June 22-29

Yesterday the 29th was a great day. I am truly satisfied, but to explain why I'll need to tell the story of this last week.

To start off this week I managed to find a couple volunteers for our Farmers Market booth after a few weeks of trying, and Dale Cooper was coming to visit at my half way point for the internship (I'm surprised it's already 5 weeks in, I feel like I haven't been here nearly that long). But with Coop's coming I had to do the mid-internship worksheet and reflected more upon what I wanted in an internship. I realized that I was unsatisfied. I had been getting up and going about what felt like the drudgery of work. I did it because I felt obligated too. After all I was here to serve the church at Granite Springs. This lead me to feeling tired and misused. I talked over the mid-internship worksheet with Doug the Assistant Pastor and he suggested that perhaps both this and my distaste at calling people and asking them to do something might come from my own feeling of being drawn into a project (once in it is hard for me to back out, I feel obligated to continue something even when I dislike doing it). So he suggested both I think on that and changing my way of doing things from I ought to do this to I choose to do this if it were the case. This all happened on a Thursday morning and I had to orchestrate the Farmers Market yet.

So I thought on it. It did seem to ring true. And I recalled that I had come up to this problem before. In college a couple times I had fallen into the trap of just surviving and not thriving. It seems I had fallen to it again. How frustrating it is. I had been reading C.S. Lewis' book Surprised by Joy and realized that what he said about finding joy could be applied to my own life: to find joy you cannot look for joy itself. If you do that it will always be just out of reach. But if you devote yourself wholly to a task which captures you, you will find joy at every turn. From here on out God will be that goal which brings me joy.

Dale came Thursday evening to the Farmers Market but we didn't really talk about the internship then but it was good just to see him and Marcia again. Friday we met at the church to show them around what I was doing and to talk about how the internship was going. I related my struggles to him and Marcia and they said that everyone at some point falls into the trap of just getting by and not thriving but also that I should talk to Kevin and Doug about changing the focus of my internship more toward discipleship stuff. After that we went out and had lunch at the Beach Hut Deli near by. Its a sandwich shop and if you ever have the opportunity to go to one do it. And get a sandwich a little smaller than the one you think you can handle since they pile it high with all sorts of great stuff. After that they left to go get Rachel from Sacramento and bring her back up here to go have dinner together. We went to a place called Bouneratties (I think) and the four of us along with Kevin and his wife had dinner. It was a pleasant evening.

Nothing really special happened on Sunday except that I got a few volunteers to join in the Granite Springs 4th of July Parade entry.

Now to Monday. I was to meet with D (the guy from the Farmers Market) at two and go to the Monday Night feast later that night. So I prepared. I read through all of my opponents arguments and reminded myself of my answers to them and then I prayed. D and I talked for 2 hours and 15 minutes. We did not keep to the topic of the TNIV translation but ranged over allot of ground. We just talked. He wondered about why Christians suffer even though God promises to protect those who obey him. He asked my why Timothy got circumcised (I don't know what verse he was quoting) even though Paul had been one of the people who made sure in Acts 15 that gentile believers did not have to get circumcised. I was able to answer some of his questions on others, like on the issue of the problem of evil, I was only able to say that he was in good company. No one had been able to answer that in 2000 years of Christianity. Over all it went well. He was teachable in some areas and not in others and I will be meeting with him again next week. The biggest problem I came up against in him was with trusting other people. He had been in a job where he had come into contact with corrupt and twisted people every day multiple times a day and has had trouble trusting people to do the right thing ever since. If you would that's what I would ask someone to pray about for him: that he learn to be more trusting. Especially of those people who are his sisters and brothers in Christ.

That is the sort of thing I love doing. Talking with someone about the issues they have with faith and giving comfort and imparting knowledge wherever I can. I was both exhausted and energized at the end of our meeting. And I still had 3 hours of the Monday night feast ahead of me.

For those of you who might not know/recall what the MNF is; it is a ministry which targets poor people. At the end of the month when food stamps and government aid runs dry people still need to eat and MNF tries to alleviate some of that by offering food to anyone who needs it on the last Monday of every month. I was once again able to talk to Dutch, an older man with allot of his life behind him and allot of wisdom from that. I was able to get to know the people who were hurting in the area a little better and I was able to encourage the people putting on the feast a little. My work day ended at 8 pm. I was tired but happy with how it had went.

Romans 16:27 my friends!