Thankful List

-Getting to talk with Teretha for a good three hours; I am so incredibly thankful for her mentorship.
-Baking a cake for Anna and taking it over to her house.
-Quality time with my house and with Kevin and his friend Chris, who was in town from Los Angeles and is Director of Homeless Initiatives with United Way.
-Mom's trip back from Corona, California (she spent the week at a Korean retreat center).
-Having Rebecca and Mae over to study for our exam.
-Waking up at 5 am with an uncontrollable urge and desire to intercede for friends and family.
- Running in cooler weather.
-Strolling through the Logan Square Farmers' Market, loaf of bread in hand.
-Deep talks with my other Korean roommate, also named Grace.
-Getting an A on my first mother-baby exam. !!!

Thank you, Lord, for your grace and for your love.

You alone can move my heart, can touch my heart, can heal my heart.

You alone deserve all majesty, all glory, all honor and praise. 

Lord, today I thank you for giving good gifts to your children. For knowing my needs and for providing for them. I thank you for the gift of faith, that it propels me to continue to pray for my family and for this city and for the nations. I thank you that you are a God who loves intimately and knows intimately, and that loving you simply boils down to saying yes to you. I thank you that you are going to use my story to reach others and that you are going to use me to expand your Kingdom. I thank you that your perfect attributes cover my imperfect ones, and that you delight in me and rejoice over me. Truly, it is an honor to proclaim you as Lord of Lord and King of Kings. 

Towing Lessons

Lord, I need a fresh dose of your grace and mercy today. I'm tired, I'm grumpy, my car got towed (and it was totally my fault). I took an Uber to the lot to pay my dues and get my car and sat there annoyed that I got caught for parking illegally. Worst of all, I sat there honking at the towing truck to move so I could get out of the lot and then shamefully ignored his gaze as I drove past and proceeded to drive home.

What if I had just followed the rules and hadn't parked in the Jewel parking lot? I would still have $172.50 and wouldn't have been so crabby towards the man just doing his job. Rules are good, rules prevent events and situations like this from happening. This little instance is a pretty good reflection of my natural tendencies to say no to the rules and boundaries that the Lord calls me to live within. Every time I say 'no' to the Lord puts me out of alignment with his will and in the end, causes me more harm than good. Truly, not worth it. And yet, I need constant reminders that His will for my life is better than my own will.

So, Lord, help me to take this experience and learn from it. Help me to genuinely feel repentant not because I get caught in my sin, but rather for disobeying you. Help me to say yes to you in both public and private spaces and help me to simply trust that you know what is best for me. Forgive me for my attitude towards the man at the towing lot and for my proclivity to side-skirt or ignore rules in my life.

Broken Vessels

As a nursing student, one of the most consistent thoughts I have is how I represent Christ to my peers and friends from school. I think my biggest fear is that I will misrepresent Christ or inaccurately portray Him because of my anxiety and well, my other flaws that tend to surface every now and again. It's not that I want to come across as a perfect Christian - far be it. It's that people will see me and think that Christ is not for them. In all my associations with my non-Christian friends, my deep desire is that they would have Christ to lean on during the highs and lows that life will inevitably throw at them. It's that they would know that deep suffering can be experienced alongside a Savior who suffered likewise and that deep joy can be truly encountered with Christ. And that everything in-between becomes precious and sacred when experienced in the midst of a person who loves and is love.

A few days ago, I had a conversation with an acquaintance from school and he pointed out that he noticed that it seemed like I was doing much better and that it seemed like I was going through a rough patch earlier this year. True. And then he asked me if during that time, I was having a crisis of faith. Wait, what? My worst fears came true in that moment and with a sinking heart, thoughts like "Grace, people see you struggling and they don't want what you have. You are your worst enemy, and it shows." I quickly processed his question, and answered that on the contrary, it was my faith that acted as a buffer. I responded with those words, but my thoughts remained bouncing around in my head.

Discouragement. This is what I felt walking away from my conversation with my peer. And yet, I had a conversation with my roommate this morning where I talked to her about this conversation and she insightfully pointed out that when Christ walked on this earth, even he was misunderstood. Christ was and is the utmost perfect representative of God, and yet he was misunderstood. Wow. A lightbulb went off in my head and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I, on the other hand, am a flawed and broken representative of Christ - of course people will misunderstand me. This is a given. So what now?  I plan to press in to Him even more, with all of my messiness and brokenness and with a little more peace on my end. At the end of the day, my job is to simply love Christ and love others and let the Holy Spirit move in the hearts of people who don't have a personal relationship with Christ. The saving work is on His end, and I gladly relinquish image control and the Savior complex that has somehow insidiously crept into my working definition of what it means to be a Christian.

Thankful List

-Small group last night and hanging out with Matt, Jane, Manny, Kaitlyn, Eunjoo and Eunjoo's dog, Gavey (I've never met a dog with such a spunky personality ha ha).

-October issue of Tabletalk. This month's issue is on perfectionism and control and the articles I've read so far have been so intellectually and heart-stirring. Especially the articles, "The Illusion of Control" by Thomas Brewer and "God's Control and Our Responsibility" by Guy M. Richard. Highly highly recommend. Plus, it looks like there is a free three-month trial subscription period (which I just entered my info for).

More on Tabletalk here: https://www.ligonier.org/tabletalk/

-Rainy days when you order a medium latte and the barista accidentally makes a large one for you. Thank you, friendly barista.

-Last week, I made the New York Time's sea salt tahini dark chocolate rippled cookies to send some to my mom along with some coffee I got her from Colombia and WOW! NYT continues to impress me with their cookies recipes. I think this, along with Laura Bush's NYT cowboy cookies are my favorite cookie recipes.

-Officially done with my first week of classes! Today, we watched a video on labor and delivery in class and I started tearing up. The messy physicality of giving birth juxtaposed against the holy and sacred experience is one that I am so mesmerized by. I truly look forward to observing a live birth during clinical.

In all of these things - both simultaneously mundane and numinous - I feel the pleasure of God.

Garden Lessons

I picked a bouquet of flowers for you,
not that you needed them

Not that cut flowers could possibly add
more to your splendor and beauty

I picked a bouquet of flowers,
soon to passively surrender to gravitational forces

I picked these flowers from the garden,
exquisitely handcrafted by you

Perhaps I picked these flowers,
unbeknownst that they were quite possibly from you to me