I'll be in and out for the next week or so..

Dress rehearsals for BIG have started, and the show opens Thursday, so my presence here will be sporadic for the next week...but I'll try to post as often as I can.

If you're the praying sort, would you mind praying for me tonight? Yesterday at rehearsal, a young girl from the cast( 15 -ish.. and a neat kid) got into a heated argument with another castmate about whether the bible is true. What could have been an interesting discussion turned ugly because she was so focused on proving her point and being right/ convincing him, that she failed to treat him like a human being. I cringed as I overheard this, remembering my zealous(and often inconsiderate) "witnessing" attempts at her age.. to sum it up, the man she was talking to lost his temper(" it's because of PEOPLE LIKE YOU that I'm still screwed up and f-ing around" was the gist of it), she left the room dejected, and after several of us calmed him a bit, I went to see if she was o.k.

She was certainly misguided and passionate in the argument, and when I caught up with her she was declaring how she was going to show up to tonight's practice with "100's" of pages of evidence that would prove to him the Bible was true.
Oh, honey.
She's fifteen, and all of us at fifteen(and often me now) struggle with a desperate need to be understood and agreed with..

She asked if we could talk tonight, and I need God's help. I want to treat her with love as I gently remind her that what people really need can't be drilled into them through a war of words, and that although her passion and earnestness are admirable, we all need to remember that our purpose here is to love God and love people. Period. And if we lose sight of that( as I know I have countless times) because we're trying to "win" the argument... we become part of the problem.. and they can't see God in us unless we're loving them.

These won't be easy things to hear..and I'm definitely not an authority on love; more like a skewed work-in-progress.. at her age, I was leaving tracts on my parents' kitchen counter and thinking that I was helping "win them" to Christ... not considering their feelings and too afraid to engage them in spiritual discussions in case I didn't have all the right answers..

But I hope that I can communicate these things to her in a way that encourages her rather than leaves her feeling attacked...because even now I need to remember that people are more important than making myself understood.