I've Moved!

I've been swayed to the dark side, or should I say, the way cooler side.

This blog has been moved to www.lindsaykate.wordpress.com.

Enjoy the new digs - I sure am!

I've Lost It

Honestly, I've lost it.

Our intern supervisor, Steve, today spoke to us and talked about how he's appreciated how much we have given and our willingness to serve this summer. This was coming from a guy who's served many places and about to leave for Zambia for two weeks. And I then reflected instantly.

This really is insanity. By all means, I could have worked a summer job, made a good bit of cash, spent time with close friends, stayed within the comforts of my family, worked out, watched the soaps each afternoon, played with my dog, spend countless hours on the internet at any time, and enjoy home-cooked meals each night. I could have had my own car to drive around, and been there to help my Dad paint it. I could have yard saled with Mom each Saturday.

Instead I chose an expensive summer, which expensive phone bills, and expensive eat eateries. I chose to buy a $200 plane ticket to travel to the other side of the United States to live in close confines with people I had never met before. I paid to live in Los Feliz, and to live on $100 a week for 8 other girls in a 3 bedroom apartment. I chose to sweep floors at a nightclub and stack chairs. I chose to spend time designing under pressure, to squeeze into cars each day as I carpooled from place to place without transportation of my own, and to dog it down the quad playing ultimate frisbee. I chose to sleep in an apartment that is right next to a noisy blvd. and that doesn't have functional air conditioning.

And this is what I got.

I've received a summer of learning. I've learned about my strengths and what they have to do with leading people. I've connected with people that come from all over the world. I've been on a team of passionate people who draw me into the conversation of their hearts. I've been challenged to love people with my time and not my program. I've been humbled by watching others sacrifice their car, money, and love for each other. I've been convicted to live a life for a higher calling, a calling each one of us desires for ourselves. I've been eating a lot of tuna because it's cheap. I've been getting a small tan on my arms and my feet so you can now see an outline of my shoes. I've been given a chance to speak twice in a 5 minute time span, an experience and feedback session that is so helpful for talking with anyone.

I'm more raw. More challenged. And more directed where to go from here.

I lost it all this summer. And I got it all.

...in fact, I got more.

The Stem System

When you live in a house, the art of cooking turns it into a home. Unfortunately, you begin to encounter hot pans and hot hands. Eventually you'll end up like a few of your dishes: burned.

Occasions like these cause me to be thankful I adopted an aloe plant. The amazing characterisitc about an aloe plant is that it's not your ordinary cactus, absorbing minor increments of water and displaying it's anti-blooming features of greenness. It's the fact that when you get scolded from a hot surface, ripping off a piece of this natural specimen appendage becomes soothing on your skin. Despite the missing segment, it fails to phase the plant as it continues to grow, still giving more goods in comparison to the water it absorbs.

The human condition is a lot like an aloe plant. There is a necessary component to the nature of our well being and wholeness that involves the act of giving. Once I begin to think about it, giving so essential to life and wholeness. All real relationships require the act of giving, mainly love.

Because love in it's purest expression is not something that is received, but something that is given.

For example, when I become emotional consumer of love, I've become unable to experience the very thing we long for: love. When I want to consume the beauty and love that is extended to me, I cannot accept it. Yet, in a paradoxical manner, when I give the very thing I do not have, I gain it.

The person who gives away the most of himself will have the greatest experience of love. The aloe plant that does not bear branches dies, but the one that grows from it's gift thrives.

Wholeness comes as a sacrifice and sacrifice as love.

Jesus finds himself being asked what the greatest commandment is, among a vast history of countless commandments. He explains that the first is loving God and loving yourself as your neighbor. This commandment comes two fold, not three. Instead of loving God, loving myself, and loving my neighbor, but by simply loving God and loving my neighbor, I take that paradoxical road and being to love myself.

Nothing is more important to God than our relationships, because when I love others, it reflects the heart of the Creator. Love's appearance is so vast to give. It becomes a limitless resource.

A hand in the kitchen.

An ear to listen.

A ride to the airport.

A cup of coffee.

A heart in a moment of crisis.

The more I give away this love, the more I become whole, like an aloe plant. We are all designed to be an intense aloe plant, a love machine. It doesn't focus on absorbing, it focuses on giving. And by giving, it heals wounds with love.

Guarding your Cheese Muffin

So there is this intern, J (pictured as the guitarist on the right with D) , and he's a remarkable individual. So many wonderful words cannot even being to describe his energetic personality. Hilarious. Loving. Talented. Truthful. J is a tremendous person to have on this project.

This morning at a meeting he was sharing a story from Sunday morning. He and my roommate, C, head to a Sunday morning Mosaic venue inland at Chino. As they waited in line at McD's in the wee hours of the day, Jesse was enthralled to receive his 32 oz. cup for Powerade. C, a strong anti-morning individual, was astonished how anyone could consume anything that is 32 oz. at the break of dawn. In rebuttal, expressed how anyone could eat a cheese muffin, coincidentally C's order.

What does this funny little story mean? J preceded to share that he's held onto various things in order to find his identity. C's comment about his 32oz. was more than a shot at the concept, he perceived it as a shot at him. He wanted to guard his Powerade, so he took a shot at the cheese muffin. But the cheese muffin was being guarded too.

It's remarkable how we let things rule ourselves. More so, it's remarkable at what community does. In the past 5 days, the community here among the interns has improved by a countless percent. The dynamics of the group started to make an upward swing when we confessed we had grudges against each other, deep struggles we weren't sharing with our close friends to enable them to walk along side of us, because it wasn't an area that could be trusted. A great measurement of a healthy relationship is the level of trust that is present, because where we find trust we also find the heart of the matter.

This is always about that.

It's never the fact that the laundry was taken out and thrown on the top of the washer. It's the fact that there is a sense of disrespect in the relationship.

It's never the fact that someone was trying to help me and I rejected it. It's the fact that I feel like I can't do it on my own because of it.

This is always about that.

Rob Bell speaks of this theory in the first chapter of his latest book Sex God, where he explores the endless connections between sexuality and spirituality. When a community chooses to confess and talk with each other, it unleashes the starting fruit of healthiness both socially, but also spiritually and emotionally.

Remarkable how so many components of spirituality, emotional, and social health are inversely tied. I personally found that without a healthy social community where trust is established, I cannot be fully alive spiritually. The Gospels scream community. Constantly we can find Jesus being so relational with others in groups and in one on one situations. I truly believe that God desires community within His creation because despite our anti-social tendencies, being part of a family with a foundation of hope, faith and love, it enables our heart to once again wildly beat.

The whole story is crazy. You know, the story of God. The whole journey I've been on in my life is just out of the world nutty. Ridiculous, really. The road ahead is so full of wondrous uncertainty. And even though the road to seek a mysterious God of this love and power and mystic nature, it's the sweetest thing I've ever tasted.

Last night at the Mayan was one of my best Sunday nights in California. Why? I had a community. A family. And I have a loving God who intensely wants to take me on this adventure to follow Him, to find out about Him through what He's written to me, and to embrace the sweetness that he desires to give me.

The sweetest thing I've ever tasted.

To Rant and Rave

Corporate America is so interesting. Markets, economies, all those great resources being utilized and studied. Honestly, the only things I know about the field are from people who do know a thing or two about them. Like one of the interns here at Mosaic, he's an International Business major and his insight on small and major issues ranging from small marketing to the economics of Africa is astounding and so profound. I'm captivated. But what is even more captivating is to first-hand witness such results. Like Costco.

Costco is the West Coast version on Sam's Club. Since we have 9 girls in a 3 bedroom apartment, food goes fast.

So buy it in bulk.

Bulk supply in anything you would imagine. Bulk in cereal. Bulk in toilet paper. Bulk in vodka. Bulk in candy.

Trying to navigate your way through one of these joints is like riding on the LA freeway, only grabbing food along the way (and if you know anything about LA freeways, you're getting a great visual). Everyone herded together with monsterous carts wandering around for the right isle that is stacked to the roof with crates upon crates of food and materials. It's like a refuge house in case the next Cold War came knocking at your fridge door.

Then you have vendors. Granted, they are hard workers, kissing up and promoting their product, but they serve as drive-in billborads among the rush of shoppers swerving and cornering around each other from section to section. Because of the size of the buggies, a traffic jam occurs when a crowd of three or more come. It's as if traffic was trying to be scriptural. "When two or more (carts) gather, I will be there".

You do get a great deal. Membership is required because of the wholesale discount you are getting. A lot of things are significantly cheaper, no doubt, but the means of aquiring grub is exhausting. I might pay my mother to say away from such places to compensate for the cost of anger management sessions that would result. She hates Wal-Mart in our small town to begin with. I thought of her today and rendered Costco a "no-shop zone". She'd be a chewin', as we would say.

I now see why some families reproduce frequently. It's so they have hands to unload the goods from the car when you finally get home. Then you crack open a yogert from a package of 18 and savor the victory as you wipe the sweat off your brow, praying that the food you hauled in will last you a significantly long period of time.

Many hands make light work. Too bad they have mouths.

Fraternizing and such.

I love Tuesdays. Typically my Tuesday on campus involve all kinds of long, crazy excitement. Cutting invites. Packaging. Designing. Class. Dinner. Heaps of tasks for the Gathering on Tuesday nites in Edinboro.

Here in Cali my Tuesdays are dedicated to the University of Southern California and the architecture house on the Row. The row is like a magical land of large homes that exhibit qualities of wealthy landowners but are actually trashed on the inside from parties and a year long of fraternization gone wild. But summer frat living is much calmer, and quieter.

Myself along with 3 other interns head down to campus in the afternoon to meet and then eventually get together a pick-up game of Ultimate Frisbee at the Quad on campus. It seems surreal to me that I am actually at the USC campus. I've looked at the Heisman trophies. I've seen all the awards. I've walked around the brochure-perfect campus. It's amazing. A rich kid's paradise.

After the pick-up game, a few head over to McD's for 69 cent drinks in something like a 32 oz cup. Large. Intense. They even have Powerade, which is more user friendly than can a coke after chucking a plastic disc down the field and chasing it like a pack of dogs at the park.

Then the best part happens. We haul out chairs and a table, make fruit cabobs, and host a grand weekly cookout. We chit chat, play another game of Ultimate in a neighboring yard of a girls sorority house that is abandoned for the summer, and then enjoy freshly grilled burgers by a true Texan who's results verify his heritage. Later in the night we finish up with some kind of random ice cream or cookie, or both. Either way, it's a good night.

But it's a great night, a tremendous night when you start talking to people who come each week and hear their story. Those from all over the country, or right in Southern California's backyard, and enjoying a game of play with them. Inviting them into a grander story, one pass of the frisbee at a time.

I'll miss USC, the smell of the fancy grass, the sounds of the numerous water fountains, and the fantastic time of fellowship. A beautiful art of loving on people.