Who Am I?

A question that you’d think I’d have figured out after 17 years, 7 months and 8 weeks of DTS but nope. Turns out it’s a question that you can only answer truthfully if you can answer the following question as well: Who is God?

That’s what this last week was all about – two questions whose answers are equally easy to find, hard to believe and numerous. God is infinite and so are His names, characteristics, roles, ways and acts. And if He created us in His image, doesn’t that tell us a whole lot about ourselves? The problem is that eternity is a concept that’s basically impossible to grasp for the human mind because it is everything that our world, our life, our TIME isn’t. So we think of God as we think of this world, we put Him in the box of our minds, of our surroundings, our standards. But what if we chose to think the other way around? I once heard someone say that we actually become the way we think of God so what if we chose to embrace that concept of infinity? If we didn’t put God, and ourselves, in a box but instead just thought of Him as the limitless Creator He is and then listened to the limitless things He has to say about us? Hans-Joachim Eckstein put it this way: We only know our own identities by what others tell us about them, so wouldn’t you want that other to be someone good and unjudging, someone that actually knows you because He gave you your identity in the first place?
And if we believe in the goodness of the universe, doesn’t that encourage us to be good ourselves? If we think of ourselves positively, doesn’t that inspire us to call out the fundamental goodness and beauty in those around us? If we love our creator we love ourselves, so doesn’t that empower us to truly love others in the first place?

That’s what we did this week: Smashing the box and its lies and beginning to replace out eternal space with truths – truths that we’ll hopefully never seize to learn anew.

Outside of the amazing, emotional and very revealing lectures, the past seven days have very much been days of fun and just hanging around, being a community.
We had a cosy girls’ night of prayer, dessert (fruit salad & ice cream) and dancing on Tuesday, Scottish country dancing night on Thursday (both interesting and absolutely hilarious!), a Lord of The Rings 2 Extended Edition movie night on Friday (without the staff because they were on staff retreat), an extremely calm housework day on Saturday (with about 50 people on base, I loved it) and an outside game night last night. The only negative thing that can be said about that is that I now have a scraped knee because I slipped in the dark. Childhood memories…

I wish you all the best for your next week :)

Good night and good morning to all edges of the world,
xx, Annika