10 Things You Didn't Want to Know

"... His banner over me is love" Song of Songs 2:4
One thing that really wrecks me about God's love is that its truly unconditional and sometimes its totally inappropriate and against the rules. I love that Jesus' favorite places to hang out are like porn shops, crack houses, and leaper colonies and His favorite thing to do is hang out with rapists, murderers, prostitutes and all the other people that we turn our noses up at. One of our young girls who used to sleep around and be a thief and an alcoholic told me yesterday about how even when she was drunk and had been stealing all day, before she went to sleep Jesus would come to her and sing her beautiful songs and laugh with her as she fell asleep. This is the Jesus I love. This Jesus is extremely compassionate, fiercely accepting, and millions of miles away from being a prude or fitting into any kind of box. He was made perfect for me, not the other way around. He's not afraid of my mess. He cleans up my messes and makes me clean. I don't have to clean myself up to come to Him. I come to Him messy and He cleanses me. Any good that people see in me is not my own, its actually all His. Any good that I do is not of myself, all my goodness comes from Him. My point is that without Jesus i'm really not all that special. In fact without Him i'm dead. Its Him that gives me life and makes me beautiful.

I am writing this post because over the past couple days I have been receiving many beautiful emails from very kind people that have made me feel so humbled, grateful, and loved telling me how much they appreciate the work I am doing and admire my love for Jesus etc. Most of these have been from people I don't know. Its been a hard week so I've really needed the encouragement. Thank you everyone, from the bottom of my heart :) At the same time, some of these emails have compelled me to write this post. I want to make sure that i'm always  extremely honest and transparent with you all. Most of the things you read on here are all happy and deep and spiritual because the point of this blog is to keep you updated on the amazing things God is doing through me here in Africa. I also use this blog to share the love of Jesus in hopes that as people read it they will feel His love through the words. But, that being said, I don't at all mean to give the impression that i'm some perfect cookie-cutter Christian angel girl who
does everything right and spends every waking hour praying and saving the world... i'm really not. I'm very far from that. I'm just a normal crazy 25 year old chick that's madly in love with Jesus. As I said earlier, apart from Him, i'm nothing special at all. So, just to normalize this blog a bit and make me less amazing and Him more amazing i've compiled a list of 10 things about myself that I normally don't put on this blog. These are the things I normally leave out because they aren't cool or exciting or amazing or deep. They are just normal things, and imperfect things and potentially offensive things. But that's me: normal, imperfect, and potentially offensive. Its only fair to you if you not only read the good things about me but also the normal things so you get a more accurate picture.  I wanna share all the amazing things God is doing, but I don't want to hoax you all into thinking i'm Mother Theresa or something. So, here we go!

1. Right now i'm really in love with the new Taylor Swift song and my friend and I frequently blast it and sing it really loud around our house and pretend like sex slavery and child prostitution doesn't exist for that 3 and a half minutes

2. Sometimes when i'm sad or feeling lonely I walk right past the crippled beggar on the street asking for money for food and I go into the store and buy myself a chocolate bar instead.

3. I spend too much time on facebook

4. When i'm in America one of my favorite things to do is call my girlfriends and have them meet me at swanky restaurants for cocktails and food with prices so high I could feed a family of 5 for a week here

5. I never exercise and I eat as much bread as I want.

6.When i'm worshiping Jesus alone I often tell Him that He's "so bad ass", but in public around other Christians I never say things like that because i'm afraid they will judge me. That's probably a bit hypocritical.

7. To deal with the trauma of hearing so many rape stories all the time here I watch at least one episode of Friends per day and laugh really hard

8. Sometimes when I think i'm hearing God i'm wrong. I thought I knew who I was going to marry twice and i'm no longer with either of those people. I prayed really hard both times and thought God was saying yes.

9. I hate doing dishes so when I live alone I let dirty dishes sit in the sink for days at a time... not as servant-hearted as you thought

10. Even though I act really brave and confident I actually am really sensitive and easily feel insecure and left out in groups of people

Love,
your normal ordinary 25 year old who just so happens to be chosen by Jesus to do radical things with her life, but without Him she's nothing special