I had an '83 Trans Am, and I liked to drive around in it singing Def Leppard's 'Pour Some Sugar on Meh'. Oh my word. I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

I'm in a dorm at seminary, but instead of living in the grad student dorms, I'm part of a discipleship & spiritual formation program that has a group of seminary women living in a suite in an undergrad women's dorm. So there's a lot of childish graffiti carved onto the ceiling of my room, and amidst it is the verse Psalm 115:1 - not the whole verse, just "Psalm 115:1". Except whoever carved it replaced the "P" of Psalm with a cross. I've been trying to make sense of it for the last two years.

especially on a nice warn, humid day

Haha! This used to happen to my old pastor all the time! He WAS the chain reaction starter. I mean, he was a really great guy, and he preached a mean message and all, but wow, once he got going with the tickle...

Hey, I'M the ex-stripper who sings at church! I don't think anybody's ever complained that I'm not wearing enough clothing, though. Not that I know of anyway. Hmmm, what're they not telling me...

Oh, that Daylight Savings Time thing, that gets 'em every time! It's really fun to be on the worship team and watch that one unfold. We're always there early, so we get to witness the DST - is it real, or is it rapture? confusion every year.

Just this past weekend, three friends and I drove down to Florida from Chicago to be with another friend whose father had died suddenly and tragically. We hopped in a car on Saturday morning, were there by Sunday, attended the funeral Monday morning, and were right back in the car and on the way back to Chicago by noon on Monday. It was probably one of the hardest weekends I've ever been through. Sometimes it was hard to see where God was in it all. We got maybe 12-16 hours of sleep total throughout the whole thing. The friend who'd lost her father was in shock, and we came to realize that if we hadn't come for her, she would have had no peers there to bear her up. We watched her ride a rollercoaster of emotions from denial to anger to a final breaking down into despair at her loss. The four of us who drove down struggled, too, because we're human and fallen. We struggled with our lack of sleep, with our own relational issues - after being together in a car for 50 hours, who wouldn't - with our own grief as we mourned with our friend, and with the simple fact that it is sin and the fallenness of man that causes such tragedies to take place.

And yet there was a moment in the midst of it all when our friend Jen, whose father had just died, took us to the beach. We played in the water and laid on the sand. We picked up cocoa nuts and shells and coral on the shore and walked down the coast line. At the end of it all, she played Phil Wickham's "You're Beautiful" for me, and we watched the sunset over the beach at Boca Raton, and it was perhaps one of the most beautiful and poignant moments I'd ever experienced. I was there with four people I loved perhaps more than anything else in this world, worshipping God, experiencing the fullness of all the emotions that He has created me to feel - joy, sadness, love, pain, loss - and it was in the midst of this tragic situation that He was bringing it to bear. There was nothing wrong with playing in the ocean in the midst of our heartache. it was the gift of God. We rejoiced because God had brought us together for our friend, had given us another day together, had made us rich in each other.

I think this is a little like prosperity. Sometimes we feel like it's not right to have nice things because we should only suffer for Christ, should only be sacrificing what we have so that others will see how much we care for Him or for others. I think it is good to give, and it is good to give things up for the sake of others, but we shouldn't suffer needlessly just to make a point. Jesus already made that point for us, and didn't He already suffer enough?

Hey, I'm just cool enough to admit that today is the first day I've ever seen any of those there vids mentioned by Jon in his post. Thanks for bringing me into the now... er... then...

If you do go with the dancing sign thing, make sure you get some photos. Praying for you today that you won't have to labor too hard at getting that house off the market!

I'm a full time graduate student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (that's seminary) working on two master's degrees, one in Biblical and Near Eastern Archaeology and Semitic Languages and the other in New Testament Studies, so I'm pretty much sucking off of financial aid (a combination of scholarships, grants, and loans) for a "living" right now. I live in Deerfield, Illinois, near Chicago.