"Not as I will, but as you will... may your will be done." [Matt 26:39,42]

I guess I'll send a brief update. Tell you what's on my mind.

I'm moving downstairs this week. I finally figured that I might as well live down there. The girl downstairs asked. So in one of my particularly depressed and jet lagged moods, I agreed. It's been a very emotional time going through all the stuff of my life. In a way I'm looking forward to moving downstairs, to see for myself how noisy the people upstairs are. And part of me is sad that it's a move simply for the sake of moving, not because I'm going to China, getting married, or going to a place where I feel called.

I'm saddened though, I went to BCEC and found out that a girl I had known since my early days in LA. She's moving back to LA after five years here. I'd gone to Jr High, High School, and College with her with then five years ago she moved out to Boston. I was glad to hear that she was out here, but somehow because she was at BCEC, never really became involved with her life out here. And knowing that the other person from my church back in LA, who lives out here. Knowing that fully well, he intends to go back to LA, in a few years (his wife is pregnant right now) and I suppose once her medial fellowship is over, they'll also be back to where they have family.

I shouldn't judge my life based on other people's actions. I'm setting myself up for dissapointment. As if my own shared values could be ovelaid upon other people's lives. I'm sarving for role models here. It's as if I'm looking for people proving that life is not so hard for transplants in Boston.

Pray for me:
The recent travel has wearied me, just thinking about everyone else's travels, makes me even more tired.
Two friends should be off to Cambodia, this month. I do hope they make it.
Two of my closest friends in Cambridge, are going to a month long Asia tour, including two week with her parents in LA, a week in Hong Kong with his parents, A week in Korea for business for him, and a couple of days in Shanghai as business for her.
Two other friends seem to be back in San Francisco from a long term trip to Mongolia, the word is that she's pregnant.

Cambridge is feeling less and less like the place I want to call home.
Yet I know right now, this is the place where God wants me to be.
I need to listen to hear what God wants me to do in life.
Whether it is China, or going back to where I call home.
Or simply living out the value that I've been denying for so long -
that I should stay in Cambridge, and prove that indeed you can live in Cambridge,
raise a family, have a happy marriage, and not be on the verge of poverty.

The preacher said this week, while preaching on Esther:
Her situation was this: she was Jew and a wife to a foreign King. Surely she wouldn't have chosen such a predicament. He said "Sometimes God puts you in places in situations where you don't want to be. You don't understand, and even it seems like you're there out of some injustice. And you want God to take this burden from your shoulders." There's a lot of pain in the world. There's a lot of dissapointment. And a lot of time we find ourselves screaming at the sky, mad at God. He could have made us better, but we suffer. And not because of anything we did. Just because... It's unfair, and it sucks.

He said that even Christ, in his hour of weakness. Knowing fully well... that all his closest disciples would fall away from him, he would be betrayed, arrested and killed. He's going to be separated from the prescene of God. It just doesn't get any worse than that. He cries, he pleads to God, he prays. In the end we are simply called to be faithful to God's will.