please pray for the return of my laptop! more details later...

to Him who is able to do more than we can ask or imagine!

Very excited about:

*Ten Thousand Villages free trade store that recently opened in Pasadena. Today was the opening day and I just happen to stop by. It was great. There was a family playing African music and they actually happened to be Christian. When I walked in they were singing, "Lord, I want to serve you". Apparently, they are the founders of a small non-profit dedicated to issues in Africa.

Check it out! It's on Lake across from Borders.

*The Pasadena House of Prayer! So exciting... They have corporate prayer from 8pm to 10pm weekly (except Thursday, Sat and Sun.) and anybody can just stop by. Lovin it. It's very close to the Lake and Washington Blvd. intersection. And you can also make an appointment to have a couple people pray over you for an hour.

*Super quote of the month, maybe even super quote of the year!

suburban post-modernist

Calvin and Hobbes seriously makes me laugh everyday (I read a comic strip a day)

You know you need that in this crazy world....

i'm back from catalina! what a fun little island! pics to come....

Holy smokes! Happy 5th of July...

I awoke in the middle of the night with a strange noncommittal cough and while stumbling around my room looking for some water I noticed an unusual fog outside my window. Later at breakfast I overheard someone say the low mist wasn't fog but left over smoke from all the fireworks.

You see I live at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains and all the smog, smoke, whatever gets stuck here in the foothills. Lovely. But despite this, so far I really like living in Pasadena.

Anyway, what I was really going to say was does anybody (who lives in LA) have a sleeping bag and/or sleeping mat I could borrow? I'm going camping with my sister from July 10th to the 13th, so it would be great if I could borrow that stuff before then.

check out kimyung's new blossoming business online!

http://www.originaletees.com/

zee old school homies at TM

here they are. dear friends i hadn't seen for almost ten years. notice that they've each grown a posse during the interim between our meetings.

aren't they beautiful...

moriah and elvis

elvis and i in nashville

elvis, mo and i had a great time in nashville. it was amazing to be in nashville with mo. first of all, mo is a great musician and is in-the-know when in comes to the blue grass scene in nashville.

and most importantly it was fun and meaningful to reunite after not seeing each other for ten years!! i still can't believe that it had been that long.

me and momma

yes, my cross country trip was more than just endless desert. i saw many wonderful people. this is sandy's baby shower in b-more.

i was able to see a lot of the people i affectionately call my "wedding friends" at sandy's shower. these are gals and guys that i met at sandy's wedding. i've uniquely bonded with these people (i think it's mutual :-) so it was fun to see them again.

i also stayed with my dear friend al in dallas. it's always fun to hang with her fam (silly us-we didn't take any pics!).

June graduates!

congrats to my sister who graduated with her MA in marriage and family therapy this month.

desert danger zone

this is the rest area that i thankfully stopped to check my tires at before i entered hours of uninhabited desert. i had two flats and waited for hours in my car for AAA. they never came and eventually the sheriff helped me get to a hotel. the nearest town was wicket.

i became fascinated with these tiny desert highway towns that scrape out most of their living by servicing travelers passing through. i would look around at what seemed like a couple deserted dried out buildings and wonder why people even stay there.

when i chatted with the guys that were changing my tires, i felt at times that we could barely understand each other. i couldn't understand their mumbled country dialect and they probably couldn't understand my mumbley city dialect. i felt more like a rich city girl at that time than i ever have in the States. i wanted them to know that i wasn't that type but i suppose to them i was no matter what i thought otherwise.

a week after i got home from my trip cross country, i watched the animated film "cars" with my sis's fam. it was like watching an animated expression of the adventure i had just been through and it actually touched on many of the issues i had been reflecting on regarding "progress" and rural communities.

edit: the title of this post doesn't mean anything. it's just the silly title i gave this pic and i accidentally let it carry through to blogger.

oil aliens

i was strangely mesmerized by my slowly teetering oil sucking companions that were along my road side for hours in west texas.

random freak storms in the desert

this was also somewhere in the desert of west texas or arizona. it was super hot so the random rain showers were a surprise.

welcome to nowhere

driving through the desert of west texas or maybe it was arizona at that point. notice the "desert trees". it was my first time seeing cactus like that. i felt like i was in a road runner cartoon. :-)

I'm in Tennessee now. It was a bit of a culture shock when I went into a gas station on the way here and everybody was yes, mam-ing me and calling me honey with a slow southern drawl. I honestly felt like I was in a movie.

Well, I'm off to explore Nashville with my friend that knows all the blue-grass music spots.

Hey, ya' all...

That's right-I'm finished and once again I'm packing up. I'm getting ready to drive out to B-more for Sandy's baby shower this Saturday. Tomorrow is my last day in Brattleboro, VT. It's likely I won't be back for a good couple years. (I've got to come back eventually to present my research.)

There's so much I want to say and so many emotions, thoughts bubbling around. But I guess to summarize it all I could say I'm walking away broken, you could even call it a bit shaken. But in a good victorious way. Because I've learned a little more about dying to me and instead living in Him.

I'm thankful.

For God, who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.
2 Cor. 4: 5-11

the cutest pic!

the cutest pic! .

jewliet a couple years ago...isn't this the best pic! june gets all the credit for this picture...

two more days of SIT life. can you believe that? i can't. wish i could contemplate it for hours but instead I'm trying to write a paper on the Turkish financial crisis. what was i thinking?

i'm visualizing finishing this paper...yes, I see it in my mind's eye...it is oh so easy. ommmmmm.....

and this book's title made me snigger..... (is that a word? :-)

A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I Am a Missional, Evangelical, Post/Protestant, Liberal/Conservative, Mystical/Poetic, Biblical, Charismatic/Contemplative, Fundamentalist/Calvinist, Anabaptist/Anglican, Methodist, Catholic, Green, Incarnational, Depressed-yet-Hopeful, Emergent, Unfinished CHRISTIAN

Yup. It's time. I'm in the process of finishing my last paper and I'm wondering if I'm going to pull it off. Why is the last one always the hardest? It's like I'm just not taking it seriously enough...I need to get panicked so I'll actually get my butt in gear. Did I mention this is due Friday?!