Hope

Welcome to the Compings

Let's all watch this just one more time...




oooo...it gives me chills and makes me cry.

- In other Compston news, we are officially becoming the Rushtons/Compings. Stephen and I signed a lease on a house last night with our friends Ray and Shauna Rushing. We are going to move in together in May and become swingers.

We have been talking a lot about living in Christian community and what that looks like. We don't really know what it means to live together in community but we're excited about figuring it out. We want to be able to give without expecting return, be hospitable, love and confront each other, and share our views of God so that each of us knows Him in a new way. It's like we all marrying each other...which is why we're swinging.

Any thoughts?

*Edit: Due to some negative feedback from our roommates and a friend, I'd like to clarify that we are not and will never be involved in any type of spouse swap.

Happy Friday, hope your's goes a little better

So each month at work I have to submit a record of purchases and the receipts from those purchases that clients have made so we are accountable that we aren't exploiting them or anything, and I had starting making the record and finished with one client and put all of his receipts and record in an envelope. Then I got really busy and left it on my desk for like two days, so it's due today and I started looking for the envelope and I couldn't find it anywhere, so I started to freak out since it had all the receipts in it, and we would be liable to have to pay back all the money for the lost receipts, so I looked all over my office, in my box, I moved everything, pulled desks and tables away from the wall trying to find it, no luck. I thought the only think that could have happened was that someone had thrown it away so I go to dig through the trash can, and I see that another client who is OCD with cleaning has emptied all the trash cans, off I go to the dumpster and there is all the trash from my office, so I do quite a bit of cursing and go back in and put some gloves on then climbed up into the dumpster and start to dig. And of course someone had gone through the field across from the house and picked up all the animal poop. So I find myself standing in a dumpster full of overflowing bags of shit; yes shit. As my hair falls into my face and I move it with my gloved shit hands and much profanity I dig and dig to no avail. No envelope.

That is really the best part of the story, I stormed back inside and pulled everything off my shelves and shook it, and somehow the envelope had slid under a notebook and gotten up inside it. Of course, why didn't I look there first.

Happy Friday!

Over my dead body

You know how you can read some little quote and it just sticks with you. I have been reading The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne and he quotes Dorthy Day saying,


"If they come for the innocent and do not pass over our bodies, then cursed be our religion."

I keep mulling this over in my mind and being amazed by the beauty and mystery of it. We have been given the gift of finishing the work that Jesus started in protecting the innocent. What a precious thing for Him to pass on to us to continue.

To enter in

What a weekend I've had...Origins (our church) has these things called "learning weekends" where a person comes in and hangs out with the Origins community all weekend.
For the last three weeks Stephen and I have been meeting with a group of about 15 people reading Christianity and the Social Crisis and discussing justice in preparation for the learning weekend. So on Friday Rob Morris, founder of Love 146 came and spent the weekend with Origins and we talked about and studied Biblical justice, and it was so good.

Let me back track a little bit and update on what's been going on in my life and heart the past few months. As some of you may remember a few days before we moved to Colorado I went to IHOP with my parents and had some prophetic things said to me. One of which was "the journey's long end". At the time I didn't know quiet what this meant, (honestly I still don't) but since we've been here God has been healing and restoring me, and it's been so sweet.

"Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will sing as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
"In that day," declares the LORD,
"you will call me 'my husband';
you will no longer call me 'my master.'
I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.
I will betroth you in faithfulness,
and you will acknowledge the LORD.
Hosea 2.14-16. 19-20

I know I'm taking this verse out of context a little but it describes so well what has been going on. For the last two and a half years I've been on a journey of searching and learning and lately God has been opening my eyes to what he's been teaching me. I was telling Stephen this the other day and trying to describe how I've been learning all this stuff, but I didn't know it. I have been searching and God has been revealing bits and pieces of truth about himself to me, and in the last few months I've been able to see the big picture of what he's been showing me.

This weekend wasn't what I expected, in that we didn't focus on the atrocities of the world, but on God's love; and how without continual intimacy with God justice isn't what God intended it to be. One of the things that the Father has been showing me was that when I went to India I had a inaccurate view of God's love, and since really the only two commandments are to love God and love people, not understanding God's love really messed me up. When I though of love I equated it with affection and sentiment, and I didn't understand justice, and God without justice isn't truth, and God who isn't true is a liar, and that's a big deal. So, when I came back I got rid of all things in the church and in spirituality that I had believed to be true and started over, searching for what really was true.

I feel like I'm not making sense, but I don't know how else to explain it. For example, Stephen really wants to have daughters one day, and I can see how he already loves them and thinks about our lives with them. So if we were to finally have little girls and Stephen was constantly telling them he loves them and providing for them; then one day they came home beaten and bleeding and Stephen cleaned them up and held them, but when they told him who had hurt them he didn't do anything, then by his action, or inaction, we see that he doesn't really love them the way he's claimed to. This was how I saw God's love when I was confronted the atrocities I experienced in India. And so I had to start over and learn what his love really was, because I did believe that He was good, because I'd seen his goodness in my life, but I couldn't reconcile my view of God with what I saw. So I questioned everything. I didn't know what things I'd been taught were true and what things were feel good answers to hard questions.

Last year at the women's retreat with the Grove I has wrestling with God and questioning his presence in the lives of girls I'd grown to love that were still in the sex trade. And as I cried out to him saying, "what about Asha, what about Lota, and Kovita,and Shamilee", God interrupted my complaints and said, "Kristen, I know their names, they are mine. I know my daughters, eta amar meye".

I look back and I can see that He'd been trying to show me that for a long time, but I was so full of questions, cynicism, doubt, and anger that I couldn't hear the still, small voice saying, they are mine, I know my daughters, and I love them with true love. The love that when they call out to me nothing can stop my from being with and rescuing them. The Lord continued to show me that this love that I have for these women isn't because I'm compassionate, but because they've been calling out to him and he will not be silent. And I had fallen in love with them because He's answering their cry, through me, through Kristen Keen and Sarah Lance at Sari Bari, through IJM and Love 146, through the Hiltons at Freeset Bags, and all of these people are working in the things that they do, not because they love the women and children they work with, but because God loves the women and children they are working with. I know this seems like a simple concept, but when my world had been ripped apart, I needed to know that this was true and since I'd never been taught about God's justice, I needed him to prove it's truth. So, this weekend when our focus was on the father love of God and that this is what justice stems from it was so sweet to be able to know that this is true.

I'll end with one last story. Brad, the pastor of Origins, was telling us a story of when he was in Cambodia and was in a sex district, posing as a John. He had been talking with a child who was being prostituted there, and as he walked away he watched a man walk up and hire the child; as they walked away the scene of the two of them began to play in Brad's mind. Even as he tried to stop it he saw the man walk with the child through the dark hallways of a brothel and go into a room. He saw the door close, and he saw the man begin to molest and rape the child. Brad began to cry out to God and say why are you showing me this? And God answered, "I always see. I can't look away when the door closes, I am there each time. I've only shown you what I see each day and night".
As I listened to Brad recount this experience, all I could think was how beautiful, how beautiful; that God's love is true. And when those he loves suffer he cannot turn away, and he doesn't give cheap, easy answers for what goes on in dark rooms as innocence is stripped. He is truth and he cannot look away. He cannot close the door. And although he already suffered unimaginable pain on the cross, he cannot let his children suffer alone, each time he suffers with them.
In the west we insulate ourselves so that we do not experience injustice; but when we chose to climb aboard the sinking ship of humanity, and know that in doing so we will join in suffering, that we will share in pain that we wouldn't otherwise experience, we begin to share the burden of suffering. We chose to enter in and this is when suffering and injustice begins to be redeemed. Not through political powers, but through the body of Christ entering in with him and sharing the burden of the fall.


Enter In, by Angela Heirendt, pg. 9

Things I learned this month...

• People aren't pulling jet skis behind there trucks, they are snow mobiles.

• Bob Dylan is white. Until this month I thought he was black and I couldn't figure out who that little white man was that's on all his album covers.

• Go ahead, laugh.
  
  

Homecoming

Is is unethical to be posting while I'm on the clock and have things I need to be doing?

I know it's been a while, as Liz so lovingly put it, I should have made me new year's resolution to post more. I appologize.

This weekend I'm coming to Arkansas! My friend Katy got married and this weekend is her reception. I'm flying in Fiday afternoon and I'd like to see as many people as possible. I can't wait to go to the Grove, but I'd love to have coffee with anyone who wants. I'll be in town Friday-Monday.

On a different note, one of my clients has the Dirty Dancing sound track and I borrowed it and I'm rocking out to "I had the Time of My Life" over and over, awesome.