You were a million years of work.

The devil doesn’t know what a marvelous creation you are.  The world can’t see how beautiful your life is, they only see what you look like and observe some of your actions.  Ever imagined what people would think of you if they saw all the way into your life?  What if they heard the songs you sing in your head all day?  What if they could feel the way you do when you see someone you really love?  Can you imagine if they knew the depth and the character you have!

I think everyone has character and I think every person is a marvelous creation.  That’s really what I believe.  I wish I would prove that by being better to people.  If you see me, tell me to be better to people.

If you think you’re a bad person, what perspective are you viewing yourself from?  Remember the people who say bad things about you don’t actually know you.  Remember that the world treats you wrong, the world is hard on you, but the world only sees your outside and only watches you live, not knowing why you do what you do, or at what cost.  Don’t let the world, the media, the other people, or anything else tell you who you are.  Good or bad, skinny, whatever.  I tell you, look at yourself as God looks at you.  He says He’s in love with you. (Romans 5:8)  He says he made you in his image. (Genesis 1:26)(Ps. 139)  What does that mean?  If He’s crazy about you, what are you?  A failure, a disaster, a mistake?  No, He is too good to see you that way.  God the just is satisfied to look on Jesus and pardon anything you’ve done.  Now He can see you they way he made you to be. You’re different, you’re sensational.  You’re a person of brilliant and unexplainable character, that’s what I think.  That’s what He says.

 

 

(If our God made us, us little people, with such unspeakable character, imagine what HIS character is like.  That’s why I want to get to know Him.)

Be of Joy.

Today, whatever you’re doing, whatever you feel like, remind yourself that God is good.  Be of Joy when life is bad, when you hurt, when your heart tells you’re lonely.  Tell it that the joy of the Lord is your strength, no person can be your strength.  You belong to the Lion of the ages, He’s not afraid of the changes, he’s in front and behind them.  He’s not the judge or the jury, He’s the evidence.  He’s got You on His mind.  That’s why I’m of joy, because I’m of Him.  It’s the right team to be on.  Either you’re on that team, or we want you.  It’s gonna light up the dark town you live in.

 

Walk with me in joy, walk with me and that great Fighter, our fearsome Friend, the King and God of all time.  Okay.

I forget to thank God for my eyes.

There’s a girl that comes into my work a lot, she started at CSU this year, but she’s always lived in Fort Collins.  Over the summer we had pancakes at IHOP and talked for and hour or two about life and everything else.  I loved getting to know her, she’s a cool person.  It’s fun taking the opportunity to just get to know someone with no guilt and no strings attached, as a single amongst happy couples without that ability.  Not that they would be jealous.  Not that I have no jealousy for them!  Her and I talked about a lot of things, but the one thing that made her different from anyone  else I’ve ever known is that she’s the daughter of two blind parents.  They both play organ at the Baptist church they all go to.  They’ve been blind all their lives, but have two or three children with fully functional vision.  I forget to thank God for my eyes.  I bet these children don’t forget to thank God for their eyes.  The oldest, whom I had pancakes with, has taken care of her parents her whole life.  This makes her interesting in a number of ways as a caregiver of sorts to them and as the only one in the family who drives, and the only one who uses a computer or reads the newspaper or watches TV.

This isn’t about her though, although I’d love to write about her more.  Her parents are the ones that fascinate me.  I can’t imagine what a story they have, not understanding the concept of color or light or geometry.  Do they see pictures in their minds?  How do they visualize objects when they’re brought up in conversation?  Do you think they connect the idea of a car instead with the noise it makes as it starts up, or passes on the street?  Is a toaster the sound it makes when bread pops out?  I mean lots of objects feel square, what distinguishes a toaster from other square things?  Here’s another crazy thought, how do you visualize your kids?  Each other?  We imagine what people look like when we think of them.  If you’ve never seen a person, what do you think when you think of them?

How did these people meet?  I bet it wasn’t anything like the way we like to meet people.  If you only know the sound of a person’s voice, and your first impressions of them are the way they talk to you first when they meet you, especially as a blind person, you look right away into their hearts instead of just at their skin.  What a healthy way to see people, what a tragically foreign concept.  If you’re blind and in love, you don’t grow fond of a face, a body.  You grow fond of the way they speak to you, the way a caring hand guides you through a world of shapes instead of colors.  The way a person looks doesn’t really exemplify the character or heart they have anyway, words do that.  You grow close to what your other senses gather about the person.  What a strange situation it must have been when they met!  Certainly they had one very specific thing in common, I’m sure they went from there.  I don’t know anything about these, people, so really I’m just speculating.  I’ve helped the woman order her food at my restaurant, and I’ve never met the husband either, but I’m about to infer something about them.

Here’s a thought.  If two blind people fall in love, having never seen each other, what is their relationship based on?  Certainly not that they both though each other was attractive, it must have been each other’s inner beauty, if I may use such a cliche.  They fall in love with, and are motivated by, each other’s heart.  Two blind people would be unaware, or at least unconcerned with each other’s fading beauty, so as they grow old, they only grow more beautiful to each other because the thing they love, the heart, gets more beautiful and more lovely with age.  I think that makes sense, or ideally it does.  Imagine, if put into our situation as people blessed with eyes, that we saw the person we loved get more and more beautiful physically as they grew old, and they saw us the same.  How wonderful, we only become more attractive to each other!  We need to care more, obviously, about the heart than the outward appearance.  A lot of people do care more about that.  I need to care more about that.  Not that it’s bad that we find each other beautiful.  In fact, I wish these parents could see what a lovely daughter they have!  He took a great deal of time fashioning our faces and frames, and we do no wrong appreciating his work.  But oh how we objectify the person for their form and face!

It is precious here to note that God is nothing like us.  ”Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart,” says 1 Samuel 16:7.  This means that God sees us sort of like blind couples might see each other.  He is less concerned with our hair and our eyes and our fitness, because the person He loves is the person He put inside our soul, to one day be released from this prison of a body that we hang clothes on, adorn with makeup, and for some strange reason, worship.  Instead of this confused, materialistic “love” that only deteriorates, we are seen instead to be more and more beautiful to Him because as we grow, God sees us more and more lovely all the time.  THAT is the God we serve!  That is a little glimpse of His character.  Our God is concerned with our hearts, not the body He placed us in to provide what ever set of challenges and trials we needed to grow through.  Moreover, that thing He does see, our spirit, He sees as PERFECT when we claim the precious blood of Jesus as payment for the sin we’ve separated ourselves from him by.  We are seen as perfect and spotless.  Because of the complete, redeeming work of Jesus, nothing can separate us now from the love of God.  BECAUSE God looks at the heart instead of outward appearances.

Why don’t I look at people that way?  I’m jealous for the love of these two blind people, although I thank God now for my eyes.  I’m jealous for their perspective and I hope I can learn from it.  I pray that family is doing well and that God lives among them.  Thank you God for your character that I don’t understand.

There must be some mistake.

I learned some things today in the white wonderland that is Fort Collins that made me sad, especially after all my tree-talk the other day.

I mentioned in my last post that the “the oval”, a large circular drive that forms the perimeter of a small sort of park, is filled with a hundred or so trees, all over a hundred years old.  Today, walking to class with a knit hat and the most waterlogged thrift store shoes ever, I came upon that oval.  I found it barricaded, with caution tape tied from tree to tree all the way around, disallowing me to conveniently cross it diagonally.  As I walked a good third of a mile around, I watched as trucks cleaned up a number of enormous branches that had fallen from these huge trees sometime that last night while we all slept.  Enormous gashes in the trunks from missing limbs left these trees looking dismembered and bullied.  God must have walked through the oval while we slept in heated homes, carefully stepping over the trees we planted and stopping now and then to bend over and pull a few thousand-pound branches from hundred-foot trees like a kid might pull the legs off a grasshopper.  He had a good reason to do it cause he knows more about trees, but I was still sad.

I mentioned it to a friend of mine, asking why they didn’t fall to pieces like that last year when we got our first really big snow.  She said that our trees have a sort of tree cancer.  It’s a bug or a mold or something that kills them from the inside and I guess a lot of Colorado trees are dying from it.  I wonder what feels like for these anciently living organisms to feel suddenly and strikingly mortal after all they’ve seen.  Because of this sad tree disease,  the trees in the oval are terminal, and have become a lot weaker than they were in decades past when they stood up straight through the winter, arms raised to heaven like a charismatic.  This year, the heavy wet snow is heartless, felling branch by brittle branch and making it unsafe for the first time since Barrack Obama spoke underneath that canopy, to walk through the hallway of leaves I’m so normalized to.

I don’t know why I’m suddenly such a tree-hugger, but I’m really crushed by this.  How long have I known these trees?  Maybe three years?  Weren’t they planted like in 1870?  The year African-Americans could finally vote, the year Virginia rejoined the union, and the year they found and named Old Faithful.  My great grandparents were probably twenty-somethings or younger, still unaware of the alcoholism and abuse they would engage in later to set the stage for the beautiful families my grandparents would found in the fifties, consequently determined to build homes free from these vices.  Some of their descendants before me would also walk under these same trees as CSU students, long before RamCT or automated text messages on our phones from the school when the snow’s grown too deep for class.  I should ask Uncle Dan what the trees were like then.  I should ask Uncle Jim if this makes him sad.

I bet they weren’t concerned for the trees back then, they seemed strong.  They were probably at a more climbable height anyway.  So why is my generation the one to watch these trees fed piece-by-piece into noisy woodchippers as their dry branches fall on sidewalks and cars?  The next generation will probably just jump from stump to stump, uniquely aware of the blue sky that was hidden to us in the oval by a green patchwork canopy of leaves the size of your hand.  But they won’t be aware of the shade we had when we would play frisbee after work on summer days.

I guess eventually they will plant new trees to fight through the cold, dead roots that stretch a hundred feet underground, to establish a new network of life.  But for another fifty years kids will bike around them, not under them.  I imagine one or two of the old trees will survive, and kids will just think it’s a monstrosity because although it used to be surrounded by friends its size, now it stands out and is contrasted as huge beside the saplings.  The pictures on the CSU website will be of this tree.  Pamphlets and brochures show kids studying under it, amongst the little trees transplanted from some tree farm.  It’s like an anomaly, a living exception that would teach us as much as we could understand if it could talk.  Maybe someday I’ll walk by those trees with a young Raab of my own, to leave him here like I was left here, a wonderful part of life and an adventure I’m still enjoying.  I’ll tell him about what the trees looked like when I went here, we’ll talk about how nice it is in Fort Collins, and then I’ll hug him and hold on as tight as my Dad held onto me. I’ll pray for him to know God and to be courageous like Joshua.

When I return home, there will naturally be a void.  Kind of like the void the trees left when we cut them down.  But he’ll return on occasion, far from forgotten, unlike the trees.  I dramatize everything.  Music people are the worst at doing that.  Now I’m caused to remember that those trees are still there as we speak, even if they’re looking a little grey like the sky the last couple days.  No one’s cut them down yet.  I don’t have a son, praise God in Heaven, and  I’m actually the one who returns home, on occasion, to see my lovely parents.  Hmmm….life is good for me.

The character of God is different than trees, because even the oldest, most majestic trees we can think of can be destroyed from the inside by little beetles or mold or whatever.  They eventually topple over and we send them in pieces to wherever dead trees go to become paper.  I assume all trees get turned into paper when they die.  God is different though, because we can climb in His branches, build a treehouse amongst the strong limbs, and live in peace and childlikeness in His great comforting love, without the fear of anything bringing us down.  No beetles, fire, or irresponsible teenage drivers could bring down this great tree.  We’re safe, we’re warm and cared about.  I am sure that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-39) We’re safe amongst these branches.

If  there does come a day when I leave a little Raab kid who maybe looks a little bit like me, at this great university or some other one, I’ll tell him about trees, and about the ones in the oval, and about how God isn’t anything like them.  Because His beauty is something unaffected by seasons or fires or anything people do or even the way people see Him.  He is Himself and He’s unspeakably brilliant and we don’t understand Him and that’s why it’s entirely appropriate to worship Him with every second, every moment, and every single thought.  That’s the God I serve.  THAT is my soon coming King.  If you’re looking for me, I’m up in His branches, holding on as tightly as He held onto me.

August Christmas Lights.

Leaving the Christmas lights up year round provides an ongoing illusion of cheer and seasonal togetherness. I like the way that feels. As if tomorrow morning we’ll all come down the stairs in our pajamas to a glowing room full of things our parents bought for us without any expectation of repayment. But its August the 7th, and my parents live in a different town now. Maybe they would like the lights if they visited for some reason, but came at night so the braided green wires didn’t just look tacky draped around the room.

I dont ever want to miss a day with God. I always think of it. See our relationship is something precious and bright, and it isn’t an illusion of joy like Christmas lights in summer.

Once a day here at my job in college, at a $7-a-plate restaurant across an intersection from the University, the sun suddenly suspends itself right over the awning for a while and shoots through the window for about ten minutes in brilliant orange. Before it disappears behind the building across the street, it colors the whole restaurant and illuminates every dust particle on its way across the dining room and into my squinty eyes. When I had glasses, if they weren’t really clean when that time of day came around, all the fingerprints and scratches would come out in the direct sunlight. I would usually just take them off at this point.

He is more like that light to me. Whenever he comes around I am blinded and mesmerized by him. See he could become just something I come home to, something I’m not shocked to see like the summer Christmas lights in my living room that lost thier novelty in the spring. I need to keep making the most of every moment I have with him, and not grow into grown-up complacency. For he is a very constant friend to me and a failproof companion I cannot see but know very well as my rock and salvation.

That resturant will be gone someday, but as long as God holds back his wrath on the Earth, the sun will return to that place every evening, whether veiled by clouds or not. I want to see him like that everyday, blaring into my dark, wicked life with his brilliant light, making me cover my face and eyes in shame and unspeakable joy to see that I’m not half as bad as he is good!

I pray all the time that he will brightly blind the eyes of my generation in the same way so they can be as overwhelmed with his glory and goodness as I am.

Re: Love like old people

I love old people who love kids.  Some old folks just don’t care for kids and I don’t blame them, but the elderly who like kids, I really like.  I remember being a kid, like maybe nine.  I was at a church garage sale with my mother, outside in front of the building our church shared with the post office in our small town.  I forget the woman’s name now, but she was always so nice to my sisters and I.  She had made some sort of beginner embroider kit items for the garage sale, apparently not understanding that you get rid of old things you don’t want at garage sales.  She had instead created some things for the sale, and I found myself at her table.  I picked up a little blue and white standalone pocket thing she had made, matching cross snugly inside its fold.  There was a typewriter-written poem on white paper stuffed behind the cross in the pocket.  I thought the thing was fascinating, not even reading the poem till I got home.  When I picked it up and asked her how much it cost, I saw something move behind her eyes.  She put a soft hand on my back and told me sweetly that I could just have it.  She then bent over and pulled out a plastic bag, like the kind you get at the grocery store when you don’t ask for paper.  She began to put a number of other things in the bag, telling me they were all things I needed.  She gave me a few things to give to my mother.  I didn’t say very much, because although it didn’t register in my eight or nine year-old brain, I was humbled and almost embarrassed, feeling guilty that this person I didn’t really know was giving me all these little Christian keepsakes and treasures she made that now I’ve lost a long time ago.  There was a very pleasant, warm feeling on my back and shoulders, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  It was like goose-bumps and butterflies in my chest.  I was moved inside at her kindness. I was like ten.  Throughout my life, I’ve gotten that same feeling from other older people when they’ve shown me unusual kindness.  Another example is Alma Suhonnen, a woman my mother used to pray with a lot. Alma passed away a few years ago now.  This lady was so sweet and so kind.  She sang in the worship team my parents led at a church in Parker, CO.  Her husband Bill played saxophone in the band, and their son Mark went on to be a professional drummer.  Playing all kinds of music in all kinds of countries.  He influenced me to play drums when I was maybe twelve, and I still communicate with the man on rare occasion.  Last I knew he was in Korea or something playing his electronica for tens of thousands of Koreans.  Life is strange.  His mother though, always gave me that same warm feeling.  She would pray for me and lay hands on me with my mother when I was sick or bothered.  I think it was her that my mom prayed with over my stomach when I had swallowed a penny at age four and was in need of surgery to avoid an ensuing hole in my stomach lining around the stuck penny.  The first miracle my mom ever felt was the penny moving out of the lining of my stomach and safely into my system, right there in that room.  She says she felt the penny move.  Now and then when I’m digging through storage back home looking for something, I’ll stumble upon a manilla envelope with the x-rays of my small body, the penny a bright reflective hole in the picture.  I think about it and the day I painfully passed the penny out of my system, never to eat money again.  God’s miracles are the basis of my life.  There’s another good, more memorable example of old people that make me feel that warm sticky cared-about feeling. I met a girl at youth group senior year of high school named Courtney Carrington.  She had a hell of a past, with family problems, health problems, the whole works.  I should have not hung out with this girl as much as I did.  I think she liked me more than I liked her and I must have hurt her.  I had known her for a number of months when I left for college, moving to the town where I still live.  I didn’t have a car for my first year of college.  I had a trashy bike and a good pair of shoes.  Those got me faithfully around campus, but I had to call on my friends for rides around town and rides back home an hour and a half away, South of the school.  One weekend, as Courtney was trying out schools, her, her mother, and her two sisters all came up North to visit my school.  We spent some time together, I showed her the campus, the dorm I lived in, the IHOP nearby, and the Village Inn a few minutes away down the main road in the town.  I decided as they were leaving that I needed to go home that weekend, so I bummed a ride down with them, sharing the back seat with two little Carrington girls as their big sister drove, sitting next to mom upfront.  We listened through every CD I ever burned for Courtney on the way down.  We stopped by the house they were staying in and I had the pleasure of meeting Courtney’s grandfather, Kirt Gandy.  Him and I connected over the fact that we both enjoyed cigars.  I don’t smoke much anymore, but I had fun then sitting on the back porch conversing with him about it as Courtney got ready inside to take me the rest of the way home.  Apparently she had to change clothes to do that.
About the time she emerged and was ready to leave, I had been ushered into his library and was seeing his collection of books.  The man is a Bible scholar.  He has a degree of some sort that he exhausted before he retired and he also has whatever sort of credentials you get after spending enough time at seminary.  Anyway in his long life that I really know nothing else about he developed this library.  That day as Courtney waited in the living room for me, he showed me book after book I needed if I was every going to study the Bible seriously.  The whole time as he poured out his heart to me regarding the depth and character of the word of God, I was covered in those same goose-bumps I had as a kid at the church garage sale, and felt that same warmth I felt when Alma Suhonnen would pray over me with my mother.  I can’t get enough of that distinctive feeling.  Later that year a box of books showed up with Courtney one day when she came over to see me at our old house in Parker.  Her grandfather had put together a small library to “get me started”, as he wrote on the first page of the blank journal that came with the collection of books, the journal he intended me to fill with clever scholarly notes like the notes he made all over every book he had given me to help me better understand them.  It was the most meaningful gift I had probably every received up to that point, bar my first drum set and guitar, not that I realized it then.  I remember sitting on the floor of my room in the basement later that night after Courtney had driven her mom’s car back to Aurora.  I looked through this box of books, lots of them still brand new, purchased by this guy just for me, and got that same feeling of warmth and unspeakable joy.  He had included a little broken book rack, three or four new versions of the bible I didn’t have, a few books on worship and worship music since he knew that’s what I did, and also a book called “How To Read the Bible for All It’s Worth”.  As we speak, I’m halfway through reading this book and it has already changed the way I read God’s word.  I’ve read a lot of the books from that box, I’m pleased to say, and one of those bibles is now my everyday reader.  The collection is now nicely arranged on my bookcase on the shelf under the fantastic array of worthless math and science textbooks I hope to never use again.  Every time I open one of those books and read through it, I get that feeling again as I stumble across something he’s underlined for me or notes he’s personally made in the margins.  I get the feeling of someone caring for me deeply and genuinely in a way I didn’t earn and don’t deserve.  Kirt Gandy must have thought I was marrying his granddaughter for the time he put into the gift he gave me.  I came back over to the house he lives in a few weeks later with a long thank-you note and him and I talked for a while.

I don’t know if everyone has that same sensation when they encounter selfless love like that.  I’ve felt it at a number of random times throughout my days, strangely always from older folks, but all those times are still so memorable.  Thinking of it now I get that feeling of warmth and closeness, even here alone on my couch tonight.  It’s my favorite feeling in the world.

I think the woman of God I marry someday will make me feel this same way.  The lucky pattern God has established in my life is called undeserved blessing and unmerited favor.  I have lots of things I don’t deserve and lots of meaningful, personal things he’s given me or done for me that were not things I asked for but have greatly improved my life.  Good room mates, for example.  A car.  Good musical instruments.  A phenomenal family and extended family.  A worship leader position amongst people my age.  Just to name a few in no particular order.  I think God will appoint for me a woman who is like these things.  A wonder, a person to make me warm and happier.  She’s sweet and sincere, uplifting and gentle.  I think she, by being a gift I don’t deserve like a box of books or a heartfelt gift from an old church lady, will give me that deep and warming feeling.  When she hugs me as I come home from work, I’ll have that pleasant prickly goose-bump sensation as a sign that not only am I with the right person, but that God is himself a giver of undeserved and marvelous gifts.  From his Son’s death in place of mine, to a lifelong companion someday so that I might not go through life alone, God’s generous character is evident in the lives he’s crafted for us.  I like how I get a warm feeling when people reflect God in this way.

Something about giving.

Saturday was ridiculous. And wonderful.  I was in a parade.  I was on a float in a parade.  I was playing drums on a float with my old worship band in a giant Mexican Jesus parade.  It was a big all-day affair and I’m still recovering, but it was a great experience.  ”Marcha de Gloria!”  Something like 20,000 people and three hours of parading through barricaded streets.  Playing Bluetree’s “God of this City” and hearing it bounce off the buildings was remarkable.  Most unreasonable worship gig ever.

 

Later that evening, still covered in the grime of downtown Denver and my own lingering drummer stank, I found myself at a nice Italian restaurant with my grandparents and my cousin from out-of-town, Katie.  We talked quite a bit, and the food was great.  So good to see Katie!  She’s all over Africa and getting her Master’s and stuff; I envy her ambition.  My grandfather, whom we all lovingly refer to as “Howie”, insisted on me giving him a ride back to his house after dinner, which I gladly agreed to do.  On the way he asked me to pull into a gas station because my fuel gauge was characteristically on zero, so he wanted to fill me up.  Have patience with me as I tell this story.  This is worth hearing.

 

A good preface to all of this would be that I am awful with getting gifts.  I cannot stand to be given something I do not deserve at someone else’s expense, especially when it is a sacrifice for them.  The gas pump asks for Howie’s ZIP code, and twice it doesn’t accept his entry, so we go inside the station.  Howie is long retired, and although the expenses of life have increased dramatically, his income has stayed the same for years.  To fill up my car is not a cheap thing for him, and I saw it as a sacrifice he really didn’t need to make for me, even if I honestly needed it in order to get home.  So as we walk into the station I’m feeling totally guilty.  I’m being awkward with my words, awkward with getting the door for the poor man, and awkwardly analyzing the situation in my spirit, fueling a fire of guilt.  They make us pre-pay, and Howie tells the nice woman of similar age to put $50 on the card and give him the change.  Her and I both know that $50 isn’t nearly enough to fill my very-empty gas tank, but we both roll with it.  I go out to my car and begin to fuel as Howie makes the woman inside smile and laugh with his genuine joy-of-the-Lord sense of humor.  $50 comes and goes, and my tank is about 4 gallons short.  I go inside and Howie’s got two packs of Hostess Zingers picked out for me for the ride home.  They were to be bought with the change from the $50 he put on his credit card.  I regretfully tell him that there’s no change, he brushes it off and pulls a $20 from his billfold to pay for the Zingers.  We say goodbye to the gas station lady and walk to my car.  On the way he gives me the Zingers, and the change from the $20 he broke to buy them.  I keep saying things like “No, I can’t take it!”, and “You do too much for me How…”, but he doesn’t understand that I’m really bothered by his giving.  Just that week his wife had sent me a $100 check because she “Knew I needed it”, which was entirely true, but had been bugging me all week.  Now this.  These people do not have a lot of money.  We get back to his house and I hug everyone and thank them for dinner before I head off to Fort Collins.

 

So a few minutes later I’m on C 470 with a big rock of guilt in my stomach, talking out loud to myself about how I’m supposed to be taking care of them and whatnot, being angry and stressed because of their sacrificial kindness, when it hits me.  God’s gift of his son to us was so similarly sacrificial, and made the way for God to bless me and favor me like he does.  God couldn’t be so good to me if he hadn’t given up Jesus for me.  It cost him so, so much, but I was worth that to him.  He handed me the Zingers and the change.  I still felt guilty, but now it was because Jesus had died at my hands more or less, so I could be so happy and blessed.  It made sense.  The guilt turned into a healthier reverence, and an understanding thankfulness that continued through my day.  I am amazed by this God I serve.  He’s like my dear old Grandpa Howie, slow to anger and rich in love, abounding with blessings for me.  Even when my undeservedness is painfully obvious he chooses to give me every good thing.

 

On the way home I stopped by Sean and Josh’s for some chicken and some porch time, we all talked and it was great. Good to see those guys.  Then when in Denver on the way back up to the Fort, my sister called and said that everyone from Marcha De Gloria (she had co-led one of the stationary bands in city park with our friend Peter Rodriguez from The Sentinel Event) was eating at Bennegan’s off Colorado Blvd.  I pulled off the highway a block and joined the happy loud group for an hour or so as they passed around a handy cam with footage of the day’s musical gloria.  We laughed and talked I finished off Becky’s chicken salad, my third chicken meal of the day.  Tyler Goerzen was there, and we got a bit more caught up about his new girlfriend and his new church in L.A. where he goes to Bible college.  I love my friends.  They are my family.

 

I have every good thing.  I have blessings uncountable.  I have a semi-full tank of gas and a freezer full of ice cream and corn dogs to live on.  I have a pretty Mac desktop that’s about to be shut off for the night.  I have a circle of friends that edifies my spirit.  I have musical gigs the next three nights.  My life is rich and blessed, because Jesus gave me everything in heaven and on Earth when he gave up everything in heaven and on Earth.  I doesn’t make sense to me, but I humbly take hold of it:)

He is Jealous for Me.

Tonight we had a worship service in my town, Fort Complacent. We called it “The Vespers Service”, and I’m still not sure what a Vesper is (maybe someone can enlighten me?).  The night was really fun.  Our worship leader’s dad, Grant Pahlau, has been playing guitar for probably like 30 years.  At some point in his career as a guitarist, he came into ownership of this amazing 1965 Fender Mustang.  A really cool and unique sounding guitar (check out the band Mew to hear one).  So basically he let me play it, and I really loved it.  There were a lot of times where I couldn’t figure out how to switch the pickups to get a sound I wanted, but there were moments where the guitar’s character just jumped out all over the place.  So fun.

Another interesting part of the night was when we did “He Loves Us”.  For the first time in my history I got to lead a song for college kids, and I feel like this was a really good song to get started with.  I pulled this song off of Sean’s iDisk a few months ago and it’s been in my head since, redefining the way I think about God’s love for me.  We did an easy simple brushes-violin-acoustic-JD’s slide/delay/nonsense version of the song that went really well, and a LOT of people responded to it, just as I had prayed for.  I got a few warm compliments on my singing and leading, and left feeling really warm and loved.  Not just by Fo Co friends either, I really really know that I am loved by Almighty God, and that is irrefutable evidence to his extravagant affections for me.  Get some.

After the song was done and the atmosphere was unusually saturated with worship, I felt as though I had some kind of wonderful chemical in my blood making me feel amazing.  I haven’t kissed a girl yet, but I imagine that this feeling was better…because girls get jealous and it stops being fun.  I know for sure that HE is jealous for me, and that feels way different.