Tomorrow is my first day of third grade. Nervous? Umm..yeah.

I just realized that I might be in over my head as most of my training has been at the kindergarten level. I do realize, however, that in order to learn and grow, I must be challenged. So, for this year, the challenge is to teach urban third graders in a Jacksonville public school.

I do admit to some excitement. Once I figure out what I am supposed to teach them...I should be okay. ;)

In other news....as I haven't been so faithful to my blogging...I am wondering how the heck I got here. I mean, I know how I got to Florida. I remember the sequence of events. But I really do wonder recently what I'm supposed to be doing here. It's only the beginning, these kinds of thoughts are probably normal and healthy. But I do miss the comforts of familiarity. I do miss my friends.

To all of you One Day people...I broke out the live cd and listened while I was out and about in Jacksonville. I seriously had tears in my eyes from beginning to end...mostly b/c the music added to the way that God was working on my heart throughout the day. The songs and prayers reminded me, though, that at another time and place, I sought out the heart of God with others around me. Oh, how I miss and long for that chance now. I long to have a heart to heart conversation about what God is doing me and to hear what God is doing in others. I long to share the love of Christ with someone over coffee and really walk away knowing that God was there. Where does that excitement go through the years? The excitement that causes you to stop in the middle of Waffle House and pray for a group of highschool graduates, the excitement that unconditionally brings thirty young adults together every week to share the love of God with one another, the excitement to talk about God and sing songs about Him and just LOVE Him? Where does it go? I still want to be excited.

Pip recently talked about the holy roar. In my own heart I know that it has been suppressed. Somehow, I know that I have allowed myself to be defined by the relationship I have held with the church only to find that it was a lie and a misjudgment. I became who they wanted me to be. I allowed their definitions to become my definitions, their labels to become my labels, their lifestyles to become my lifestyle. And I never questioned whether it was right or wrong. Until one day when I no longer fit into the mold that I had assumed had been created for me.

I want to know God more than I want to know anything in the whole world. I want to hear His heart and to see His face. But all of a sudden doing church as I have always done it no longer seems to coincide with knowing who He is. Do I want to ignore the people of God? No. Do I want to ignore what He is doing among His people on earth? Absolutely not. I hear the roar. I hear it at the depths of my heart. But how do I free it from the box that I have locked it away in? The box of uncertainty and apprehension.

Lots of questions on a night like tonight.

I've been reading the Chronicles of Narnia this week so I will end with this excerpt from chapter 8 of The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis. It is the chapter where the Lion begins to sing and as he sings Narnia comes into being.

"In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it...

Then two wonders happened in the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by the other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it..The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leapt out...The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing."