FutureMe letter written in Jan. 2006

Dear FutureMe, I found this cool site on January 12, 2006 and thought it would be neat to look back on the past little while of my life and reflect so when I get this email I can remember how my life is right now. I am currently in a relationship with Ryan Skinner and think it would be awesome to still be with him for years down the road. He is one of those people that if you don't know him you might think he's really weird and doesn't know what he's talking about because he has a really random brain that I don't understand. I don't think he does either so it's ok. But what I love about Ryan is that he is honest. When he says something nice, he means it. It isn't small talk or surface stuff, it is real, heartfelt truth. He tells me how he likes being with me, something people have never really told me, and makes me feel important. Like I'm worth something. He also is special because he has one of the strongest relationships with God that I have ever seen. He is constantly trying to improve himself in order to better the kingdom of God and bring heaven on earth. That's an odd phrase, heaven on earth. I think I think it's odd because I have no idea what heaven will be like. I know God will be there and no bad will be present, and that it will be the most amazing thing ever, but I just can't comprehend a different dimension than I already know. Humans are weird. We make terms up for things we shouldn't be able to understand. God probably laughs when people are in physics class struggling with the idea of gravity. I just took my Physics final today and we had to use a formula to calculate the force of gravity at different distances from the earth. A number called something like the gravitational coefficient, a number in the formula no matter how far away you are from the earth, was like 6.64x10 to the 24th N(m) to the 2nd x...... I mean seriously! How do we know that kind of stuff! I'm sure it's pretty acurate, but my feeble brain does not comprehend how we can invent science and figure out crap that shouldn't even concern us. I don't think humans were meant to be in space, or put things in space like satellites to help us watch tv and spy on people in Moscow. I bet God invented gravity real fast. There I go again. How do I know God invented anything. Everything is a piece of him. I didn't invent my kidneys just because they are there. The Bible just says he spoke and everything was. Geez, writing about all this really makes me feel like humans are silly. Or maybe it is just me. I wish I lived in the times before tv's and microwaves. I think it would have been nice to not have something to entertain my brain with junk that fills me with evil thoughts of jealousy and imperfection. I think if my family did not have a tv we would be a lot closer. If instead of sitting around a television letting Ray Romano entetain us during dinner sometimes, we would actually talk and show interest in each others lives, we would be a more healthy family. Not that I don't like watching tv or eating and watching at the same time or using the microwave, I just think if people were all we had, we would know them better and be able to love them more. I just read a book called Blue Like Jazz. Very good book. There is a chapter in it about love. As I read it I felt convicted. The author Donald Miller writes how he spent a month living in the woods with a bunch of hippies who smoked a lot of pot and drank too much beer. He noted though how they loved each other, and himself in a more genuine way than he had ever encountered at church, an institution he had grown up in his whole life. i started thinking about how I have been subconsciously judging people since I popped out of the womb. I don't know why I am the way I am, but there are many things that I think are bad, and if i encounter them i have an overwhelming sense that I have to get away from them. One of them is smoking. When I was growing up, not like I'm done or anything, but when i was younger my parents always let me know if I was doing something bad and told me never to do it again. They formed in my head a very guilty conscience. Or maybe it's a feeling that I must be obedient. Either way I have always had a sense of right and wrong that led me away from everything wrong. Well, not everything but most things. This I have discovered in recent days has been an impedement to my ability to love as well as forming the thought that I am a better person for staying away from everything bad. The biggest thing though is my ability to love. When I see people doing "bad things" my head says, "stay away, that's bad." I know it sounds stupid, and those words don't really go through my head, but the notion that people who do bad things are bad people is a horribly wrong assumption. Back to the smoking idea. Yes it is bad for your health and carries an unpleasant smell, but if when I walk down the street and see someone smoking and the first thing that pops into my head is "stay away," how am I ever going to bring Christ to the world? Why would people listen to me when I say Christ has brought me more love than I have ever known if my snobby erre in life says nothing but I'm better than you because i have found JESUS?!?!?!? As I was reading Blue Like Jazz, I realized what a snobby jerk I must have been seen as while at school telling people not to cuss, and half heartedly asking people why they haven't been in church, yet all the while proclaiming my faith. I can definitely see why people do not want to go to church or even approach the idea of Christian love. It is because of people like me. The day I read the chapter on love I made a decision that I wasn't going to be me anymore. I needed to be Christ to everyone. He was not afraid of people that looked like they might be carrying a gun or be plotting an attempt to rape him. OK, those are things that I am afraid of, but really, he loved everyone. Hard to understand, but he did. Even when he was dying on the cross, he asked God to forgive the Roman soldiers who nailed him to the cross. That night I had a meeting for a mission trip to Costa Rica and on the way in to the church there were like twenty people outside of it smoking and looking kind of conspicuous. The me of a couple hours prior may have just put my face to the ground and hoped they didn't say anything rude while my ears were still in listening distance, but because of my decision to love, I smiled and said good evening. That doesn't sound like much, but they almost looked surprised that I would even acknowledge them and wish them a good evening and yet thankful that I did. It felt freeing to see how they responded and accepted my gesture. I am still new in my outlook of love, but I pray that I will not lose the ability to love. I am finding new aspects of people everyday. When you simply love people, they are a lot more tolerable. It used to be that a lot of people annoyed me. People that would say things that no one really wanted to know or people that wouldn't shut up no matter how many times you thought you made it obvious that you didn't want to talk. But when I realized that everybody needed love and that that was more important in the eternal scope of things than me being comfortable and me spending time with only the kinds of people that were just like me, it opened my eyes to the beauty of life. There were endless relationships that i could pursue with people, not because I thought they needed me to love them, but because I actually wanted to love them. I am sure that if you are genuine in your relations with everyone, and truly love them with patience, kindness, gentleness and all the other fruits of the spirit, that they will be much more open to the ideas of Christ's love than any kind of bible thumping strategies. It is through relationships that people receive the love of Christ. Without receiving love from humans, how can we know what God's love is like? Make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Christ. This is a phrase introducing the steps of strengthening the Body of Christ with more people to be like Christ to other people, making more people to be Christ to other people and so on. But what does to make a friend really mean? How does one go about making a friend? If you think about the wording chosen for this phrase it kind of sounds a little silly. I think the only way that people will become your friends is if they think you like them. The only way for me to like many people is to love them. Everybody has the opportunity to love and be loved and yet so many people go on with their lives feeling hopeless or like they aren't complete without a boyfriend, or a job, or something that gives them worth. The truth is that our job as Christians is to show people that they have worth. God doesn't create a person without worth and it is our job to communicate that to everyone in the realm of our existence. Why should we let finding out we didn't make the cut for the school musical, or just ending a relationship with the person you thought you were going to marry put a hindrance on the love that we have the pleasure of distributing. The joy that I think we will find in heaven is so much more fulfilling than any pleasure on earth. When we don't take the opportunities given to us to be the helping hand or the needed shoulder to cry on, it is like we are robbing people of the love we know through Christ. I think everyone deserves endless, uncontainable love because of the price Jesus paid on the cross. He suffered so much because he loved us. Isn't that amazing! I ask all of you to pray before you go to bed tonight to ask God to show you anything that is stopping you from expressing God's unconditional love to anyone and everyone and I pray that you will see the benefits in yourself and in the changed lives around you because of the ability to love. Fly with Christ. What I just wrote, ended up becoming much of my Christian Action talk for Chrysalis flight #41 in February of 2006. They are my thoughts and hopes for myself and for others. I pray that by reading this I am touched again in a couple years.