The 100th Note from the Sojourn

I've been writing "Notes from the Sojourn" since 2008; 100 posts in five years is nothing amazing but I think this blog is accomplishing what I set out to do in 2008. Even though physically, I am in the same geographic place I was then, so much has changed in these five years. I started this blog as a way to tell stories from my travels & adventures in far away places. As I told those stories & shared my heart, I processed them & learned from them. Through one of the hardest seasons of my life, I learned that it's not only in far off places that adventures happen & experiences change us. So I kept blogging, even though the people I started writing this blog for were living across the hall & across town and probably knew way more about my "adventures" then they wanted to know.

  I love looking back and seeing how I've grown & changed in five years. God has so beautifully woven people, experiences, places, pain, beauty, hope & love together to make me more like His Son in five years. If you asked five-years-ago-me where she thought she would be on July 14, 2013, her answer would be quite opposite from the reality I am living. Yet, these last five years have been full of more than I could have asked, hoped or imagined in 2008.

  And that makes me excited for the next five years, and ten years and twenty years and fifty years! I have no idea where I will be or what life will look like but I'm confident that the years will hold more than I can "ask or think according to the power that works within {me}" [Eph. 3:20]. God is so good and so faithful to His kids.

  Thank you to my thirteen followers and everyone else that stops in now and then to catch up on my life. Many blessings!

 

laughing at the days to come :: photo credit to B.Hammar Photography

(being besties with a photographer has it's perks! lol)

summer is here & so am I

  I haven't posted a blog in nearly three months. Life just took off after Traffick Jam 2013 and it hasn't done much slowing down since. Summer is fully here now which gives me a little more free time, but I seem to be good a quickly filling that time up agian. Here are a few updates:

•   Our Traffick Jam event was very sucessful; we raised over $4,000 for the Hard Places Community working to end child sex trafficking in Cambodia! There will be a few changes but I'm planning to be involved again next year to hopefully raise even more funds to rescue even more children from the horrors of human trafficking.
• I joined the twitter world of tweeting! @heathergrace717
• I fell in love with dates! (The kind that grow on trees, not the kind you go on to eat food) I'll be posting a recipie for date bars soon!
• My love of running has an outlet again & this year I'm running 5K three to four days a week. I'm looking at the possability of running a half-marathon in the fall too.
• And currently the most exciting update: I have travel plans for this fall! I've been invited to join a team traveling to Bangkok to bring some hope & love to the red-light districts and potentially other parts of the city too. Since my trip to Mozambique last summer, God has been reminding me how much of my heart I left in Thailand so I'm excited to go back & see what He has for me there. I am looking forward to catching up with some friends during my 10 days there as well. I'll be posting more details as I get them so stay tuned!

The Big Day!!

Tomorrow is The Big Day! I have been planning a 10 mile walk-a-thon to raise funds for The Hard Places Community in Cambodia. The walk is called Traffick Jam and it's happening tomorrow!

Planning and organizing this has pushed me so far outside my comfort zone which is good but I couldn't have done it for a cause I was less passionate about. I've also learned heeps about God's heart for mercy and justice as well as His faithfulness. Tonight, I'm putting all worries aside and hoping for a beautiful day tomorrow! 

The Whopper

Yes, The Whopper. And I'm not talking about the candy. This is a little lesson I'm learning in humility and balance.
  In preface let me say I've been on journey of learning to eat healthy and studying the organic, gluten-free, non-gmo, vegetarian and vegan ways of eating. I grew up with a mom that educated her kids on healthy eating and did what she could on our budget to feed us organic and healthy foods. {Insert blessings on Her here! Prov.31:28} It used to drive me crazy until I studied a little on my own and began to understand what God intended us to eat when He created our bodies. But lately, the more I learn the more I feel like I can't eat anything until I move to a farm and grow my own everything...which is pretty much impossible I might point out. How does one live in a world of genetically modified, processed, corn-starch-loaded, and preservative-filled foods AND take care of the gift of health God has given them? I'm still wrestling with that one but that is only part of this lesson.
  To continue The Whopper story: I've been doing my best to eat in a way that stewards the precious gift of health He has given me. So yes, that means I don't remember when the last time was that I had a Whopper, or any burger for that matter.
Then Thursday happened. I was sitting at my desk working away with my salad in the fridge waiting for me, when my co-worker arrived, Burger King bag in hand. This is where pride comes in. I had some very ungenerous thoughts comparing the bag's contents with my salad.
  Then came the fall that inevitably follows pride. My sweet co-worker walked up to my desk and said: "I had a buy one get one free coupon for a Whopper so I brought you one! I hope you don't mind onions." I politely thanked her and let that bag sit on my desk for about 15 minutes while I tried to decide what to do. I thought about making an excuse to go out to my car and putting it in the garbage. I also thought about taking it home and throwing it away. Then I thought, it was really sweet of her to think of me, She doesn't know my eating habits, and she was trying to be a blessing. So the wrestling match ended and I ate all 670 calories of that bleached white bun, genetically modified meat and slimy, nutrition-depleted lettuce, all covered in mayo. {That is still really hard to admit.}
  After I ate it, I felt horrible both physically and emotionally. "I am a failure and a hypocrite! I just ate the epitome of everything wrong with American food!" This was my pride talking. But I still didn't see it until I went to God to repent for eating that stuff. It was like He smiled at me and said "the only one holding this over your head is you, beloved." Then it hit me. This is what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 7 when He said:
"For in the way you judge, you will be judged..."
I was holding the world around me to an impossible standard, thinking that I had it all figured out & I was the only one eating "right". But when I held myself to the same impossible standard, of course I didn't measure up! So I repented of my pride instead of The Whopper.
  I still don't know what the right thing to do was in that situation. I still regret eating it because of the stomach and headache I had the rest of the afternoon. But God used that Whopper to convict my heart and bring me to a place of humility where He can work with me. Psalm 25:9 says "...{God} teaches the humble His way." I guess that is my answer; remain humble and let Him teach me what to eat and what not to eat.

Dreaming Big

"We are too young to realize that certain things are impossible... So we will do them anyway.” 

-William Wilberforce

I think this is part of what Jesus meant when He was holding children up as an example in Matthew 19:14. He said the "Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these (children)." Children are dreamers with endless imaginations. We are children with an endless heavenly Father. He told us nothing was impossible with Him, so why do we constantly have to make things "realistic" or "practical"? 

Two words: 

fear. 

&

disappointment. 

Two ugly little words that will keep us from changing the world if we let them. 

We've probably all been afraid of being disappointed at some point. And we've all been disappointed. 

But God said NOTHING was impossible for us or Him. 

"He replied, "Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'move from here to there,' and it will move; and NOTHING will be impossible to you." -Matthew 17:20

"With people it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God." -Mark 10:27

What if you couldn't fail?
What if nothing could stop you? 

What would you do? 

This spring I'm organizing a fundraiser for an organization working to end child sex trafficking in South East Asia. The fundraiser is called Traffick Jam and their tag line is this:

In one day, we can help bring child sex trafficking to a grinding halt.

Sounds audacious doesn't it? One day? A grinding halt? To the second fastest growing crime in the world?

Why not?

I'm learning to have faith like a child; to be to young to realize that certain things are impossible and do them anyway. People thought William Wilberforce was crazy for trying to end the trans-atlantic slave trade in England. They thought Abraham Lincoln was nuts for trying to do the same in America. And yet, it was done!

My prayer and passion is that the body of Christ would come together and partner with God's heart. That the bride of Christ would stand up and say this stops NOW!

So if your not busy on April 6, 2013, come walk 10 miles with us to end this crime against precious little ones that Jesus longs to draw to Himself. If you are busy that day, sponsor a walk-er for $10 or buy a t-shirt for $15!

I love words. Here are a few written by John Mark McMillan that inspired me this week.  

Do Everything Better - January 14, 2013

  I haven't written in a bit because life has been full. Today I had an hour free to...spend. I hate to kill or waste time when life is full so I decided to spend it in the most relaxing way I could think of after an extra full weekend with some precious young people. The most relaxing and accessable thing I could think of was a stop in at my favorite book store for a latte and some browsing. I think few people go to bookstores to actually buy books these days...at least I don't. But I love browsing book stores; reading a chapter here, a page or two there. Bookstores are a never ending realm of possibilities to me. Books are full of things waiting to be discovered.
  Today I read about the deeper meaning of choosing clothes (I actually get that a little bit but who really spends $XXX.XX on Jeans because they express your personality the best!), what to do on my next visit to Prague and Budapest (I wish!), and a chapter about trying to do everything (how timely God).
  I found that timely chapter while wandering through the Christian book section. I noticed the book because it had a picture of chocolate on the front and was titled "bittersweet". Written by Shauna Niequist, the book is a collection of thoughts and reflections on life's lessons. I only read one chapter but it "happened" to be the right one. God is good like that.
  Shauna (I feel like we're on a first name basis already) shared about her tendency to continually add to her checklist of things to do. Finally one day she wrote on her checklist: {Do Everything Better}. That and a conversation with her husband made her realize that she needed to change something. She was running herself ragged trying to be supermom, superwife, superchristian and an all around superwoman. She dreamed about a life where she wasn't tired all the time. One day Shauna received some advice from a wise woman that lead her to realize that doing the things she loved (and doing them well) meant NOT doing a host of other things. The result of these revelations was another list. Two actually. On one list she wrote the things she did do - things like loving God, caring for her marriage and family, entertaining friends, and (good for me) writing. The other list was things she did NOT do; things like gardening, baking, and making her own baby food.
  I immediately thought of my own very full and sometimes exhausting life. I have a very hard time saying no when there is a need to be filled. I guess I find myself trying to be Jesus. (Problem...um...yes). I honestly feel a little scared. What if I say no to something that I should do? But the opposite is true: what if I say yes to something I shouldn't do? When faced with a need, my first question should be to God. Do you want me to say yes? I'm also want to ask myself: is this something I love, something that makes me come alive? Obviously there are times to do things because they need to be done but if God tells me to say no, I can be confident that He has a plan to fill that need. We serve a God that does all things well; He can be trusted to fill every need. I learned that so practically last summer in Mozambique where I watched God meet need after need. This weekend, I got exhausted doing something I love, something that makes me come alive. I think it's time to look for things that I don't do so I can have more weekends like this one.