Help!

This is Long Beach's conference video for the Sunland regional TRUTH conference last weekend. It was so much fun to be behind the camera again!!!

I love the Olympics...

Joannie Rochette of Canada suffered the loss of her mother this past Sunday. I cried as she took the ice tonight giving a bronze medal performance. For once in my life, I'm glad the US did not medal so that she could. Talk about heart pull!

Let My People Go!

I sometimes wonder how Moses was feeling when God told him that he was sending him to Pharaoh so that the Isralites would be freed and then said in order to do so, "I will harden his heart so that he will not let his people go (Ex. 4:21)."

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Oh LORD Who am I to see you in this way! I am not worthy to be here barefoot on this ground. Oh YHWH, thank you that you have heard the cry of our people! The Egyptians are causing us to suffer. You want me to tell Pharoah for you?!? They will just laugh at me, how will they believe it is you who has sent me?

What? What's in my hand, it's a staff. Whoa, a snake! I wasn't expecting that. Do what now? Put my hand in my cloak? Ahh, I'm a lepor! Now I'm going to have to leave the community! How can I see Pharoah now? Oh LORD I am sorry to have doubted you. I've never been good at speaking and now you are sending me to the ruler of the whole country! Yes, I know you will help my speech, but wouldn't anyone else be better than I? Aaron's already headed over. Ok. I won't forget the staff.

Wait, God. You just told me you are sending me to Pharaoh to ask for your people to be freed and now you are telling me Pharaoh is going to have a hardened heart?!? Look, I didn't ask for this! Now they are not even letting them use straw for making bricks and yet still require the same quota per day! See I've messed up your plan, why are they still captive?

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Moses did not understand why God had told him his people would be free and then they were not free right away. It took ten plagues for Pharoah to let the Isralites go. When I think of friends or people in my life held captive by the world, I can't help but plead with God reminding Him these are His people who he has allowed to be free by He, Himself coming to Earth to be broken. He has promised to finish the work He began and yet I don't see it anywhere near finished and the clock is ticking! Oh I wonder how God shakes His head at me when I am anxious or impatient at His transformation in other's lives.

Ecclesiastes 3:11, "He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."

Such true words to be recorded.

I want to go to there

I can empathize with the Israelites.

I find myself at times (particularly when my screen saver scrolls through photos from last year) where I find myself wishing for the past. Wishing to be back at Point Loma for Spring Break sleeping on the floor of a physio classroom building fences and strolling around old town San Diego. I was to carve my name into a tree with SS and look at photographs in a museum while having to remember to put my shoes back on before going into the building.

I don't think about the tears cried with Lauren over where God was calling us after we graduate from ASU. I don't remember the pain of a friend over a relationship. I push away remembering the hurt from close friends in my own life. I don't recall being broke and living paycheck to paycheck.

We choose to remember the good. We want to go back to safety becasue we know how it ends up...with the present. We know we make it out alive and so we can remember the good from a situation and not worry about the things that once kept us up all night.

I want to believe no matter what stage I am at in life, that the best days are ahead.