time to breathe

This weekend Jade, Elliot, and all of us in the first year Servant Partners class took our first retreat together. West L.A. Baptist kindly opened up their facilities for us to stay in, so Friday evening after work all the Pasadena folks squished into a car together with all of our stuff for the weekend and drove down there. It turned out to be a very restful weekend. It's been a hard last two weeks emotionally, so taking time to enjoy people and connect with Jesus was just what I needed.

A few of the highlights from the weekend included shooting hoops in the West L.A. Baptist gym (I miss playing basketball!); spending hours alone with God listening, praying and journaling; sharing and singing together; going bowling; playing frisbee on the sand by the Santa Monica Pier, and eating ice cream between DELICIOUS chocolate chocolate chip walnut Ditty Reese cookies. :) It was great to spend down time with the South L.A. folks, since it's hard to really connect and chat at our regular meetings, as they are always scheduled full. One of the most impactful moments of the weekend was a time of healing prayer that started out focusing on one intern's back pain and ended up with God bringing out all kinds of emotional crap in our whole class surrounding issues of comparisons, envy, inadiquacy, and pride. It was amazing to see how just like when Jesus healed people in the book of Luke, God's picture of healing for us extends so far beyond the healing that we envision for ourselves, and he knows what the deeper issues at play are even when we ourselves are unaware of them. Knowing that God knows where we need healing so much better than I do is deeply encouraging to my journey of learning to trust him.

Now I'm back in the regular pattern of life, trying to job search during what free time I have between working and Servant Partners and Northwest Neighbors. Diamante and I have been pouring over presidential candidates' information on the web. We joked that we're going to vote for the person with the prettiest and easiest to read website (Obama's definitely winning on that count). It's so exciting to me that a biracial man and a woman are running for president this year. If you had asked me even a year or so ago if I thought a woman would be running for president with a viable chance at making it anytime in the near future, I would have said no. It's been a LONG time in coming. Our country will be so much healthier and balanced when we have wise input from people of both genders and many ethnic backgrounds determining our policies and direction.

It's also exciting to see the impact that Hillary and Obama's candidacy is having even for the kids in our neighborhood. In the last Northwest Neighbors high school Bible study, when they were talking about the election, one of the multiracial high school girls asked, "What does it take to become President? Could I be president?" :)