Adage #16: It's a dog eat dog world.

I have friends with two Siberian Huskies, Ivan and Eena. A while ago, my friends brought their huskies to a family dinner where there were several other dogs. One of those dogs, much smaller than Ivan, is named Mrs. Mugglesworth. For some unknown reason, Ivan is terrified of her. I would have thought that her unintimdating name alone would insight lots of teasing from Ivan, but he is afraid to even make eye contact with her.

When Mrs. Mugglesworth walks into the room Ivan assumes the posture I do when there is an awkward public run in with someone I'm not sure I want to see, combined with a toddler who doesn't get how the game of peek-a-boo works yet: he looks the other direction, hopes that she won't notice him and figures if he can't see her, she can't see him.

As my friends were seated at the dining table during one of these family dinners - it's one of those higher tables with the tall stools, Mrs. Muggelsworth waltzed into the room and Ivan responded by doing what any small child who is afraid of someone would do. He tried to climb up into my friends lap to get away from the much smaller "scary" dog. Below is a picture of Ivan and his owner, the one who's lap he was trying to climb on: not an easy task for him.

I could hear this story from my friends 100 times and I still laugh so hard I cry, but it also started me thinking. Ivan doesn't even realize he could snap Mrs. Mugglesworth in half if the need arised. God has created each of us in specific ways, what happens when we aren't even aware of who He has created us to be? Genesis 1:17 says, "So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." We are created in the image of God, let that sink in for a minute.

Ivan is afraid because he doesn't know who he is or what he is capable of. But we do, we were created in God's image, the most powerful, wonderful, awe-inspiring being in existence. We find our definition not in what we do or what we like, but in the One who created us to be like Him.

Are you like Ivan? Are there parts of you that you are unaware of? Are there gifts and talents God has given you that you are not using or don't even know you have yet? I encourage you to ask God to use you in the most unexpected ways and see what happens!

Adage #15: If the shoe fits, wear it.

I love shoes, I'm convinced they can fix emotional problems (while simultaneously creating physical ones due to bad foot support). When I'm at the store and every pair of pants I try on don't fit, I can always count on shoes. I read in a Relevant magazine article a while ago that suggested one thing you should be able to do by the time you are 25 was to learn how to walk in heels. I took this information to heart and began my journey to better looking fashion and more uncomfortable shoes. If you are a female and are not already able to walk in a pair of heels without looking like a drunken monkey, here are a few reasons I think you should learn this life skill:

1. If you have a low pain tolerance, this is a great way to work on building that up. Wear your heels on your next trip to Disneyland or do laps around your neighborhood and soon you will be able to tolerate any sort of pain. You could probably win on Fear Factor after that kind of training.

2. Apparently, wearing heels makes you look more "professional", so if you are interviewing for a job, I would highly recommend you wear those heels instead of your running shoes.

3. Celebrities are people, too. And celebrities are always wearing heels - I'm pretty sure they wear them when they are asleep. When we wear heels it allows us to get into their world a little bit, feel what they feel and all that. We can either sympathize with how tough their life is (being followed by the paparazzi, hours of boring awards ceremonies, no privacy, etc.) or we can feel glamorous just like them by wearing our expensive Jimmy Choos (read: wearing the heels I bought at Target on clearance).

4. Maybe you need to come to terms that you are short and this is the best solution you have besides surrounding yourself with only short people. Not that this is a terrible idea, but I feel like there are a lot of great tall people in the world and it would be sad to miss out on those friendships just because you feel short when you stand next to them.

I hope I have convinced you. Or maybe really I'm just trying to psych myself into taking off these flats and putting on my super cute Jessica Simpson nude wedges.Happy shoe shopping!

Winter Adventures in Spokane: Spokane Public Market

When I tell people that I live in Spokane, WA they usually conjure up images of rain and hipsters. Then I have to gently let them down by informing them that I live in eastern Washington, where they are more likely to have a run in with rednecks and snow. But I think Spokane is getting cooler every year.

A couple of weekends ago, a friend and I went to the Spokane Public Market on 2nd Ave (it's inside so you can go anytime). We learned about and tasted every possible way to prepare a cherry, listened to a guy play his accordion, bought some delicious homemade jalapeno cheese bread and learned about all the different kinds of eggs you can buy straight from the farm. They also had fresh produce - I bought delicious zucchini for 99 cents! There are a ton of different friendly vendors selling everything from mini cheesecakes to fish to stairs for your dog.

After wandering around the market for a while, we ventured into Sun People Dry Goods which is in the same building. It's a local business that sells all sorts of eclectic Eco-friendly goods. I bought some note cards, some bath accessories and a bunch of awesome stuff for a friend having a baby soon. It is definitely worth checking out!

We ended our outing by stopping by the Main Market Co-op on Main Street. You could just shop here and Trader Joe's and be set to go! Since it's a co-op, its owned and managed by it's members and it is not-for-profit, but you do not have to be a member to shop there. They have tons of stuff that is hard to find in normal grocery stores and a delicious deli! 

So when you wish you were in Portland or Seattle, but don't have money for a road trip, check out these three places (it's even better if you go on a rainy weekend)!

Memories

In honor of Life Center North's move, I have compiled a list of some of my favorite memories at the old Life Center North building. I'm sure I've missed some good ones, so please add your own!

1. The "Things We Will Never Ever Use in the Video Cafe Ever Again" List
Every youth group learns the hard way that certain games make a mess. After discovering some of these things (such as eggs), a month later forgetting what a mess we made and repeating the process, we finally started to write down a list so we would remember. Just for good measure, we wrote that list down on the floor under the carpet of the new building.  

2. 30 Hour Famines
I am not even sure how many of these I have done anymore, but they were always awesome and the most epic kind of overnighter. One year the leaders thought it would be super cool to put all of our students in the video cafe (our multipurpose room) with the lights off and then burst in and silly string them. This was super fun for us, I'm pretty sure the students got tired of it and the ridiculous amount of clean up was how it ended up as the number one spot on our "things we will never ever use in the video cafe ever again" list. One of the Hitchcocks would always be the one with the most sponsorship. This event is when some of the students discovered the "mean Alissa voice". It would come out in the morning, while we were cleaning up before we would break the fast. It was usually directed toward students who were too tired to help clean. Over the years we did a bunch of different service projects, probably played every youth group game known to man, sometimes we slept and sometimes we stayed up all night, we played broom hockey and bigger or better, but the best part of the 30 Hour Famines was the chance to get to hang out with students and become a closer group.
 
3. Office Russian Roulette
It was like clockwork - every fall we would find ourselves moving office locations within the building. I worked at the church for 3.5 years and in 3 different offices/cubicles. One morning I walked into my shared office with then-youth pastor Adam to find him painting a Texas Longhorns logo on an orange wall. I promptly decided to paint the wall on the other side of the office hot pink. We figured they wouldn't make anyone move into such a unique (read "ugly") office and thus ensure that we would not have to move our office for a while. It was actually a fairly successful tactic. 

4. Coffee Spills.
Who hasn't had to hastily grab all their belongings on the floor of the auditorium because they were right in the middle of the coffee river determined to flow straight the the bottom of the stage? There's nothing more unifying than passing around paper towels and a mop to clean a spill that spans from the top row tot he bottom.

5. The Orange Pews
There is not much else in life that I detest more than the orange pews. They were awful. I had dreams about ways to destroy them. Noting good ever came of youth group students sitting on them during group, they were big, always in the way, and they were just ugly.

6. Community
I have been involved in many ministries at LCN as an intern, a staff member and a volunteer. I am thankful for the community God has provided for me at this church, a family away from my family. I am so glad that the church is not about the building but about the people, so I'm excited to see where God takes us in a new location!

Adage #14: Never overestimate sticky notes, either.

I have a love for office supplies. Perhaps, an unhealthy one. One Christmas while I was in high school, I received a $50 gift card to Office Max in my stocking. The only think I found more exciting than the gift card was the huge Office Max office supply catalog sitting next to it. I spent the next week pouring through the catalog carefully choosing what I would use my precious gift card for. Going to Office Max with my dad to use my gift card was just as exciting as getting the card in my stocking.

Of all the office supplies, I particularly love sticky notes. I have a reputation in the office for having a ridiculous amount of them. I wrote a previous blog post about starting to organize my day using a sticky note prioritizing system. This amazing new way of taking charge of my life lasted me approximately two weeks. I come up with organizing plans like Zack Morris comes up with schemes on Saved By the Bell (such as getting cheap class rings that turn your finger green). I fall into the trap most busy Americans find themselves in - I use all of this technology at my fingertips to make my life more efficient and fast paced instead of taking the time to slow down. What if I took the time I spend concocting ways to live more "efficiently" to take a breath, slow down and think about what I needed to accomplish that day instead?

Even though checking to-dos off of our lists feels like we've accomplished something, sometimes it can be harmful. I burned myself out in ministry once because I became so wrapped up in getting all the stuff done, that I blew right past the time I should have spent with God. One of my professors at Whitworth once read us a quote by Martin Luther - the gist of the quote was that when Luther had a busy day in front of him, he would spend the first 3 hours of it praying. I have spent years trying to find this quote so people don't think I just made this up, but I can't seem to find it (apparently, googling "Martin Luther quote about praying for 3 hours" and variations of that is not helpful). But even if I had made it up, the main idea is worth taking some time to think about. How often do you just dive into a day instead of taking the time to center yourself in Christ?

We can all find a thousand different techniques to prioritize our time and get through our to-do lists, but without Christ is there any meaning behind our checklists? My favorite times in ministry were the times that I took a break and prayed. I would go into the room our youth group met in or a quiet, dark room in the back of the church and I asked God what He wanted me to do, what was important to Him that day, that week, that year.  When I did that, I felt focused and centered. Sometimes God would give me clear direction to take and sometimes it was just a reminder that He needs to be my priority.

How can you slow down this week and make Christ your focus? What might God be asking you to give up so that you can pursue him?

Adage #13: Find the beauty in the breakdown.

I’ve had a bit of a rough year, ever have one of those? There were a lot of changes - some good and some bad. Someday I will look back at this year and instead of considering it a waste of time, I will see that I was able to embrace the lessons I was learning and praise God despite things not going according to plan.




There’s a song by Frou Frou called “Let Go.” Here's how the chorus goes:
“So, let go, let go
Jump in
Oh well, what you waiting for?
It's all right
'Cause there's beauty in the breakdown
So, let go, let go
Just get in
Oh, it's so amazing here
It's all right
'cause there's beauty in the breakdown.”

This year I learned to find beauty in the breakdown. This is not to say that there were not a lot of good moments in my life this year because there were many of them! But I also found myself experiencing types of sorrow I had never dealt with before. And in the midst of crying in my car while listening to a sad song on the radio, I learned to find the beauty in it all. Beauty in the process of mending a broken heart. Beauty in watching God unfold a plan he’s had for all eternity. Beauty in the journey of being a human being. Beauty in learning to love others first. Beauty in the community God provided me with. Beauty in finding God in everything and all around me.

Where have you found God’s beauty recently?

Soundtrack:
Frou Frou - Details

Adage #12: Learn to make coffee so well you can do it in your sleep.

My wonderful co-worker and friend, Laura, gets annoyed with me when she tries to have a conversation in the morning with me, but I am too tired to know what's going on. After waking up for 3 years before 6am (to work at a coffee place, nonetheless), one would think I could handle being fully aware of my surroundings by 8:30am, but this is not the case.

Yesterday I came into the office and after unsuccessfully trying to hold a normal conversation with Laura, she considerately suggested that I should make some coffee before I attempted to talk with her again. I then spent 15 minutes in the kitchen trying to figure out how much coffee to make. Here is the internal conversation I had with myself:

"Where is the measuring spoon?"

This took me approximately 3 minutes to locate. Mind you, you can hardly fit two people in this kitchen, so there were not a whole lot of places for the measuring spoon to be.

"Now how many tablespoons of coffee do I put per cup of water?"

"If I put 6 tablespoons, then I need 3 cups of water..."

"But wait, 3 cups of water will make 3 cups of coffee and that won't even fill up my mug!"

At this point, my mind thinks 3 cups = 3 ounces.

"So if I put 10 tablespoons of coffee in the filter, I will need 5 cups of water which will equal 5 ounces of coffee and that's less than a cup of coffee which is 8 ounces."

I had this part of the conversation for a couple of minutes, using different tablespoon amounts to try and end up with a full cup of coffee.

"How in the world do people successfully make this stuff everyday! You have to use so much coffee to get one little mug of it. 12 tablespoons is a lot to get just 6 ounces of coffee. How can this be right!?"

"Ugh, I don't know!"

At this point, I preceed to stop counting any sort of measurement and just dump coffee and water into the coffee pot.

After 15 mintues in the kitchen, I emerge:

Laura: "So, you were in there for a while."

Me: "I know, wasn't I!? I had a really rough time making coffee this morning."

Laura: "Did you figure it out?"

Me: "I'm not really sure, we'll find out when it's done."