Can we say "miracle?"

About an hour after that last blog post yesterday, I was in my room getting ready for bed, putting some stuff away, when all of a sudden B barges into my room. At the time my back is turned and I'm putting some papers away in a drawer in my desk while she's talking.

She's apologizing, and crying.

Long story short, she was spilling on how she was sorry about the things she's been saying, how she's having so much trouble figuring out who she is, how she feels like she can't be herself, how hard it is for her to believe at all in God, how she feels like she just keeps messing up and can't do anything right. I was humbled by this display of sorrow and all I could think, as I invited her to sit on my bed and lean into me and cry while I told her that I forgive her, was, "How wrong was I for bashing her only an hour earlier!"

Even fifteen minutes prior to this event, my other sister C and I were discussing her attitude and how mean she had been acting lately. I spilled to C some of the things she had said to me. I think C probably had a hand in exposing to B these faults. It seems like B listens more readily to C than to me, which is fine I suppose.

I prayed for her and talked to her, and even talked to her a bit about God and gave her some reading from a site called everystudent.com since she told me that it's hard for her to believe without proof outside the Bible. I'm hoping that she asks more questions and that we all can be more open with each other from now on.

It just seemed like a total miracle.

Happy Easter everyone! He is risen!

God, please grant me some patience

Looking back at many of my previous blog posts, it seems like each of them has some sort of underlying theme or moral or idea or something, I don't know. I don't think this one will. This one might turn into more of a rant.

I don't know what to do about my sister, who we will call B. I have pretty much had it with her. Lately (like for the past six or eight weeks, roughly) she has become more intolerable than usual. She makes mean comments right and left, and when anyone says something about that (i.e. "that was rude" or "that wasn't nice") she'll say something like, "Can't you take a joke?" or "I was only kidding." What lies; if she meant to pass those comments off as jokes, she a) would use a very different tone of voice, b) wouldn't be saying them so often, and c) wouldn't be saying them in bad situations. Then, whenever someone brings this up to her, she replies that she doesn't know what that person is talking about, she doesn't have an attitude problem, she's only joking, she doesn't know why everyone's so serious.

Last night, I had some friends over to watch Passion of the Christ since it was Good Friday. I told B beforehand that I didn't want her downstairs with us if she was just going to sleep through the whole thing or make comments throughout the whole thing. She got defensive and tried to get my mom involved, who dismissed the whole situation on both sides and didn't get involved. I knew that since I was inviting over the teenage worship leader I mentioned in my last blog post and his two brothers, B would not want to be left out of the situation. Those three would be the only guys watching the movie, and them plus B would be the only people not in my small group. The other seven of us (with myself included in that number) are all in the same small group. Well, throughout the entire movie, B could not help but make loud side comments and flirt with the worship leader (who, on a side note, she has dated before). I know that if B had not been in that room, the guys would have all been really into the movie. I wish she had gone to a friend's house last night or something. The funny thing is that the worship leader's younger brother was more mature that night than his two older brothers! He actually, when I started crying during the movie, reached over and took my hand and squeezed it knowingly in support.

The worst was when one of the girls in my small group and I started bawling and hugging during the last fifteen or twenty minutes of the movie together. B went and said, "Aw, you're cute" in a sugary, syrupy kind of voice. It was completely out of context and uncalled for, especially since Passion of the Christ is such a serious movie! Oh, did I mention that she said this while Christ was being nailed to the cross?

Lately she's been hurting me worse than ever by overexaggerating and ridiculing my intelligence ("Your smartness annoys me!" "Like every five seconds you say something smart about plants and this and that and I don't care.") and my love for Christ ("At least I don't run around shouting 'Jesus!'"). It hurts because I know for sure that I'm not "saying something smart" every five seconds; in fact, it's a rare occassion when I bring up what I learned in school on whatever day because of the fact that nobody asks and so nobody seems to want to hear. It hurts because I know for sure that I don't "run around shouting 'Jesus!'" like Bullhorn Guy; I bring my Bible to school most of the time and I connect with others at FCA and at Sonrise, but unless someone asks me why I'm carrying around my Bible or why I act differently or do this or that, I generally do not talk about my faith. I don't hide it, but I don't randomly out of nowhere say, "So, do you know Jesus?" And it sucks because at home I feel like I can't be open about my faith, either. The place I feel safest and able to open up most is at Impact. It's even a rare occassion when I feel safe and open in my own bedroom. How sad is it when you feel like your home is a place away from what the rest of your family calls home? I feel like I'm closer to my brothers and sisters in Christ than to the family I was born into. But I digress.

I just don't know what to do with B anymore. It seems like she's been turning into those backstabbing mean girls you sometimes see around school. She has said before that she's accepted Christ (apparently last summer), but it's obvious she hasn't; I'm worried/scared for her future because even though I'm trying to be an example for her, I don't think she wants to have a faith like mine. All I feel like I can do otherwise is pray. I'm just at a complete loss besides that. And because of how she's treating me, it's become extremely hard to think fondly of her. God, please help me. And her. And the rest of my family. And the world. :(

Indescribable

I just titled this blog post "Indescribable," and now I'm going to attempt to describe this thing that I have deemed indescribable. Hm...

So yesterday, I went to Impact and was delighted to see that SOS (Students On Staff), which is made up of a good majority of my closer friends at Impact, were leading the Impact service. It started out with one of my good friends, who has been truly blessed with musicality and who has such a deep connection with God, leading worship with a set of Hillsong United songs. Watching him worship (when my eyes weren't closed), I just felt this sort of awe at the connection that God has with him, that worshipping Him just opens up a line between them. It was awesome to see it from a third-person perspective and also to feel it happening around me and within myself, everyone just opening up to His presence and praising Him.

Two of my friends spoke before and after a song-skit (which I will describe shortly the best I can) and it was amazing how God spoke through them. I kind of knew beforehand that my guy friend who spoke was outgoing and would have been up to speaking, but to see one of the girls from my small group, the shyest of us all, speak? It was awesome! And I know that she would not have gotten up there and talked to us about witnessing to others had God not spurred her on to do it. I am so blessed to know her and be her friend.

And the song-skit. Oh. My. Goodness. It was...wow. It's to the song "Dare You to Move" by Switchfoot. I'll try to explain the best that I can, but I am in no way doing it justice and I hope that it gets posted somewhere so I can watch it again and forward it on. So all of the SOS people in the skit were given sandwich-sized, cutout hearts. The SOS worship leader that I mentioned earlier was playing the role of Jesus, but nobody was in costume or anything so it wasn't cliche. He mouthed the song the entire time. First he gave a heart to his sister, who was playing the girl who kind of just came into the world. She goes off and finds some friends at a party and gets some confidence, but it's a little bit fake. One of the friends sees a guy and gives her cutout heart to him, and they're happy together, until another girl comes along and the guy throws the first girl's heart on the ground carelessly and walks off with the new girl. The expression on her face, of such sadness and heartbreak and numbness at the same time... I think it was at this point that I realized, "Why do I feel like I'm going to cry? I mean, this isn't anything really, really close to me at this point in time." The scene moved to two more high schoolers who were playing a mom and a dad, sitting at a table stiffly and ignoring each other, reading the paper, and a totally different girl comes to the table and tries to talk to them, but the kids playing the mom and the day burst out into argument for like the entire second verse of the song, and the girl is begging them to stop fighting, and she looks like she's about to cry... A tear slid down my cheek, and yet it wasn't anything close to home. So why was I so full of emotion? And then the scene turned to the guy from before (who took the girl's heart and threw it away for another). He slowly took an exacto-knife from his pocket and shakily, angrily, hopelessly, started pressing and dragging it across his wrist. His head was down the entire time in anguish... I think this was where I just couldn't keep the tears back, I couldn't, no matter how hard I tried, and I didn't know why. And then the first girl, whose heart the worship leader playing Jesus gave to her, started going around to each of the other three broken, hurting characters during the bridge of the song, witnessing to them with a sort of desperation that was so heartfelt and emotional and urgent... And at the end they all ended up kneeling at the worship leader's (Jesus's) feet, holding up their cutout hearts to him in abandon. His arms were out shoulder-height like Christ's were on the cross.

I did not do that any justice at all. And the only reason I can think of for why I just couldn't stop the tears from coming, why I was so moved by the whole thing, takes me back to something that happened on Saturday, while I was writing part of a story. It's a scene where a character, someone who has no significance to the plot whatsoever, ends up trying to commit suicide because, due to the temptings and antics of my main character (who is a demon), she ends up in massive debt and can't handle it and feels like she has nowhere to turn and nowhere to go and doesn't know what to do and just wants it to all end. And writing that, I felt this sudden surge of pain from the Spirit, and it became so hard for me to write all of a sudden, and I felt such a heaviness that I had never felt before when writing. It was this sudden reminder: God hurts for His children. He hurts when they hurt themselves, He hurts when we run from Him. He is our Father who loves us and He hurts when we hurt. I feel like this is similar to what happened in that room yesterday, that the Spirit inside me just showed me, "The Father hurts for this. He hurts when you give your heart to things that hurt you, not only because you turn from Him, but because you hurt yourself." And I just felt that hurt well up inside me, even though it wasn't like it was my own hurt. My parents have fought, but not since I was little. I have never cut, even though I have a few friends who have done it before. I have never had a boy break up with me, I have been the one who breaks up with a guy, though guys who I've liked have taken that for granted.

And the desperation with which the worship leader's sister witnesses is such that it struck me that these aren't just people, they are God's children, even if they don't know it! Even the people we don't like, who we think don't deserve life, who don't know Christ, were made in God's image and He longs for them to return to Him! Christ could come back any day for His people, first of all. Second of all, people could die at any time, and if those people refuse God even to their deaths, they have no salvation. That's the kind of desperation that that girl was running around with: The kind that knows that our life on Earth is short compared to eternity, and we may not have much time left.