One Flip Flop and Some Snow Chains.

My brain is a jumble of letters and emotions that I'm trying to sort into words right now. I left you with my obsession with the pits. Since then my heart has been learning to do cartwheels of ecstasy. Now if only the word ecstasy could be used without your mind immediately jumping to pills and raves and unhealthy amounts of energy.

The past couple days I've gotten a taste of the ecstasy of Jesus. Krista and I have had some truly rich conversation these past couple days along with some pretty wild adventure. Here's my attempt at conveying this life of mine to you...

You know that indescribable feeling you get when you pick up an activity that you're super passionate about but haven't had the time or motivation to do in awhile. I picked up a basketball Saturday night and I immediately plummeted back into senior year of high school when I loved the game and the way the ball in my hands just felt right. I shot around for hours and played with my post moves and my pump fakes and my two dribble lay ups from the half court line. I even did a little 14 spot shooting. All was right with the world in those moments...my feet squealing on the court, the ball pounding off the floor into the cradle of my overturned hand, the whisper of the net as the perfect shot flows through it. Krista has asked me to teach her the fundamentals of the game so I taught her proper layup footwork and how to box out. I showed her how to drop step and we even got to a little up and under maneuver.

As you know, there is a skate park here at camp. One of my worldly goals this year is to be able to at least drop into a halfpipe, if not make it out on the other side. Krista used to skate in middle school and the beginnings of high school. She has volunteered to teach me how to skate.

Saturday was the epitome of joyous fellowship. All the single interns just frolicked and played in the sportscenter and threw basketballs and put on smelly elbow and knee pads, we danced to MC Hammer and we talked about life and love and all the things that really matter most.

Sunday was all intern housekeeping day and I discovered another subtle obsession of mine. I adore folding camp blankets. If you only knew the puzzle they present, you could maybe know how good it feels to fold one properly. The poor man's iron is my new best friend.

Towards the latter end of Sunday afternoon, I started to get a little work drunk. My energy was gone, seeped out all over the floor. I stumbled over things that weren't there. My words didn't know how to hold hands and make sense. I couldn't stop giggling and my feet felt fit to fall off. But then it was time to be off work. Krista and I had an utterly unsocial evening. Everyone else went to the marrieds house to play games and prank call and explore the depths of camp. Krista and I sat in her room. She looked through extremely old pictures while I colored a picture in my spongebob coloring book and we just talked about what it means to truly taste the heavenly gift that has been presented to us. A friend of hers from awhile back has completely renounced his faith and she raised the question of how can that happen? We are reading Hebrews right now and the author of the book writes that once we have truly tasted the heavenly gift, it is impossible to forget it. Are we not tasting the real thing then if it has become so easy for people who were once followers to simply deny the existence of Jesus? It's a healthy question and I've struggled this past year with remembering what it was like to be in the unadulterated presence of the Lord. To bask in His untainted light.

Monday morning we woke up at 7:30ish to hit the trails for a 4 miler. The cold wasn't as gnashing as our 6:30 run the other day, but it was still painful. After the trails we hit the pavement, on our two hour adventure to Bend. Krista and I drove together because we really wanted to spend the day at a cozy coffee shop in Sisters and the other interns just had a few errands to run before heading back to camp. As Krista and I drove out of camp, she got a taste of the real me as I bumped my raunchy hip hop CD that I made at my friend Chrissy's house. I've come to the realization that most of the lyrics within the hip hop music I listen to don't really register with me. I listen to the songs for the beats and not for the lyrics. Krista is the same way. We don't wholly realize what's being said until someone asks us, "What the heck are you listening to?" And then we actually make an effort to understand the messages that are being poured into our young and absorbent minds. That's my disclaimer for the inexcusable music I listen to. The beats move my body. The words don't move my soul. Unless it's Lupe Fiasco. Now his lyrics rock me to my core.

And then we made it to town. After some incessant laughter over mad libs. Two memorable statements, "Three blind hookers, see how they run" From the nursery rhyme mad lib...and "Aren't you going to give me a transvestite killer first" from the visit to the dentist mad lib. Epic.

We indulged in homemade peanut butter and pickle sandwiches as we ran some quick errands around town. We ran into the other interns at the Goodwill superstore (not my kind of thrifting) and then we headed over to the coffee shop in Sisters. The town of Sisters is made up of 1700 people. It's quaint, cozy, and very Northwestern. We sat in the shop until they kicked us out. We wrote letters, had meaningful convo, and caught up with friends via f-book and cell phone. At 6 we drove back to Bend because we had ultimately decided that we weren't done at the Sisters Coffee Company and that we wanted to come back in the morning. So we went to Bend to invest in a warm blanket as we would be spending the night in my car.

Don't get me wrong, we definitely had options as far as people to stay with and warm beds to sleep in, but really, how adventurous is that? I looked in my trunk to see if I had any blankets or anything warm that we could utilize, even the beach towel that I used as a blanket in the Best Western parking lot, but alas I had nothing. The only two things in my trunk were a solitary neglected flip flop and some snow chains. So Krista and I went to Wal-Mart and after much debate, settled for a 10 dollar sleeping bag, some sourpatch kids, and some gummi bears. We hopped back in the car to go play at the local Dairy Queen. They didn't close until 10 so we sprawled out in a booth and wrote some more letters and read some more scintillating facts about Jesus. We also had a photo shoot with the creepy decor. I'll share the results with you guys later. Krista got a hold of her friend Dan who lives in Bend and was a year long intern when she did her summer internship two summers ago. We made plans to meet him at Townshend's Tea in downtown Bend because they supposedly didn't close until 11:30. We're just floaters.

We got to Townshend's and Dan bought a tasty pot of tea and we sat in the warmth and talked about life and I made a new friend. Then Townshend's pulled a fast one and decided they were closing at 10 so we headed to Shari's, which is the Northwest's version of Denny's, which means they are open 24 hrs. We ordered dessert from a stoic old woman named Pat, Krista-warm apple pie with ice cream, Dan-single scoop of vanilla ice cream, and me-a chocolate milkshake of course. As we sit down and get comfortable another waitress starts running the vacuum by us as we're talking. It was pretty comical. Later, a couple guys, about our age, come into the restaurant, and one of them has the most absurdly long mohawks I've ever seen. Dan goes on to tell us a little bit about Bend, since he was born and raised there. Apparently they have the best golf course in America, nominated by four different magazines and Dan is a caddy there and his dad is the caddy manager. Thoughts of being a caddy girl for a month or two after my internship have been brewing. Dan also shares that the heiress of Pepsi just had a 27,000 sq ft house built for her near the golf course that he works at. The highest number of Porsches per capita are owned in Bend and the wealthy dress like vagrants in Bend. Needless to say, it's an intriguing town. Finally Krista and I decided to head back to Sisters to sleep in the coffee shop parking lot so we can finish our work that we didn't get done on Monday. Little did we know that we'd be taking a little detour.

I noticed that we were taking the 20 E but I didn't think anything of it. Sisters is west of Bend. After driving for over a half hour when Sisters is only 18 miles from Bend, I realized my mistake. But Krista and I were totally engrossed in conversation about the Lord's plan for us in this next year that we didn't even notice, nor was it a burden. We ended up turning around in the middle of nowhere at a dilapidated gas station called Millican and it was perfectly eerie. As we headed back toward Bend, we talked about how to decipher between desires that are placed on our heart by God and desires that are purely of ourselves. My sincere desire for this year is that I would be obedient to the commands that Jesus calls me to and to know the difference between my own worldly goals, and the goals and plans that God has for me.

Finally we made it to Sisters and blasted the heat for about five minutes so that we might stay warm until we could fall asleep. We crawled in the backseat and our 10 dollar sleeping bag was worth every penny in that you pay for exactly what you get. It had synthetic nylon on both sides. Certainly not warm at all. And we are both pushing 6 feet tall trying to cram into the back seat of a Corolla. It was tragically entertaining. I haven't laughed so hard in a long time. We tossed and turned for hours as the temperature in the car continued to plummet. We moved from the backseat to the front seat back to the backseat. And let's just say Krista and I got closer than we ever intended to. At one point, her head was in my lap while her arms were wrapped around my legs. She made a comment about how her eyes felt like there were little tiny plungers stuck to them because she couldn't take out her contacts. No matter which way we turned we couldn't be completely warm, nor were we ever moderately comfortable.

At about 4:30 in the morning Krista whispers, what's that watery sound? Is it raining? I didn't think anything of it and we fitfully fell back asleep. At a little after 6 I wake up and can't sleep anymore. Low and behold, it's snowing outside. SNOWING! We slept in my car while it snowed on us in little tiny Sisters, Oregon, population 1,700. Now that's what I call adventurous.

We are currently upstairs in the coffee shop, listening to family conversations, watching the snow fall, fireplace crackling, the smell of freshly brewed coffee permeating the air. It's good to be alive.

I want to leave you with a final word that I think I might be engraving on a coffee table that I'm going to make sometime in the future.

Hebrews 13:2-Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it.

Sing. Dance. Frolic. Life is good.