remembering

i've been remembering lately. i guess because i've been thinking about the future, which makes me consider the past.

(by the way, i just got a part-time job!)

anyway, i've been thinking about how i want dreadlocks, but now more than ever i can't get them because i have to be a professional in school. but in the future, in my dream, in czech, i'll be able to do whatever i want with my hair.

i do honestly believe that my future lies in czech. i'm yearning to be there. but i know that my future there won't be for a time, and i don't know how long that time will be.

so in considering this, in considering moving there sooner rather than later - and i've decided to give it time, i'm still young - i realize how much i'd matured each consecutive time i've been there. even since i was there in october, especially since the internship in 2008, and most definitely since my first time in 2004.

i have a specific memory, and i've really been thinking about this one lately. i think because i've been re-reading "blue like jazz" and it really hits on this stuff.

at the point of this memory i was 19. i was leading a class and discussion group. i had known most of the students for at least a year, but the main character of this memory i had known for two years; he had attended my first english camp, though i don't remember if that had been his first. he was very much against christianity - not christians, because he had christian friends, and he kept coming back to english camp which was very obviously christian. but he wanted nothing to do with christianity. in my group he started naming off all the horrible actions that had been done and said in the name of Christ, like the Crusades, and anti-homosexuality. and i could do nothing but shake my head partly because a) i didn't know how to answer him, and b) i was that christian.

i understand very well how i would talk to that student now. i would defend the name of Christ, because ultimately as humans, us Christians mess up who Christ really is. He didn't want thousands of people to be murdered by people claiming to be doing his work, He wasn't anti-gay - he ate with the worst sinners!

but more important than how i would defend Christ, i am moving away from being that person. if i claim to be a christian, i need to be loving people no matter what. i sin...ugh...i can't tell you how much i sin and how i make Christ appear to be unloving. i hurt people, and then i say i'm a christian. no wonder we have a bad rap...it's because of people like me. and it's such a struggle to love people and not to judge them. but in judging i am disobeying Christ. i'm sorry, Lord.