Wedding Bells

     Well, we're down the mountain for good. It is good to sleep in a bed again, but I was definitely sad to go! We built some great relationships with the snowboarders the past couple weeks, and I don't think waking up in the mountains could ever get old.  The students up there are awesome people! For example, the morning we left to go snowboarding, one of the girls who decided not to go that particular day offered me all of her gear, including: board, bindings, boots, helmet, goggles, gloves, and a mouth-warmer-thing!  Total, it ended up saving me about 50 bucks. In case you hadn't picked up on it yet, I snowboarded and am still alive to tell about it! Not a scratch on my body (several bruises, but no scratches!).  I had tons of fun, even though I spent most of the day on my butt. It turns out, I had been doing it completely wrong the entire first half of the day.  Snowboarding tip #1: you should never actually be riding with the bottom of the board on the ground, you should always be riding on one of the edges of the board... who woulda thought?!?  Not me.  But I learned a couple hours in and was good to go after that. :)  I could not have asked for a better 21st birthday!  I believe I got sung to a total of 5 times throughout the day.  AND all of my brothers texted me... woohoo! 4 for 4. It made me feel important and loved (cough cough).  That was somewhat passive aggressive, I apologize... like mother like daughter I suppose. :)
     Okay, enough revealing of the family secrets.  What is God teaching me? To be completely honest, I don't have one specific answer for you this week.  We get pounded here with so much information day after day, week after week, that I feel like I am learning SO MUCH I can't even narrow it down.  I'm learning so much that I don't know what I'm learning... make sense? Someone here once compared DTS to drinking from a fire hydrant, and I think that is a perfect analogy.  Our school director, Jacob, told us the other day that if you count all the hours of lectures and ministry we do here just in the first three months, it is equivalent to going to church on Sundays for 4 and 1/2 years! That's a lot. Like, a lot.  So, my goal here is not to regurgitate the hundreds of pages of notes I have taken and all that I have learned, but to keep it personal.
     Something I shared with the group here the other day is that I feel as if God is romancing me.  I love that word!  In worship on Wednesday, I had a revelation about my love for God.  I have realized while I'm here how much God is truly in love with me and I have shared that some with y'all.  I am finally realizing His commitment to me.  But what occurred to me Wednesday is that I have not fully committed myself to Him.  Allow me to explain.  Now, as the mature, wise, just plain brilliant 21 year-old that I am, I have known for quite some time that the word 'love' in regards to marriage has less to do with feelings and more to do with commitment.  When I tell a significant other in the future that I love him, it will mean I am committed to him for a lifetime.  Now, for some reason, whenever I have told God how much I love Him, it has been when I was feeling close to Him.  Why has my love for God never been about commitment, the way marriage here on earth is?  So, this past week, God and I got married! You can send wedding gifts to my YWAM address. :) Seriously, though, when I tell God I love Him now, it means I am committed to Him in the easy times and the hard, the good and the bad.  Right now, I am in the honeymoon phase of my love story with God.  I am totally obsessed with His love! I can't get enough of it.  Looking forward from the honeymoon, I know there will be difficult times, but now I know that my love for Him is not determined on how "in love" I'm feeling at each particular moment.  He's not going anywhere, and neither am I.  I can only make this commitment to Him because of the commitment I know He has to me.  1 John 4:19 says, "We love because He first loved us."  Any amount of love or commitment I have comes only from the amount I realize He has for me.  I could go on with this analogy forever, but I'll let you try and figure out other ways the word 'marriage' works for our relationships with God. :)