Starting Over

Ok. Well, where to start. I guess it's appropriate to start with CU since it begins there and come full circle back to it.
Sometimes I feel like CU is my heart and soul, but it's not. It feels that way because that's where my heart and soul grew the most and the best. That's where I faced trial and survived thanks to my faith, my friends, my second family. It's where I learned to be passionate about my career, about life, about God, about His people.
Sadly I think I got some separation anxiety my final semesters and, combined with some outside bad choices, I made myself disillusioned and left CU angry and bitter. And for a short while I even blamed CU, though it had absolutely nothing to do with CU at all, and had everything to do with me and God and our slowly deteriorating relationship.
Why or how or when it started deteriorating I don't know and thanks to Mike (my friend Mike, CUEMS Mike, not the one we'll get to later) I realized that, while I knew I was mad at God I had no idea why. I couldn't remember when it started or what triggered it. And I certainly couldn't think of a single time when God had wronged me, ever (duh!). In fact, even aside from salvation, He's done so much for me I couldn't believe I had ever been angry with Him. It all seems so retarded now.
I looked at my life and I realized why I was miserable: I had no life! Literally. I was angry and moody and depressed and bitter and snipey and scared and confused and completely without a center.
And I have no idea how it happened, but I got my life back. One day it was just like, snap!, back. And I felt like I did at CU again: I had hope and happiness and love and alive. I wanted all the same things I did before, I felt the call again. I knew who I was again! I was Mikki again, finally, when I never thought I'd be that girl ever again. The bubbly girl who loved medicine and loved people and wanted to scour the world for broken people to fix, she was back!
It's not easy to be that person: I want to be that person but I still feel the old crusty angry me. I feel it like rubber bands snapping into place, which doesn't really make sense except that it's sudden and painful but easy because you've released the tension. But easy doesn't make it right. In fact, it usually makes it wrong, in my experience. I want to complain about school, and be lazy in my work, and yell at people, and be snarky to the point of being cruel, and judgemental! Oh my goodness I am so judgemental. And lie. That was one of the shocking moments, to find I was lying at the drop of a hat, without batting an eye, about things that didn't matter at all! It was pathological!
So it's hard. But it's worth it, because who wants to be the angry person? And what does being that way accomplish? Yeah, it might make people notice you for a while, and maybe they'll be scared of you. But for what? I don't know. It's not what I want.

And so, yes, I wrote a really angry spiteful blog back in August. I wrote many angry spiteful things about a lot of people. And they were all wrong. I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to have used someone's actual name and get caught, and get called out on it.
So here we have it: public apology. I'm sorry for what I said. It was uncalled for. It was juvenile. It was a snap decision. I was angry and hurt and didn't think things through, and I should have. I should have thought Why am I so angry? Why do I really care what other people think? *laughs at self* I get so caught up in looking like I don't care what other people think...because I want other people to think I don't care what they think. How messed up is that?! So anyway, I'm sorry. I mean no bodily-professional-emotional etc. harm. Do I have issues with you, yes, but I have to ask myself: what's more productive? To be angry because Christians are tearing each other apart over nothing (and therefore join in on the tearing each other apart: pointless!) or be the opposite and prove the stereotype wrong? Definitely the latter. So I'm giving up.
Giving up on being angry. Giving up on trying to seem like I have it all together. Giving up on projecting an image of knowing it all. No one knows anything, come on, don't we all know at least that by now?

After all that, I'm deleting all my previous posts. Because I don't want a lawsuit, sure, waste of time and energy worrying about that. But also because I don't want people to see that awful person I was. I don't want to see that person. I want to see the person who was madly in love with Jesus. Who had a heart for the city, who voluntarily slept on ice blocks to relate to suffering Christians, who sang with her whole being in Chapel and clung to Dr. Brown's every word. Who wanted to be Dr. Brown, Dr. Cook, Steve Saint, Marilyn Lazslo, Brother Andrew.
I want more blogs like January 2006 and less like August 2008.

So, to start off with a bang, some reminders to myself:


I know you don't have the strength to fight, but do you have the faith to stand?

If every picture tells a story,
Mine must be a mystery
'Cause I lose sight of who I am and who I am
And who I'm supposed to be
Gotta be something better than just trying to survive
Gotta be some important puzzle piece that I am missing
Gotta be something more to life

I don't want to end up where you found me...
I start the day the war begins
Endless reminding of my sin
Time and time again Your Truth is drowned out by the storm I'm in
Today I feel like I'm just one mistake away
From you leaving me this way
Jesus can you show me
Just how far the East is from the West
Cause I can't bear to see the man I've been
Come rising up in me again
In the arms of your mercy I find rest
Cause you know just how far the East is from the West:
From one scarred hand to the other

No guilt in life, no fear in death—
This is the pow'r of Christ in me;
From life's first cry to final breath,
Jesus commands my destiny.
No pow'r of hell, no scheme of man,
Can ever pluck me from His hand;
Till He returns or calls me home—
Here in the pow'r of Christ I'll stand.

I am not skilled to understand
What God has willed, what God has planned...
Yes, living, dying, let me bring
My strength, my solace from this spring;
That He who lives to be my King
Once died to be my Savior

What was said to the rose to make it unfold
Was said to me, here in my chest
So be quiet now, and rest.

Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so I can see
Everything that I keep missing
Give me your love for humanity
Give me your arms for the broken hearted
The ones that are far beyond my reach
Give me your heart for the once forgotten
Give me your eyes so I can see

Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; He died to make them worth it. -C.S. Lewis

"Now, with God's help, I shall become myself." -- Soren Kierkegard

"Seems that God is looking for more ways to get us home than for ways to keep us out." –Max Lucado, When God Whispers Your Name

"As a gay man I've found it's easier for me to get sex on the streets than to get a hug in church."

"What a nation needs is not a Christian ruler in the palace but a Christian prophet within earshot."

"What He does in places around the world unknown to us is His business. And He does a pretty good job, oftentimes without our help." --Dr. Brown.

"Don't measure your life by whether you have a Jaguar or not. God is not all that impressed." --Dr. Brown.

"Do you have nothing to lose and everything to give? I'm not sure what we're holding onto." --Derek

"You may not live what you profess, but you will live what you believe." -- Dr. Brown.

"My greatest fear for you is not that you will fail, but that you will succeed at something that just doesn't matter." --Dr. Brown

"Behold, these are but the outskirts of His ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of Him!" --Job 26:14

"I will lay my bones by the Ganges that India might know there is one who cares." –Alexander Duff
"Some wish to live within the sound of a chapel bell, I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of Hell." –C.T. Studd

"If we do not go to the heathen with the Gospel, they will come to us as revolutionaries and occupation armies" --Brother Andrew, The Calling

It will often look as though Christ is defeated. That's the way it looked on Good Friday. He let himself be libeled and harassed and scorned and shoved around and killed. But in it all He was in control. "No one takes my life from Me." So it will always be. If China was closed for forty years to the Western missionaries, it was not as though Jesus accidentally slipped and fell into the tomb. He stepped in. And when it was sealed over, He saved fifty million Chinese from inside -- without Western missionaries. And when it was time, He pushed the stone away so we could see what He had done. When it looks as though He is buried for good, Jesus is doing something awesome in the dark. --John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad

Ok, I think that's long enough ;)