The school year started off pretty cold. I think this is the most snow I have ever had to deal with. I do not really care for snow. And then just when we thought that maybe spring was coming and winter was over, that stupid groundhog had to see its shadow and the snow came pounding down again.
Not everything has been so sad though. This year has been awesome even with all the snow.
This year I am still on a worship team at Moody and have had a few more opportunities this semester. A few weeks ago our leader/lead singer got sick and put me in charge of leading the team. This was both fun and terrifying. We also had to opportunity, as a team, to do a two hour musical worship service in a local church.
Something that I have been learning in all of this is that God is funny. Not in a disrespectful way, but what I mean is that I do not always need to be so serious when thinking and talking about Him. Sometimes I feel like I can have fun, but as soon as we start talking about God: no more fun, be serious, do not enjoy this. While we are to have a healthy fear of God, we are also to enjoy Him and all that He has done for us. He has given us so much to be thankful for and joyful about. Why can't we show that in how we worship and talk about Him?
"Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth;
break forth into joyous song and sing praises!
Sing praises to the LORD with the lyre,
with the lyre and the sound of melody!
With trumpets and the sound of the horn
make a joyful noise before the King, the LORD!"
[Psalm 98:4-6]
But after a long run of winter, spring may just be coming soon. As I sat in class today with the sun warming my back, I wrote flowery words to describe how I was feeling: "I love to gaze out the window and see the blue sky and flowers starting to push up through the still frozen earth. While the rest of the world lies dead, these small green..." I was distracted after these words so who knows where I was going to go with that thought.
Lately my classes have been really influencing my everyday life. My favorite class right now is Intercultural Communication. This class uses reading, lectures, discussions, guest speakers, field trips, and projects to teach us how to minister cross culturally. For a team project that I am a part of, we are looking at how to reach minority groups in our our community. Our group is choosing to research Ukrainian people in Spokane. The first step in this was to go to a Russian speaking church. The church that I usually attend Sundays also has a sister Russian service at 2pm. We connected with a few people and now we will be hopefully meeting with them and attending this sister church more often. I am very excited about this opportunity!
Another project for that class was to attend a Talk Time meeting. These are times for international students to meet with American students to practice their English. This week there were about 50 Japanese girls in Spokane to learn English. They were all super sweet and I wanted to take them all home with me. We were celebrating an early St. Patrick's day so I got to try and explain, in very simple words, what we were celebrating. it was hard to even explain seemingly simple concepts such as luck
Thank you for your prayers. God is doing amazing work.
Tschuss!
