bigstuf(f).

I am constantly amazed at how good our God is.
This week I had the honor and pleasure of attending a conference called BigStuf in Panama City Beach, Florida with our high schoolers from church.  I knew the week was going to be good but I didn't realize how much the Lord was going to rock my world.

It's funny because I don't even think I understood how much the Lord as was working in me this week.  On the surface, I was participating in incredible worship that was probably the closest glimpse to Heaven I've ever experienced, I was completely confirmed and encouraged in being an intern at First Pres for the summer, and I was being blow away by our youth who was thirsting for God in a way I never could of imagined.

It wasn't until I got home and began the transition process of coming from a spiritually high week that I realized the astounding amount of process God had been doing in building me up and transforming me.

i thank you God for most this amazing day.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

-e.e. cummings

and as if it couldn't get better: 

arrangement of this text to music by eric whitacre

the arrangement we're singing in my women's choir

i don't believe i need to elaborate.

for today.

my heart feels so full
my lips search for the words to describe
my legs wanna run
but where?

where do i go from here?
my mind screams go!
and my heart wants to follow suit.

but i stay.
if only for a little while longer.

i try to breathe in patience.
breathe in peace.
breathe...my heart feels jumpy still.

Lord I can't stay.
there is so much more than this.
please show me the way.
show me.
show me.
show me...

i wait, resigned, impatiently patient.

[Image: http://granula.deviantart.com/art/somewhere-a-clock-is-ticking-152564936]

i can always tell my story through music... 

it's time to recognize.

So this has been a long time in coming, but I'm finally getting you all in the loop.  This is something that has been on my heart for a while and I've been trying to be patient and allow God to move in the process. 

About two months or so ago, I was having a conversation with a couple friends about the health of our church.  We all felt this need to DO MORE.  We felt that as the youth of the church, we were being complacent and not using our gifts to the fullest.  But then as we talked more, we realized that this wasn't just an issue within the church but the community as well.  That's how Recognize came into being.

Recognize is a 5 hour prayer meeting/worship service scheduled for January 29, 2011 with a vision to bring not only our church closer together and seeking Christ's plan for us but for bringing our community together to have a more united pursuit of Christ as the body of Christ.

The service will alternate between worship, talks on community, discipleship, missions and spiritual gifts and times of prayer.  Recognize was inspired by a prayer meeting that I attended while in Philadelphia this summer.

song of the day #20: i will not be silent.

So God has been doing some crazy things in my life recently.  Things are still getting settled so I'll share them with you at a later date but in the midst of all of that I've been researching a lot of worship music.  As I haven't been very good at keeping up with blogging, I thought now right in the middle of the last week of classes when I should be study, that I would write to you about a song that has really been resonating with me recently.

[Image: http://browse.deviantart.com/photography/?q=shouting&order=9&offset=96#/d1i0t1v]

small.

A couple weeks ago, maybe longer than that now, I was asked if I'd be interested in being AIM's representative at JMU, promoting Adventures in Missions and their trips. [For those of you who don't know, I worked with AIM all summer in Philadelphia.]  Life has been crazy and I've been a little bit of a procrastinator with it.  Basically, AIM has a program called Real Life which are mission trips geared specifically for college aged students.

The promotion campaign has three parts and today I started one of them which is the t-shirt portion.  I was given a t-shirt by AIM which looks like this,

[385 million people live on less than $1 a day]

and was told to wear it for five consecutive days in hopes that people will ask questions and I have the opportunity to talk to them about poverty and what we can do to help.

Part of our role as college reps for AIM is to also keep a blog on what we're doing and how the activities are going.  So I wrote a blog today and for some reason the AIM server was down.  And that got me thinking about how little I've been writing lately and that it would be good to share what's going on.  So here are my thoughts on the t-shirt challenge for today:

breaking chains.

This week, JMU's chapter of Intervarsity hosted an event called the "The Price of Life".  This event was to make our campus aware of human trafficking and sex trafficking or modern day slavery.  It was run and put together by the Justice Team of IV which is a ministry team seeking for the restoration of God's rule and are engaged in advocacy, study and prayer for the injustice in our world.

On Wednesday and Thursday of this week, the Justice Team was on the Commons of JMU, selling t-shirts and taking donations to go to World Vision, a Christian relief, development, and advocacy organization, to help the fight against slavery.  The t-shirts were designed by the Justice Team and looked like this:

 

The culmination of the week was last night during Large Group.  The Justice Team had Jesse Eaves from World Vision come to speak to us.