There were three who wouldn't bow...

Hello my internet friends.

I love music. I love listening to it, attempting to play it on my freakin' sweet guitar, I love tapping my foot along to really good tunes, I love rockin' out and singing loud to the best sing alongs. Most importantly I love the words, the lyrics that move me to want to jump up and down and sing them out.

About a month ago Wendy made a youth group gig to go see Shane and Shane play in Grove City. We ended up making the trip with one student, oh well, it was fun and everyone else missed out. Anyway, so they played a song off their new cd and Wendy picked it up after the show. I put it on my phone, which also plays mp3's, and have been jammin' to it all the time.

Here are the words that get me every time:

Burn us up, burn us up, burn us up
Oh king, won't you burn us in the furnace of your desire
We give up, we give up, we give
Oh king won't you burn us in the furnace of your desire
Won't you save us from the fire

You are able to deliver, from the fire of affliction
It's the declaration of my Lord
You're not an image of gold, you're the God of old
You have made us, come and save us
We are yours
But even if you don't, even if you don't
We will burn, we will burn


This song by it self doesn't really seem like something I should be singing out, talking about wanting to burn in a fire. But it is referencing the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. They wouldn't give in to Nebechadnezzer and worship his idol, so they were thrown into the fiery furnace because they believed that their God would save them and even if he chose not to save them they would still go in the fire knowing that their God is the true God.


So when I sing those words something inside of me gets so excited to know that my God will save me, he will deliver me from my grief, my pain, my struggles. He will bring me through the fires in my life. And so I sing those words, that he will deliver me, that he has made and will save me. Then I get to the end of the song and these words are not of doubt or unbelief or sadness. I sing out "even if you don't, we will burn."

I will take on every fire, I will stand my ground and be thrown in. And I believe and trust in my God that he will save. But if something comes along and he doesn't, I will burn for his sake.

Shane and Shane "Burn us up" from the album Pages

Squatter, Jawbone, Outlawed, Qat...

Wendy and I don't have the internet in out apartment, yet. Maybe when I get a good job we will be able to afford all of those really cool luxuries. However, when that happens we will not have the need to hang out at Panera all the time. I think that we have been to every Panera that is within a reasonable distance to our home. Any time that we are going somewhere we plan Panera into our journey and hang out there before or after.

Today for five dollar movie day we will be seeing the Simpsons movie.

A couple weeks ago we decided that we needed a board game that you can play with two people. So we went out to Walmart and bought Scrabble. Up until we bought this game I have loathed the game of Scrabble. It has always intimidated me and in all of the times I had played previously I had a hard time coming up with a word that was more than something a 5 year old would put down.

Wendy is one of the smartest people that I know. She has an incredible vocabulary and knows words that I can't believe are actually words. Needless to say I thought I was going to get my butt kicked.

So we played and played and played. And I have not lost a single game against anyone. Total Scrabble domination!!

And last night at approximately 9:53 PM I put down the best Scrabble word ever: Outlawed. That word landed me a whopping 158 points!!

I feel like I should retire now, but Wendy just bought a Scrabble Dictionary. So I suppose I need to keep playing so she can put down all those really strange words that she knows and actually be able to prove to me they are words. That's when the tables will turn and my winning will cease to happen.

Until then you can call me Super Scrabble Woman. (Not to be confused with Super Flash Flood Woman, but I can see the similarities)

Goodbye.



PS Anberlin in 4 days. : )

I am the patron saint of lost causes...

Here I am.

I will update my life since I haven't posted anything relevant for a long time. I have an apartment in Pittsburgh with Wendy. It is beautiful. I was looking for a job when I first got here and I ended up working at a summer school for kids that have autism and behavioral problems. It was crazy. I got bit, scratched, kicked, punched and called about as many horrible names a 10 year old can possibly conjure up. I would come home exhausted, sometimes I would cry, other days I would have fun stories to tell.

When I got the chance to get away from being beat up, I spent most of my time with a girl who was very far behind her peers developmentally. She is autistic, not very good with fine motor skills and almost completely non-verbal (the only word she knew how to say was bye bye). But I enjoyed my time with her so much. She would walk around the classroom picking up an object in one spot and carrying it over to somewhere completely different. At first it was annoying, but as she warmed up to me it became funny. Neither student nor teacher could ever find what they were looking for and the words "Oh, Jenna" would usually follow the end of their search.

She never liked to sit down, it was impossible to get her to do any school work, sometimes she would just burst out screaming and she made a mess every time she ate anything. But we enjoyed time at the beach filling buckets with sand, and when all the other kids were playing on the water slide we filled up buckets of water and dumped them out over and over again.

All of that sounds like fun, but to get her to transition from one thing to another took enormous effort and most of the time she ended up biting herself as her coping mechanism. When she wouldn't do what she needed to or her wandering/picking up things/yelling got too much to handle we would give her food to get her to do what we wanted. As if she were some sort of pet, filling her up with treats all day long. It made me feel horrible each time it happened.

On the last day of school we played with our buckets and water outside and eventually she ended up playing in the mud, just like a little kid should. When we made it inside she began to have seizures, one right after the other. We tried to get her to sit down, to clean her up, but she wouldn't sit any other time why now? She would get up and start wandering around and it would happen again, she would fall and hurt herself and I was scared to death. She would fight us if we tried to keep her sitting down, but she would fall every time she got up. It was the scariest thing I have ever been through. I feared for her life.

I cried that day when I came home. I had nightmares that she was falling over and over again and there was nothing I could do to help.

There were days I would look into her eyes and get a blank stare in return. My heart hurt for her, for her life, for her happiness. I wanted to help her, to do everything for her, to give her whatever would make her happy, to get her to be able to do everything that she should be doing by the time she is 10 years old. But I could do nothing. She still has so much life to learn, to live and I wanted to give that all to her.

So, someday, whenever I take all those test I have to take, fill out all those applications and send all those resumes I am going to help all the kids that are just like her. Help them in whatever way that I can. Whatever way will give them the life that they deserve to live.

One little girl has changed my life.