Too tired to think of a title

But at least I have some alliteration going...

Yes, I went back to work today. Thankfully it was Friday. If it had been a Tuesday, I don't know how I would have handled it. Yesterday made me seriously question how much longer I can do this...so you can all pray for me that I have wisdom in making some decisions...Today was a little better.

In the afternoon, I was helping one of the senior staff do an intake of a new resident. The poor sweetheart was being placed from a foster home; basically she hadn't done anything wrong but I guess the situation in the home was not the best and so she was sent to the Shelter until they can find something better for her. Argh. So now she's being thrown in with all these hellions. Cringe. She brought TONS of stuff and we don't know WHERE we are going to put it all as we are consolidating everything b/c of the move; space is at a premium in the house right now. In the midst of her picking out a few outfits to use while she's here, two strange men walked in. Huh...deja vu? Not the same two strange men as yesterday. THESE men were here to test the fire alarms and wanted us to call the fire alarm center to tell them that there might be false alarms going off...So I was expecting the alarms to go off any minute and I was walking around the house plugging my ears because I know from past experience that even when I know an alarm is going to go off, I jump about half a mile in the air when it does. They never went off while I was there...

I have started reading a book called "When God Interrupts" by M. Craig Barnes and I wanted to share a quote from it. And just to clarify, he is using the word "conversion" in a much broader sense than simply making the initial decision to accept Christ. I think he's sort of maybe referring to...the process of sanctification...maybe? It's kind of hard for me to define what he means by it but maybe you'll get an idea by reading this: " Conversion always begins as God's terrifying initiative in our lives. It scares us to think that God would actually intervene in our good lives and say, " I don't care how devoutly you believe, you don't know who I am." If that happened, life would be very different. The inverse of that is also true. No matter how desperately we may want to change, we never will unless we see God differently. God alone is the Converter. We cannot change ourselves, and we cannot help but be changed when He reveals more of Himself to us. To follow Jesus is to enter the lifelong process of discovering more about God than we know, discovering that "my ways are not your ways," discovering that we have been worshiping not God but an expectation of God. Nothing makes it harder to see God than our expectations of Him. They blind us to the new ways He is at work saving our lives. Conversion pulls us away from being religious, away from having all the answers. It turns us into pilgrims who journey through life with some hard questions. For God is always working just beyond our limits, inviting us to venture into the unknown where we are abandoned by everything - especially by our prior expectations of God."

It really made a weird kind of sense to me - the whole thing of worshiping an expectation of God and not really knowing who He is...and being pulled away from "being religious" and not "having all the answers." I mean, I think I DO know God at least a little bit...but maybe it's like reading a file of one of the girls coming in to the Shelter. You get some information, you find out where they're from, what kind of trouble they've been in...but you don't know everything that has made up their life in the past, what family influences are present, what their personality is, what their interests are, their fears, dislikes, loves...you don't KNOW THEM. I think he might well have said that following Jesus is a lifelong process of discovering more about God than we thought was necessary or comfortable, or that we initially wanted to!