comin from the sunny west coast

Hey guys!


Update on me for anyone interested: I'm currently at home in Victoria, resting and letting myself be taken care of by the parentals. I've been here for exactly a week now, over Bcrest's modular/reading break. I was originally enrolled in a modular class for the week (World Religions with Tim Stabell!) but had to drop it due to concussion symptoms from getting hit during the Oh Sleeper concert at Youth Quake. I'm still not seeming to get much better very quickly. Like Anna, I'm finding it's pretty annoying since school requires my brain to be working a little better than it can at the moment. Concussions are cumulative I think and this is definitely not my first. So yeah, my body is being weird and my parents want me to stay home for a bit longer to rest up/possibly catch up on school. Prayer for healing would be awesome.


But I'm realizing that good health and good marks and playing basketball well aren't actually the epitomes of life. It's more about getting to know Jesus Christ better, it's about living in light of his Lordship, and exuding that divine light by loving and serving his people as part of the Church, his body. I'm sorry if that all sounds theological and abstract. To me, it's pretty practical. Not that I'm anywhere near good at any of it yet (even the last two months I've wrestled a lot with darkness/lies/deceit/self-degradation), but I desire to live this out by immersing myself in the Word (getting to know Christ, what his Lordship means), loving on the people placed in my life (for me right now, this should look much like building up the Church, since I do live in a place where most people are generally on the same page with the whole Christianity thing), and looking to sacrifice my lifestyle choices in order to further social justice (and man, I'm sucking at that one lately, not giving a rip about what I'm consuming or what it looks like to steward well my time/money/talents I've been privileged/gifted with).


Hahaha on the English essay I should be revising right now instead of writing on here, the comments by my professor centre around how I need to cut down on wordiness :P


On another note, I'm going to Hong Kong and Northern China this summer, along with possibly New Zealand and Thailand. I should probably figure it out pretty quickly here whether I'm doing the latter two or not – I hear the end of April is only like 5 weeks away or something? But yeah, the two for-sure trips - China is a full-credit course called Mandarin Chinese 3, and it looks like: 5 weeks at a University in Changchun, Jilin province learning more Mandarin, doing assignments and presentations, and tutoring some students in English. That's May 17-June 22. And then June 23-August 13 is teaching English to kids in a summer-camp style (ie. not so that they retain all the stuff we teach them, but rather to expose them to Canadian culture and native English speakers) at middle and high schools in Hong Kong. New Zealand would be a two-week pre-trip before China, and Thailand would be a 1.5 week post-trip after Hong Kong. I haven't thought a whole lot about any of this yet... it just seems so far in the future and not actually real.. but being committed to the point of having to pay 800 bucks if I back out it pretty dang real haha, and 7-8ish weeks is reeeeally soon...


Uhmmm what else is new... basketball ended a few weeks ago, TESOL at Bcrest is awesome (actually, Briercrest itself is the best... hint hint Bret), my brother just flew from the Philippians to South Korea (pretty exciting!), Saskatchewan winter has been super mild so far, and weather on the Van Island can NEVER legitimately be described as “cold” I've decided.


Also, I'd like to ask you guys to lift Anna Watts up in prayer. I don't actually know much about what's going on with her right now but it sounds like it's a really tough time. Please please join with me in praying for our sister, for physical and spiritual healing, and for life-giving freedom to consume her. Maybe even send her some lovin in a letter?


I'd also LOVE to hear from any of you anytime, how you're doing, what's been going on, how I can pray for you. Seriously. Facebook, skype, email, text...



-Meghan

The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light. -Romans 13:12 ESV