Encouragement

I have to admit, it's pretty cool how God uses people that you haven't talked to in a long time (years from some) to just encourage me about going to Ghana. I haven't gotten any money yet, but I'm excited already. yeah God's pretty much the most amazing thing since...well, ever.

sad

So, it makes me sad when people that are close to me, like family, start talking about other races in a negative way.....it makes me sad to hear blanket statements applied to whole racial groups and to hear the "n word" coming out of certain people's mouths....makes me sad that some (a lot probably) Americans think that all middle easterners are terrorist...and they also think for some reason that those terrorists are also in Africa...(guess they don't know geography)..makes me sad that I have family members that really don't want me to go to Africa...to the point that they "jokingly" talk about trying to mess up my plan to go....yeah, not gonna stop me though.....in fact, it kind of makes me want to go even more, so that I can come back totally fired up and show them WHY people need to go.

I'm in the process of getting together addresses for my support letters to go back to Ghana. I'm trying to decide if I should send letters to churches or people that didn't support me last time. I kind of figure that I should send them, I mean, who knows the reason for not supporting me the first time. Maybe there were financial reasons at the time, maybe they didn't feel passionate about the cause I don't know. Basically, I think that I should send out as many letters as possible. I've printed 50 up for now, I'm sure I will print more. I keep thinking, "oh, if I send out 100 letters and everyone donates $70 then I'm there!" but I know that isn't reasonable. It just doesn't work that way. I'm getting kind of excited/scared about the money. I'm scared that it will take a really long time to raise $7K, but I'm excited to see how fast God could send it in. I guess either way, the money will come in however God wants it to come in.

strange findings

So, for the last few days I've been using this online program to sort of track what I eat. It's like an online food journal, but it calculates the nutritional info for you. Well, I put all my meals, snacks, water etc in, and for the last 3 days I've apparently eaten less than 800 calories a day. I have to fix that, I'm going to totally screw up my metabolism, if I haven't already.

I have to be AT work in 7 1/2 hours...yeah and I'm not really tired right now. that stinks.

I've been memorizing Philippians. I've got the first 11 verses down. It's not much, but it's a start. All the people I met in Africa put us to shame when it comes to scripture memory work. The little kids have chapters (yes CHAPTERS) of scripture committed to memory. It's important and I've been ignoring it all these years, other than at VBS when you get a prize for it. While I was in Ghana I just started thinking about it though, if I can memorize all these lines from movies (like LOTR) and all these songs, why not the Bible? So, yeah, I'm working on it now.

My head has started hurting at work the last 2 days in a row, I don't know if it's from lack of sleep or not eating enough, or stress....I guess I'll have to start taking better care of myself to find out.

I've been having trouble sleeping for the last week or two...I just can't seem to slow my brain down at night. I lay there in my bed and I can't just zone out, for lack of a better way to put it. I think I'm letting some of the stresses of daily life combined with trying to get organized so I can go to Africa get me all worked up. I dunno.
I'm going to try to go to sleep now.

don't look back

I gave out some of my support letters at church this morning. I guess it's real now, no looking back. I did realize after getting home from church that I didn't put any info in the letter about getting money to me, should anyone decide to donate. I suppose the people I go to church with can probably just give it to me when they see me. But now I need to make a little thing to put in the envelope with my address etc on it. I have so many emotions about going to Africa. I can't figure out if I'm happy, excited, scared, apprehensive, crazy. Probably at least a little bit of all of them. This morning we talked about "persecution and suffering among Christians." It made me a little bit sad, because we as American Christians think we're being persecuted when the media paints a picture of Christians as being naive and having blind faith. Or maybe we think that OUR suffering is more of a psychological thing, like, we are really suffering when someone thinks negatively about us or talks badly about us. So then we had a discussion of how mental/psychological persecution might be harder to recover from than physical persecution. While I agree that there are lots of ways to be persecuted psychologically and mentally, I really don't think most Americans have ANY idea of what real suffering is. Over in India right now, thousands of people, quite a few of whom are Christians, are having to HIDE IN THE JUNGLE!!, because Hindu extremists have been burning homes and churches to the ground trying to kill them. How's that for physical AND mental persecution. We as Americans don't have to worry that when we go to sleep at night some anti-Christian group is going to torch our house with us in it. It just makes me sad that we take our puny little "persecutions" and try to make them as bad as what the rest of the world is going through. This economic "crisis" we're going through right now, to me it's like, yeah welcome to how the rest of the world lives. Only even when we're in an economic downturn, we still are better off than almost the whole rest of the world. I guess that's enough ranting for now.

Confessions of a tortured youth

I'm about to tell you something, that I've never told anyone, other than family. I HATE my weight. Hate is a strong word you might say....that's very true, but if you had been made fun of everyday for years and years or if you had ever been so embarrassed that it totally ruined your entire week. Maybe then you'd hate it too. If you knew what it was like to wake up every day and wish that you could just go away....all because some kids you go to school with think it's SO fun to humiliate you, then maybe you'd hate your body too. I have been so embarrassed by my weight over the years, from such a young age, I don't know if I can ever be "normal" it may not be an option for me any more. For some reason, tonight it's getting to me. I cannot TAKE THIS anymore. I've been trying to lose weight for as long as I can remember. When I was little, mom would try to convince me how "fun" Sweating to the Oldies was, but she never made me do it for more than a few minutes. No one ever made me eat right or exercise. It sounds like I'm blaming my parents for this...and I guess that I sometimes do blame them. Someone should have stepped up and shown me the right way to eat and exercise, but it's not like my family members are all healthy weights either. So here it is. I'm an adult, and if I truly want to get healthy, I have to do it myself. And no you don't "know how I feel", you probably never will. I don't know anyone, personally, that has been fat for nearly their entire life. For that matter, I know very very few people that have ever even been significantly overweight. I don't want your sympathy, I don't want you to feel bad for me. I just want to get this off my chest. I'm starting it up right now. I guess that's enough ranting for now.