Ya Dvadstat-oden ~ I'm Twenty-one

School is real now I tell ya. I kind of feel like I have been staring at a pretty picture and the Olympics have come and gone. I feel like I'm MISSING things.

We have, so far, successfully traversed the couple friends terrain so far. We have Scott and Jo who are beautiful, authentic, REAL people that have been an unreal blessing to u

s in the past year but we have slowly (on my part, very slowly) integrated ourselves into the community at Regent and Westside and the Lord has brought about such great people. We had our first small group last Thursday which was so fun! It may at some points p

ut a bit of strain on studying and getting homework done but it is absolutely worth it. Westside has this surprising demographic despite being Calvinist and Mennonite, of about 18-35 year olds that make up most of their church. And so most of the people that we're connecting with are of similar life circumstances and times of life and all invested in very different things. I am so excited for small group. There is this one fabulously positive girl in our small group. She, very misguidedly, asked me to cut her hair. I have not acquiesced as of yet. I am reminding her repeatedly (and FOR HER OWN GOOD) that it would be a very bad thing for me to cut her hair. And then we have one girl from Germany. A dancer. A ref

ormed hippie. It's a good mix. It's not really a 'small' group, more of a 'midsize' group with twenty-one people. And they have great snacks. Matt and I are always late though. Hmm.

Last night we went for dinner at the house of one of the pastors at Westside. Their little boy, 18 mts old, is holy smokes the cutest little person I have ever seen. Chad was telling us how they have programmed OCD into him already. Once last night, when their little boy walked up to a plate of crackers and grabbed a handful (which turned out to be 2), Dad says, "Kiel you took two, can you put the other one back?". Kiel looks at Dad, selects his cracker of choice and dextrously places the second cracker back into the exact same place. He pushes his chair in once he's done with it. He goes to get paper towel when he's spilled something on the floor. He's 18 months old.

My man was in fine form last night. I'm not the only one who could pick his brain for hours. There was a rather chirpy debate going on reg

arding women in leadership which is something Westside (being crazy, I think. I think that's the term) doesn't support in their church. It was something that broke my heart a little when I found out about it. The Lord had blown my heart wide open and hadn't let me go when we first went to Westside. Afterwards, after we had moved to Van, I found out about certain stances they have. They are very complimentarian,

which I do not, on many levels, agree with. I am only now, however, beginning to encounter it from a scriptural basis. I prayed a lot about it to wrestle through can I stand for a community that stands for things that I don't? I felt like the Lord said to me, "I am not asking you to confront that right now. I am asking you to trust and believe in what I want to do in you through this place." So after about fifteen minutes of the party line being towed, they quiet down a

nd all kind of look warily over at Matt. He has established a reputation of being the debating type. And then he pretty much takes a deep breath and throws it down. He called it the last form of acceptable discrimination in the church. I kind of felt like I should have had a weave in my hair and fluorescent hi tops with the laces undone, barking at some throwdown behind my man dressed like a white 'Fitty'. But he was AWESOME. (Totally feelin' the caps lock today.)

I love fall. I have said this, no? I recently came upon a freakin' gold mine of fallishness. I have tried to incorporate what I consider fall clothes for the past two weeks and every time I have sweated myself into submission. It is not fall yet. Not even officially. I wear flip flops everyday or else I can't get myself under control. It's really so too bad. But it will get here eventually. November will arrive and everyone will be in such a bad mood that we'll have to bring out the thick socks and wonderful toques.

Hyperbole and a Half has recently reintroduced me to laughing so hard I herniate something.

This girl is like my age too and her stick drawings are AWESOME (Again? Totally). She has a post on Social Terrorism that is soooooooooo true. The Four Levels of Social Entrapment. The one I saw first was why I'll never be an adult which contained the 'go the the bank like a motherf***king adult' thing. But it gets so much better. I think she probably draws all of her stuff on Paint but she's got such freakin' skills I can't contain myself. Blogs and humidity WILL be my demise.