Thaing up the school year

Almost a month ago my first year of seminary came to a close with a Thai ceremony.

According to the ex-missionary, current professor who shared the ceremony with us, in Thailand people take small strands of cotton string and tie them around the wrists of friends and loved ones.  As they do so, they say a blessing over the gift's receiver.  This ritual often accompanies a time of transition. To end our time together as classmates in "Religions and Culture" we took the last twenty minutes of class to share encouragement, blessings, and string with each other.

Traditionally, the strings are only worn for three days.  I have had mine on for three weeks.  I have kept them as a reminder.  I have kept them hoping to remember the feelings of that day.

As we went around the room and shared blessings one with another I found myself standing in one place waiting for others to come to me.  I didn't feel that I had anything to share with the others.  This has been a theme for me this semester.  This semester my sin and shame have been very close to my conscience.  And on this day I was feeling particularly unworthy.

There has been a second theme this semester.  This year God has repeatedly reminded me of my worth before him.  In chapels, academic reading, friends, counseling, and many more times this year the refrain God has played for me is that I have incredible worth and incredible value in his eyes.

The third stanza for this semester was my learning to stop and receive this love, this acceptance.  Sometimes it encourages me to action, other times I can barley take it all in.  I have saved bulletins, I have rehearsed conversations already spoken, I have tried to hold onto the feelings of acceptance that seems so fleeting.  So now I wear around my left wrist a reminder of the blessings spoke into my life on that day nearly a month ago.  I did return a blessing to others when I could find the words.  But mostly, I stood in the corner and tried to take it all in.  I tried to push back the tears in my eyes and the lump in my throat as I received the love God had for me that day.

Yet feelings are so very fleeting.  However, we are not called to feelings but to relationships.  I was reminded of this truth by reading this blog.  I have been trying to find ways to hold onto feelings and memories, rather than living in the now.  Living in relationship.  Living with my God.

This summer has been hard.  There is a lot of free time.  I find myself spending a lot of my free time on the pointless and selfish.  I find myself running from the man of God that I began to see myself as this semester.  It has been the boring, non-fulfilling life of one called to so much more.  What I need is to move from the "hard" life to the arduous one.  To move to a posture of working at the relationship, to give to it, to stay with it despite the fleeting feelings of the moment.






--Serving Him alongside all of you, just from further away
--Jesse Letourneau