in the time that our friend bump has let us stay at his house it has dawned on me multiple times how different each person can be. Within our group we have people who sometimes seem administrative, closed off, short, removed and sometimes even angry. But this seems to be a blessing sometimes, because we have people like bump to help us process these things. towards the beginning of our stay he had talked to us about what kind of prayer we needed and we had said something along the lines of looking past the dumb crap to see a bigger picture and not getting caught up on frustrations. he taught us his way of making sense of these things. He told us to make a statement of what frustrates us; i hate it when/it makes me angry when/ it frustrates or confuses me when ______ does _____ or is _______. and then he told us to change what was in the first empty space to the word "I". This sounds lame and not applicable in all situations but as i was riding one the bikes we got donated to us through the parking lot at the school near by, trying to be peaceful about the situation that was frustrating me at the time i tried it and when i came back to join the people hanging around the bus i felt much better and felt as if i had a clearer understanding of what would make the situation better-me helping it and not being the agitator or devils advicator. Whats hard about this is not only the fact that you have to way in the call to not commit the sin of ommision in many instances but also that the process will never be speedy oreasy - that is the process of dying to your self. When we went to church this last week i was suprised at how good the sermon was. It was short, had very little content, but the content there is worth repeating a million times: worship is dying to yourself, for Christs sake.
I recently thought about getting love your enemies written on me. That seems idealistic but it is very much a neccesary thing to remind yourself to do on a constant basis. The problem is that it is easy to talk about in this circumstance but it is even harder to handle the idea of loving your neighbor and putting that into action.
the hardest part is when you already love someone, like your siblings in Christ, or at least you think you do and try to but then catch yourself acting out of anger towards them and not walking in love.
after a week of difficulty, despite our generous host who i think we could have made an effort to treat better, and still grasping on to the remnents of our sicknesses, we felt very at peace about taking the bus to pennsylvania and we are leaving tommorow morning to work on the bus with howie's parents up in elizabeth town. However only 3 of us are going to leave in the bus tommorow;myself, bailey and gary. And gary is jumping off before we get there to go to new jersey for a couple of days and bailey will have to try to drive a bus the rest of the way (neither of them have ever driven a school bus before, and i certainly will not drive any time soon, so please pray for our safety)
then on tuesday john will fly to new york to meet his good friend jake and potentially bring him back to pennsylvania to live on the bus with us for a while, and howie and amber are staying in florida to hopefully plan their wedding and spend some much needed time together.
so the 6 of us will be in 4 different places for a minute but hopefully by april there will be 7 of us with 2 dogs and a hopefully surviving mouse in the same place. But were at peace about it and the lord has blessed us with 4 wonderful people to stay with in elizabeth town so i think this will turn out wonderfully and hopefully we can all spend more time in quiet and not feel as if there are 5 other people stepping on our toes and ciggerettes.
