i love my friend bekah. she is so so very beautiful. i read this and i thought that this was just too amazing to just stay on her myspace blog.

"So there is this homeless man who is always outside of our walmart who stands on the corner near the stop sign to get in and out. Every time i go to wal-mart, i'm with my mom, and as we leave, we have to stop at the stop sign. I am in the passenger seat, and my mom does such a good job of ignoring him. It almost angers me how unaffected she is by it, because i feel so ashamed every time i'm in that passenger seat and i pass him by.

Today as i was leaving CNU after 8 hours of work, God really put this guy on my heart. I decided that I would go to walmart, and if he was there, I would buy some stuff there and give it to him. Then as I was driving home, I started to freak out. What if he was there, but I was too scared to take action. God spoke to me kind of loud, and pretty much made it clear that if i didn't stop, this man would die. So i could choose. which...definitely pushed me.
so i drove home and to walmart...and he was there.

i went inside and freaked about what i should get him. His sign always says homeless and hungry. help. so i went to the food isle. Having just bought my car, i don't really have much money...actually i'm in debt about 300 dollars to my mom. So i looked for something cheap. I bought a super huge bag of animal crackers, a big thing of gatorade, and a little book with scripture passages [because i wanted him to know it didn't come from me, it came from god, cuz i sure wouldnt have done it if he hadnt told me to]. On the way out, I also felt really called to get a cold bottle of water from the front for him. I went out and gave it to him, and when i did, it started pouring. When i handed him the bag, I mentioned that the water was cold, and then I mumbled that i should have got him an umbrella. He smiled, and then said thank you and that he had been dying of thirst.

Then i left. when i got in my car, i started crying. i had to pull over cuz it was so rainy and i couldn't see out of my eyeballs and i just had to pray.
but for some reason...i felt worse than i did before. I feel like what i gave was crappy. i wished that i could do something so much bigger. i wished that i didnt have to do it behind my mother's back. i wished that i didn't feel like i did it for myself. i wished that i hadn't said something so stupid to him.

now i don't think he would have really died if i hadn't given him anything; i think that is was more of a motivation to make sure that i did what i needed to do. i do, however, think that i would have died if i hadn't acted. spiritually that is. this much i do know: he had been dying of thirst, but so had i. it's really not enough to learn about passages like the good samaritan, analyze them, and know what is good and what is not. if you keep on staring ahead, you havn't really learned anything.

now what i did made me feel like i suck in about 100 new ways, but i did try. i took action on something that i felt passionatly about, and i feel like that is a step in the right direction.and just now i decided i was still really not at peace with the whole situation, so i opened the bible to a random page and read the passage. i came right to matthew 10, which is when jesus sends the 12 apostles on their way. the whole thing is pretty startling. it calls for action, and a lot of it. it is very bold, very scary, and yet very encouraging. jesus let's the diciples know how hard their journey is going to be, yet how filfilling.the passage itself is pretty long so i won't post the whole thing, but you should read it if you have time because it is so vivid.I will, however, leave you with this- my peace for tonight. the very last line of the passage.

"And if you give even a cup of cold water to one of the least of my followers, you will surely be rewarded."

God is perfection. "

Greetings, friends!

To be quite honest, sometimes as I am walking about the neighborhoods of Portland, navigating the bus system, working in the office, or even taking part of a ministry or a cultural event, I feel quite sad. I wonder why I feel this way, and sometimes I just don't feel "real". Not real as in honest or genuine, but real as in breathing and living and finding all the potentials. I've noticed this from being around people who seem so real in this sense to me. They actively pursue life and fight for joy. I see this and wonder why I just hang back. Sometimes I feel so cut off from what's really going on. I feel a certain disconnect that I can't reconcile in either my social times or lone times. Portland is amazing, really. I just have had a spirit problem for a long time. Something that I subconciously believed that being in Portland might fix. But of course it hasn't. Only God can fix it. I go to him, I feel consistently. But I feel like it can be in vain. Sometimes I feel most narcissistic when I am going before God, because I feel like I'm just trying to take, take, take from the relationship. I only really seem to give with the hopes of recieving. I feel most of the time, my relationship with God is focusing only on what I can get out of it. I. I. Fuckin' I. I'm sick of myself. I realize that I'm not feeling the same joy as I used to, cause part of me absolutely hates myself. Most of you might be surprised to read this i'm sure. I'm so damn good at acting like a perky, energetic person.

Why am I sharing this? I have friends who don't like that I get so personal in my blogs. 1) I want to be real (in a genuine sense of the word) and 2) I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, and I'd like you to be reminded that you're not alone and 3) so you're open to share and stop pretending that everythings just "good" (as we often respond when we're asked how we're doing).

Anyways, I just read this out of the Brothers K, and it really hit me. And it helped me to realize what my problem I felt looked like. Cause 'til now, I couldn't write it out.

"There are kinds of human problems which really do seem, as our tidy expressions would have it, to "come to a head" and "demand to be dealt with." But there are also problems, often just as serious, which come to nothing that we can recognize or openly deal. Some long-lived, insidious problems simply slip us off to one side of ourselves. Some gently rob us of just enough energy or faith so that days which once took place on a horizontal plane become an endless series of uphill slogs. And some- like high water working year after year at the roots of a riverside tree- quietly undercut our trust or our hope, our sense of place, or of humor, our ability to empathize, or to feel enthused, and we don't sense impending danger, we don't feel the damage at all,
till one day, to our amazement, we find ourselves crashing to the ground."

i have a really good friend out there, thinking of me. and i know she's not the only one. :)

handmade card from bekah

a love letter included

back of the card

anklets she MADE me

my ugly foot with pretty anklets



i heart my best friend.
i love and miss all my friends from va.
i bought stationary today. expect love letters soon. unless you're a boy. you'll get a cool postcard. but only if you really want it.

this picture, and some worse ones before it were the starting point of my still life photo shoot today. i know hardly anything about photography, nor the rules of still life. it's fun though to fake it. i think my pictures gradually get better.

the subject- a flower i made in kids community, where i was helping out on sunday. this day was a be good to your earth cause god made it day. the kids took recycled materials, and invented something out of them. out of recycled materials, i made this flower.

what else used:
salt
foil
petals
yellow flowers
light
brown table



i took like 50 pictures...i picked what i thought was the best in the wee hours of the morning

i feel like i am waking up to a truth, that has just been unfolding to me in the past year.

the truth that we really do need to take better care of our planet. that i, as a person, should take steps in my lifestyle to help this.

sometimes waking up is disruptive.

i have a lot of past assumptions, and ideals that really contradict this new way of thinking.

one of the biggest things, is that i'm worried about what certain people i hole close to me would think. they think that many envrionmentalists go over board, but i don't know with these issues at hand, if there is such a thing as going over board.

but man, i hate this. it's so hard to start really believing in something when you're deep-seeded in doubting the whole thing as a kinda hoax, dismissing it as a joke.

i don't think that individual people are wrong. the people i'm worried about have really, really good hearts, but perhaps have confused politics with ethics.


i'm becoming more of an environmentalist. and i don't know. i wonder how i will be when i return to va. it's easy to believe in such things here in portland. and i really feel i would feel a lot differently if i was only changing just cause the culture i am in is telling me differently.


i'm not a fan of al gore.
i wish the documentary focused more on how we can change the planet, then have shots of him and his politcal career. it sent out the message, wow look at al gore. he is such a hero of a good cause. i think it was awakening documentary at the same time. and i wish that both parties cared equally about the issue of global warming. because i know first hand, that republicans haven't so much.



i want to see a new party rise up....a party that cared about issues that God cares about....
it could be called the pro-life party, adding on to the meaning of pro-life as just matters of letting babies live, and extending the pro-life attitude further...some important values of it might be...
-educational benefits to all who desire for it (even people who can't afford to go to good colleges)
-a job market that keeps the country's economy running while making room for the millions who are unemployed and welcoming them. encouraging programs that help people get and maintain jobs
-adequate healthcare for all
-the banning of abortion, except in cases of rape,incest,and threat of a mother's life
-promoted love and toleration for all (this means angry marches outside of clinics and slanderous words used towards the "immoral" are not proper ways of effecting change)
-an encouraging campaign for people to give directly to global causes (rather than just giving money to goverments who don't use it to help their people, or giving more money to the American government, out of necessity, rather than out of a loving sacrifice)
-encourage and enable people to make good means of their resources, recycle, and reduce the pollution that big and little companies make
-encourage the use of cars that don't require gasoline (being good stewards of our resources)
-encouraging and enabling small businesses to run, rather than just relying of huge corporations that exploit people's labor in developing countries
- less focus on celebrities in the media, and more focus on issues outside of consumer-material ideals
-give to non-prof organizations that truly do show that they help people
-use of ethics in politics, rather than politics driven on greed and image

there's probably a lot more to this dream party, but i'm ignorant on a whole lot of issues. anyways, this is just a list of ideals. but i really do think that most christians or morally ethic people i know have become apathetic to politics because of the extremism in parties. so, maybe it's time for a moderate party that can approach humanistic issues in practical ways i don't even know about, cause i'm politically dumb.