Three days from now, I will be heading for Austria. I felt like this would never come. I am so excited to lead my first trip with Go Now! BUT IT'S A LOT OF WORK! I feel like I still have so many last minute details to take care of. I find myself going over the camp schedule with a fine-toothed comb multiple times a day. I have a great fear that we will get over there and I will have forgotten to do something.

I feel like I have to prove myself! I don't know know what I am trying to prove or who I am trying to prove it to!

But if you think about it, send up a quick prayer for me and my team.

Pray for health. I am pretty sure I have a sinus infection that has set up camp in my head. With a lack of a "real" job right now comes a lack of insurance. I am REALLY praying that this whole mess will clear up before I am stuck in a pressurized plane for a long period of time.

Pray for the girls on my team. They all seem SO AMAZING. I can't wait to get to know them more. Two of them have started their own blogs so they can keep others up to speed with what's going on in Austria. Ask the Lord to protect them over the next couple of weeks.

Pray for the children that will be coming to the English camp. Most of them do not have any sort of evangelical background. Though this is not a "Christian camp," we will be telling Bible stories everyday, as well as seeking opportunities to share the gospel.

Pray for the church that we will be working at. The people of the church seem to have such an incredible heart for the un-churched in their community. Pray that they would seize every opportunity to connect with families during camp.

Pray for the teenagers that are "volunteering" during camp. In reality, these are teenagers that have gone to the camp in the past, but are now too old for camp. Therefore, they CHOOSE to come back and WORK, because they like it THAT MUCH! I have a strong feeling in my heart that this is where we will see a lot of opportunities during camp.

I guess that's it for now!

It's funny how things work out.

Just yesterday, I was driving back to the good ol' Merce after being home for Father's Day Weekend. I had the windows down (still no AC) and some good tunes playing loud. And I thought to myself, "I'm pretty happy with my life right now."

A year ago, I would have never guessed that I would end up in Commerce, much less actually LIKE it in this area. And just a couple of months ago, I thought that was all going to change!

I know it's been a bit of a rough year, but life out here is pleasant. It's just a little slower...everyone knows everybody, so naturally, you wave to everyone as you are driving. I LOVE my church and the hearts of the people there. I love that a lot of people out here work on their dairy farms every morning before anything else. There's a strong importance put on families out here, which I love.

Question is...when it REALLY is time for me to go, next summer, will I want to stay?

Thankful Thursday

Missed me last week? I was in Colorado for high school camp, which was AMAZING! Maybe more on that later.

I am VERY thankful for Chicken Express sweet tea. It somehow makes everything better when I am in a bad mood. I'm pretty sure that it will be in Heaven....in abundance.

I am also very thankful for my mom, who is willing to call me FORTY-ONE times in one morning to make sure I get up in time to get to VBS!

I am reminded how thankful I am for air conditioning. I don't have AC in my car, and haven't in quite a while. I'm not sure when I'm going to be able to get it fixed. But it's rather frustrating. I often can't wait to get into a building, simply for it's AC.

Lastly, I am VERY thankful that I live by myself. I love that I can come home after a long day and take a nap if I want... Or I can spread out all my stuff for Austria all over my living room and leave it there for days until I come back to it.

Thankful Thursday

Today, I am reminded how thankful I am that I have a car. With all the crazy events that have taken place over the past week, I was at home yesterday on "phone patrol." I had to basically sit at home all day so I could answer the phone when someone called. Well, if you know me at all, I'm not much of a sitter. By the end of the day, I felt like I was on house arrest. I was so thankful when more of the fam came home and I was able to get out! I went to a dollar movie (by myself) just to get the heck out!

I'm also thankful for a best friend who I can spend all night sitting in Braum's with...just laughing and talking about life. While we were there tonight, she even mentioned "You know, we could be out at a bar, drinking. But instead, we are here at Braum's in our scrubs having a grand time." I concur Liz, I concur.

Lastly, today I am thankful that I have my own room at my parents house. Though I sometimes get frustrated when I come home because it looks more like my mom's closet than my bedroom, it IS still mine. It is still my safe place... a place where I can hunker down in when I just need some time by myself, whether it be for a nap, to read, or whatever.

If you know me at all, you know I'm pretty much obsessed with Jon and Kate plus 8. And just like most fans, I was pretty upset about all the scandal surrounding their marriage. However, I just read an article in Christianity Today written by Julie Elliott called "The Gospel and the Gosselins" that shed a whole new light on it. I think she makes some good points about Christian's love and hate for Jon and Kate and what that says about our faith.

If you have recently stood in line at the grocery store and glanced at the tabloid covers, chances are you have seen the faces of reality TV stars Jon and Kate Gosselin. Jon and Kate are stars of the wildly popular TLC show Jon & Kate Plus Eight, which documents the life of this Pennsylvania couple as they raise their eight children, 8-year-old twins and 5-year-old sextuplets. Until recently, Jon and Kate were celebrated as models of wholesome family values. Sure, they bickered a lot, but they were committed to staying together for the long haul. Indeed, last season featured them renewing their wedding vows on the beach in Hawaii. Such commitment endeared them to the watching public and made them TLC's most profitable commodity.

Of all the viewers who followed the Gosselins, evangelicals were among the most faithful. Jon and Kate's refusal to resort to "selective reduction" when they found themselves pregnant with sextuplets, their membership in an Assemblies of God church, and their Isaiah 40:31 T-shirts all helped to make them icons of evangelical piety. Churches from across the country clamored to be added to their speaking tours. In the last two years the vast majority of Jon and Kate's presentations took place at Christian conferences or at evangelical churches, most often Baptist, nondenominational or charismatic.

Zondervan, one of the foremost evangelical presses, published two books with the Gosselins, both of which hit the New York Times bestseller list. The popular tongue-in-cheek blog Stuff Christians Like listed "Watching Jon and Kate Plus 8" on its list of favored Christian products or activities. Evangelicals dependably tuned in to the television show as the family received free trips to posh resorts, when the couple underwent plastic surgery, and when they moved from a comfortable house in the suburbs to a sprawling estate in the country. If they noticed that Jon and Kate's family and friends—most notably Aunt Jodi and Beth—were, one by one, being estranged from the family (reportedly over financial disputes), it did not stop believers from looking to this couple for inspiration on how to be a good Christian family.

Then everything changed. Reports surfaced that Jon was out partying with co-eds and getting too friendly with a 23-year-old teacher. Shortly thereafter the tabloids claimed that Kate was having an affair with her bodyguard and that she had given Jon the go-ahead to see other women, as long as he showed up for filming. The truthfulness of all of these claims has yet to be established. But one thing is clear—the marriage is crumbling. In fact, on the season five premiere, which aired on Memorial Day, the couple expressed no love for one another and made no promises about being together in the future. Both appeared ready to file for divorce.

Viewers, and especially evangelical viewers, are aghast. How could such a loving, Christian family disintegrate so quickly? Is the failure of their marriage due to the stress of parenting multiples? Can it be attributed to Kate's love of celebrity versus Jon's desire to retreat from the limelight? Might it be the result of living under constant (albeit self-imposed) surveillance? I suspect that each of these theories tell part of the story. But the story that has not been told is the one that sees in Jon and Kate the shortcomings of evangelical piety itself.

We evangelicals tend to be easily impressed. We cheered on Jon and Kate's decision to carry all six babies to term but rarely considered the prior question: Was it right for them to undergo risky fertility treatments in the first place? They had been married only a matter of months when Kate, who was in her mid-20s at the time, took fertility medication to stimulate her ovaries for intrauterine insemination and became pregnant with their twins, Cara and Mady.

Only a few years later, Kate's ovaries were stimulated once again, but this time they were hyper-stimulated. Warned by their doctor during an ultrasound examination that the fertility medication had worked a little too well and that four mature follicles were present, Jon and Kate nonetheless went ahead with the insemination. Apparently their doctor had miscounted on that fateful day, because Kate soon discovered that she was pregnant with seven embryos (one of which miscarried a short time later). Six babies were growing in a space designed for one, posing great risks to the life of each baby as well as to the life of their mother. Faced with this unintended but preventable situation, Jon and Kate were right to carry all of the babies to term. But this decision is not enough to warrant their status as models of Christian faithfulness. That most evangelicals were satisfied to celebrate the end—six miraculous lives—rather than assess the morality of the means whereby those lives were created, betrays the thinness of evangelical reflection on reproductive ethics. Too often our ethics have focused so singularly on the question of abortion that we have given comparatively little attention to the morally-significant issues surrounding infertility, reproductive technology, childbirth, and parenting. As such, we have a hard time challenging the assumptions of our consumerist culture or those who, like Jon and Kate, seem to be beholden to it.

As fellow Christians, we should have reminded the Gosselins that life is a gift to be received in gratitude, not something to be grasped, purchased, or sold. In many ways, the last four seasons of Jon & Kate Plus Eight is the story of a family that seemed to progressively lose sight of this truth. Of course, they had help along the way from TLC, from the show's producers, and not least of all, from their Christian viewers.

When the first few episodes revealed the earning potential of this "everyday family," Jon & Kate Plus Eight became a brand name that was packaged and sold. And many Christians were happy to comply by opening up their wallets and their fellowship halls. When the network and the couple were not satisfied with the money generated through high ratings and book sales, the Gosselin home was filled with product placements and the children were filmed for long hours each week. All the while many (though not all) evangelicals watched with undiscerning eyes. Somewhere along the line we, like Jon and Kate, seemed to forget the warnings of 1 Timothy 6:9-10:

But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. (NRSV)

It was not until the recent allegations of sexual impropriety arose that a significant number of Christians began to question whether Jon and Kate were indeed the examples of faithful living that we had imagined. Somehow most of us missed the long trajectory that was, day by day, moving them farther from a life of Christian virtue. Sexual immorality—whether actual or merely suspected—caught our attention, but the materialism, narcissism, and exploitation of children that preceded it was largely overlooked.

As such, the breakdown of Jon and Kate's marriage is but a symptom of the larger weaknesses of ethics in the evangelical community. We are easily seduced by wealth and fame. We are easily contented by the shallow rhetoric of hot-button issues. In short, we are easily deceived by cultural values painted in Christian veneers (or clothed in Isaiah 40:31 T-shirts).

The hope for us—and the hope of Jon and Kate—is to turn once again to the rich, complex, and difficult ethics of Jesus and to let those ethics form us into a more discerning people in the world. It is time that we look for role models who value self-sacrifice over material gain. It is time that we practice forgiveness and the healing of broken relationships and call fellow Christians to do the same. It is time that we take our own marriage vows seriously and hold our brothers and sisters to be true to their commitments as well. Most importantly, it is time that we develop a view of faith and life that is capable of asking deep questions and courageous enough to embody real answers. Then, and only then, will Christians have something to offer the world and something to offer Jon & Kate Plus Eight.

Julie Vermeer Elliott is a faculty member at Eastern University, St. Davids, PA, where she teaches courses in Christian ethics and interdisciplinary studies and directs advising and first-year programs. She holds a master of theological studies degree from Duke Divinity School.

"Speaking Out" is Christianity Today's guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.

Found this on Bleecker's Blog ...it's worth reading


RELIGION: I obey-therefore I’m accepted.

THE GOSPEL: I’m accepted-therefore I obey.

RELIGION: Motivation is based on fear and insecurity.

THE GOSPEL: Motivation is based on grateful joy.

RELIGION: I obey God in order to get things from God.

THE GOSPEL: I obey God to get to God-to delight and resemble Him.

RELIGION: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I am angry at God or my self, since I believe, like Job’s friends that anyone who is good deserves a comfortable life.

THE GOSPEL: When circumstances in my life go wrong, I struggle but I know all my punishment fell on Jesus and that while he may allow this for my training, he will exercise his Fatherly love within my trial.

RELIGION: When I am criticized I am furious or devastated because it is critical that I think of myself as a ‘good person’. Threats to that self-image must be destroyed at all costs

THE GOSPEL: When I am criticized I struggle, but it is not critical for me to think of myself as a ‘good person.’ My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on God’s love for me in Christ. I can take criticism.

RELIGION: My prayer life consists largely of petition and it only heats up when I am in a time of need. My main purpose in prayer is control of the environment.

THE GOSPEL: My prayer life consists of generous stretches of praise and adoration. My main purpose is fellowship with Him.

RELIGION: My self-view swings between two poles. If and when I am living up to my standards, I feel confident, but then I am prone to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people. If and when I am not living up to standards, I feel insecure and inadequate. I’m not confident. I feel like a failure.

THE GOSPEL: My self-view is not based on a view of my self as a moral achiever. In Christ I am “simul iustus et peccator”—simultaneously sinful and yet accepted in Christ. I am so bad he had to die for me and I am so loved he was glad to die for me. This leads me to deeper and deeper humility and confidence at the same time. Neither swaggering nor sniveling.

RELIGION: My identity and self-worth are based mainly on how hard I work. Or how moral I am, and so I must look down on those I perceive as lazy or immoral. I disdain and feel superior to ‘the other.’

THE GOSPEL: My identity and self-worth are centered on the one who died for His enemies, who was excluded from the city for me. I am saved by sheer grace. So I can’t look down on those who believe or practice something different from me. Only by grace I am what I am. I’ve no inner need to win arguments.

RELIGION: Since I look to my own pedigree or performance for my spiritual acceptability, my heart manufactures idols. It may be my talents, my moral record, my personal discipline, my social status, etc. I absolutely have to have them so they serve as my main hope, meaning, happiness, security, and significance, whatever I may say I believe about God.

THE GOSPEL: I have many good things in my life—family, work, spiritual disciplines, etc. But none of these good things are ultimate things to me. None of them are things I absolutely have to have, so there is a limit to how much anxiety, bitterness, and despondency they can inflict on me when they are threatened and lost.