I've been sitting here for the past few minutes, just looking over my blog, giong all the way back to the beginning, sorting through some pretty crappy times the past year, but really just enjoying this thing that I have been blessed to create. I remember starting out these expressions, timidly wondering if what I had to say was worth reading, and i think there is nothing that brings me more joy than this small record of my life. i think God must have ordained blogs becuase they are such beautiful expressions of his creations. And you know, sometimes as I am just surfing the "blogosphere" as some people endearingly call it, I come across really painful stuff, heart-wrenching stuff, and I love it becuase these are God's people. Honest people who are tired of hiding their junk.

And I think the thing I love the most about my blog is that it is okay for me to write it simply with the intention of someone else reading and enjoying it. I think way too often we think it would be wrong of us to want another person to enjoy us. We hold ourselves off from loving ourselves and totally end up suffocating ourselves from the love God has created us to experience from other people. I know because this is a big hole that God has totally pulled me out of a zillion times and He is slowly filling it up so i can be free of it forever.

As i think over the past week or so at TEAM, my most overwhelming source of joy is my freedom from guilt over needing love. In the first few days I was so encouraged by people who simply said "I've been reading your blog and its great, "or even more simply "Yeah, I know who you are." We believe this lie that it is selfish for us to need other people-- as a matter of fact, we'll die without it. And i think we know deep down that this is lie, but to actually refute the lie requires vulnerability and sometimes a great deal of pain. So we justify it with thoughts like, "she's way out of my league, " or "I'm just not good enough," or "they just wouldn't understand," or maybe even, "I would never associate with her kind."

But you know what? Under all of our clothes, we're all naked. When I was waiting for my plane home from CA, i was sitting in a restuarant, overhearing a conversation between a customer and an employee about just normal stuff; they had found something in common while she ordered a taco and he rang it up. Airports always sort of give me a feeling of tension and mistrust, but I sat there are just thought, you know, we're all naked and we are all just people. Beautiful people with backgrounds of pain and brokenness, joy and love. Its how we are created.

So I just wanted to thank all of you who are part of my life, even if it is only through journeying with me here on this little webpage. Thank you, especially all of you TEAMer's. You have no idea how much you mean to me, how deeply God has used you in teaching me all of this wild, deep, almost foreign stuff about love and life. I couldn't have even begun to understand all this without you all.