from one human to another

I think sometimes we get really caught up in how great we think we are. I’m not necessarily referring to the overt pride that we can have (though that also does apply here), but to the subconscious way it’s easy for those of us from wealthy, educated and loving communities to feel like we have something to offer those “less fortunate” than us. We want to do something about the suffering we read about, and we try to accomplish short-term goals that we’ve created from our own will. But sometimes—actually, almost all of the time—all God asks us to do is show up.

I came here to Camden with a group of nearly 20 Pepperdine students on spring break, and I must admit, we were not all initially in the best state of mind about this trip. Service is one thing, but service and freezing cold weather? That’s another animal. Warm weather, beach and relaxation are what most college students look for on their spring break, and I think it’s fair to say that after months of writing papers, studying and taking exams, it’s perfectly justified.

One girl from our team, Ashley, said she and her roommates went shopping before they left for their respective trips and while they tried on new bikinis, Ashley scoured the stores for a few pairs of warm wool socks. It’s a bit of a silly example, but it really sheds light on trading one type of week for another—swimsuits, sunglasses, and rest for boots, coats, and some serious hard work. Regardless of our small degree of hesitation, on February 27 we all packed our bags, hopped on a plane, and showed up.

From the moment we started our journey from LA to Philadelphia, the Lord began to prepare us with patience. Elena sat next to two small, crying children; Maddie and Bri endured loud snores from the man in the aisle seat next to them; Heather, Dave and I spent over an hour searching for parking in downtown Philly before finally deciding to divide and conquer, paying almost $20 for one spot, and parking blocks away for another. But despite the obstacles, each hour and each patience-trying event seemed to bring us more united as a team and prepare us more for the week of work ahead.

In our week here working with UrbanPromise, we have torn up old tile, ripped out a ceiling, facilitated classes, shoveled truckloads of snow, picked up trash on the side of the road, played games at after-school programs, and helped kids with their homework. That’s a lot of stuff—a lot more than any of our vacationing friends have done this week—and it would be easy to give ourselves a pat on the back, feel some sense of accomplishment, and act like we offered something special to this community. But if that’s our attitude, then our work is in vain and worth nothing.

I’ve been beautifully reminded this week of what it means to truly relate, and to show love to someone when they’re seemingly unlovable—the kind of love that our Savior shows us. “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7-9). At the end of the day, we have nothing to bring to this broken community but our broken selves. We are all, as the pastor of Epiphany Fellowship in Philadelphia said on Sunday morning, “Raggedy.” Every single one of us. We are all “wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” (Revelation 3:17), but we are also all redeemed, understood and loved by the only One who knows exactly who we are underneath all of our appearances. I am just one human relating to another, serving another, loving another. Sure, my brokenness is certainly different than someone else’s—especially a kid from Camden—but it doesn’t change the fact that we share the commonality of the human experience. I cannot offer anything except the willingness to serve this community through making myself available to be used.

NOTE: This is also posted on the UrbanPromise blog! Check it out and learn more about their ministry here.

away for the week

Hi friends!

I’m away for the week on a mission trip in Philadelphia and New Jersey with a group of Pepperdine students. Today we took a bus tour of the city we’re working in, did demolition work in an old building, and spent time with middle school kids at their after-school program. Our group is already connecting so well and we’re having a great time getting to know each other and serving together.

I’ll be back on Sunday with all the details!

Love!
Natalie

the chair is your enemy.

I’ve always hated the idea of sitting behind a desk all day, but an article I read this week from The New York Times shed new light on the idea of living an “active lifestyle.” Read below, and let me know what you think about it!

Stand Up While You Read This!

by Olivia Judson

Your chair is your enemy.

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

That, at least, is the conclusion of several recent studies. Indeed, if you consider only healthy people who exercise regularly, those who sit the most during the rest of the day have larger waists and worse profiles of blood pressure and blood sugar than those who sit less. Among people who sit in front of the television for more than three hours each day, those who exercise are as fat as those who don’t: sitting a lot appears to offset some of the benefits of jogging a lot.

So what’s wrong with sitting?

The answer seems to have two parts. The first is that sitting is one of the most passive things you can do. You burn more energy by chewing gum or fidgeting than you do sitting still in a chair. Compared to sitting, standing in one place is hard work. To stand, you have to tense your leg muscles, and engage the muscles of your back and shoulders; while standing, you often shift from leg to leg. All of this burns energy.

For many people, weight gain is a matter of slow creep — two pounds this year, three pounds next year. You can gain this much if, each day, you eat just 30 calories more than you burn. Thirty calories is hardly anything — it’s a couple of mouthfuls of banana, or a few potato chips. Thus, a little more time on your feet today and tomorrow can easily make the difference between remaining lean and getting fat.

You may think you have no choice about how much you sit. But this isn’t true. Suppose you sleep for eight hours each day, and exercise for one. That still leaves 15 hours of activities. Even if you exercise, most of the energy you burn will be burnt during these 15 hours, so weight gain is often the cumulative effect of a series of small decisions: Do you take the stairs or the elevator? Do you e-mail your colleague down the hall, or get up and go and see her? When you get home, do you potter about in the garden or sit in front of the television? Do you walk to the corner store, or drive?

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

So part of the problem with sitting a lot is that you don’t use as much energy as those who spend more time on their feet. This makes it easier to gain weight, and makes you more prone to the health problems that fatness often brings.

But it looks as though there’s a more sinister aspect to sitting, too. Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.

As an example, consider lipoprotein lipase. This is a molecule that plays a central role in how the body processes fats; it’s produced by many tissues, including muscles. Low levels of lipoprotein lipase are associated with a variety of health problems, including heart disease. Studies in rats show that leg muscles only produce this molecule when they are actively being flexed (for example, when the animal is standing up and ambling about). The implication is that when you sit, a crucial part of your metabolism slows down.

Nor is lipoprotein lipase the only molecule affected by muscular inactivity. Actively contracting muscles produce a whole suite of substances that have a beneficial effect on how the body uses and stores sugars and fats.

Which might explain the following result. Men who normally walk a lot (about 10,000 steps per day, as measured by a pedometer) were asked to cut back (to about 1,350 steps per day) for two weeks, by using elevators instead of stairs, driving to work instead of walking and so on. By the end of the two weeks, all of them had became worse at metabolizing sugars and fats. Their distribution of body fat had also altered — they had become fatter around the middle. Such changes are among the first steps on the road to diabetes.

Conversely, a study of people who sit for many hours found that those who took frequent small breaks — standing up to stretch or walk down the corridor — had smaller waists and better profiles for sugar and fat metabolism than those who did their sitting in long, uninterrupted chunks.

Some people have advanced radical solutions to the sitting syndrome: replace your sit-down desk with a stand-up desk, and equip this with a slow treadmill so that you walk while you work. (Talk about pacing the office.) Make sure that your television can only operate if you are pedaling furiously on an exercise bike. Or, watch television in a rocking chair: rocking also takes energy and involves a continuous gentle flexing of the calf muscles. Get rid of your office chair and replace it with a therapy ball: this too uses more muscles, and hence more energy, than a normal chair, because you have to support your back and work to keep balanced. You also have the option of bouncing, if you like.

Or you could take all this as a license to fidget.

But whatever you choose, know this. The data are clear: beware your chair.

NOTE: The bold text is my emphasis

Read the original article from The New York Times here.

talitha koum

I decided last week that for Lent this year I wanted to read through The Message version of the New Testament. It’s been really powerful reading the gospels with such intention each day, and I’ve loved the way the Lord has been shedding new light on the old stories I’ve heard many times before. Last night in my reading, I got to Mark 5. I’ve read it dozens of times before, but this time it felt like something brand new. There are three stories in the chapter, but one small part at the end jumped out to me like never before.

To set the scene, a man named Jairus had a daughter who is “at death’s door.” He came to Jesus in desperation, convinced that Jesus could heal her if he was willing to lay hands on her. When they arrived, the people at Jairus’ house told him that his daughter was dead, and that there was no need to bother Jesus with healing her.

³⁶Jesus overheard what they were talking about and said to the leader (Jairus), “Don’t listen to them; just trust me.”

^37-40He permitted no one to go in with him except Peter, James, and John. They entered the leader’s house and pushed their way through the gossips looking for a story and neighbors bringing in casseroles. Jesus was abrupt: “Why all this busybody grief and gossip? This child isn’t dead; she’s sleeping.” Provoked to sarcasm, they told him he didn’t know what he was talking about.

^40-43But when he had sent them all out, he took the child’s father and mother, along with his companions, and entered the child’s room. He clasped the girl’s hand and said, “Talitha koum,” which means, “Little girl, get up.” At that, she was up and walking around! This girl was twelve years of age. They, of course, were all beside themselves with joy. He gave them strict orders that no one was to know what had taken place in that room. Then he said, “Give her something to eat.”

This story is so beautiful, it almost brought me to tears. When we feel defeated and hopeless, Jesus tells us, just trust me. I can think back to my sophomore and junior years at Pepperdine when I truly felt like a shell of a girl. I was broken, but he put me back together. I was in darkness, but he shined light on me. When I was dead in spirit and lost in lies, he called out to me, Talitha koum! Little girl, get up! And I came to life.

Through faith and trust, we are brought to life (metaphorically, and also, as this story shows, sometimes literally). The Lord is good and faithful, and his power is greater than we often give him credit for. He loves us with deep compassion and desires to fill us with himself, which is the greatest gift we could ever get, because he is love and he is life. He is calling to you — talitha koum! Little girl, get up! He wants to be—has to be—the source of our life. He wants to fill us up and shine light on the darkness we have within.

How are you dead or broken? What darkness are you in? Will you let the Lord heal you as he did this little girl?

Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. (1 Peter 5:7, NIV)

the one who Jesus loves

John describes himself in the gospel he wrote as “the one Jesus loves” and it has always makes me giggle a little bit. At first, I thought it was pretentious. Who does he think he is? What makes him so special that he has to stand out among everyone else and point out Jesus’ love for him? Is he more important than the others? Is he more loved than the others?

One of the disciples, the one Jesus loved dearly, was reclining against him, his head on his shoulder (John 13:23, MSG)

She ran at once to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved… (John 20:2, MSG)

Turning his head, Peter noticed the disciple Jesus loved following right behind (John 21:20, MSG)

While it was odd to me at first, as I’ve read these scriptures more and more, I’ve come to really love that he calls himself that. How often do I think of myself as Natalie, the one who Jesus loves? After all, it’s true! And you—you, too, are “the one that Jesus loves.” Fill in your name and say it aloud.

I, (your name) , am the one who Jesus loves.

Do you know that? Do you believe that? The Lord loves you so deeply that with complete knowledge of the depth of our sin, he died to save us anyway:

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in sin…

That’s real love. And it’s yours.