Now Playing: Andrew Peterson, "Love and Thunder", "High Noon".

Miss these friends!

Spent all day today revising for the GRE, o joyous activity. In the morning, took a practice test, and in the afternoon, read chapter after chapter of The Princeton Review's guide to this wonderful exam. If I ever write a book, there shall be a mock heroic account of the hero doing battle with a fearsome standardized test monster.

Our cat Annie likes to jump up onto my windowsill and look out the window while I'm working. She bathes herself and sleeps up there, and wakes up if she hears the slightest sound outside. I'm a little bit afraid that someday she'll pull a boy-in-the-window trick as in the Book of Acts and fall out during one of her naps.

I've decided to make a tour of my music collection this fall and listen to it from start to finish. There are a lot of albums that I don't listen to at all, so it's high time for me to become reacquainted with whatever I have floating around in iTunes.

Ruth and I presented about our RP missions trips on Sunday. Hooray for Lorna and her straighteners! Petros's hair will never be the same (especially after that last haircut right before we left!). It was good to get to talk about what happened in Cyprus. I miss full time missions work. Maybe it's not really because I miss the actual service but because it made me feel good. Such is my heart. After I've been reading about God's grace, I come to God with my requests for the day and for my friends and relatives. And instead of asking purely with faith, expecting to receive whatever God decides is best, I come rationalizing, editing, choosing my words so that they'll be as pleasing as possible and make me look as good as possible. Prayer has become very difficult, especially, for some reason, after reading C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters. I'm afraid that I'm just praying to the page. But how do I know for sure? Christ promises that we will ask the Father and that He will hear our requests because He loves us. But the enemy in my head whispers doubts constantly while I'm trying to pray so that praying becomes an effort, slogging it out, never sure whether I'm supposed to be "relying on the Spirit" or "excercising my responsibility", or something in between. 

Don't we all just love the tensions of the Christian life?