Not My Life, But Their's

I have always wanted to see the world. I have always wanted to travel and get out of my own space ever since I was a little girl. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be a paleontologist and travel to the deserts of the world to discover the past and the extinct creations of God. When I was a little older, I wanted to study marine archaeology and travel the depths of the oceans. In high school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I took a step of faith my senior year and left my country for the first time and spent seven weeks away in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This blog was created to be a way to update everyone while I was there. Those were the best seven weeks of my life so far, and I would give anything to be able to go back. Because I was out of my home and living and working amongst strangers who became my family through faith and who I am still so deeply connected to emotionally.

I have never wanted to stay in one place. Coming back to the same home I leave would be nice, but recently, I've been having this overwhelming urge and push to leave and not come back. I love my family, I love my friends, and in some ways, I love my country. But my country, if we are completely honest, does not need me. Nor do I necessarily need it. Over the summer, I kept getting the urge to go somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere but where I am, where I was. Granted, I went back home because at the time my family and I thought I would be needed to help everyone while my mom recovered from surgery. Because of that, I do not feel too deeply a sense of regret for staying home. But next year, I don't want to go back home.

I love my family, but the biggest thing they taught me was they did not raise me to be a boomerang, they raised me to be an arrow. Psalm 127:3-5 says, "Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate." My parents firmly believed this, and they firmly believed it was their job to raise me and my siblings to be not just arrows, but flaming arrows, on fire for God and ready to spread His love and His story like wildfire. And if I do that better halfway across the world, then great! Do they like the idea of me leaving and being all alone? Of course not, what mother is going to willingly send her daughter into the world that so terribly treats women? But they trust God with me and with my life, my safety.

And still, I have been afraid of bringing up the idea of leaving the country for good to them. Because that is such a monumental life decision, and it is really quite a big deal. But it is not an urge I can shake off and leave in the back of my mind. This urge has gotten so strong and so invasive that I must act or I will never be able to focus on anything else until it is handled. And that is how I know this is not of myself or my own ambitions. This is from God.

This week is Global Focus Week at Liberty, and I love, love, love GFW. I love the booths in the library, I love the speakers the school brings into convocation, and I love the sense of willingness you get from the students. But today was So. Much. Better. David Platt (renowned for his books Radical, and Follow Me, as well as others) was our speaker today, and before I go any further, I want to say one thing: David Platt has been gifted by God with his ability to speak and with his passion for the world and his ability to clearly articulate it to the masses. So today, Dr. Platt stood up and pleaded with us to understand the depth of what an unreached people group is and the urgency with which we need to be acting. I got a lot of good notes, and I want to share them with you all so you can understand where I'm coming from in a few paragraphs.

• Unreached people groups do not have access to the Gospel. 
• They have a general knowledge of God. 
• Because of this general knowledge, they have rejected God. 
• They are trying desperately to appease different gods and sometimes even to appease their own self and sins
•  The sinful nature manifests in us in a myriad of different ways. 
• Biblically, if you are unreached, you stand condemned before God. 
• There are not any innocent people in the world, there are condemned people all over the world who need to hear the gospel. 
• Biblically, if you are unreached, you will never be told about the good news, the amazing news, the awesome truth of the saving gift of Salvation and the gospel. 
• The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time. 
• Unreached people's knowledge of God is only enough to damn them to hell forever. 
• All they have is the bad news. 

With these points, I want to say what I have been feeling for months now.

I am not meant to stay in this country. I am not meant to teach in an American school. I would love to stay and help bring about education reform, but that is not my calling. My passion is to help people, my path is to teach, my calling is to leave. There are children dying because no one is presenting the Bible as a work of literature and in doing so presenting them with the truth that it contains. There is no one translating the Bible so that students can understand it.  No one is presenting the gospel to an entire third of our world population.

And for months I have been struggling with trying to discern whether or not this desire to leave and to go international was just something from myself in an attempt to get away from a city I didn't want to live in, or if this was a true calling from God. But throughout all of convo, I was repeatedly given a sense of reassurance and relief that this is not something I want to do. This is something God wants me to do. And being able to finally know that is a God-given desire is such a relief and has removed so much internal stress from my life.

I feel I am rambling now, so maybe I should be done.
In peace,
Emily E.

A Stressed Out Life and Why There is Nothing You Can Do About It

My life is stressful.

There is no getting around that fact. It just is. Could I prevent it from being stressful? Maybe. But everything I could try would never stop things from happening outside of my control. Because I'm not God.

It is the second week of school here at good ole Liberty University, and while many people claim if they can survive the first week, they can survive the entire year, I don't know if I necessarily believe that statement to be true. Because my first week here has been incredibly stressful. And it isn't going to get any easier. I don't have any "easy" classes to fall back on this semester, I don't have time to do nothing for an entire day. I have a constant stream of work, reading, and general life to get a hold of. I have things to do, a car to pay off, poems, essays, books, and plays to read, and even more to write. This semester is not going to be unstressful. I didn't think it would be. I also didn't think that there would be as many things out of my control as there already are.

You see, my laptop - my beautiful, precious, dependent franken-computer my dad lovingly put back together for me - has broken. The screen doesn't work. It is fixable, but it will cost me some money that I don't have at the moment. I haven't gotten paid for last week's work yet. So, I can't pay to get my laptop fixed until I get money and I don't have money until (hopefully) tomorrow. Which is not good because I need my laptop in two of my classes tomorrow.

I don't have some of the books I need for two of my classes still.
"But Emily didn't you think ahead? Didn't you prepare yourself and buy your books ahead of time??"
Yes, I did. But things that I can't control happened. A girl told me she had the books I needed and then she backed out and said she didn't. Then the one book I bought used from the bookstore actually ended up not being available used and they canceled the order the day before classes start. So now that I have reordered all of these books new, I am still waiting to get the email from the bookstore telling me "WE HAVE YOUR BOOKS IN HOORAY LIFE IS BETTER AND NOT TERRIBLE."

Fun fact: I ordered these books last Wednesday. They still aren't here. Also, to the students who bought the books off the bookstore shelf because they just wanted to have them and were not actually taking my classes, I hope you step on a Lego. Why would you want to buy a random textbook, and when do you have time to read them during the semester? Please explain your life choices.

And if all of this had happened to the Emily from last year, she would have had a mental breakdown and gone home. Because this would have been too much for 2014 me to handle. But I'm not 2014 me, and I'm not going home. I'm staying here, and I'm dealing with my life like an adult. Because even if I don't seem like a "real" adult a lot of the time, there is still so much I have managed to accomplish in myself the past year. The one thing I learned since then is that sometimes, you can't control every single thing that happens to you in order to protect yourself from the real world and from keeping you from going insane. Sometimes, in order to keep yourself healthy mentally, you have to face your crap. That's just the way the world works. And the world is not mine to control. So this past week, instead of having a breakdown and flipping a table, I've been trying so (sooooooo) hard to be calm about this stuff.

Maybe what I'm trying to get at is this:

It's okay to be stressed out. It's okay to be worried, it's okay to be afraid. In fact, it's completely 100% normal to feel this way sometimes. It is normal to have uncontrollable variables in your life and be afraid of their outcomes. At the end of the semester, getting my books in a week late isn't going to destroy me. It might mean I have to work extra hard to catch up, but I won't be any worse off because of it. Going without a laptop for a week isn't awful, and it's an inconvenience, but this school has so many computers all over the darn place, the only thing that is being inconvenienced is my profound desire to stay in my room all the time instead of out in public. But even that isn't awful because guess what? No one cares about what you are doing in college. Everyone is too stressed out and focused on their work to even think about you and what you are doing. (College kids do not have any concept of sonder. Also, that is the best word and idea ever and quite honestly, should be an idea that shapes Christianity and our faith. But that is a different topic for a different time.)

So all in all, life is unpredictable and can throw you off at times. That doesn't mean it has to be stressful. It just means you're living.

Emily E.

P.S.: In regards to my last post, Nasser noticed and read it. I have talked to him. We, as well as my own personal team of girls and the actual convocation team, will be meeting after the semester settles down to discuss the matter. We have been invited to help assemble a list of women we believe will make the biggest impact in the lives of our fellow students. If anyone has a request they would like to put in, feel free to comment or contact me if you know how :)

Overall, I am incredibly humbled at this opportunity and would greatly appreciate your prayers concerning the matter. 

An Open Letter to Liberty University and David Nasser

So out of the 20+ speakers who are scheduled for the upcoming Fall 2015 Liberty University convocation this year, only 5 of these are women, and one of them has a man scheduled to speak the same day.

First of all, I would like to take a moment to write specifically to David Nasser. Pastor Nasser, I applaud you and your work here at Liberty University. I do. I am in full support of you and everything you have done for this school even in the single year you have been here. I could not be happier with a campus pastor. I know you faced a lot of opposition from a lot of different people here since you joined the LU family. And on behalf of the student body and those who agree with me, I sincerely apologize. You do not deserve, nor have you done anything to deserve, the criticism and the terrible words you received. You are a blessing to this school and I am excited and expectant to see what positivity you bring to us in the years to come.

But, to whom it may concern, and to you as well, Pastor, I want to extend a suggestion: You need to bring on more women convocation speakers. Approximately 56.5% of both the residential and online population or Liberty University is female. That is your demographic. These young women are the majority. Young women don’t need middle age, married men with 2.5 children telling them how to live out their faith. They need older women who have successfully navigated the world both as a Christian and as a woman, as well as everything else that comes along with those titles. If any of the young women (or any of the women for that matter), who sit on campus or who watch live streams of convocation come from a similar background I do, they didn’t have a lot of women leaders. They didn’t have good, godly, Christian examples to look up to. They had mothers and grandmothers, yes, but they almost certainly did not have other women they were taught about or they heard about who were successful in their fields and lives and who were also Christians. I know I did not. Now, we are in college or we are continuing our education, and in this time we have to expand our horizons and see farther beyond our homes and our childhoods, we still do not have strong, Christian women to look up to and to sit under. We are still listening to men. And yes, men are the ones who God ordained to be pastors. I understand that and agree with that. It is biblically-based and sound.

 But, Liberty University, you do not invite just pastors onto your stage. You invite all kinds of people into Vines Center. You invite politicians and journalists and authors and comedians and missionaries and performers into our Liberty Bubble. So why can’t any of these people be women? There are women politicians and journalists and authors and comedians and missionaries and performers who are all successful and who are very good examples to bring in. Women have just as much experience in their lifetimes as their male counterparts do, and sometimes, they even have more experience. Yet we do not see them, and we do not know how to find these women. Liberty, you have an incredible opportunity to pour into the lives of these women. Because women are the doer’s of the world. Women do not sit and talk as men do. Women stand up, and women wake up before dawn, and women get things done. And this generation of women are so eager to get up and to move and to get things done. But when we do not see any other generations in front of us encouraging us on, we become disheartened and discontent.

This generation of Christian women do not need an older generation of men telling them the same thing 20 different ways. We NEED to see more successful women. We NEED to see Christian women who have overcome the stigma of being a woman. We do not need men telling us how they think we should succeed. We need women showing use how they themselves succeeded.

You have one TBA spot open in the Fall semester. I ask and I pray that you all deeply consider bringing in a woman to speak.

Frustrated and discouraged, 

Emily E.