Days 3 and 4: Diversity!

Sorry I didn't post last night. we got back kind of late, we had kind of a late night and I couldn't resist some programming on Milton afterwards. But yesterday and today kind of fit together thematically, so that's fine.

Yesterday was (amazingly) Sunday. We had a bit of a slow morning; we were attending church in the evening and didn't do much in the morning even though we could have gone to Hope. We just hung out for the morning and played some games; I was on Milton for a while. At 1 we went to Hope, where the second service was just finishing up; we snagged some Panera bread. We were going on another tour of the city led by John Mayer (not the John Mayer, but we joked about it plenty). He was the leader of a group called City Vision dedicated to serving the poor and sharing the gospel in Minneapolis. He was a big fan of what he called "stomach evangelism", which apparently involved trying lots of multicultural food. We climbed on the Hope bus (this tour had apparently been publicized at the service today, so there were lots of people there besides our group) and headed for Midtown.

At Midtown we went to an amazing ethnic market with shops and restaurants representing many of the cultures in Minneapolis. I had biked by the Midtown building tons of times on the Greenway, but I had no idea how amazing it was inside! John Mayer recommended the camel burger (that he apparently invented), which many people tried. We walked around and visited the shops as we waited for them to be prepared. It was all amazingly colorful and full of cool stuff hanging in stalls, though we didn't buy anything. I wasn't adventurous enough to try the camel burger (I wish I had) and had some Thai food instead. After we were all sufficiently stuffed, we went on a tour of the rest of the city.

John's tour focused on the ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity in the city. Apparently Minneapolis is the top ___ city in America for just about any minority religion or ethnic group you can think of. He made plenty of jokes to help teach us about them (if you see green buildings, it more likely means they're Somali than Irish). We got out in a few places and explored a few neighborhoods, including the Super Mercado, a Hispanic mall on Lake Street. I'm already having a bit of trouble remembering all the specifics, but it was similarly illustrative to yesterday's tour. I will admit, I was a bit reluctant to keep hearing about all the diversity. Maybe it reminded me a bit of all the silly diversity exercises we did at my (not very diverse) high school. Sometimes it seemed like he was focusing on diversity for diversity's sake.

After the tour we debriefed a bit at Hope and then had some down time before the evening church service. We went to the neighborhood around the church (which the tour had passed through) and visited Mercado Central (across the street from Super Mercado), a Hispanic grocery store, where we got some soda (with cane sugar!) for dinner. We just walked around and visited a few markets in the neighborhood, then went into the church.

We were pretty much the only white folks there. It was a totally Hispanic church, and we weren't really sure what to expect. Luckily they apparently had a translation service for the sermon. They started off with six or seven worship songs; because they were in pretty basic Spanish ("Mi Dios es grande y fuerte") and I remembered surprisingly much of my high school Spanish, I actually followed the songs pretty well and even sang along. Some were translations of familiar English worship songs, and had sections where they broke intro English (I wondered if that was for our sake). The worship was surprisingly great; having to mentally translate really got me to think about the lyrics more.

The sermon was also all in Spanish; they gave us receivers and headsets to listen to an English translation, but mine didn't work very well and I eventually ditched it and just tried to understand as much as I could, which was actually about a quarter to a third of it. (About as much as I was getting off the headset, plus I could hear his tone) The sermon was about the importance of coming to church and participating in the body of Christ, which seemed pretty solid from what I could tell. (Apparently there was some theology we didn't really agree with, but I missed it) So that service went better than expected; just like with the African-American churches we went to in Milwaukee, everyone was really welcoming and you could tell the Spirit was there at the service with us.

After that was over we returned to le Hotel Legault to finally make spaghetti dinner; I did the meat for the sauce as I was good at it from making chili. the service had gotten out around 8:30, so it was a late dinner; David and Michelle joined us and a good time and meal was had by all. After Danielle and Rebecca (the female spring break-goers) left for the night it was pretty late and I just did some coding before bed, hence the lack of a blog.

The next day was mostly spent at Hope. Seth was taking us on another epic whirlwind tour through the entire Bible as we often did on Sundays, only this one took all day. I kind of had to force myself to pay attention and not feel like I knew the story by now: God's perfect creation of man, the tragedy of the fall, and the rest of the Bible as the working out of His redemptive plan. It was pretty dense and we spent a while on each part of the timeline; luckily there was plenty of food. As a break we went to a cool used book store (The Book House) in Dinkytown that I had known about but never went into. any students who are reading this, it's at 14th and 5th, I think; check it out. Books everywhere. I got a couple of good books like a Java book from 1996 that had been marked down from $50 to $1.

After lunch we got through the rest of scripture, covering how necessary and yet unexpected Jesus was in first-century Israel, then just hung out at a coffee shop until our evening activity. One other nice thing about this trip compared to Summer Project is that it's much less packed with lots of free time scheduled and unscheduled. We sat at a bar (drinking tea) but I kind of sat on the outside next to a speaker, so I couldn't really hear much. While lost in thought I designed most of an algorithm for my latest coding project.

In the evening we went to International Village, a nonprofit in St. Paul that offers lots of services to immigrants and refugees. Apparently they started out aimed at Somalis, but lots of Bhutanese refugees have been coming lately and they've mostly switched to helping them. The couple running the ministry showed us a video on the Bhutanese plight (ethnic Nepalis were getting kicked out of the country by the government and had spent over 15 years in refugee camps in Nepal before the United States invited them here) and did a simulation on how stressful the refugee experience could be.

After dinner we actually went out and visited some refugees in their apartment. These visits were apparently pretty common for the couple and served no purpose other than to be friendly and social. I wasn't too excited at first; I was worried about the language barrier and that I'd have no idea what to discuss with them. But nonetheless we went into an unassuming apartment, knocked on a door in the bottom floor, and were accepted into an apartment. My first impressions were that it was pretty bare, and it smelled. I eased into a chair in a corner and Charity, the woman we'd come with (who knew some Nepali) started talking with them.

Living in the apartment were the guy International Village knew best, Mohan, his younger brother, and their parents, who were students of IV's ESL classes. One of Mohan's friends and an older guy in a cool elf-like cap (we weren't sure of his relation to the family) were also there. Mohan and his brother spoke pretty good English; his friend was somewhat less intelligible, and the parents spoke minimal English. At first they left and let us English speakers talk, but Charity invited them back and tried to engage them in the conversation. They were generous and served us some chia (pronounced in one syllable), a traditional blend of tea and coffee, and then Mountain Dew, which was a nice illustration of the merging of two very different cultures.

Like I said, I at first had no idea what to say and we kind of let Charity do most of the talking, but pretty soon they opened up to us. Bhutanese people are really open; I asked questions that would have gotten one or two sentences out of an American, and they told us these cool stories. I ended up conversing with Mohan a lot and heard his own story as a refugee. He was about six when his family got kicked out of Bhutan and has only fleeting memories of his life there; his family apparently lived on a big farm in the mountains. He then lived as a refugee in Nepal for 18 years, which I could barely even imagine. Their accommodations in the camp there were really cramped, but they did get ten free years of schooling including English lessons, which turned out to be really valuable when they got to come to America. His parents had similar stories, remembering more of their life in Bhutan, but compared to life in Nepal their only problem in America was not knowing English, which IV was helping them with.

The other older guy (with the cool hat) also randomly mentioned he'd been bitten by a snake in Bhutan, which I asked more about. He was carrying some firewood home at night when his leg suddenly started stinging and going numb. By the time he got him it was swollen and he could barely move it, then he lost consciousness. When he woke up lots of his friends and family were there and his mother was tying up his left to keep the poison out of the rest of his body and applying an herbal treatment. Obviously he was fine now, but it was just amazing hearing first (or secondhand) something I would normally have read out of a book. It was so cool to be talking to these representatives from another world.

We drove that guy and Mohan's friend back; me and the friend had a nice conversation about how flat Minnesota was compared to Nepal. (It's hard to compete with Mt. Everest) We briefly stopped by the apartment the other group had gone to before heading home for the night. Apparently their conversation hadn't gone so well with the IV guy with them doing most of the talking. Anyway, today really brought home the point John Mayer made about the importance of bridging ethnic and cultural gaps. When you do, you meet some really cool people with amazing stories!

God has really surprised me the last two days and broken down lots of the resistance I had to cross-cultural ministry. Tomorrow we are doing more Biblical teaching in the morning and going to Hope Academy. I can't wait!

Spring Break, Day Two: Urban Homeworks

Today was pretty exhausting. We did a workday with Urban Homeworks, a Minneapolis nonprofit that seeks to provide "dignified, affordable housing" for low-income families and improve neighborhoods by developing property, aiding homeownership, and renting space to Christians who serve as neighbors for the families. They focus more on rehabilitating homes than on building new ones like Habitat for Humanity.

Anyway, we got to the worksite--actually worksites--today at 8 AM. They were two houses across the street from each other in north Minneapolis and we were doing demolition work. With plenty of people, we split between the houses. I went upstairs in our house and spent several hours removing spare nails, staples, and screws from every square inch of the gutted rooms. The original builders (it was a fairly new house that had had mold problems) has been a bit overzealous with the staples--they had secured the carpet at roughly half-inch intervals and each bathroom (there were two master bathrooms) had about thirty or forty full-sized staples at random locations.

Midmorning we had John, one of the Urban Homeworks staff and a former pastor, come and give us the "doodle"--a twenty-minute talk about Urban Homeworks' ideals with visual aids scrawled on the side of a box. The houses had been damaged by the tornado a few years ago; they'd had their hands full ever since. I hadn't realized how significant the difference between renting and owning homes was to north Minneapolis--many homes are in disrepair because their owners live elsewhere. Urban Homeworks is trying to help low-income families "own' their communities and feel at home there.

Anyway, soon after that we started applying a water sealer to the basement. (Apparently concrete is pretty permeable to water) It was pretty much like painting, but the holes in the wall made it hard to cover everything. Rolling the walls until we ran out of sealer took pretty much the rest of the afternoon, afterwards we went on a tour of Minneapolis, similar to the one we took in our first week in Milwaukee. I thought I knew the city pretty well, but we went to places--entire neighborhoods--I didn't even know existed. It drove home the point John had made earlier about the problems in north Minneapolis and Urban Homeworks' goals.

For dinner we visited some of the "urban neighbors" John had mentioned, living above a low-income family in a renovated home, where we ate Mexican food with them, introduced ourselves, and heard about their experiences as neighbors in a community they would otherwise have avoided. One of the guys, Erik, had been an urban neighbor for several years after traveling the world and figuring out what to do with his life. He was one of the most interesting people I've met in a while and ate five and a half enchiladas. (I think he could be a competitive eating star, but he's in law school)

Tonight we watched The Breakfast Club (I can't believe I hadn't seen that before) back at the "Hotel Legault". I'm still processing all the stuff I learned today, but it was well-timed--I'm seriously thinking about where in Minneapolis I want to live after college.

Spring Break, Day One

Today was my first day on my church's spring break mission trip! Until next Thursday I'll be working with lots of Hope's partner ministries around Minneapolis. I'm really excited to do some inner-city ministry again after Milwaukee summer project, especially in my favorite city. I'll also get some great ideas for other ways to serve with Hope in the future since these ministries are all in the city--an opportunity I didn't have after leaving Milwaukee.

Anyway, I got picked up around 5 today and we made our way through rush hour traffic to Hope. From there we quickly got briefed on what we'd be doing--serving meals at a homeless shelter at First Covenant Church. There were maybe ten men and women there to help out, some for the whole week and others just for the weekend or day. We carried all the food out to the Hope van, piled in, and drove...about two minutes, a few blocks away, to the church. (It would almost have been faster to walk) It was kind of crazy how quick it was. This morning I was finishing up configuring my new laptop, Milton, now I'm at a Hope couple's house in north Minneapolis. In Milwaukee it was a 6-hour drive and a week of briefing before we got started--it was kind of jarring to jump in so quickly.

Anyway, we got to the church and carried the food down to the kitchen, a big industrial kitchen with tons of cool machines. We unpacked the delicious food, donated by Hopesters, and started assembling plates--at least fifty. We got the soup heating on the stove and then pretty much got to hang out until people started showing up.

Setting out the food for the people who came was honestly a really joyful experience. I remembered Christ's words, "Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." I wanted them to feel cared for and accepted. After the first round of people had gotten their food, we took some and ate with them. I sat with three guys--John, Bob, and one guy with a more unusual name I sadly forgot. It was hard to figure out how to talk to them at first--we were so different, I wasn't sure what to say that wouldn't sound insensitive. Luckily they were actually pretty interested in us, so we talked about the U, the city, sports, the food. The chili I had was really good--I need to find who made it. I turned in to watch the kitchen and held down the fort for about fifteen minutes as everyone else was eating--it was really nice having something important to do and knowing that everyone else was out there talking to them.

As people finished, we hung out in the kitchen and talked for a while, serving any latecomers, then eventually started cleaning up. This place had a ridiculous industrial garbage disposal that looked like it could shred tree branches. Cleaning went pretty fast with so many of us. As we were talking with about twenty minutes before closing, a woman showed up asking for a meal. I was a bit taken aback--everyone else was already finished and we were putting away the food--but we made sure she got her meal. Again, it was pretty cool--the more we helped and loved on the people who came in, the more joyful--not just happy--I felt. It was a powerful reminder of God's heart for the city.

After our final cleanup we headed back to Hope to put away the leftover food and pack lunches for our workday with Urban Homeworks tomorrow--super excited for that. Apparently we're doing destruction; I hope I get to use power tools. Anyway, a hope couple and the wife's younger brother (Rich) have taken me and the other full-timer guy (Nathan) in for the week, and Rich destroyed me and Nathan at Modern Warfare II. I should get to bed soon--early day tomorrow.

May you find joy living out God's love for all people.

The Christian-ese Lexicon

In conversations within the context of modern Christianity, I've noticed there are some buzzphrases we like to throw around. These are words that may or may not have mundane meanings, but seem to be typically used in a highly technical, jargon-like manner by Christians to refer to deeper spiritual concepts. I call them "Christian-ese" terms. If you've been part of a church or Christian ministry I'm sure you've heard at least some of these. I'm going to help anyone confused by them by attempting to define them.

Generation (n.): An arbitrary grouping of Christians into a roughly five-year age range.
Walk with God (n.): 1. The current status of an individual's personal relationship with God the Father through Jesus Christ. 2. The history of such a relationship.
Quiet time (n.): Time spent in solitary prayer and meditation on scripture, usually in the morning or evening.
People group (n.): 1. From this official-looking source, a people group is "the largest group through which the gospel can flow without encountering significant barriers of understanding and acceptance." 2. In common usage, it almost always means a tribe living in relative isolation and lacking modern technology.
Eternal perspective (n.): 1. The human approximation to God's perspective on the past, present, and future as an eternal, unchanging being. 2. Increased patience and "big picture" vision.
Spiritual warfare (n.): Spiritual oppression or opposition to God's redemptive work in the world by demonic forces.
Opposition (n.): The forces being fought against in spiritual warfare. Perceived hardship or difficulty in ministry.
Cast vision (v.): I'm honestly not sure what this one means. I think it's basically to tell others about some calling God has given you to do something or something you've been praying for.
Scandalous (adj.): Disgraceful.

Perhaps you know of others. The point I'm trying to make is that while terms like these can be helpful, they run serious risk of being turned into spiritual buzzwords to be exchanged, argued, and acted on with little connection to their underlying spiritual reality. You begin to care more about these words and your relation to them than your relation to God. (Not explicitly, of course, but in truth) I let terms like "walk with God", "quiet time", and "sharing the gospel" dominate my concerns until I forgot the Reason behind these things.

One thing that worries me about the church today is how careless we can be with words. I don't just mean hiding behind buzzphrases like this; the spread of social media has made it all too easy to share "Christian"-sounding ideas that may not be helpful or even entirely truthful. An example is the "Jesus vs. religion" dichotomy I went over in a previous post, which, while true in a sense, was easily twisted into a rallying cry against whatever part of organized religion you don't like. This is what I most dislike about memes: you're just repeating something because you like it on a surface level, with little thought as to the deeper meaning.

If a word is used repeatedly in a technical sense, it needs to have a precise, well-defined meaning. This is part of why the Bible gives me so much trouble--the link between common words like "justification" and "redemption" and their true, spiritual-reality meanings is absolutely essential, but they are such strange words to fallen minds that it's hard to make that connection and so much easier to just talk and reason and preach and teach about the words themselves without seriously looking deeper.

Doubt

As I've been striving to build an authentic life on the foundation God laid with my decision in early January, I've been noticing something kind of alarming on my second trek through the Bible. I made it through pretty smoothly in ten or eleven months the first time, but I've been making much slower progress this time. All these passages keep jumping out and rubbing me the wrong way! Before was like cruising with an oiled bike on nice pavement, this time it feels like crawling through dense underbrush. Or thumbtacks. A month ago 2 Chronicles 18 (also 1 Kings 22) sent me into another faith crisis for a few days. When I found myself continuing to pray to a God who logically I no longer trusted to be truthful, I truly realized there was more to my faith than a set of facts I believed--it was intimate knowledge of the Person of God and trust that couldn't be broken nearly so easily. Rather than denounce God, I was willing to stay with Him and trust that there He really is good, and that there is more to Him than I will ever know.

I still don't have an answer about that passage, but it's not the most important thing to me anymore. It was good practice for more passages I keep running into lately. Who ever thought getting through the Psalms could be so hard? King David, pre-Bathsheba incident, is starting to seem like an arrogant, self-righteous prick (see Psalm 26 among others). Psalm 32 got me confused for a while when it seemed like David was preparing to lecture God, though it's more likely a case of missing quotation marks. Even the language, the figures of speech, the structure are strangely hard for me; I definitely can't just tear through it like I did the first time.

Yet somehow I'm not terribly troubled that there are all these parts of the Bible and Christianity that I'm having trouble accepting. Because there is a difference between rejecting something and wanting, but failing, to fully believe it. There's a difference between me wrestling with these tough passages and an atheist reading them for ammunition with which to mock Christians.

The New Testament almost always uses one word to mean doubt: διακρινω (diakrinō). It also means to decide, determine, or contend/struggle. This seems to describe what I'm going through pretty well. I'm fighting to believe in a way deeper than just saying "yes" to a list of things. I'm fighting to make my faith my own. And these doubts don't mean I'm going backwards. They are the manifestations of the parts of me that are still hostile to God and want nothing to do with Him. They have always been there, previously hidden, influencing me to interpret and distort Christianity through a lens so it avoiding touching them. Now they're out in the open and I'm willing to let God work with me to deal with them.

To expand on a thought I had at small group last night, God is helping me make the choice to fully believe in Him. I've already signed the (metaphorical) contract, made the commitment, but we're poring over the fine print. Looking at all the difficult truths of Christianity and accepting them in a shallow, too-easy way--"Oh, okay, praise Jesus!"--is not making this choice for yourself, but forfeiting it in exchange for surface-level obedience. Yet even as you seem to be living a fine and dandy Christian life, the rebellious part of you that creates all these doubts is still down there, at work beneath the surface, unworried by how holy you seem to the believers around you. Admitting I have a long way to go and dropping the facade is among the first steps to actually being holy. (This is starting to remind me of that crazy seeds-and-shells post I made the night all this craziness started happening)

Don't pretend everything is okay if it's not. God has a map for bringing you from where you're at to perfection in Him, but the terrain won't always be easy. On the voyage of belief, it's okay to have doubts.

Skyrim, Revisited

Well, I've logged a respectable 35 or so hours on Skyrim, and despite having gotten almost nowhere in the main quest, I'm feeling about ready to provide a more educated opinion on the game.

I've come a long way from rolling into Riverwood as a fur-armored ex-convict loaded with cheap loot. My character is now a level 42 badass battlemage who owns a shack in Whiterun and a very nice cave house in  the western city of Markarth. He wears a mixture of glass and dragonscale armor (I need to kill one more dragon to finish upgrading the dragonscale) and is extremely dangerous with his Legendary Daedric Sword. He throws fireballs, summons atronach companions, and is quite good at delivering devastating sneak attacks. If you can't tell, the gradual but undeniable sense of advancement is one of Skyrim's biggest draws.

I can't believe I only touched on the leveling system last time. The leveling systems of Morrowind and Oblivion were deep, rewarding, and multifaceted, but also quite flawed. The system of major/minor skills in Morrowind and major skills in Oblivion meant that when you created your character, besides choosing your name, race, birthsign, etc., you also picked a subset of skills your character was especially good at. You would advance more quickly in those skills, and increasing a total of 10 of them cause you to level up. Except your total skill gains also controlled the possible attribute bonuses you received upon sleeping to level up, and you could only pick three, and if you had too many bonuses you'd waste some of your skill level ups, and if you had too few you weren't gaining attributes fast enough, and you had to devote one of the bonuses to luck almost every level if you wanted to maximize it, and you had to maximize endurance quickly by leveling Armorer, Heavy Armor, and such to maximize your HP...

As you can see, the leveling system of previous games was a mess. The major skills were the ones you were supposed to be good at, the ones that defined your character's archetype, but you wanted to make them skills you wouldn't be leveling, at least not naturally, because then you wouldn't be able to precisely control when you leveled up to ensure you always gained the right amount of skills to maximize your attribute bonuses. If it sounds confusing, that's because it was; I had to get mods to "fix" the leveling system and keep myself from having to obsess over which skills I was leveling when. It was nasty and seriously broke the immersion of the games (at least for calculating players like myself) by keeping you from playing your character "naturally".

The leveling system in Skyrim, then, is probably its biggest improvement. I would say it's even better than any of the mods of the previous two games. Basically, there are no major or minor skills anymore; all skills count towards your next level, though higher-level skills (the skills your character is best at) count more. Makes sense. Also, as I mentioned before all the attributes (strength, endurance, intelligence...) have been removed; health, magicka, and stamina (which also controls how much you can carry) are now your character's only attributes, and rather than bizarrely tying their advancement to your skills, you simply pick one to increase by 10 whenever you level up. Total control. You can increase mostly health and stamina for a beefy fighter character, or more magicka for a mage. Just being able to do whatever I want, increase whatever skills I want, actually leveling up a diverse variety of skills willy-nilly, is tremendously freeing, like the way The Elder Scrolls should be. The birthsigns and specialties of previous games have both been folded into the guardian stones; rather than picking them once at character creation, you choose a guardian stone and can switch at any time by visiting another stone.

But even with no specialties or major skills, you are still encouraged to specialize your character; it just happens gradually as you play the game and explore, rather than at the outset when you barely know your character yet. This is made possible by the "perk" system, which is almost as brilliant an improvement as the skill/attribute system was a fix to previous games. Basically, every time you level up, you get a perk point to spend. Each skill has its own tree of perks to explore and choose from; as you increase the skill and go deeper into the tree, more perks become available. Simply increasing the numerical value of your skills is less powerful than in previous games; to really get good at a skill, you have to get the perks of that skill. These range from greatly increasing the effectiveness of a skill beyond what simply increasing it could do, to nice little bonuses (the chance to critical strike with sword attacks) to awesomeness. (Having two summoned minions at once) It makes leveling much more dynamic, interactive, and all-around fun.

Update: My level 51 character (now the Archmage of the College of Winterhold) has maximized his smithing and enchanting skills. He has fully moved into a three-floor mansion in Solitude, the seat of Imperial power in Skyrim. I've killed enough dragons and captured enough souls to finish his legendary, double-enchanted Dragonscale armor that boosts his stats, lets him resist elements, and lets him cast Destruction spells for free. Yes, spamming the expert-level Thunderbolt spell is tons of fun. Amazingly, though, even with that and my infinite-charge Legendary Daedric sword that does fire damage, the game still has its challenging moments. This game is amazing.

Singleness and Spiritual Gifts

I was going to write nothing for this Valentine's Day and let the silence speak for itself. But instead, I'm afraid I'll be pulling off the old cliche of writing about singleness on Valentine's Day because I'm single. Not because I'm not content with my relationship status, but because I am.

Most people, Christians and non-Christians, fall into the trap of agonizing about their singleness and how to best (and most expediently) end (or, dare I say, "solve") it. So many books have been written for and by Christian singles about waiting for the right person, being the right person, and letting God write your love story because so many people need to hear these lessons There's also plenty of bad advice packed with unhelpful or outright false cliches about singleness, often originating from the lie that marriage or family is the ultimate goal for all Christians. I'm truly blessed to have so many friends who aren't always trying to set me up or share Biblical wisdom for marriage with me as if I needed help.

No, for the past few years I've fallen more towards the other extreme of being too comfortable with my singleness. I don't know of any Christian books for that. I took the fact that people almost universally tended to fall into the trap of idolizing relationships, which I considered myself to have escaped, and fell right into the biggest sin of all: pride. I wasn't so weak as to be enslaved by my passions and feel incomplete without my "other half"! I was a whole person! And besides, relationships were hard and painful. (It was easy for me to say this because I'd had a 100% failure rate with mine) Being single was so much better; to think I would ever throw it away! This attitude began before I was really trusting God with the direction of my life and continued in a milder form afterward.

Obviously I don't think this way anymore. Last summer God chipped away at my pride and fear of "drama" until after a good deal of soul-searching He got me to admit that maybe, possibly, someday, I could get married. Doing so was almost painful and He had to drag me figuratively kicking and screaming away from my prideful pedestal. Marriage still isn't looking likely anytime soon, and I'm fine with that, but this admission was another step towards letting God guide my life instead of myself--trusting Him with my future as One who knows best instead of whatever I can come up with. Seriously, my future plans are pretty lame: work as a software engineer, live in a tiny apartment, drive an electric car, listen to cool music. That's pretty much it; nothing to be excited about, no transcendent significance. And the possibility that my singleness might end someday helps remind me to make the most of this time of freedom while I can.

Until then, I'm content. Whether I remain single for one year or ten, I'm learning to see the extra time, freedom from concern, and ability to live extremely cheaply as gifts to enjoy and use in service to my God. I'm not incomplete. I'm not lacking anything I need. If you are single this Valentine's Day, please hear this: you are not the least bit less valuable or lower in status for it. Don't let anyone make you feel otherwise.

More generally, every gift, even one considered a "curse" by most people, has the potential to be abused. If we only pay attention to the gift and how cool it is--if we get greedy with it--and forget to thank the giver, then we've missed the point. This also applies to the other spiritual gift I'm pretty sure I have, knowledge.

Unlike with presents you get once and keep forever, spiritual gifts from God are continuous things--you only have them when He is actively giving them to you. The fact that the word used for the Spirit in the New Testament, pneuma (πνευμα), also means "breath" is a nice illustration: the working of your spiritual gifts is like God breathing through you. Some nights at Bible study the secrets of scripture seem to be plainly laid out before me, other nights I can barely make any headway and have to rely on everyone else. It's a gentle reminder that this wealth of knowledge isn't my own.

Whatever your spiritual gifts are--preaching or serving or administration, whatever that means--I hope you realize just how great they are and how not-your-own they are.