Mary's Blogs

Somehow I’ve been feeling a loss of desire.  This I find is the worse thing that could happen.  I tend to feel less willing to do things, less willing to see people, less willing to do much of anything.  The only person who can and has helped to spark any bit of interest in me to WANT to do anything is my Lord and Savior.  Days tend to be a bit of a drag from time to time.  I’m happy to have my brother around though.  Friends tend to come and go but my Lord remains the same.  In terms of school I feel like a failure.  I’m not smart enough, I don’t have good memory, and I feel like science is starting to become my worst subject.  I feel less motivated to continue on the road of science.

The other day my mama asked me why I’m not trying to become a surgeon and the only thing I could tell her was that I’m trying my best at school and that I’m just not smart enough.  It brought me to tears realizing that I just can’t do it and that my current grades are living proof.  But somehow when mama said that God can give me the wisdom to do it, I am encouraged once more.  My God IS the God who provides.

And so I refuse to give up and I refuse to quit trying.  Although it feels like a drag now, the days to come are much more exciting.

“The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes.” -DEUTERONOMY 1:30
“Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.” -2 CORINTHIANS 4:16

Somehow waking up this morning, the Lord excites me with the day ahead.  After much thought in the morning, I find disapproval with myself and where I am with the Lord.  I wish I was closer to him than I am now.  I cannot come to him as a spiritual warrior, but I come to him as a seeker.  I come to him as a beginner in faith, searching for my calling to do his will.  I long to be his walking hand, being used where ever I go.  I know that I disapprove of myself, but the Lord makes me OK.  I continue the day happy to serve my God whenever he wills it. =)

“Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” -1 CORINTHIANS 15:58

This particular subject is something that I feel that God uses to bless you and your OWN day in return. As for my personal story, Sirena (my younger sister for those who don’t know) and I didn’t really feel like we really wanted to continue helping out our High School with their Christmas concert. For Sirena, she just didn’t like playing the Viola that much. For me, I was just being selfish and didn’t feel like giving up the beginning of my winter break to do this. But in the end we got through it and it wasn’t so bad helping after all. But it really didn’t matter what happened during the concert that really touched me. It was the after math that made me realize God had blessed me in so many ways.

After the concert, God gave me the privilege of giving two of my friends a ride home. This was something that Sirena and I saw as a positive thing. If we didn’t stay, those two would have been stuck there waiting for rides for a while. A bonus right? So as we were on our way home, not far from the school, we passed by a girl who was sadly walking in the rain without an umbrella and with only socks on and just some light clothes. IT WAS COLD OUTSIDE!!! So while at the stop-light, I asked Sirena if she would be so kind as to give up her umbrella for the poor girl since she was the only one with an umbrella. We looked around the car to see if we had anything else that we could give her but it seems that was as good as we could do. But as we stopped to give her the umbrella, we asked her where she was headed. She had the biggest smile on her face afterwards and told us her story.

She was a girl that had hung out with the wrong crowd and somehow got into a fight with her best friend which turned into a situation where she ended up walking away from this friend with no shoes, no JACKET, and no umbrella. We all felt sooo bad. And then it hit us all. We could give her a RIDE home!!!! When we offered her the ride, this girl went from a smile to tears instantly. But not because of the offer in itself, it was because she realized that God had answered her prayers in sending us to help her. The whole time while she was walking home, feeling so lonely, feeling like there was no one around to help her, and no friends to be that support, there we were. God had allowed us to be his answer to her prayers that there ARE people kind enough to care, to lend a hand, and to show her love. She couldn’t help but see his glory in this situation. The next thing we know, she started saying how great God was and how much she wanted to go back to church because it is filled with such lively and happy people.

It’s so amazing how God can truly use us to touch the lives of others when we least expect it. The cool part about this story is how we got to see results instantly of how God had touched her so deeply. Most times when things happen where we’re able to stop our clocks just for a second to help another, we don’t always see the results of how God is able to work in their lives, but we hope that the little things we do blesses them exponentially. THIS time in particular, God revealed his plan to us plainly and he revealed just how big of a difference it made that Sirena and I had helped out with the concert. None of this would have happened if we didn’t help out and we never would’ve have met that girl who blessed all our hearts with her story of how we had been her sign of God’s help in her life.

WOW God is amazing isn’t He! My suggestion to you is to take the time to help a person out even if it means to stop the clock of your little day, because in the end, not only are you helping someone else who may be in need, you are also allowing yourself the blessing of knowing that God was able to use you in some way.

“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds.” -Hebrews 10:24
“See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.” -Hebrews 12:16

Last weekend I was able to experience a taste of what we will be doing this summer. We performed a worship service at a church in Merced, CA as well as one in Fresno, CA and they were amazing. God truly touched my heart with His love and grace as he lead me to pray with a girl in Merced who wanted to rededicate her life to Christ. It is SOOOO beautiful to see people long to truly come back to Christ with their life. The Lord truly filled my heart with His compassion and His love as he revealed to me this girl who was having such great back pains and who really wanted to be considered for disability from the Government, only to help another person who is important to her. This person she wants to help is also in pain with his muscles slowly being attacked by a virus. To be able to pray for this girl this weekend brought pure joy to my heart which could only have come from God. It’s because of situations like this that I have a passion for the ministry I’ve joined.

Something else I found out this weekend is how the summer is going to look for me and my team of Celebrants. Aside from the time we will be spending across the U.S., this summer we will be spending a few weeks in Morocco to be the FIRST LIVE PROCLAMATION OF THE GOSPEL to be heard in FIVE of the largest theaters in Morocco and FIVE of the biggest hotels, all open to the general public. We will be partnering up with a man named Butcar Mazus to speak against terrorists who are growing children as young as 10 years old to be suicide bombers, to be said after every worship service we perform. Since Morocco is 99.9% Muslim, any Christians who DO live in Morocco are usually South-Africans who came to Morocco in hopes for a visa to travel to Europe. So obviously this summer is going to be amazing and interesting. Nothing else brings me more joy than to proclaim the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and to lift the spirits of others with His praises. Yay summer!!!

I feel like God’s infinite and perfect love is such a hard thing to grasp for many. This is one thing that has been on my mind for a while and hopefully will continue to stay on my mind. The thing that really gets me thinking is just how much Jesus loved us to want the full measure of his joy in us. He wanted all those who hears about Him and believes in Him to be brought together in pure unity of His love and glory. The unity that He gives us as believers is the witness to others that this is the type of love that can only be provided from Him and has been made full through the sacrifice that He made on the cross.

Another thought on love and why we MUST love others is the thought of how it’s an endless cycle, one that comes first from God, made full through Jesus which is given to us. We as humans are made in God’s image. This idea for me really means that God created us in his image of beings who love. “…For love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”-1 John 4:7 Everyone loves something and therefore everyone is born of God. Which is why God loves us so much that the only way for him to bring us back to him was to send his son on earth to die on the cross for us. It’s interesting to think that EVERYONE loves and therefore EVERYONE is born of God. But because of this, we cannot say that we love God without truly loving one another. And because we cannot truly love one another without the help from the love of Jesus Christ, this is what creates an endless cycle of love that goes back from God to us and back up to God. Through the love that God gives to us, we can then love others; through loving others, we then give that love back to God. In no way can we say that love is ever from ourselves. It can only come from God. Which is why I see that God loves us soooo much that he has given us the ability to love in the first place; however, our own love is imperfect and waivers due to earthly reasons, but God’s love is everlasting, unchanging, and pure with no set of reason and value behind it. “God is love.” -1 John 4:16b

Hmmm…confusing but kinda cool at the same time. =T

WOW! God is soooo amazing. He caused for sooo many amazing transformations to happen this weekend. He allowed us to see more of his glory and mercy upon our lives and how we are to serve him.

This weekend was the InterVarsity fall retreat called Trilogy. We had four different tracks which revealed the different spiritual walks of following Christ. (I’m really bad at explaining things correctly). Anyways, I went to the track ROC which stands for Revealed On Campus. There, we started the night by reviewing the story of the paralytic and seeing if where ever we are in our walk with Christ, do we go out of our way to reach for him. The next morning, one of our Intern-staff members Crystal gave an amazing talk on the spiritual disciplines and talked about giving our time to God through meditation and solitude. I was struck first by what she had said: how can we be afraid of things that are “too spiritual” when our Father God reaches us THROUGH the spiritual realm. (It wasn’t that exact quote but that was the main point.) She talked about a man in the bible who went away in the wilderness for 20 years being in solitude with God and fighting spiritual battles. Afterwards everyone recognized his change in character and his spiritual change and his passion for God. This part of her message was so compelling. It definitely made me want to devote my mornings to the Lord to purposefully allow Him my best energy in the day. I want to be transformed for and from the Lord. I want to be like that man. From there, we concentrated on what the spiritual disciplines were and what it really meant to be in meditation with God. Meditation isn’t only for buddist monks or for those who are truly and spiritually in tuned. It’s for us ordinary believers to connect to God. This I thought was kind of different. I didn’t think too much about it until God hit me in the face with it and totally met me where I didn’t expect. He showed me what he wanted from me. He showed me how I am to serve him and he revealed to me an image of how much MORE I need to allow the blessings he gives me to be poured to those around me; not just friends or family but anyone I might run into. I want God’s light, blessings, and love to be poured out in an obvious sense.

One of the staff members from IVCF Chico state gave a talk that night about truly believing in God. He emphasized on serving and telling others just why you served them. Truthfully he talked so much that I’m getting his talks all mixed up. But my favorite part about his talk is when he stated just how much of a miracle it really is for someone to truly believe in Jesus Christ. It was soooo legit. oh I remember now. Hehe. Saturday night he told the story of a friend who suffered from depression. This guy didn’t ever smile. But somehow after God had revealed to him through someone else that he should get prayer for his depression, the staff member told him to tell God about all the lies he believes about himself. When he finally did, he started to laugh crazily and realize that none of it was true. Not long after, God had met him where he was in life and he became a believer. This story was so beautiful it made me cry or at least kind of tear up. It made me reminded me just how beautiful it truly is for ANYONE to finally meet God in their lives. T_T

The final talk was based on revealing God in whatever we do. If we do a deed, then to make sure that person KNOWS that it was through God’s blessing that the service was possible. He talked about bringing others to Christ and how obvious it can and should be for us to want to bring others to Christ just like it was so natural in any situation to think about bringing others to Christ for a friend he knew named Mario. He talked about Peter and John who went to the Temple in Jerusalem and used the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth to heal the man. They took no credit but instead proclaimed Jesus’ name. He talked about them bringing 3000 people to Christ. After hearing all this, God put the craving of service on my heart. I want to serve. I want to be the one God uses to bring others to him. I want to show others of God’s blessings.

In everything that God revealed this past weekend, I thank God for the peace that he put on my heart in my relationship with him. I thank Him that he allows me the privilege to hunger to perform services in His name. And finally, I’m thankful that God allowed me to want to serve him on campus, revealing this with my talk with Licia. Haha. He uses her a lot to reveal things to me. So cool.

My Lord is my faithful Provider, Protector, Merciful Redeemer, my healer and my Best Friend. (This is not a parallel sentence. I know. Sorry English majors!) I thank him for allowing me the miracle of knowing just who he is in my life.

It’s taken me a while to get back to blogging so I guess I should say hello for now since I haven’t been back in a while. There are so many things that I wanna touch base on about my life so far. I guess lets start with what’s been happening daily.

I’m co-leading a biblestudy as an apprentice for the year. ^_^ Yay for God’s word. The joys I get while leading has to do with the times when my bible study is most involved. It makes me happy when I see them hangin’ out with one another; it makes me happy when they go to the events, and the most important thing…it makes me happy when I can see that they’re growing in love for God. My favorite thing about being an apprentice for the Castillian bible study in the dorms is being able to meet with my study members one on one and getting to know them personally and getting to know their current walk with Christ. My favorite incident so far is studying Joshua 1 with study member Yia and seeing how happy and filled with satisfaction she was after our final time with the Lord together. =) Here’s a picture for you all to look at. Kind of blurry. sorry.

The second thing right now is family. This year, for some reason when my older sister is home, it gives me more of a reason to come home. And now that I have a nephew, I want to come home even more. Papa texts me from time to time which makes me happy. Recently papa bought me a phone which I was extremely greatful about. I thanked him for it greatly. His reply is what made me most happy. The our texts back and forth was basically very mushy so I shall sum up by saying He loves me and I’m blessed to have a papa like him. I miss my family and I can’t wait till I finally go home again to have a reunion with everyone including my nephew. ^_^ Here’s an adorable picture of my nephew as well.
Isn’t that the most adorable little nephew you’ve ever seen? I know. He’ll grow up to be a little hottie some day.

Anyway, aside from family and friends, the one thing MOST important to me is my relationship with Christ. I’ve felt lately that the business of things made me not have as much personal time with my Father god. However, yesterday was THE MOST satisfying day spent with my Lord. I got to play my Viola in praise, I sang praise songs, I journaled telling Him about my weeks in school, I journaled about my scattered thoughts, I spent time with His word, and I got to end my time in prayer. It was filling and amazing. In the end of it all, the things that God revealed to me caused me to have a desperate desire to speak out to the mienh youth in Visalia and maybe more. It also got me really excited to go back on missions this summer with my team so that I could tell others about the Lord.

And of course the super cool blessing that God gave me today. I didn’t get to do my lab which was due this morning at 9. I woke up at 6:30am thinking I’d at least turn in half of my pre-lab. But for some reason there was an error and all my information was wiped out. I thought, “WOW. This sucks.” But one thing I said to myself was that this was NOT going to be something that brought me down and that in everything that happened that morning, I’d continue to rejoice in my Lord because I know that He already has it all figured out before everything happened. Knowing that He does, I shall continue to praise him. After coming to my computer and finally checking my email, I found out that there has been errors all week with the pre-labs and that I am actually able to turn in the pre-lab DURING lab this week. WOW was I truly blessed this morning. God truly granted me grace this morning and in the midst of it I am thankful to him that I was able to remain faithful in him. The thing I remember from yesterdays devotion to my Father is the direct quote from Jesus himself, “The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” This is my motivation to do, say, and think only things that are pleasing to God because I know that He is always faithful no matter what and will never leave me. Only I can be naive enough not go to Him. I am not as completely faithful like Jesus was to God when He was on earth, but I CAN follow his steps as much possible. My cool realization is just knowing that God knew ahead of time that I was going to spend all day with him. Knowing this, He blessed me ahead of time with the errors on the smartsite. I thank God for his never-ending grace on my life.

All this is what I leave you all with for the month that I’ve had so far. With the blessings of the Lord on my side and his unfailing love and grace on my life, what can go wrong. Haha, well I guess there can be many thing that still worry me. But knowing that the Lord has everything under control gives me a great peace of mind. ^_^

Wow, I haven’t blogged in a while. Anyway, today I thought about the little joys in life. I thought about the amount of energy and happiness you can get from certain people and the love that you can feel for them, whether you knew them for only a few weeks or even a little over a year. I thought about the idea of happiness and the fact that it only comes from God.

Today after having an extreme amount of energy and after completely overdoing it during times of conversations (I talk too much), I realized that even with so much happiness and joy you feel, you can still never feel completely satisfied in that happiness. If you see the people you love who bring you joy…THEN what? When you have a whole day or even a whole week of exploding energy, does that mean that’s where your heart lies? Of course not. But it also doesn’t mean that you have little care for THOSE people as well.

I DO have a point. I guess I felt like even after having friends that I love to bring me up and seeing how needing energy more and more becomes consistent, I also realize that there are many things I am unable to accomplish with my current priorities now. I wish I could talk to certain people, I wish I had more time to finish certain duties, I wish I had more time to catch up on studies, I wish the other people I love who don’t live in Davis can be just a short drive away, I wish I was able to keep up with my happy and energetic emotion for more than just 3-5 days straight.

But seeing and thinking about all the wishes that I am unable to completely fulfill, it first causes me to wonder why I can’t. Is it because of my priorities? Well of course it is. But the final conclusion that I realized is that first and foremost, no matter how many wishes i fulfill/complete, I know one thing is MOST certain, and it is that my supply of happiness comes from the Lord and the Lord alone. Without him I have nothing. Without him I am not even satisfied with talking to people I haven’t seen for a while. Without him my days become emotionless and senseless. Without him, the stereotypical Mary who has an overage amount of energy becomes just one who finds no reason to try in anything that she’s doing.

My identity is in Christ and Christ alone.

PRAISE GOD FOR HE IS GOOD AND HIS LOVE & MERCY ENDURES FOREVER!

With just the few weeks that I’ve had for vacation, I have been able to spend them at home with my family. Granted I didn’t take much of that time to visit some friends here at home but I do what I can with the time I have available. But the one thing that intrigues me the most is NOT HOW I spend my time, it’s what God has revealed to me with the time that I have. It’s amazing that even AFTER my tour with the Celebrants, God is constantly revealing to me what my strengths and weaknesses are…mainly my weaknesses. There’s so much that I’ve learned about myself already and yet God still continues to show me more areas in which I must grow. Everytime this happens I feel like life is just hitting me hard because of what I’m realizing, and then once I truly find out what God is trying to show me, things don’t seem so harsh; granted it’s still things I need to work on, but It’s not as bad knowing its coming from my Lord and savior, the one who gives me strength to begin with. And as I continue to begin each day with the Lord, it’s nice to know that He’s continuously watering me so that I can one day bloom into the most beautiful flower.

La bonté de l’Eternel n’est jamais épuisée!

How has summer been so far? I got back from my summer tour with the Celebrant Singers not too long ago. This summer has truly been the most amazing summer of devotion and dedication to God’s will of spreading the good news. I can’t stress how much of a blessing it has been to be able to go across the U.S., across Canada, in Morocco, and back across the U.S. just for one purpose; and that was to tell others about the personal relationship that the Lord wants to have with ALL of us. Before the end of the tour, I was never able to completely sum up how i felt about the tour in just a few sentences here and there until I heard the three words from our director Jon Stemkoski of what this ministry is all about, and that is Discipleship, Encouragement, and Evangelism. When I heard this, I thought, “that is SO true! that’s EXACTLY how I feel.” Because being on a bus for 2 months with about 19 other complete strangers in such close corners like we did this summer could not have been possible without the love of God in all our hearts and the intent to serve him. With this, we all grew together as a family learning from one another, which is how the discipleship came in to play for the most part. Along with the bus came a great deal of work with the fruits of the spirit. We remained as one whole army, fighting against any spiritual attacks. If one person felt attacked, we fought back, laying our hands on them with prayer and support. It’s times like those that bonded our team like family. I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye when we ended the summer with our banquet, but I can say that it was the most meaningful summer I have ever had and I feel so blessed to be apart of such a great team of Celebrants. ^_^