Escaping high school

High school was not a time in my life that I would like to forget, but it's definitely not a time that I would relive for any amount of money. I was a generally mean person. Not on the outside, but on the inside and certainly around my friends. I gossiped like it was going out of style and I would make fun of someone in a heartbeat. And I wasn't even in the "popular" crowd. High school was brutal, both to me and because of me. Nominally, I was a Christian, but I did not act like one. Among my closest friends we would backstab one another. It was a shock for me to make friends in college and not wonder if they were talking about me when I wasn't around.

All of this to say, I have had too many high school-like experiences lately for comfort. It all began a couple of weeks ago when I walked back into a classroom after a break duuring class and all of the sudden the conversation among my classmates came to a screeching halt. Their faces seemed to say, "No, we weren't talking about you...." Sure. All of the sudden I felt exactly like I did six or seven years ago. Like people I had been trying to get to know for a long time were just patronizing me with their friendship and their smiles. My heart really sank in a way that it hadn't in so long. And I know that it's my fault. And I'm sorry.

I've spent the last six years escaping high school probably the same way I would want to escape a burning building. The person that I was then, I wish to be no longer. I don't want to be the patronized one, the one everyone hides from. I don't want to be a backbiting gossiper who fuels her self-worth with the chastisment of others.

I'm so sorry.

"Wretched man that I am! Who will resuce me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
-Romans 7:24-25a

Micah Jacob

I am going to have another little brother!!!! Again, please do not forget to read the word BROTHER. It is very important. Several people that I have told have stopped listening at, "I am going to have..." and assumed that I am pregnant. I am not. Nor is my mother for that matter. He is coming from China. He is a special needs child which means, 1) he had a cleft lip and still has a cleft palate, 2) we (or my parents, specifically) got to pick him out, and 3) the adoption process is not going to take half as long as it did with the Gracer.

All that aside, his name is going to be Micah Jacob. His Chinese name is Zhen Xian Jin. I am so excited. Adoption is such a wonderful thing for everyone involved. When Grace was adopted, people kept talking about how lucky she was to have us. But what they don't realize is that we are the fortunate ones. We are all blessed to be so enriched by her life. She is so full of joy and love and everything else, I cannot imagine life without her. And I know that things with Micah will be the same.

Through these adoptions, God has taught me much about my adoption as His child. Just like Grace and Micah were, I was helpless. My parents sought them out to be adopted, payed the full price, travelled/will travel to get them, gave them new names, and brought/will bring them home to be a son and daughter, full heirs just like Sarah and Andy and me. God sought me out, He paid the full price, came all the way to the depths of my sin for me, has given me a new identity in Christ, and will someday call me home. Before Christ, there was nothing that I could do to go to the throne of God, but He Himslef has opened the way. I, who was once without hope, am now co-heirs with Christ.

"And as He stands in victory, sin's curse has lost its grip on me,
For I am His and He is mine, bought with the precious blood of Christ."

BYOB Baby Shower

Yep, you read it right. Our friend Robin is having a baby in July, so tonight there was a party for her at Cafe Cuba, which is amazing. There were presents, and tears, and exclamations of, "awwww," and "that's cute," and, oh, beer (but not for mama), and fake bugs and pirate coins on the tables. Honestly, it was the most fun, genuine, laid back baby shower that I have ever been to. Sadie is going to be a very loved little girl because, well, she already is and she has very loving parents.

And why drink punch when everybody really wants Mexican beer?

Depravity

My brother, who is one of the greatest thinkers that I know, said something profound last night that has been in my mind all day. He said, "Everone gets depravity. All great works of literature are one chapter short, because they understand depravity but miss redemption." This struck me because I love literature and I had never thought about it this way. But I guess it's true, we all "get" depravity.

Whether we want to admit it or not.

The fear of God

I was struck Tuesday morning by the awesomeness of God as I looked at a tree. Now, before you think I've gone "all Thoreau" on you, hear me out. I am often very impressed by the works of others' hands. Art, music, fashion, even writing fascinate me all the time. But a tree is an entirely different thing. You may say to yourself, "Well, trees have always been there, they are different, " but they have not. God created the trees. He not only fashioned them by his hands, the very idea of trees was birthed in God's mind before the beginning of time.

Maybe this is not profound to you, but it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Why do I toy around with God, thinking that something I can do will change Him? He MADE me. He thought me up. He thought up hearts and kidneys and blood and bones. God invented mitochondira and atoms. He alone conceived of music, its notes, and ears to hear them with, as well as white light that is really made up of many colors and eyes that flip it around in order to see it.

I'm not here setting up the argument that God brought us into this world and He can take us out (although He can), I am attempting to put forth the pure awesomeness of that is manifested in all that we see. He is not small or insignificant to our lives and this world. He is also not a clockmaker, sitting back to watch His creation tick. He is integral. The closest that I can come to describing Him with a word is "Awesome."

"May the glory of the Lord endure forever; may the Lord rejoice in his works - he who looks at the earth, and it trembles, who touches the mountains and they smoke."
- Psalm 104:31-32

Self Efficacy

So, just in case you're like I was about 9 months ago, ignorant about about the world of behavioral theory, (and pretty darn happy about it for that matter) I will briefly explain self efficacy before launching into my assault of it. Brain child of Albert Bandura, it basically means one's belief in their own ability to do something. So, your self efficacy for eating jellybeans would be your belief in your ability to put them in your mouth and chew? Not can you do it? Do you believe that you can? But maybe this was a bad example.

Anyway, moving on, self efficacy is an idea that we over-kill in public health. But there is so much of a conflict in me about this idea even though I use it a lot when we have to justify what we are writing about using theory. My conflict comes because, as a Christian, a foundational premise of my faith is that I am the chief of sinners. As such, I believe that I will always fail. No matter how hard I believe that I can do something, I know that I will always fail. We will all always fail apart from Christ. So, sometimes I feel like a phony thinking about teaching people to "believe in themselves." It is a false hope. And when we fail ourselves, what have we left besides Christ? If I am teaching a health belief system without Him, do I even believe in what I am teaching?

Life has taught me that there is always someone better than me, that I am much less qualified to do what I am doing than many others. There's always someone faster, someone smarter, someone prettier, someone more popular, someone with more talent. I get really lost in despair when I am not remembering what Christ has done on my behalf. Why can't I always be confident? If I have hope at all it is in Jesus Christ alone.

"But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us." - 2 Corinthians 4:7

So, I'm still here

This has been a very long, arduous semester with the addition of the assistantship back in December. I am only blogging now because I can either do this or write about a disease outbreak on a cruise ship, a topic that does very little to peak my interest. In fact, nothing that I am currently studying interests me very much this semester, which is why I have unabashedly immersed myslef into Lewis' Mere Christianity lately. It is fascinating. I hope to read some of the Reformers this summer, but I am always a little partial to my dear CSL. His writing is enchanting.

I have struggled a lot harder this semester also with what it looks like to be a Christian in the world in which I do my day-to-day living. I'm talking about what it looks like to really live by faith, to really live out faith. What I have come to is simply love. Love for the people around me despite everything. Their beliefs, lifestyles, attitudes, thoughts about me or Jesus do not matter as a deciding factor on whether or not to love them and pour myself into them.

The past year and a half has found me in a rather swift downward sprial into selfishness and materialism and, frankly, I'm sick of it. Other people's opinions of me will never satisfy. The best outfits and shoes will never satisfy. Being a great student will most certainly never satisfy, even for a moment. Having the most charming, handsome, amazing husband in the world will never satisfy. Christ and Christ alone is the ONLY satisfaction.

It was freeing to stop trying to build my resume. Not that I am not trying anymore. Admittedly, I want to work at everything that I do as if I am working for God alone. But I really could care less about building for myself a great big kingdom of accomplishments. And that I mean with all of my heart.

"If I stand, let me stand on the promise that You'll pull me through,
And if I can't let me fall on the grace that first brought me to you.
If I sing let me sing for the joy that has borne in me these songs,
And if I weep let it be as a man who is longing for his home."
-Rich Mullins

Still here...

With a potential "all-nighter" impending, I am filled with deep thoughts and it occurred to me to blog again. As I struggle to critique an epidemiological article about the relationship of HIV with previous herpes simplex virus type 2 infection, the only things that I can think about are totally unrelated to that subject. I have discovered a new musical group that I love for the first time in a very long time and this always leads to a reawakening of my bohemian tendencies.

Tonight, just like many nights, I am wondering why I am doing what I am doing. Don't get me wrong, I never doubt getting married, but sometimes I wonder why I did everything in the "right" order. For example, I graduated from college in the obligatory 4 years with a very practical undergraduate degree and then entered the working world. Now, I'm back in school and doing all the "good" graduate student things like studying a lot and getting an assitantship (even though it's in a field of study that I wouldn't like to work ever). Why have I always done exactly what was expected of me? I've never fallen asleep in class (really, ever), never turned anything in late, never made a C, etc. There's a Derek Webb song that alludes to "trading in our crowns for paper or plastic lives" and this is my greatest fear.

We've built this unfathomably enormous ladder for ourselves to climb not knowing that at the top we'll find that we've passed all of the important things by. As much as my flesh tells me that I want the things of this world, my spirit cries that I am a citizen of Heaven.

Propaganda

Because I love you all very much, I plead with you to NOT go see the movie Jarhead. It is truly one of the most disgusting things that I have ever been subjected to. Filled with sexually explicit content from the beginning, it is neither entertaining or very informative on any level. I guess that I cannot vouch for more than the first 45 minutes of the movie because I left at that point, but I seriously doubt it gets any better.

If you have seen the movie I can say that I don't know anything about what it's like to be a Marine, but I am married to one and he is nothing like the ones depicted in this movie. I am very disenchanted by Hollywood right now. They put this slant on everything and we are supposed to accept that their truth is actual truth, when 9 and a half times out of 10, it isn't.

So, there's my two cents for what they're worth. And happy 230th to Marines everywhere.

Love me, love my cats

When I was in seventh grade, I had a t-shirt with "Love me, love my cats" emblazoned on the front alongside a picture of a little girl with a bunch of cats around her. This has always been an underlying motto of my life and, fortunately for me, I married a man that takes this particular role very seriously.

First of all, don't let him fool you, he loves animals as much, and sometimes I think, even more than I do. He had two ferrets as a kid named Ricky and Bouncer and I think that if you can tolerate nasty ferrets (not to mention our ear-piercing, vicious bird), then you must be an animal lover. The proof of his love for me through this love of animals, and namely cats, comes in the form of two stories.

The first one begins on our way to Wesley one evening while we were dating. As we passed through Five Points, we witnessed a most horrible accident: a cat being run over! I was so distraught by the situation that my boyfriend (now husband) turned his truck around and went back to the scene. The cat was still alive, although barely, and I couldn't stand the thought of it being run over repeatedly, so Brian mustered up all of his un-queasiness and picked up the cat and placed it in the bushes. Right then and there I knew that he was the one for me. (I actually knew it already, but this did help seal the deal as they say.)

The second incident happened today when we thought that our recently adopted cat, Jake, had been run over while we were at church this morning. We saw a cat that looked identical to Jake in the gutter near our apartment complex. I was a mess. So, my wonderful husband went to look and determine whether or not this cat was, in fact, Jake. He surveyed the scene, but could not come to any definitive conclusions. My mind could not rest, so he went back to the cat, took him out of the bag that he had put it in, and tried to make a decision. He could not, but, people, this is love. To study a dead cat just to ease your wife's mind!

The happy ending, besides that I have the most amazing husband in the world, is that it was not Jake. He is home now and we're not sure how much he'll go outside anymore!

In Memory of Frances

My grandmother went home last Tuesday night. She doesn't live in Magnolia Estates anymore and of that, I'm sure she is very glad. She doesn't need her oxygen anymore. When we were trying to talk to Grace about it, she said, "Grandma's oxygen make her better." "Yes," we replied, "yes it did." But it wasn't the oxygen and it wasn't the thousands of pills and doctor's visits she's had over the past so many years since she began to get sick, it was the Lord himself that finally healed Grandma last Tuesday. Now she is whole, now she is perfectly who she was created to be. And I am overjoyed because of all this.

But I am really sad at the same time because my grandma is gone. She won't ever sit and drink coffee with us on Sunday afternoon again or tell us stories of how she and Daddy Fred met. She won't ever have us slip her wine into the assisted living home or laugh so contagiously here again. I loved her hands so much. She had one crooked thumb from an automobile accident and that made her hands so prominent. Her eyes were beautiful and they sparkled with quiet determination. She loved everyone around her more and gave of herself more freely than anyone, except for my own mother (her daughter), I have ever known. During the last two days of her life, everyone from the man who owns the assisted living home where she lived for the past two years to the cooks and cleaning ladies came by her room to tell her goodbye and that they loved her. My grandma was a woman who poured out the love of Christ. And now she knows it fully. What was mortal is swallowed up in life.

"And, Lord, Haste the day when my faith shall be sight..."

Heavenly dwellings

Tonight I sit amid the almost cool, although still quite humid, Georgia air at the intersection of Milledge and Lumpkin completely unable to concentrate on my task at hand, epidemiology. At the beginning of the semester it was my favorite class, but now my mind is so filled with other things that I just can't concentrate. The Asian man who is frequently up here has just finished a soothing round of classical guitar and every few minutes some undergrad pulls by blaring an all-too-loud country or rock or emo song. Brian sits, hooked up to his ipod, reading Constitutional law. The sound of espresso makers pounding out the grounds is barely muffled through the wall. Ah, another evening at Jittery's.

Our grandmother is really not doing well and so I've been thinking a lot about Home. Not our apartment or even the house out in Watkinsville, but Home. Heaven. I have no idea what it will be like. Paul uses the illustration of this life being spent in tents to compare it to the heavenly dwellings not built by human hands in 2 Corinthians 5. He says that as much as we long to live in these heavenly buildings, we still don't want to be uncovered of our earthly tents. Frances Reinhardt (my grandmother) will know Home soon. She will know peace soon. And I can't wish her to stay here in our tent village because both she and I know that this is the truth. She will dance with Fred again soon. There will be no more pain, no more new diseases, no more assisted living homes. Just the light of Jesus' face.

"And when from death I'm free, I'll sing on, I'll sing on..."

Update on Des

Since I last wrote, our zoo here has been changing a little. Desmond finally took the grand flight off of the back deck earlier this week and we last saw him descending into the trees. He looked like he was flying well and, frankly, he was making a huge mess in our study room, so I am not all that upset about his departure. Meanwhile, Jake the fluffy black cat has joined us. Brian even got him a litter box. He (Jake) jumped on my legs at five am the other morning and started biting me. Needless to say, I discourage him sleeping inside. It is fun to have a cat around though.

The best story of the week is that there was a spider on me during a class earlier this week. Yep, I had one of those little "stop the class because I'm freaking out, except no one else can see the spider" incidents. Gotta hate it when that happens.

Meet Desmond

...the newest member of the Magee family. We have sort of taken in a stray cat that we found attacking this little baby bird last Friday evening. I could not bear it, so our friend John rescued this little guy. He is now living in Paco's traveling cage until we decide what to do with him. He is really cute but he makes a terrible mess and I kind of feel bad for keeping him caged since he was never meant to be caged. Brian wants to release him at Big City Bread so that he can join the little flock of fellow finches there and live off of the bread crumbs. I just want to make sure he's completely well before we send him off. If you have any suggestions or if you want a cute little house finch, let us know. Until then, I guess our zoo will continue to grow!

The Cold, Hard Truth

The National Geographic for this month is all about Africa. I have been completely distracted all day by it, looking at the pictures and reading the stories again and again. Did you know that 6500 people die EVERY DAY in Sub-Saharan Africa from AIDS? What is more, 8500 people in Sub-Saharan Africa contract HIV/AIDS every day. There are 40 million people living with HIV worldwide, 26 million of whom are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fifteen million children were orphaned by AIDS as of 2003, 12.3 million of who live in, you guessed it, Sub-Saharan Africa. The list goes on and on. People, this is the same world that we live in! If you have any money left over after giving to the victims of Katrina, there are so many wonderful organizations out there that are trying to make a difference in Africa. World Vision, Blood Water Mission, Compassion to name a few. Please pray for Africa, then give if you can, but at the very least be informed about what's going on. And thanks, all 2 of you that might read this, for listening. Maybe now I can do actual, constructive things that I have been supposed to be doing all day.

"Look at all those fancy clothes, But these could keep us warm just like those. And what about your soul, is it cold? Is it straight from the mold and ready to be sold? Cars and phones and diamond rings, bling-bling, those are only removable things. What about your mind, does it shine? Are there things that concern you more than your time?"
-Jack Johnson

Escape

In the silence of this shadowed room, when the walls are pulled toward the center,
I'm afraid to be alone with you 'cause I'm dying full of splinters.
Why do you still want to hold me after a day like this?
All you can do is sing over me as if all has been dismissed...

You escape my words
You escape my words
I cannot consume what you offer, but in spite of myself,
I am yours

No, I cannot speak this language. You have quenched the thirst of these demands.
I can be no more than faithless, but this breath is from your hand.
You've released me from condition, someone's already been down this road before.
He has taken the scorn that I deserve, but my hands still move the sword...

My words cannot contain you. They cannot hold you down, close you in fill you up.

** I can take no credit for these words. This is a song by Sandra McCracken.

Hope for the future

"For we know that if the tent, which is our earthly home, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened-not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life." -2Corin. 5:1-4

"For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."
-Romans 8:22-25

"Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, but wine and milk without money and without price." -Isaiah 55:1

Science

There are moments in life when you actually realize why you are doing what in particular you are doing. Although these epiphanies are few and far between for me, here are some really cool science quotes that "light my fire," so to say.

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
-Albert Einstein

"All scientific work is incomplete-whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time. Who knows, asked Robert Browning, but the world may end tonight? True, but on available evidence most of us make ready to commute on the 8.30 next day."
-Sir Austin Bradford Hill

That second quote alone makes me want to be an epidemiologist. Powerful!

Procrastination

is what I'm best at I think. There should have been a major for us. But, since there's not, I'm moonlighting as a Public Health student.

On to a more thought provoking topic, I have been thinking a lot about how to tell a non-believer about my faith lately. Not that it's come up, but I feel like it will soon for some reason. Maybe because it's becoming so much more real to me now. Growing up in a very deep south, evangelical, Bible belt box I can be quite the cynic about things of those nature now. All I did were blindly follow rules that I didn't even know why I believed. Jesus met me on the floor of my dorm room one night during my freshman year of college though, and I think that that was the turning point. It became real, it became my own. I no longer believed in Him because my parents or my youth minister or anyone else did, but because I had met Him myself. Since then I have run the gamut of ministries from the very conservative, "group-dating," sect to the hyper-charismatic community church to find myself now in a quasi-traditional reformed church. All of these things have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I have never before felt like I could be a Christian and a "real person" at the same time. All of this to say, somewhere in the middle of this, I fell in love with Jesus. And I don't know much of what else to say right now.

My Twilight-zonish week thus far

Actually, we have to dip into the last bit of last week also, but weird things are happening here at the Magee household. Oddly enough, most of it has to do with mail.

First of all, we received our vehicle registration last Wednesday from a private citizen who was nice enough to forward it on to us on their own 37 cents. The geniuses at the ACC tag office mailed our vehicle regisration to another random Athens man in the back of the envelope with his. Our vehicle registration, people! A $175 sticker that says 2006. Thankfully, Random Athens Man is very kind.

Secondly, Brian got a tax refund from 2003 this week out of the blue. Weird. Next there was the incident in which we returned home to find a UPS sticker on our door with the standard, "First attempt at delivery/Signature required/Will attempt delivery tomorrow," message. This would have been normal enough had the coffee maker being delivered (free with Lexis-Nexis points) not been sitting in the middle of the sidewalk! Apparently, it didn't make it back onto the truck.

Additionally to these, our student loan check, AKA life-blood-for-the-semester, was returned to the Student Accounts office marked "return to sender, no forwarding address left," even though it was correctly addressed to Brian at our current residence. Did they bother to try and call? You guessed it, no. It was just sitting in a pile of things in the back of the financial aide office until someone dug it out today when Brian went by there.

Oh, all of this has happened not to mention the fact that we found out that we have been married for a month longer than we thought. Yep, our marriage liscence states that we were "joined in holy matrimony" a month before we thought we were. Best of all, no one has noticed until last Friday when I was getting an ID made. And now it's been over a year and 1 or 2 months.

I will close with the incident in which our friend's dad discovered a dead body yesterday in Pennsylvania. Yep, like on CSI. So, I would like to say that we are "getting into the swing of things" here, but, somehow, it kind of feels like we aren't. Good thing we believe in a Sovereign God!