a week in view

Life around here has been incredibly busy. Here are a few highlights of the fun moments of my past week via instagram and path photos.

 Locked my keys in my car at work. Don't worry, our campus safety team is on the ball!

I made a new friend! This is Charlie.. I'm not really a cat fan (at all) but he's pretty cute.

We hosted a National Geographic premier for a documentary featuring one of our professors. You should check it out when it airs on tv!

I've been having some big fun with these two-- we never cease to make each other laugh.

A sweet lunch surprise from a sweet friend! Blessings on a busy week!

Okay, so this isn't from this week... but how fun is this girl? I love her a whole lot.

Went to see The Vow with my girls!! and ran into this thing...

Early Saturday morning breakfast with some friends! I'm so excited for this girl to be working camp this summer!

Daniel and I got Valentine's Day mail from the parents! Have I mentioned I love this holiday? So fun.

Saturday night we built a fort and started reading The Hunger Games. Have I mentioned what a wonderful blessing my boyfriend is?

And this afternoon I made cupcakes in Daniel's kitchen while he did homework. It was a well-planned task to keep me quiet while he worked ;)

And this. This has been the sweetest blessing to me this week, especially in the midst of working extra long hours and being overwhelmingly stressed out. I've been learning a lot lately (as I mentioned in my last post) about what it means to truly be in Christ  and to have Christ in us. See, when we enter into the faith and give our lives to Christ, we are promised the Holy Spirit-- the one Jesus refers to as a Counselor, sent to us in His absence. The Lord has been doing a work in my heart about just exactly what we are given in the Holy Spirit and let me tell you, it's so much. But check out, if you will, just this one passage:

"When he [the Holy Spirit] comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned." --John 16:8-11

Now, you may get something different out of this than I do. I'm always up for learning and I'm sure my understanding here isn't fully complete, but as I began to think through the reasoning that Jesus leaves us the Holy Spirit, this verse left me a lot of insight. It isn't at first what I thought it was... Keep in mind that Jesus is sharing these words as He prepares to die and to leave the disciples here on earth for a time.

The word convict here is the greek word "elegcho", meaning to bring to light. Convict. We look at it as a negative thing sometimes, but try here to look at it as bringing about a realization or an understanding.

...In regard to sin because men do not believe in me:

We needed the Spirit to reveal our sin to us because we did not believe in Christ. This is that initial part of process of belief and redemption. I think about the moments I've been blessed to sit and talk with children about understanding what it means to accept Christ and become a Christian and we always talk first about understanding why we need Christ and recognizing the sinfulness of our lives. Because He has sent the Spirit to us now, we recognize, at His prompting, our sinfulness. It is our sinfulness that brings our need to believe in Jesus. (Actively believe... pisteuo. Believe in such a way that we take action as a result, not just acknowledge it's existence. But that's a post for another day...)  We begin the entire process of redemption only because the Spirit convicts us in regard to sin, that we may believe in Christ.

Not only does the Spirit come to convict us at the beginning of our journey, (how many times Scripture says that He chooses us! It's by His prompting, though we of course must make the decision on our own.) but the Spirit also convicts us along the way when we are failing to believe actively as we should day by day in Christ. It's a journey. I need that reminder often. That is how the Spirit convicts us-- reminds us of our sinfulness, our imperfection, our desperate need for Jesus, His grace, and our call to believe with action as a response to that every single day.


...In regard to righteousness because I am going to the Father.
 This one might make more sense to you right off the bat. It didn't to me. But as I began to think about it, the Spirit convicts us of righteousness because Jesus is no longer present to do such. It's a simple truth. Jesus has been walking with the disciples and teaching them constantly what was right and wrong-- and it was often so contrary to what the world assumed. In fact, Jesus tells us in John that if we are following Him, the world may hate us. Why? Because His commands aren't instinctual and sometimes they aren't easy. Remembering also that the disciples didn't have a copy of the entire Word in their hands, I feel sure they were getting nervous at this point about how they were supposed to know what on earth to do in Jesus' absence. I'd be worried. How were they do know what's right and wrong? What is righteous? Hence the conviction of the Spirit. He will show show you what's right and wrong by His leading. In Christ, we are given that also.

...In regard to judgement, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.
It's interesting to me how at this point, Jesus calls himself a prince. He's been so humble throughout his entire life (look at His birth, for goodness sake) and has now reached a place of making sure the world knows for certain who He is and what we have decided to do to Him, as He prepares to give His life for us. He says that he has been judged-- krino in the Greek. It means summoned to trial. The word for judgement here is krisis, meaning the exact same thing. A sentence of condemnation. So... He sends the Spirit to convict us of judgement and to remind us of the price that He himself has paid? Praise God that we aren't to forget that... and only through the Spirit can we begin to understand the magnitude of that. Wow. Another step in the process towards pisteuo-- believing and acknowledging not just the weight of our sin, but the power of His righteousness, of who He was, and of how He willingly stood condemned for us as a response. It's the next step in the process of understanding salvation. The Spirit has convicted us of our sinfulness and our need for Jesus. Now we come to be convicted of the power and magnitude of what He has done for us. We are able to begin to grasp all of this only through Him interceding and convicting our hearts.

Wow. So the Spirit is given to us to convict our hearts in a lot of ways, ultimately all to push us closer to Christ. It is Him that prompts are hearts and pushes us through that process of coming to initially know Christ. It is Him that lives inside us and leads us though this journey day by day. The beautiful reality of Christianity is that our God is alive-- that He came back from the dead after facing such a brutal death and that He has ascended to Heaven to be with the Father. But He didn't leave us to wander about on our own-- no, instead He sent us what He often calls the Helper to walk alongside of us, inside of us, once we choose to give our entire lives to Him. How beautiful that our God loves us enough to be our guide through this crazy journey.

I don't know about you, but I'm grateful for that today.