Apartment Life

Maybe I didn’t get the memo but since when is it ok for you to summon your friends and your neighbors by beeping at them. It would be one thing if I lived in the woods and my house was surrounded by a moat full of flesh eating piranhas and the only way for me to lower the drawbridge was for you to beep. Not that anybody is coming for me anyway but I do find it annoying when people are always laying on their horns at all hours, shouldn’t there be some book of etiquette for apartment living. I should write one. 1. It is not polite for your friends and family to come over and instead of knocking they choose to beep the horn of their car from the parking lot which happens to be outside my window. You deserve more respect than that, I deserve more respect than that, tell em to cut it out. Yeah, yeah I know if you have a 1. You are supposed to have a 2. but I don’t. maybe the second should be. Don’t splash people with puddles when they are trying to take pictures of the bubbles on the surface of the puddle, that happened today after a good hard rain, luckily I turned in time to protect my camera, I suppose if I had been feeling better I would have been playing out in the rain rather than just watching it. It was a good playing rain. I should also put in my apartment etiquette book something about car alarms, yes I know they are necessary sometimes, but they sure are annoying when they go off at 1:30am and probably because some cat walked by. I dunno, I guess I will work on the other rules for my book, I’ll keep updating it.

yay for randomness

A guy tried to live in walmart for his entire spring break, how cool is that!! He’s my hero, I wonder if he is single? I read a book when I was in 4th or 5th grade where these two kids lived in a museum; I totally wanted to do that.
A duck billed platypus has 800 hairs per square millimeter, more than a polar bear or a river otter, I couldn’t find the hair density of a beaver, but I imagine its gotta be close. The platypus is the animal shown on the Australian 5 cent piece, they have more hemoglobin in their blood than any other mammal and they can slow their heartbeats down to less than a beat a minute. They are also the only venomous animal, but no worries all you platypus owners its only the mails during mating that are venomous—apparently—WHO KNEW?
It’s easier than you think to lose 100 bucks in dimes, but no worries I found them.
The funniest thing just happened. I was sitting down in my chair writing some blogs and I leaned back in my chair and it broke and I fell backwards and if hitting the wooden bedframe hadn’t hurt so much I might still be laughing. I have a bad habit with chairs—the base just broke off the top I don’t know why or how but its hilarious so now my desk chair is on the floor where I am sitting on it as I type.
(next day) I have a bruise the size of my face on my shoulder, it hurts real bad.

the absent minded becka

Lately I seem to be forgetting everything. I think I might actually forget my brain if it wasn’t securely surrounded by my skull. This weekend I thought I lost my cell phone—turns out I just left it at home. Saturday night I forgot to set my clock forward. So as I hopped out of the shower yesterday I got a phone call from a friend because I wasn’t at church yet. I lost my bible study questions and I forgot to charge my camera battery. I also forgot my bible study book. Last night I turned on my a/c and forgot to shut the window. Today I managed to leave my lunch on the table at home, so I decided to go pop in the pizza shop and get some lunch. When I got there I realized I had forgotten my wallet at work. To my benefit, I have a friend that works there and he made sure I got some food.
After I finish eating, I have to run by the bank on the corner to pay him back, I just don’t feel right getting something for nothing. That’s probably the greatest struggle with my salvation—essentially it’s something for nothing. Even when I think of my intellect—something I have always taken pride in. I suppose I got that for free too—and it’s something for so long I have taken for granted as if it was ever mine to control to begin with. I guess its all pride, even the idea of needing salvation to begin with, we must come to the reality that we are hopeless without Christ. We all want to think we have it all figured out and we don’t need “charity.” I am leery of the abuse of grace as well. If I was to go back expecting free lunch everyday—it would be a different story, I am not in need of a constant free lunch because I work hard and I have money to pay for it. But with out salvation all of our works are as filthy rags. We can never pay our own way. Grace is such an antithetical concept to the human mind; we are so trained to think in actions and consequences. You work hard you get money you pay for what you need. But grace is not for the lazy who won’t work; it’s for those that have come to realize that all their work is pointless without the shed blood of Christ covering their sins. The people that are the worst are the ones that need grace the most. If grace could be about deserving the favor then the less you deserve grace the more it makes sense that you need it. If grace is unmerited favor wouldn’t it make sense that the worse you are the less you deserve anything-- which is what makes grace so complete? So if I actually let go of my pride—which is the very thing that makes me a candidate for grace maybe there is room for Grace to work in me. But I keep tripping over this attitude that I am ok, or I am not as bad as______, or to the point of bringing down others in an attempt to make it look like I am good comparatively, even if I am better, it may not be a matter of being better—it may just be that I am less worse.
So as I sit here enjoying my free lunch I am reminded again of God’s grace—not only in the salvation I don’t deserve but in every aspect of my life. Even when we think we have what it takes, we realize grace is not even about what we deserve, it’s about God. And that’s all that really matters.

three weeks

I’ve gotten to know God a lot more in the last three weeks. About a month ago my friends mom came down to live with him, her first week down here she fell and broke her leg in 2 places. That was her welcome here. Those situations would be difficult for anyone, but especially for her; developmentally she’s lost somewhere along the way.
So the first week she was out of the hospital she was moved to a nursing care facility. I went to visit her the first week she was there-- In an attempt to somehow show the love of Christ. I wasn’t sure what to think at first and sometimes even now I am not really sure what to make of it. I can’t say that I immediately felt any love for her, I didn’t really know how to navigate such a situation, but I know that I should do it. The second visit came easier. Although I was worried it would be strangers staring at each other in awkward silence. I didn’t want to be there for the wrong reasons and I spent a lot of time praying that my motives would be correct. I didn’t want to go just to look good, or gain the respect of people, or because of a sense of duty, or even to gain more respect from my friend for doing this for his mom. I wanted it to be because I was bringing glory to God by showing love to someone that I didn’t even know. It wasn’t that they weren’t unlovable, I just didn’t know them. I knew as long as I remained distant I would also remain apathetic.
The second visit was better, not only was she in less pain but she was out and moving around a bit, so there were things to talk about, she shares similar tastes in music as I do, and music is always common ground for me with just about anyone. But something happened on the second visit, I got to see her interaction with other people, I saw a kind and generous spirit of a woman that I can only equate to an animal probably because there are very few humans that embody this—that is to say like a dog that you kick will still come back and lick your face and wag its tail. That was my first lesson--the lesson of truly loving your neighbor as yourself.
During that visit I was also privy to an intimate exchange between a mother and her son. She admitted there were nights when she would sit on his bed while he was sleeping and wish he was dead, the story started off as a “when you were young…” type of story so we thought that it was going to be a really good juicy embarrassing story about him. But it changed very quickly to a solemn time. She felt over 20 years of guilt from wishing her son was dead, the son who is her lifeline and her strength right now. Usually a conversation killer, but instead, someone suggested forgiveness. She leaned over to her son with his face in her hands and asked for forgiveness, with tears in her eyes. That’s probably a lot of information all in one day, to know that instead of a cute embarrassing story about your childhood that instead your mom wished you were dead, but in grace and great wisdom, I witnessed Gods power of reconciliation, as a mother and son held each other, both realizing the weight the fallen world puts on us, and rejoicing in the fact that the past is the past and there is forgiveness and healing.
Today was a special visit, because today was her birthday, I decided that I don’t have much to bring but I do have the ability to make stuff, so I made cupcakes, easy to make eat and share. I was amazed by how many people she knew, the people around her that she would give the world to if she could. There was a bit of the awkward silence today, but I don’t mind it as much as I used to. I stayed and hung out with her for several hours, people gravitate towards her room, she has a way of putting people at ease and making people laugh, some have to ability to raise their selves up and “rise above” everyone else, she has a way of raising others up, a gentle humbleness that I really can’t explain. When I went to leave she gave me a hug and told me she loved me, something I wasn’t really expecting at all, which was by the way my third lesson about God and his love. His love always comes first. We only love him because he loved us, and I hope in a sense that she loves me because she loves God in me, after all it is his love, not my own that I give.
The past few weeks I have seen a practical application of the things I have spent most of my lifetime studying—the hard to grasp concepts of God’s love and forgiveness. I went in thinking I was going to show the love of Christ to someone, and what happened was they ended up showing me.