GLORY

The past three months have been fantastic.  I’ve tried to keep my blog updated, but I couldn’t possibly write down all the things I have experienced and everything God has been teaching me.  While the “purpose” of my trip was to study abroad in a new culture, improve my Spanish, and finish my degree, the most significant aspect of the experience is how God used it to further prepare me for my future in missions work.  God leads so perfectly.  His governing and sovereignty over my life blows my mind—I can’t even imagine what it will be like to get to Heaven and see how He perfectly orchestrated all of human history!

I think I can summarize my trip in three major themes God has been teaching me since I’ve been in Spain.  First, during Semana Santa while we were in Sotogrande, God was revealing to me (to some degree) the power of sin and its effects on our soul, then the power of Jesus’ perfect life and resurrection and the victory we have through his sacrifice on the cross.  Second, while spending lots of time in the prayer room back in Madrid God showed me the importance of hungering for more knowledge of God and how when we seek Him, He will reveal Himself to us.  I wrote about both of those things in previous blog entries.

The third lesson God has been teaching me the past month through the wonderful people at Kilometro Cero (the prayer room/evangelism school).  They are so dedicated to evangelism, preaching the Gospel in Puerta del Sol every evening (except Sundays) for the past 22 years.  I got to talk to Jacob, the guys who started it all and he told me a little bit about how he got started, how they went about adding a prayer room to their ministry, and the importance of preaching the true Gospel.  This is when God opened my eyes to the third major lesson of my trip. 

One day while I was in the prayer room I felt really compelled to talk to Jacob, ask him about evangelizing and ask him to pray for me.  He talked about how everyone in the Bible who evangelized first preached repentance.  It was John the Baptist’s message as he prepared the way for Jesus; it was Jesus’ first message; it was what the Apostles preached in the book of Acts.  He told me about Ray Comfort’s ministry ‘The Way of the Master’ and gave me a copy of Ray Comfort’s book God Has a Marvelous Plan for Your Life: The Myth of the Modern Gospel.  It was really impactful.  Comfort criticizes the sugar-coated (and very inaccurate) message of evangelism and Christianity that many modern churches have adopted.  The most popular modern method of evangelism employed by the church is to present a soft and loving God who has a wonderful plan for your life to attract nonbelievers.  The result is the presentation of Jesus as a life-enhancer rather than His true place as our Savior and the only way for a person to escape God’s wrath and Hell.  The effects of this non-Biblical method of presenting the Gospel are very dangerous.  It causes people to think Jesus is either unreal or unfaithful when they decide to give Christianity a try and their life doesn’t all of a sudden become perfect.  It also fills the churches with people who don’t really understand what Christianity is all about. 

This book revealed to me that often when I talk to people about God I leave out the most important part.  I am guilty of presenting Jesus as a life-enhancer for this life rather than the only way to obtain eternal life.  It challenged me to evaluate my understanding of the Gospel in order to examine my own salvation.  I think it’s important to examine yourself and the state of your soul, rather than wondering if or hoping you are really saved and will go to Heaven when you die.  I think that is what Philippians 2:12 means, “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

Therefore, I decided to try to write out my understanding of the Gospel—the heart of the Christian message.  Because God is infinitely complex and His ways transcend human thought, there is no way for me to understand everything that God’s plan for the salvation of humankind entails.  But the Holy Spirit has given me some insight, so here is my best interpretation/explanation…

So, in the beginning, before time even existed, God existed.  All of God—the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit—was there, as described in Genesis.  God created everything that exists and to top off His marvelous creation, He made man and then woman, Adam and Eve.  He created them in order to have a relationship with them and He made them in His own image, so they would be capable of enjoying all the wonders of maintaining a relationship with the uncreated God.

God gave Adam and Eve a little something called free will.  The reason He did this is because He wanted them to choose to love Him, because forced love is no kind of relationship.  It’s only a relationship if there is mutual love—love must be a choice.  Unfortunately they, being prideful and evil, weren’t satisfied with the paradise God offered them.  They wanted more.  They wanted to be like God—something they were incapable of handling.  Satan caused them to doubt God’s nature—His completely holy, good and perfect character—and turn to their own ways instead of trusting God who always had a perfect eternal plan for them, to be with Him and enjoy His goodness for all of eternity.  However, Adam and Eve decided to go their own way and disobey God (the definition of sin), going against God’s nature and His good plans and thus bringing destruction to their souls.  That is when death entered into the picture. 

Death is separation from God, who is the creator of life.  When Adam and Eve chose to sin by disobeying God they not only rejected His nature and goodness and everything that He is, they also earned the result of sin, which is eternal separation from a Holy and perfect God.  Because God is holy and all his ways are just, He can’t be in the presence of sin—or rather sin can’t stand to be in His awesome presence.  God is light and in Him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5).  And darkness flees from His presence.  Because Adam and Even chose to sin, God had to separate Himself from them, which broke His heart.  But, because He is omniscient, He had a plan from the beginning for man’s salvation.

God gives each man in every generation a chance to be with Him, the only requirement is to live a life of holiness.  In order to teach us how to live holy lives, He gave us the law.  The law is contained in the first five books of the Bible and in it are rules for how to live perfectly, according to God’s perfect and holy nature.  The culmination of the law is the Ten Commandments, which God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Jesus (a few thousand years later) says that all the law (and the messages proclaimed by the prophets) center on the first two commandments, if a person keeps these two, he will uphold the rest as a result.  The first is to “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, and mind” (Matthew 22:37-29).  That is what it means to “have no other gods before Me.”  The second is to love your neighbor (fellow humans) as yourself, which is an outflow of the first commandment.  If we love god with everything that we are, we will love those whom God loves as a result of our love for Him.  If a man can keep all the laws God gave, then he is fit to dwell with God in his holy place: heaven.  The bad news is that there is no way a man could possibly keep all of God’s commandments.  We simply are not capable of being as good as God because we are not God, we are human and we fall short of God’s holy standards. 

Since sin cannot be in God’s holy presence, any creature who has sinned would die in the presence of such a holy God.  Because we choose to go our own evil way, rather than following God’s holy and perfect law, we all deserve to be separated from God forever.  More than deserving it, we have to be because sin can’t survive in God’s presence.  Because God is holy and perfect, he is also just.  He is the only one who judges rightly and ensures that true justice will be done.  He can’t contradict His nature.  He is all things good and nothing bad at all.  Therefore according to God’s perfect justice, all who have sinned deserve to be separated from Him forever.  Even breaking just one of His commandments makes us guilty, because it reveals an evil motive—that our nature is contrary to God’s because one with a holy nature is not capable of sinning.  When we sin, we become an enemy of God, allying ourselves with Satan and hindering the advancement of God’s kingdom.  God has to make sure justice is done; therefore anyone who has sinned is under God’s wrath and must pay the price for their sin: eternal separation from God.

We can’t even imagine how horrible Hell (complete and eternal separation from God) is because here on earth the forces of good and evil coexist—and are at war.  God and Satan are constantly battling to draw men’s souls to themselves.  God woos us with all his goodness and Satan deceives us and convinces us to misunderstand God’s nature and therefore resist Him, which breaks God’s heart and fans His fury towards Satan and all of his works.  So on earth we see aspects of God (everything good) and aspects of Satan (everything bad).

Because we have sinned we don’t deserve any of God’s goodness that we enjoy here on earth.  By breaking His law, and choosing sin over being with Him, we reject His goodness.  But God chooses to bless us with His gifts even when we reject Him over and over, in hopes that He will win our hearts and we will turn back to Him.  After we leave this earth, we, all who have sinned, deserve to be separated from God forever, in a place where none of His attributes are found—only things that are contrary to His good nature.  There will no love, only hate.  No joy, only sorrow.  No relationships, only loneliness.  No peace, only anxiety.  No consolation, only anguish.  No healing, only pain.  No pleasure, only torment.  Satan is everything contrary to God.  He is a cruel master, finding pleasure in hurting us.  And this is what we choose to subject ourselves to when we sin.  However, God is a good master, doing everything necessary to protect us and keep us safe from all harm, even sacrificing Himself.

God came to earth on a rescue mission in the form of the man Jesus.  Jesus is God in human flesh.  Jesus and the Father God are One, completely sharing one holy, good, and perfect nature (John 17:21).  Hebrews 1:3 says that “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.”  Jesus delights in God’s law, and therefore never sinned, even though He was fully human and subject to all the weaknesses and temptations that we are (Hebrews 4:15).  God lived as one of us, coming down to our level and actually experiencing exactly what we experience, yet overcoming by not giving in to the temptation of sin.  This is the reason Jesus is worthy and able to save us.  In order for God’s justice to be done, someone had to pay the price for sin to satisfy God’s wrath.  Because He lived as a human, Jesus was able to substitute Himself and take our place.  The book of Romans explains Jesus’ role as our substitute, satisfying God’s wrath that we earned.  Romans 3:24-26 says “God presented him [Jesus] as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.  He did this to demonstrate his justice…so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.”  Jesus, because He became one of us, was able to take our place—the Lamb that was sacrificed to satisfy God’s wrath.

Equally important to Jesus’ humanity is His sinless nature.  Because he never sinned, He was a worthy Lamb, pure and spotless, without stain, impurity or blemish.  And because He never gave in to sin, He had authority to defeat Hell—and with it Satan, death, and all sin.  That’s what He did after He died on the Cross.  And then He arose in victory on the third day!  Through His death, He provided a way for us to escape God’s wrath and through His life (resurrection), He provided a way for us to escape Hell, eternal separation from God.  Romans 5:9-11 says “Since we have been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him!  For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!  Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God and through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

What Jesus’ death and resurrection means is WAY beyond human understanding.  We have no idea the sacrifice God made in becoming man.  A holy God dwelling with sinful man, and becoming sin when He took it from us on the cross.  And we have no idea the work it took to defeat Hell and sin’s hold on us.  And we have no idea of the power that resurrected Him death.  And we have no idea of the sacrifice that Jesus made when He laid aside His God-nature and became a human FOREVER.  There are so many mysteries within God, and this is the greatest of them all.

So what is most important is understanding what we need to do to respond to this great sacrifice.  While Jesus did all the work, we still must take action to accept it.  I started off explaining this lesson God is teaching me by talking about a book that emphasized the importance of preaching repentance when evangelizing.  Due to the popular (sugar-coated and false) message proclaimed by many modern churches, many people think that saying a prayer asking Jesus to come into their heart is all they have to do to be saved and go to heaven.  But that is simply not true.  That is not what Christianity is about.  It’s not about saying a prayer once and then living the rest of your life however you want and being comforted by the fact that you will go to heaven when you die because you are a pretty good person and because you said a prayer one time.

The truth is it doesn’t matter if we think we are a pretty good person, the fact is if we have sinned once we have proved our nature is contrary to God and therefore deserve to be separated from Him forever.  Being “good enough” to go to Heaven isn’t a subjective matter.  You don’t have to wonder if you are good enough to go to Heaven when you die.  The answer is NO, YOU’RE NOT.  None of us are capable of earning the right to dwell with God in His holiness.  Only God is holy and only He can dwell in Heaven, the place of His holiness.  However, another incomprehensible aspect of God is His love.  He loves us so much that He did whatever it took to make a way for us to be with Him in His holiness.  After all, He made mankind in order to have a relationship with Him.  So even though we have rejected Him over and over again, He still extends His arms out to us and accepts us whenever we choose to turn from our selves, from our sinful nature and to Him and His holiness.  He extends His arms out to us in the most loving embrace, by stretching Himself out on the Cross.

So that is what we need to do to flee from the consequence of sin and God’s wrath (Hell) and run into His love and holiness (Heaven): REPENT.  Repenting means turning away from and completely rejecting our sinful ways and pursuing the things of God.  Right after Jesus tells us that the gate that leads to life is narrow and few find it and that the road that leads to destruction is wide and many enter through it, He says tells His disciples how to recognize someone who is really following Him.  He says “By their fruit you will recognize them…every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them” (Matthew 7:13-20).  If you are really following Jesus, you will bear good fruit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control for example-Galatians 5:22) and you won’t be able to produce bad fruit (sin).

That doesn’t mean that at the moment you decide to follow Jesus you will be perfect and incapable of sinning.  Becoming like Jesus is a process.  But once we do decide to surrender our lives to Jesus, He comes and dwells inside us by His Spirit and thus enables us to overcome sin.  The One who defeated sin forever gives us the power and authority to overcome any sin we come across.  When we surrender our lives to Jesus and His Spirit enters us, we cross over from death to life.  We come out from under spiritual death: the path under God’s wrath on the way to eternal separation from God, and enter into eternal life: freedom from sin and its consequences and the path to eternity living with God and His goodness!  Life is a process of walking out these truths.  What we do on earth is earning our reward in heaven that we will enjoy for all of eternity. 

God is SOOOO GOOOOOOOOD.   I could keep going on forever praising His goodness.  And I could keep on seeking Him forever and finding out more and more about Him each day.  Actually, I plan on spending all of eternity doing just that.  I hope you will be there with me!

Last day in Spain

I am planning to write one more blog entry after this one, but it's going to take some time and processing to write it.  I'm planning on doing it during my layover tomorrow, so be on the lookout!

Today was a great day.  The kids finished school yesterday, so this was their first day of summer vacation and our last day here.  I couldn't have planned it to work out any better.  It was great spending our last day with the family.  I am going to miss them so much.

The family was invited to go visit some a friends' country house in Segovia, about an hour North of Madrid.  The parents gave Bree and I the option of coming with them or staying behind to do whatever we wanted to do on our last day in Spain.  We decided to go with the family and I am so glad we did!  It was so much fun and it was great spending the whole day with the family before we leave tomorrow morning.

The house was great, similar to a cabin and surrounded by trees.  They also had animals like horses, dogs, chickens, ducks, and bunnies.  They also have 8 kids all between the ages of 16 and 2, so our kids had so many friends to play with.  We just hung out and played with the kids and had lunch.  Then we all put on our bathing suits and drove to the lake.  It was about a 15 minute drive through the curvy, hilly region of Castillo y Leon.  Then we parked the car by the road and walked along the lake to a good spot to swim.  It was gorgeous there.  The lake was completely surrounded by mountains.  Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera, but hopefully I can steal some pictures from Bree.  It was so fun swimming with all the kids.  I swam with the older girls all the way across the lake (which made me so tired....I am so out of shape!)  After a couple hours we loaded the car back up.  I carried Mariana to the car because her shoes were wet and she didn't want to put them on.

Then we took a detour on the way home to see Segovia's famous aqueducts from the 1st century.  The father of the family that we visited today was very interested when Javier and Ines told him I wrote my thesis on Saint Teresa and we spent quite a bit of time talking about both Saint Teresa and San Juan de la Cruz (Saint John of the Cross).  So after we saw the aqueducts we also went to the church where San Juan de la Cruz is buried.  While we were there he bought me two little books from the gift shop--one about St. Teresa and one about San Juan.  I wasn't expecting that at all, I just met him today!  He was really nice and passionate about his faith, especially the writings of the Saints.

When we got back to their house from the lake we ate dinner and played with the kids some more.  Bree and I ended up playing foosball with the boys 4 on 4!  Each one of us was controlling just one handle.  It was so much fun.  Then we loaded up the car and headed back to Madrid.  Mariana fell asleep in the car and the older kids went straight to bed when we got here, so we didn't get to say goodbye to them.  :(  But I did at least get to carry sleeping Mariana to bed.  I kind of hope they wake up in the morning so we can say goodbye.

I could not have asked for a better last day in Spain.  The family was so great to us over the past three months.  They added so much to our experience of Spain.  I am really going to miss them a lot.

Ok.  Last blog post coming soon.

See you all back in Cincinnati!

El que busca halla.

My days here in Madrid since I finished my thesis have been indescribable.  I have been spending almost all of my free time diving into God's presence and it has been so rewarding.  He never disappoints.

I've been spending the mornings that I don't have class in the prayer room.  I love being there--God's presence is so strong because people go there expecting to meet Him and He comes.  I love just worshiping Him, contemplating who He is, and adoring Him.  I feel like the story of my life is becoming like Luke 10, where Mary sits at Jesus's feet, listening to His words and teachings.

God has been reminding me of various times throughout my life, and showing me how He was there and that He worked everything in my past together to form who I am today.  Seeing how God has taken every event in my life and used it for the purpose of creating me into who He wants me to be is so comforting.  I truly am clay in the Potter's hands.  It also proves His faithfulness to me in such a way that I have no other choice than to trust Him completely with my future.  He is such a good teacher.  He knows everything about me and He knows how to teach and lead me in the perfect way for me to learn and follow.  He has always been so gentle and patient with me when I resisted Him and took my time learning how to trust Him.  But the years of walking with Him and learning His lessons have been so precious.  I am thrilled to continue on this journey through life with Him into eternity.  :)

A few months ago I prayed that God would help me understand the person of Jesus better.  I am beginning to  see how He is answering that prayer.  I read Andrew Murray's book Humility, and it blew my mind.  It presents Jesus's humility as His single most important characteristic and the reason for our salvation.  It was His humility, complete submission and obedience to God, that lead Him to the cross: death to self so that others may have life (Philippians 2:3-11).  And it challenges us to fight off pride, the root of all sin, and embrace humility, the source of all grace and blessing.  With my eyes being opened to this whole new aspect of Jesus's beauty, I am starting to understand so much more about His personality and all of His ways.

Now I am reading Mourning for the Bridegroom by Dana Chandler (thank you Heather!) and it is flipping my world upside down.  The book is based on Matthew 9:15 where Jesus says "How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them?  They time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast."  The author encourages us to view Jesus as our bridegroom (we, the church, are His bride) and if a bride is separated from her groom, shouldn't she be distressed that He is away from her and long for His return?  As I read I can feel my desire for Jesus growing deeper and deeper.  Which leads me to the best part of this blog post.

Yesterday was one of the best days I've had in a long time.  I went to the prayer room in the morning after the kids left for school.  While I was there I was praying that Jesus would reveal Himself to me in a greater measure.  I spent a couple hours there until it closed at noon, then I headed over to Casa del Campo, one of Madrid's largest parks that I have been wanting to check out.  As I walked down the dirt paths through the trees, I could feel Jesus so near to me.  He was closer than if He had been walking right next to me, because He's living within me!  :)  He kept putting songs on my heart and telling me how much He loves me.  I walked along the paths just listening to Him and singing the praises to Him with the songs that He put on my heart.  Mainly In the Garden, The More I Seek You, and Perfume a tus pies.  Then I sat down on a bench and listened to my Ipod.  The Marcos Barrientos songs that played were all about seeking His face, wanting to see Jesus's beauty, and God promising to manifest Himself to those who seek Him.

I'm beginning to see how the hunger for God is such a gift.  Hungering for more of Him will compel you to seek Him, and be satisfied with nothing less than the fullness of Christ.  I think that there is nothing more important than a hunger for God, a desire to know Him better.  The reason being if you are really hungry for Him, then you will spend your time seeking Him, doing whatever it takes to get closer to Him.  I am so grateful for this season of hungering for Him because it is causing me to passionately seek Him and I know that I will find Him.  He says over and over again throughout the Bible that those who seek Him will find Him and I know He is faithful to keep His word.

Jeremiah 29:13 - "You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart"
Matthew 7:8 and Luke 11:10 - "For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds"
Matthew 5:6 - "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled"
John 14:21 - "Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.  He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him"

Something amazing happened when I went back to the prayer room when it opened at 4.  When I got there three women were in there praying in the spirit with power.  I sat down on the edge of the room and began praying with them.  When they finished, each one came over and gave me a huge hug, accompanied by a loving smile and whispers of bendiciones (blessings).  One of the ladies, after hugging me, looked at me and said "?Tu estabas aqui esta manana, verdad?" (You were here this morning, right?)  I said I was and she smiled and said "El que busca halla"  (He who seeks finds).  I love when God tells people things to tell me!  If I had to sum up my day (and this season of my life) it would be that exact sentence.  There's prophetic confirmation for you.  I am going to keep seeking Him until I find Him and then I'm going to seek knowing Him even deeper.  Like Paul says,

Philippians 3:7-14 - "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ--the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith.  I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.  Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.  Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.  But one thing I do:  Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

I want to encourage everyone I know to ask God to give them a hunger for more of Him.  There is no greater gift and He loves to give it.  He wants His children to long for Him and seek Him, so He loves filling them with hunger when they ask.  Life is meant to be an adventure of traveling down the road to Jesus's heart, each day going deeper into the knowledge of God.  We were created to know this Love that culminates in Jesus's sacrifice on the cross so that we, sinners, could be with our Holy and perfect God.  Hunger is what compels us to take each step down this road.

I'm going to leave you links to a couple songs God has been putting on my heart over and over again these days.  (I've been listening to/singing them all in English and Spanish, but I couldn't find any of the songs in both languages).

The More I Seek You (I listened to this one over and over again while writing this post).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI_1YliutzA
Como un perfume a tus pies (like a perfume at your feet)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap4f2N8B_JY
Marcos Barrientos songs.  They all flowed together during a live concert, and I have the CD from the concert.  These are the ones I was listening to on my Ipod in the park yesterday.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCralj9ADFI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT4W0Ut0-So
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgGs-8CHySc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jcpgJtt4Ms&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGI9FcO14gk&feature=related  *** (Seeking and finding) ***
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhyvoPr3us0&feature=related

Let the post-thesis Madrid experience begin! :)

I successfully finished and submitted my thesis yesterday.  And guess what we just happened to do with the family today?  We went to Avila!  Teresa's hometown.  The parents of all the kids in Javier's class decided to have a picnic for the kids and their families at a park in Avila, which is about an hour away from Madrid.  So Bree and I went with them.  The park was nice.  It surrounded a sanctuary/convent.  I think it was called Sonsoles.  We played with the kids the whole time, mainly just Mariana because the boys were playing with their friends.  We had lunch there (an amazing burger with bacon, goat cheese, and a fried egg on it!) and left around 5.  Before everyone left, all the kids and parents in the class went into the sanctuary (which was full of images of Saint Teresa) and prayed together.  I think they were saying the rosary and all the kids were taking turns doing the readings.  It was really neat.

Then after we left, Ines and Javier (the mom and dad) let us stop at the convent of St. Teresa so I could see it.  It was so nice of them.  I know they did it just for me, especially because the kids REALLY didn't want to.  I didn't go through the Teresa museum because that would have taken too long.  But we all went in the Church and saw the first convent she founded, which is still in use today.  I also went in the souvenir shop and i bought a little St. Teresa emblem for 2 euros.  It was so cool getting to go there the day after I finished my thesis about her.

Just to share a little about her: She was a nun in 16th century Spain.  She is known for her "mystical experiences" which means she had supernatural visions and encounters with the Lord, angles and demons.  She founded a new order within the Catholic church (the Discalced Carmelites) and founded quite a few convents during her life.  Her reformatory ideals were very dangerous in the political/religious climate of the 16th century Spain, with the Counter-Reformation and the Inquisition. She is considered one of the most significant writers of the Spanish Golden Age and was the first female Doctor of the Church.  She was an amazing person and I learned a lot about prayer, humility, and God from studying her autobiography.  I am really blessed to have been able to write my thesis about her.


As far as filling you guys in on the past few weeks....  Not much new has been going on.  I have pretty much spent all of my free time working on my thesis, but I think I can find a few things that happened that are worth writing about.

Well, Bree and I went to Puerta del Sol yesterday before class to go to the most famous "Chocolateria" in Madrid to get chocolate con churros in celebration of finishing my thesis.  And Bree treated me as a reward for finishing my thesis.  I LOVE the chocolate they serve with the churros.  It's like hot chocolate but a million times better.  It's like a cup full of melted dark chocolate.  So delicious.

After getting the churros we had some extra time before class so we explored further down Calle Mayor and stumbled upon a cool market place.  Everything was pretty expensive, but I think you could buy any kind of Spanish food there.  Each corner had a different type of food like fruit, cheese, bread, meat, fish, nuts, olives, wine, croquetas, patatas, pastel...  I think I took a picture of each corner.

Oh, something really interesting.  Spain's regional elections are tomorrow, and with the economic crisis going on here, things are pretty tense.  There have been thousands of Spaniards, mostly youth, who have been gathering in Puerta del Sol protesting for the past week.  Very non-violent protests, don't worry.  Bree and I walked through Sol yesterday on our way to get chocolate con churros, and it seemed more like a gathering than a protest.  It seemed like people were just hanging out, but there were political signs hung everywhere.  But many of the protesters have even been spending the night there.

My professors have been talking to us about the protests in class this week.  Apparently this is (or could be) a historic event.  Spain has had a pretty rough recent past since the Civil War (1936-1939) and the dictatorship that was set up afterward under Franco.  Franco's regime was extremely oppressive.  After Franco's death in 1970, the monarchs were allowed back into the country and Spain set up a constitutional monarchy with democratic elections.  But the recent past has left a big impact on the ideology of the Spanish people.  I wish I had paid attention better in my classes about Spain's recent history so I understood this better.  But one of my professors described the Spanish people as very calm and patient, accustomed to putting up with a lot, but that they are like volcanoes and when they are pushed past a certain limit they will explode.  This is how she described the situation with the youth.

I think Spain's social security system is completely regulated by the government (health care and retirement and things like that), but since the economy is failing (due to bad bankers, according to one of my professors) the people are worried that the government won't be able to support this generation of youth when they get older.  I see so many fliers and so much graffitti at the university when I go to school about "Jovenes sin futuro" (youth without a future) and calling the youth to political action.

According to another professor, the youth are rebelling against the corrupt politicians.  Many are refusing to vote and encouraging others not to vote, as they don't support any party because they are all so corrupt.  This professor of mine emphasized how historic this was because Spaniards are used to corruption and usually don't care too much about corruption in politics.

According to Ines (the mom of the family we live with) the youth are protesting just for the thrill of rebelling.  And that the current political party is behind the rallies and protests, trying to encourage people not to vote because they know they are going to lose power, but they don't want the other party to get a complete majority.  This is the opinion of a very upper-class Spaniard though.

It's just been interesting to see all of this going on.  Just like I said I wish I understood Spain's history better, I also wish I understood politics better so I'd have a more educated perspective on things.

Anyway, tomorrow is Sunday (my favorite day!).  I am looking forward to church!!  :)  There is also a concert/worship service tomorrow night put on collectively by all the protestant churches in Madrid that I would LOVE to go to.  Bree and I are unsure about asking for the evening off  though because the family already gives us all day off on Sundays (until about 7:30 when they come home).  So we would feel bad asking for even more time off after having all day off.  I'm going to pray about it and see what their plans are and decide if we should ask if we can go to the service.

I'm not 100% sure what it's going to be like, but I know I really want to be there.  Lol.  It's a worship group or ministry or collaboration of ministries called En Espiritu y En Verdad (In Spirit and Truth - name taken from John 4:24 where Jesus says "God is Spirit and his worshipers must worship him in spirit and in truth").  This details about the ministry are what I am unsure about.  The website says they work with a collaboration of hundreds of Hispanic worship leaders.  They translate all the popular contemporary worship songs into Spanish and put out CDs and travel around all the Spanish-speakings countries doing "Noches de Adoracion" Nights of Worship.  They are coming to Madrid tomorrow night.  I want to go so bad.  Hopefully it'll work out.  God knows how much I want to be there.  I bet He'll work it out so I can be there.  :)

Well, I'm going to go to bed now.
Love you all!

Sunday, May 8

This is going to be a short entry because I need to work on my thesis.  It's due May 20 and I have 3.5 of 40-50 pages done... Enough said.

But I want to write about church today.  So Bree and I left the house about 10:55 this morning and made it to church about 11:45 (it starts at 11:30).  During worship I spotted my friend Molly!

Molly is my friend from class. She's German and she's working as an au pair here in Madrid and taking classes at Complutense too.  Molly and I have hit it off well and we usually hang out after class for a little bit, get lunch or something.  Anyway, I asked her last week if she went to church anywhere and she said she does at home in Germany, and she went a couple times with the family she works for, but she didn't really like the Catholic way of doing things, so she stopped going.  She was pretty interested when I told her about Amistad Cristiana and I told her she should come with us some time.  When Bree and I were at the metro station I remembered about Molly and I told Bree I was sad I had forgotten to call her.  So I was so surprised and happy when I spotted her during worship!  We also rode the metro home together (until we had to go different directions).  She absolutely loved the service.  :)  Praise God!  So that was my exciting story about Molly.

Now about church.  Have I already described the worship?  It's amazing.  I love love love love love it.  ;)  They play a lot of my favorite worship songs, but translated to Spanish.  And they really play them led by the Spirit, lingering on chords between songs, to give people time to focus on God and let them hear Him speak.  I just love it.

Then the sermon.  They are doing a series about the cross.  First of all.  Woah, that is awesome.  I guess I missed the first two messages of the series while we were in Sotogrande and last week was just worship.  But the first two messages were What did the cross mean for God?  and What did the cross mean for Jesus?  Today was What did the cross mean for Satan?  Haha!  It was so awesome!  Everything she said was exactly what God has been teaching me lately.  The victory that Jesus won on the cross.  Over sin, over Satan, over death, over Hell.  And that that victory also belongs to those to believe in Jesus!  AMEN!!

This is the general outline of the message.  The verses she used and a short description of them.

1 John 3:8 - "He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work."


>>>The main reason Jesus came was to destroy the devil's work.  That was His sole purpose.  (Other good things came as a result, but that was His purpose)


Hebrews 2:14 - "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil"


>>>He had to become flesh just like us because that was the only way He could save us.  By being subject to the temptations and struggles of being a human, and yet not giving into sin, but rather living a perfect life, He would have the authority to defeat Satan.

Romans 5:12 - "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned"


>>We all sinned, therefore we all earned and deserve death.


John 11:26 - "and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”


>>>But we will never die if we believe in Jesus because through Him we have power over sin!  And we need to really believe it!


Colossians 2:15 - "And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross."


>>>This was my favorite point of the message.  Satan and his demons have NO POWER because Jesus disarmed them.  Then He made a public spectacle of them, mocking them in front of all the hosts of heaven.  He triumphed over them by the cross.  Satan has no power because of what Jesus did.  The only way he can hurt us is if we let him.  By sinning, we give him permission.  So Satan's only power is deception, tricking us into sinning.


John 12:31 - "Now is the time for judgment on this world; now the prince of this world will be driven out"


Revelation 20:10 - "And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever."


>>>But these verses show Satan's future.  God knows Satan's future.  And Satan knows it too.  He's just trying to take as many down with him as he can.  The only way he can hurt God is by hurting those whom God loves--us.  But in the end God will have complete victory because of the work Jesus did on the cross!


Ephesians 6:10-18 - "Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. ¹¹ Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. ¹² For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. ¹³ Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. ¹⁴ Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, ¹⁵ and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. ¹⁶ In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. ¹⁷ Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. ¹⁸ And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints."


>>>The pastor ended with these verses, encouraging us to stand firm against the devil's schemes.  We are in a war, so we need to put on the armor that God gives us to be protected from the Devil.




Ok, so that was a little longer than I expected.  But it was such a good message and it encouraged me so much, I had to share it.  :)


Now back to working on my thesis!

Semana Santa in Sotogrande, April 15-25 and the following week back in Madrid, April 26-29

Wow.  I feel like I could write so much about the ten days we spent in Sotogrande for Semana Santa.  Where to start…

Well we packed up and left on Friday morning and drove the 7 hour trip from Madrid to Sotogrande.  Before going, all I knew was that we were going on vacation to a beach on the southern coast of Spain.  So Bree and I loaded up the car with Ines (the mom) and the three oldest kids.  Javier and Mariana took the train.  The drive was nice.  We drove straight down the middle of the bottom half of Spain, so I got to see a lot of the different landscapes that Spain has to offer.  Bree sat in the back with the kids and watched movies with them while I sat in the front with Ines and got a lot of reading for my thesis done.  (But unfortunately I still have so much to do…let’s not talk about that…)

So we arrived at Sotogrande around 7pm on Friday.  Every day at Sotogrande was pretty similar.  Bree and I woke up when we heard the first of the kids stirring around the house, which was usually Mariana around 9:00.  We kept her entertained and quiet until the other kids and the parents got up and we had breakfast around 10.  Then we usually took the kids outside to play until lunch around 2:30.  Sometimes the older kids would go play golf or go for a bike ride with their friends, but we were always at least with Mariana.  After lunch we would go out and play with the kids again until about 7:30, when it was time for them to shower, put on their pjs, and then we had dinner around 8:30.  (I think Bree and I are finally starting to get used to the Spanish eating schedule. Maybe.)  Then we would either watch a movie, play Apples to Apples, or play wii until bedtime (usually around 11).

The family’s vacation house in Sotogrande is very similar to their house in Madrid, just a little smaller.  But they have a guest room with bunk beds and that is where Bree and I stayed.  The neighborhood where they live there is full of families with very similar lifestyles.  All the families who live around them in Sotogrande are also their friends who live in the same community in Madrid.  Most of families have numerous kids, many of which go to school with the kids of our family.  So there were always lots of friends to play with.  And Ines’s parents also have a vacation house down the street, where Ines’s sister also stays with her husband and two sons (Alvaro and Juan) and their Nanny (Anka).  So they have family right down the street.  Alvaro is Javier’s age, so they played together  every day.  Those two boys play soccer for hours upon hours every day.  They also play a lot of wii.  Juan is about 2 and is so cute.  Anka, their nanny is from Romania and has been working for their family for 3 years.  She’s 22 and so Bree and I had a good time playing with the kids with her.  We all played soccer, handball, wii, played on the playground, went for walks, things like that.

 

Not every day was exactly the same.  We did some different things a few days.  We went to mass on Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter.  We also went to the beach for a couple hours two days (the only two days it was nice enough outside, but definitely still too cold to swim). One day Mariana had some friends come over, so we went to the store with Ines and bought painting supplies for them.  This ended up attracting the whole neighborhood and every kid around ended up in our yard with a paint brush.  Also, the day before Easter Mariana and Javier had an Easter party, which was so much fun. It was PACKED with tiny children and Easter egg hunts, games, food, and lots of chocolate.  I took a ton of pictures at the party.

 

Easter Sunday was pretty similar to every other day there too.  We went to mass in the morning, but other than that nothing was different.  This was pretty weird for me because I also do a lot with my family on Easter.  Easter is my favorite holiday.

Now that I’ve summarized what we did with the family on the trip, I’ll share a little about what God was teaching me personally.  First of all, He has been revealing to me a lot of sin in my life and convicting me to work at getting rid of it.  Well, reading St. Teresa’s autobiography at such a time in my life is very timely because she is EXTREMELY humble.  I have been learning so much from her about humility and the way the Kingdom of God works.  Every few sentences she remarks that she has done nothing and there is no good in her at all, save the good God has been pleased to put in her for the purpose of bringing Him glory; so therefore all the credit and praise is due Him.  Her humility is the very reason God could trust her with such great spiritual experiences as He did—because she wouldn’t become prideful about them and think that she did anything to deserve them.  One of the things God has been convicting me of is how I’ve been the opposite of this.  I’ve been so prideful to think that I can do anything good on my own.

 

Anyway, He has just been calling a lot of sin in my life to attention and telling me it needs to go if I want to go deeper in my relationship with Him.  So by the time Saturday rolled around (just over a week of being there) I was starting to feel discouraged.  I kept seeing all these things in my life that are contrary to how Jesus lived, things that produce bad things rather than the things of God.  Although I was trying to stop doing the bad things, I kept failing.  Then when I was going to bed on Saturday night God told me that tomorrow I was going to see a breakthrough—on Easter!

 

For this reason, Easter was not just another normal day in Sotogrande for me.  Whenever I thought about Jesus raising from the death—defeating sin, death, Satan, and all of Hell once and for all—I could hardly contain my excitement.  As I had realized the few days leading up to Easter, I am powerless to stop sinning on my own.  As a human, I am a slave to sin.  However, as a Christian, I am free to live in righteousness!  I have victory over sin and death because of what Jesus did on the cross!  He, being sinless and absolutely perfect—the only human being to ever live through the world’s temptations without sinning, took my sin, guilt, shame, and punishment upon Himself and died and took my place in Hell.  But because He is God and because He never gave into sin, Satan had no power over Him and He defeated him when He rose from the dead.  And just because He loves us, not because we have done anything to earn or deserve it, we can share in that same victory over sin and Hell.  That is the Gospel.  That is the power of God. That is love.

God was speaking so many Scripture verses to me about this over the next few days. They were absolutely blowing my mind. 

1 Corinthians 15:55 – “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

Romans 5:10 – “For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”

Colossians 2:9-15 – “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, ¹⁰ and you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. ¹¹ In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ, ¹² having been buried with him in baptism and raised with him through your faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. ¹³ When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, ¹⁴ having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵ And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”


Ephesians 2:4-6 – “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, ⁵ made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. ⁶ And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.”

Galations 5 (the whole chapter!) especially the end where Paul contrasts the fruit that the flesh produces verses the fruit of the Spirit.  SOO MUCH BETTER!

So that was my Semana Santa in Spain.  Not what I was expecting, but so much better because God revealed the power of the cross to me a little more.  There is still infinitely more power in the cross than I will ever be able to understand while I am on earth, but this experience I lived through brought me a new level of revelation of the cross.  Thank you Jesus!  Thank you Father! Thank you Holy Spirit!

Oh, and God was also been showing me a few things about the Catholic Church.  So far during my life I have seen a lot more people on whom the Catholic Church has had a negative impact than positive, but these past few weeks God was showing me more of the good.  Reading St. Teresa’s life and going to mass with the family, I’ve been seeing a lot of things that I really like and am impressed with.

We got back from Sotogrande on Monday evening.  Since I don’t have class on Tuesdays, Bree and I spent the morning using the internet and finishing up homework for our classes.  I worked on my thesis a little bit too.  We walked down the street to find some lunch.  We bought a loaf of fresh-baked bread and a package of lunchmeat and sat on a bench in front of a Residencia de Mayores (a senior citizen home).  We ended up sharing our sandwich with one of the residents and made conversation with a couple others while feeding the pigeons.  Then we spent the evening with the kids when they got home from school.  Wednesday and Thursday I had class all day and spent the evening with the kids.

At the request of my big brother, I’m going to write a little bit about my classes. I love them.  I’m taking 3 literature classes and a grammar class.  All of my classes are completely in Spanish, but my classmates are all other foreigners, not Spaniards.  A few are from Latin American countries, but most of them aren’t native Spanish speakers.  I have classmates from Japan, China, Russia, France, Germany and other places. I love communicating with people in Spanish who have different native languages.  It’s fascinating.  My literature classes are from 10-2:30 on Wednesdays and Thursdays and my grammar class is from 3-5 on Thursdays and Fridays.  My literature classes are Nuevas Tendencias en Literatura Española, Comentario de Textos, and Literatura Española.  The classes cover essentially the same topics as my graduate classes at UC, but require less work.  Like, we just read parts of novels and our professor summarizes them for us, rather than reading the whole novel and we’ll just read a few key poems from a poet, rather than his complete collection of poems. Needless to say, I like this way much better.  J  But my professors are all fantastic.  They are very enthusiastic about what they are teaching and make things very interesting.  I really like their style of teaching.  They make it very easy to participate in class discussions, which I used to hate doing.  My grammar class is a review of subjunctive, which I thought I had a pretty good handle on, but am finding out that I really don’t, so it’s good that I am re-learning and practicing it.  I am very content with my classes.  Now if I could just get this thesis done…  I appreciate prayers for it please!

 

Friday morning Bree and I went for a run and did some abs and chin-ups in the park by the house.  That was my first time working out since I’ve been here—a whole month!  Then we took the bus to the station in Moncloa where we tried to buy our monthly pass (abono) for the bus and metro for May, but they were out.  So we went to Puerta del Sol and ate at our favorite restaurant Pitas and Company, where we got pitas for a euro.  So good and cheap.  It brought us back to our hostel-living days, where we stayed in 4 different hostels all very close to Puerta del Sol.  I kind of felt like we were back at home.  Then we went to another station there to buy our abonos.  Bree couldn’t buy hers because she didn’t have a copy of her passport.  I just happened to have one.  I’m not sure why we need our passports to buy a transportation pass.  Anyway, now I can take the bus and metro as much as I want and make as many transfers as I want without worrying about the price.  That way it should be easier to find a more effective route to school – one that doesn’t take as long and one where we don’t have to walk as far.  Then we went to Corte Ingles, the only super market chain in Madrid, so the only place that sells cheap groceries (one of our favorite places) and bought a liter of tiramisu flavored ice cream that we split and ate on the metro.  Everyone was judging us for eating that huge container of ice cream on the metro!  Then we felt sick after eating it all.  Looking back, that was probably a mistake, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Then we went to class from 3-5 and went home to spend the evening with the family.  Friday night was a pretty normal evening with the family.  We walked with the kids to the candy shop, at dinner, and watched a movie.

This morning Bree and I took the kids swimming at an indoor public pool down the street from the house.  It was pretty fun swimming with them.  I also did a few laps.  I wasn’t able to do much because Bree and the kids were waiting and the pool was pretty crowded.  I only did about a 200 and it made me tired!  Oh my goodness, I am so out of shape!  But it definitely felt good to swim again.  It’s been a month since I’ve swam too.  It’s so weird to go so long without swimming.  Then we came home and had lunch and played soccer with the boys in the yard, had dinner, watched a movie with the kids while the parents went to have dinner with some friends.  Now I am here typing this at 1am, and am going to go to bed.

Love and miss you all!