and I finally (after much deliberation and prayer) decided to go.

My plan was to start in the Fall of 2001 and take the year-long Greek class. Well… God made it possible for me to take Summer Greek. I loved Greek — it opened the New Testament to me and I really started to understand what I was reading. Our professor, Dr. Bryant, was fanstastic and made sure we understood everything. I don’t know exactly what it was that summer, but the Lord called me to preach His word. Perhaps, it was the word study we did or perhaps it was the experience of leading worship. I had supply-preached at the end of my Spring Quarter and writing the sermons was really fun. I realized that I loved what I was doing and wanted to continue it. More than that, I felt like God had called me to get His message to His people as everything had worked out in a crazy way so that I could be where I am. My housing for this last summer worked so that I could stay on campus. I was able to to get the financial aid to take Summer Greek and my church accepted me as a worship leader.

In the last two quarters of seminary, I have had quite a bit of theology, Biblical languages, Old Testament studies, and everything else and I still love what I am doing. I cannot wait to do my homiletics classes and my pastoral leadership classes and my New Testament studies. I know that next year will be a break from the work as I am having to take it off for family reasons (i.e. so Jon can go on Internship) but I know that the ministry will continue next year for me.

C/S

One of the people in my I-group (a group of people with the same academic advisor told me that I might want to start learning to share my call story. Here is my first shot at some of what is leading me to become a pastor. This is going to be a story in installments, so stay tuned to this journal. 🙂 (By the way, I am really open to dialoging with people about this, so please email me if you have questions or [civil] commentary.)

During my senior year of high school, I helped to run Club Jesus, which was our school’s Christian club. I had planned to just be the publicity person and I ended up doing everything from preaching to praying. It was really difficult at first but I really loved it once I got into it. I definitely think the Lord had a hand in me doing it to prepare me for something higher. When I went to visit colleges that year, one of my considerations was where I would be spiritually fed. UC Santa Cruz (of all the places!) had a really wonderful chapter of Intervarsity and that was one of my deciding factors. St. Mary’s on the other hand had people who were really not into living as Catholics and I didn’t get to attend one of their Masses. I decided on UCSC and planned to get involved with IV there.

That summer, I worked as a camp counselor. Staff training was a blast — camp itself was stressful. I think that every teenager that considers having sex before marriage should be a camp counselor — you are a mommy to 24 girls for a week. Sparrow, one of my friends on staff, and I took turns keeping each other sane. I discovered that summer that caring for my girls was one of the most fun parts of the job and that I did really love working with kids. My fellow staff however was another story. Many of them were really hostile to me being Christian (mostly because many were lesbian and had been hurt by the Church) and I realized the importance of community after that summer. While talking with Sparrow one night, she commented that I would make a really good pastor. I laughed it off at the time but I did go back to the moment a few months later and think about it. I was planning on being a Biology major in college and joked about having a Religious Studies minor.

When I hit college, I joined IV and got involved in Bible studies and all, but the best thing that could have happened to me was my church. They had a college fellowship and would have lunch with us on campus every week in addition to having lunch and Bible study with us after church. Dane, Kathy, Laurie, Gordon, and Joan became parents for all of us when we were up at UCSC. I attended High Street for two and a half years and it helped me to grow stronger in my faith. I also really started reading and studying the Bible during that time. The other really wonderful thing that happened to me in college was Mark Study. A group of twenty of us took 2 quarters to go over the entire book of Mark in manuscript form. It was hard to get into at first but I soon caught on and really got a lot out of the Gospel. It was like meeting Jesus face-to-face and He became a real person in my life. During my second year of college, things went from bad to worse really fast. I had suffered from serious depression since age 14 and I had post traumatic stress disorder from the teasing I endured all the way through school as well as the sexual harassment that came during high school. My relationship with the guy I briefly dated my first year ended and it left me heartbroken. I ended up on medication and in therapy. This wasn’t the greatest time of my life emotionally but it was wonderful spiritually. I saw God work in ways that I had never thought would happen. I saw ym faith in God strengthen as I had to rely on Him to get me through my present state. My therapist was a lovely Christian woman and I stayed in therapy with her for two full years.

During my first quarter of college, my Core class had been on California history and literature. As my professor had figured out that I *did* know how to write a good paper, he let me write on whatever I wanted to, provided it fit in with the class. I did a paper on biculturalism and a paper on Chicano spirituality. Those papers were probably the most fun ones that I ever wrote and I saw how much I enjoyed studying religion and the way it impacted society. During my fifth quarter, I decided to switch to a Religious Studies major because I was hating the Biology and Chemistry that I was taking. So I switched… and ended up graduating a year earlier than I would have if I had stayed with Biology. That year was wonderful because I was doing an independent major and taking classes that I liked. I also saw from visiting Jon that seminary was something that I really wanted to consider. I loved working with him at his MIC site and attending worship a couple times that week (which was the first Lutheran service I had ever been to).

At Urbana, I led a Bible study and I saw the results of missions and that really interested me. I tried to get some missions experience set for the summer after graduation but that fell through so my mission experience ended up being the weekends I spent in San Francisco doing ministry with the homeless and then being my Christian self on my campus. People say that it should not count but living a Christian life on the UCSC campus means that you are constantly telling people about Jesus and how He can fix the problems for which they are using drugs and alcohol and sex to remedy. I do not know if I “converted” people but that was not my aim. My aim was to get people to understand my position and why I believed so strongly in a God who most people thought was evil and hateful.

Graduation was fun because I graudated with most of my friends but at the same time, it was difficult to leave Santa Cruz. I was homesick for the campus for six months after I left and I think part of the reason was that it was where I truly found God and I truly came into my own as a Christian. High school was merely going to church with a friend until my senior year and I often felt like an observer. College was where I could live out my faith.

Coming up… seminary and the moment of my “call”

One of the people in my I-group (a group of people with the same academic advisor told me that I might want to start learning to share my call story. Here is my first shot at some of what is leading me to become a pastor. This is going to be a story in installments, so stay tuned to this journal. 🙂 (By the way, I am really open to dialoging with people about this, so please email me if you have questions or [civil] commentary.)

Psalm 139 describes how the Lord formed us and knows our souls. As I reflect on my life, I feel that God set me aside from the beginning. Nobody in my nuclear family (mother, father, brother) is a practicing Christian and I think my father deliberately to steer me away from faith. He is cynical about the faith and that influenced me for the first ten years of my life. My first glimpse of the Gospel was my neighbor Mrs. Griffin reading us the Christmas story and reading on with me until the resurrection and crucifixion while baking cookies with her in 1st grade. That has really stayed with me and I think God planted a seed in me that day that grew quietly within me even during the times when I denied God’s existence. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light [are] both alike to thee. (Psalm 139:7-12)

At age ten, I attended Camp Hammer, a Christian summer camp, with my friend Emily. I gave my life to Jesus that week but promptly forgot the promise two weeks later. I lived without God until I was twelve or thirteen when I began to wonder if there was a God. I taught myself the Lord’s Prayer and prayed it every night. I did not fully believe but wanted to hedge my bets. If there was a God, I thought I should probably do everything in my power to make myself look better. I started wishing that my family had been Christian and that I had grown up going to church. Ironically, I could have asked any of my friends or my neighbors if I could go with them but I was too afraid. Around that time, I found a book of Bible stories that had been given to us by a friend and I devoured those stories. They were so interesting and I really saw how human the people in the Bible were. I read about Jesus and how He died on a Cross for me and it just amazed me.

This continued from the end of middle school and into my first year of high school. That year, everything that could go wrong did. I had deaths in my family, was beat up at school, lost many of my friends to rumors, had one of my cats die… By January of that year, I was friendless and miserable. I started having severe problems with depression and I started contemplating suicide. When I finally did come close to attempting, something in me intervened.Â? Then, I felt this incredible peace come over me and I heard a voice telling me not to do it because I was too important to lose. I stopped at that point — I now knew that God existed and that He cared so deeply about me.

That year, my friend Jason had started bringing me copies of Our Daily Bread and I devoured these voraciously. I found my mothers old KJV (which we used as a book of spells when my brother and I were younger) and I would read the passages out of there. I soon sent for a subscription and would read it and the passage in the mornings when I got up. I started praying more frequently and I did grow in my knowledge of God. However, I lacked baptism and was too afraid to ask for it. During my junior year, I joined the Episcopal Church in Almaden. This was two days after I had buried my friend Gabriel Maze, the third of my friends to have been killed in a three month period. During that time, the Lord more than sustained me and I knew His comfort more than ever before. The people at ECA were wonderful and became a second family to me. I lived in fear however, upon finding out that I had taken the Eucharist without being baptized and that it was a sin. I did not want to just stop because it would look bad, but I secretly yearned to be able to do it rightly. People at the seminary have told me that God is not going to hold this against me because I was definitely one of His followers and I was baptized during my first year of college.

Next… my senior year of high school and my college years.

I met with Dr. Fransen on Friday to discuss the details of what Jon and I need for Internship. We want a place in the Midwest because it’s cheaper to live there and a place where we’d be in a small town but not in the middle of nowhere. A college town would be nice because it would mean that we’d have community and be able to minister to the college students. We also want a parsonage so that we don’t have to deal with finding a place to rent. We need a stipend because we’ll probably be paying back my student loans though Dr. Fransen is going to work with me on that so that I might take an Independent study with him and avoid having to pay them back immediately.

It’s ironic that a lot of this is happening because we’re so young as compared to everyone else here. Jane (our Contextual Ed) person wants me to get some life experience. I *have* life experience — just not what she perceives it to be. I’ll also start circulating my resumï?? so that I can find a job upon arriving there. This summer, I’ll also start my candidacy process and try to get all the nasty stuff done so that I don’t have to come back too frequently.

I also seriously do not know when I will choose to go back to school. I might work an extra year so that we can get some of our student loans paid off. We’ll have my loans for this year, Jon’s loans from college, and his seminary loans to pay off, meaning that we’ll be pretty much loan crazy for a while but we can pull together and get them paid off eventually.

Another thing I like about being in the Upper Midwest is the proximity to Canada so we can go play over the border occasionally. I’ve loved every part of Canada that I have visited and I would love to live there some day if the opportunity arose. I would love to serve with the ELCIC and raise my kids there. I would really like to go travel around the country and see more than just the Pacific ones. (I do *love* the Pacific ones however.)

C/S