Church and a Hike

So this week I had Friday off, and I thought I had Saturday as well, since that’s what I had last time (They usually give employees regular days off). But as it turns out, when I came into the cafe around noon for lunch, I was working that day! 😛 I ended up being only an hour late and worked hard as it was busy… And now I have Sunday and Monday off – which will be my new regular days off. My boss, Mary, changed them because she knew I would be going to church. 🙂 So sweet of her!

So day off, one day of work, day off, day off. What am I to do with myself with all that free time?? I already posted my pictures from the hike I did on Friday, here’s what happened today (Sunday):

Once I found out I had the day off, I knocked on my neighbor’s door, Kayla. She came with the Christian ministries in the parks (www.acmnp.com), along with a guy named Lee. They were actually the first people I met when I came. 🙂 She was super excited when I told her I could come.

So the next morning I got up before seven (earliest I’ve woken up in a while… I’m sure my family’s smirking at that, but hey, I see no reason to wake up early if I don’t need to. 😉 ), headed over for breakfast, and picked up my sack lunch from the cafeteria. We can arrange for one sack lunch a week, and take it hiking or wherever. And it’s free! (Which it better be as we’re paying for meals…) Sweet deal.

I drove with Kayla, Lee, Courtney (Kayla’s roomie), and Gene (who works in the kitchens) to Ohanapecosh (try remembering that name five minutes later!). It took about 40 minutes to drive to… beautiful drive though, along one mountain ridge, slipping across the valley, then back along another mountain ridge. It was a clear, sunny day, so we had great views of Mount Rainier along the way. There were waterfalls everywhere along the road – almost got a car wash a couple times. 🙂

Once we reached Ohanapecosh and met up with Vince and Kristy – a couple that are in charge of the ministry at Mt. Rainier NP, I believe – we went to the amphitheater which was outside (gaspeth!) and a fairly good size. A good amount of people showed up too, I think about 17 others, not including us. They came from the campground nearby and the ranger station. It was a small church service, with a few songs and prayers, then Vince  talked for a while about Genesis 1.

It was great talking with the people afterwards. 🙂

Annnnd then we went for a hike! The seven of us – Vince, Kristy, Lee, Kayla, Gene, Courtney, and me! We walked up to Grove of the Patriarchs and then back. On the way we passed Silver Falls – BEAUTIFUL waterfall. 🙂 Mesmerizing to watch.

Silver Falls

Pictures just don’t do it justice – cliche but true. I’ve never seen another waterfall where you could see so many individual water drops as they sprayed into the air and fell. This waterfall was fast, almost violent, sending some water shooting into the air after they hit the bottom. Beautiful. 🙂

Bridge we crossed on the way – awesome, yes? Only one person could cross at a time. It swayed and bounced in an odd but cool way as you walked.

All of us. =)

My Sack Lunch

And of course my lunch. 🙂 Just to show you how amazing it was!

Most of the rest of the day I spent in Paradise Inn, reading Donald Miller, people-watching, and listening to piano music. They have a piano player who is there about 5-8 every day, so wonderful to sit and listen to… When I came in tonight he was playing “I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady. 🙂

 

Here’s the link to my pictures:

https://picasaweb.google.com/113953510817426936065/Jun5GroveOfThePatriarchs?authkey=Gv1sRgCJmm9KHisey20wE&feat=directlink

Weaker alone, Stronger together

In church today, the speaker talked about working at a dude ranch for a summer, when he was 19 years old and a brand-new Christian. He drove to the ranch with a Bible on the passenger seat of his trunk, but found himself pummeled by the enemy and unable to withstand the attack. At one moment, he said God actually put a physical pain in his chest to get his attention, and spoke to him, saying, “Leave. Let’s get out of here. Come away with me.”

This guy chose to ignore that call, though, because the things of the world he was experiencing were, at that moment, more attractive than what God offered. When his time at the ranch ended, he drove home weeping. The choices he made had left him empty…

I don’t want to head off to Mount Rainier with the naivety that I can stand strong on my own. I need time with God, and I need fellowship with believers.

I’ve downloaded some sermons to listen to while I’m gone, but I want to be edified by the church. I want to hear from you guys. So I wanted to make a list of people that agree to email me a couple times while I’m gone, and get enough people that I can get a couple emails a week.

Not to be a limitation, but ideas for the emails:

• What you’ve been reading in your Bible, and hearing/learning from God.
• The highlights and lowlights of your week.
• And – most importantly – a prayer for me. Not to sound selfish… but really it is out of selfish desires that I ask for this. 🙂 This summer I’m going to be far from everything I’ve lived with thus far. I’m going to be encountering things and lifestyles I’ve never encountered before. And I don’t want to be overcome and give in to this world – and go home weeping – but I want to live in Christ’s strength and through Him be an overcomer. I want to demonstrate Christ to those I meet. So please, a prayer for me.

🙂 So if this is tugging on your heart and you’d like to be part of my “edifying group” while I’m away, let me know. I ask this because I know it would be prideful to depend on just myself.

Thanks!

Sarah

BookSneeze Review: The Map by David Murrow

I signed up for BookSneeze about a year ago (a program where you receive books for free – the only criteria being that you post an honest review on your blog & a consumer website.) After ordering my first book and reading more than halfway through it, life got in the way and a couple days ago I remembered “Oh… that book I got! Yeah should probably go finish reading it…”

“You must not have found the book very exciting”, you now say. Well… there was nothing wrong with the book per say, I simply didn’t realize what the book was, and more specifically what its intended audience was before I selected it. After I received the book, I realized the subtitle was “The way of all great men”, and the author also wrote the book “Why Men Hate Going to Church.” Whoops. Newsflash: I’m not a man.

Instead of passing this book off to my dad or brothers, though, as I guess some smarter people would have done, I plowed through it on my own. And here’s my review:

The first half of the book was fairly interesting. For some reason Murrow decided to write a fictionary, “Da Vinci Code” like tale of finding a map that would change the world. As he reveals in the second half of the book, the story was not true (no, really? He didn’t go visit some monks in Greece and face danger for a lost map?), and the map was simply a pattern he had noticed while speed-reading the book of Matthew. He offers the speculation that all men must travel three journeys: The Journey of Submission, the Journey of Strength, and the Journey of Sacrifice – in that order. Traveling these journeys requires vacillating between “Feminine” and “Masculine”, then back to “Feminine”. Murrow draws these journeys out in a simplistic “map”, because he says men tend to learn visually. For a condensed view of this map, go here.

Again, I am not a man, so this message definitely did not strike me in the way it might strike its intended audience. Murrow said some pretty bold things, mostly about the Journey of Strength, that I hesitated to agree with. On page 147, he says:

“I’m going to tell you something you’ll never hear in church: You can fly into a rage and still be a faithful Christian. You can hurt people’s feelings. You do not have to be nice all the time. You can say no to people. You can shut some people out. Jesus did all these things. And we are first and foremost imitators of Christ.

Just remember the cardinal rules of the journey of strength: do not forsake the lessons of submission. As long as you do everything out of love, and not out of bitterness, you can be demanding and even unpleasant once in a while – especially when dealing with other men.”

For me I just know this sounds dangerous. My old nature can so easily twist things so that even if I am convinced in my own mind I am hurting someone out of love, it’s really because of a selfish, self-serving cause. To deal with someone out of love, in a manner that may not seem so loving, requires a lot of prayer and should not be done in the moment.

Just as a side note, a sentence he said on page 129 made me laugh, when he wrote about himself – “I have not always been this humble”. 🙂 Sorry, that just made me smile.
Overall, I thought this book had a couple good points about how our Christian life should display Submission, Strength, and Sacrifice. I wasn’t impressed enough to recommend this book to others, though, or to read it again. And again, please remember I’m a woman so this book probably struck me completely different than it might a man.

For more information about this book, its author, and its message, visit www.threejourneys.com. The author is currently working on a discipleship program for men based off of this “map” called Men’s League. I believe he is planning to build programs for women, children, etc. as well, based off of these three journeys.

For more information about the BookSneeze program visit www.booksneeze.com

We are His Body

Found this draft and thought I might as well post it…

This Sunday I went to the Duvall Church. It struck me as I was listening to the pastor speak and standing for worship – we went to many, many different kinds of churches on our trip. MCC, Cascade, Adventure, Duvall, I’ve attended them all. I know people at all of them. And God is at every one of them. It’s kinda hard to explain now that I’m sitting at the computer, but I was just thinking about how all these people are my family. They’re all my brothers and sisters in Christ. God is in their worship, no matter how it differs, and He is in the pastor’s words, no matter if it’s Scott or Matt, and… He’s there.
I don’t know if I’m explaining it right. =) But just a random thought during this week.