Yay Finished Job!

Back in 10th grade English class I was supposed to read Job and give a report on it. I never read the whole book. I think I probably started and then found something on the internet. If I remember correctly, my report summarized the book and then gave a little lesson on faith even when we suffer and then I played some Jars of Clay song on my boom box!

Well I am proud to say that 11 years later, I finally finished Job! Learned a whole lot more this time by actually reading a using my ever so helpful NIV Personal Life Application study Bible from Ollies! It is burgundy with a hot pink cover from the Dollar Store and is the love of my life these days!

Let me just tell you that I am right there with good ole Job! Whenever I have gone through different trials (none as bad as Job mind you), I complain, lay around thinking "why poor ole me" and ask God lots of questions. Thankfully my friends are much kinder than Job's, but other people and acquaintances have given bad advice too!

When my parents separated, I couldn't listen to the bad advice, it sometimes would make my stomach hurt!!

Love Elihu, his advice was at least 50% right.

"But those who suffer He delivers in their suffering; He speaks to them in their affliction. He is wooing you form the jaws of distress, to a spacious place free of restriction, to the comfort of your table laden with choice food." Job 36:15-16

"God's voice thunders in marvelous ways; He does great things beyond our understanding."Job 37:5

When God answers in chapter 38, I was sitting on the edge of my seat. Wow, what a spanking!

Love Job's response: "I am unworthy- how can I reply to you..."

My Bible study notes say "Throughout his time of suffering, Job longed to have an opportunity to plead his innocence before God. Here God appeared to Job and gave him that opportunity. But Job decided to remain quiet because it was no longer necessary for him to speak. God had shown Job that, as a limited human being, he had neither the ability to judge the God who created the universe nor the right to ask why. God's actions do not depend on ours. He will do what he knows is best, regardless of what we think is fair."

Sometimes we really need to hear that, our society is all about self promotion and airing our opinions (even having blogs like this ha!) But oftentimes we need to be reminded of our smallness and God's greatness.

Job repents, tells God he is sorry for talking about things he knew nothing about. God restores Job above and beyond! Job's friends apologize, Job prays for them. ( I would want to slap them first but Job has a better heart..) All in all a good day Job died old and full of years!

I would love to interview Job years after he was "restored" and ask him about his life. I am pretty sure he didn't question God's plans anymore!!

P.S.

Soooo I haven't kept up my end of the baragin of blogging about reading the Bible. It got to be tedious and frankly I fell off of the wagon!

But Lauren, Brittany, & I have been reading together since the beginning of the school year! We started from scratch aka Genesis and are doing a one year chronological study Bible plan. So far so good! We are in Job and will finish that up next Tue. We figure out how many days we want to read each week and show up and talk about it. I may ask if they want to do the S.O.A.P method...

This time, no falling of the wagon! I plan to stick with it and think meeting with them each week will hold me more accountable than blogging! (Hate that I couldn't stick with blogging but I just didn't have the time to keep up with that!)

So that's that! Campus ministry is going great!!! Everything is in full swing!

Tonight I hung out with my friend Jayme and talked wedding stuff! She and Matt are tying the knot Dec. 18th. Here is a pic of there presh engagement pictures! So happy for them!!

http://brittanischultze.tumblr.com/(hope it was ok for me to post this)

Also, my sister, nephew Jack, mom, and Aunt Janette came Sunday for a visit. We all went out to lunch with my friend Kendall to Winslows downtown Greenville. While walking out of the restaurant my aunt asked where the downtown area was! Kendall and I were like "this is basically it!!" Ha! We walked in Catelog Connections and then headed to check out my apartamento. Carrie, Jack, and Janette hadn't seen it before! Then we did some more shopping! My mom bought me a yellow mum and a shirt from Target!! :) It was sooo good to see them and catch up!

Here is a cute picture of Jack (at a weird angle). I made him hold a twizzler, he didn't know what he was doing but it was good to me! (of course he didn't lick or eat so no children we harmed :)) Sadly this was the only picture I took that night!

Ps. Aldi has their version of Girl Scout cookies right now that are right on the money for $1.70 a box!! The Caramel Coconut Fudge Cookies describes the carmel delight to a T!! They really were delightful and I'm afraid to count how many I have eaten!

Going to bed and going to read some of Job! :)

3 things I'm loving right now!

Today was the best day in the world!!! Not because of anything big but because of a 1000000000 little things! Here are the def top 3:

3. The Weather was gorgeous today!! It was a nice sunny day, barely a cloud in the sky with a a nice breeze. Still shorts weather but not excruciating heat!

2. I have a new baby nephew!! Little Jack is one week old today!! He is precious and perfect. He looks just like his daddy but with "the Norman nose." The Norman nose is the nose my Granddaddy Parks, mama, Aunt Janette, Aunt Mimi, Carrie (Jack's mama) and I have! Mama, Daddy, and baby are all doing great! Hopefully I will get to see them again soon!

(this is what Jack's nose looks like :))

1. I love my "job." I love doing ministry at the school I love! ECU is a school that most people haven't heard of unless they are from NC! And I am totally ok with that! This is where I grew up! I came to know the Lord, grow in my faith, and mature into an adult here! I love sharing the Gospel and the same truths I learned with students, yards away from where the same truths were shared with me!! I love the legacy of our campus ministry! Yesterday I talked with a student about the Holy Spirit, the same thing I talked to my campus minister at the time Heather with, 9 years ago!! I called Heather and told her about it last night and she told me another story about a conversation we had back then about when I first wanted to go into campus ministry, second semester of my Freshman year! What a young buck I was back then! I had just gotten saved months before that at Christmas time.

Anyway, all that to say, the past two days I have had such good conversations about life and the Lord with such sweet girls! I am so thankful & humbled that the Lord had called me to speak into these precious lives! Lives I know the Lord treasures in His heart! 28,000 students can be a little overwhelming, so I love it when the Lord "drops" relationships in your lap He wants you to cultivate!

(one of the sweet girls Praisy that I'm friends with! She said, don't make me pose here like a freshman! :))

I feel like such a lucky lucky girl! I have a cute little apartment, an awesome support team, a great town to call home, an awesome church, family that loves me, a cute bundle of cuddleness for a nephew, and a Saviour who has seen me through the good, the bad, & the ugliness of my heart that He is constantly renewing, who still loves me!!

Boston Day 8

(Why yes this is a few months late, but found it sitting in my desktop folder and decided to post anyway :-) )

Day 8:

This was our last day of the trip! We started with devotional at the Whole Foods Market where we got our buffet breakfast! Yummy! Then we meet up with the Fishers for our Historical walking tour. Their little girls are precious and I am so glad the whole family joined us. Aralyn had a hard time walking for long, she kept saying “But I need to breath...” “But I need to rest.” Then one time she and Janna were taking a little while to join the rest of the group and Aralyn came around the corner with some daffodils that they bought from a street vender! :) Precious.

We learned a lot on the tour. One church we went in was the King’s Church. It became the nation’s first Unitarian church. Inside of the church the did not have pews that were long rows, they had pews that were boxed off. This was done as a way to make money for the church and so that the congregation could gain status. How sad is that!

We learned about a preacher who preached the Gospel with no amplification to a huge crowd of like 6,000. We visited a really old cemetery that Samuel Adams is buried in. Do people these days know he did more than “brew beer?”

We ended our tour at the Quincy market where we ate some Clam Chowder then shopped in a hurry. We said goodbye to the Fishers! (Excited to see them and the Mabrys at the Dream Conference this July!) Then went to to the airport and headed South!

Thank You’s:

Thank you Ten Days for a second great trip!

Thank you Mabry’s and Fisher’s for hosting us and teaching us about the city you love and serve!

Thank you for new close friends like Grace! So glad this trip brought us together even though we have known each other for years, our friendship really grew drastically over the course of this trip! A bridesmaid you will be! :)

Thank you Jesus for bringing me to Boston, for opening my heart to the city, opening my eyes to you, and teaching me sooo much! YOu love me more than I know, bring me to this city I could tell you were loving on my soul even through all the service and evangelism we did on this trip!

Memories I will have forever:

~ My fave part of the trip was really talking to Adam and Donny about God calling them to plant the church in Boston! Still can’t get over their selflessness to uproot their families and reach people “not in their own backyard” for Christ!

~Loved doing evangelism at Harvard even though the lawn guy acted like a security guard and removed us from campus! (Wow really!)

~Bonding with Grace and Lauren my roomies for the trip! We kept saying why haven’t we been close before now? :) (Love Miss Victoria too but we already pretty tight! :))

~“I will take you”= This is something one of the men that lived in the YMCA (basically a place for men to live while they get on their feet) said. I went through the hall and heard him talking to me and he said “I will take you...” well I didn’t know what he was talking about so I basically made a beeline back to the room to paint in b/c it sort of scared me. He ended up telling Nick the whole story. He wanted to take me to his parent’s house in Puerto Rico to paint for them. Still a little shady but not as bad as what I first thought he meant!

~“Pink Ice cream” Donny and Janna’s two little girls were precious, their baby girl Lilah was precious too. But the two bigger ones Aralyn and Elise said the cuttest things. They called strawberry ice cream pink ice cream.

~Trying to go babysitt for the Mabrys but once we walked about 30 min in the cold to their house, Hope calls and says baby Cole is sick! At least we got to visit for a short while, see their precious house, and ride back with Adam, Alanna, and Nora and her Adam as a daddy call his girls sweet names like “My love”...

~“Lion, otter, beaver, golden retriever” = this was a personality test Derrick told us about.

~Playing the “Amanda from Atlanta that sells avocados” game. A game where you go through the whole alphabet with your name, a place and something you sell or do..

Boston Day 7 :)

This was our fun day. We started the day with our devotional at the ABP. Then afterwards we went back to the hotel and were going to do the walking Freedom Trail Tour, the historical tour of the city with Donny as our tour guide. It was raining pretty hard so we decided to do the walking tour the next day. The ECU girls went shopping. We stared by going to H&M where after trying on oodles of clothes, I walked away with a scarf! Then we tried to walk to the Forever 21 store. The guy giving directions said we could take the T. Well we thought we could walk it, in the drizzly rain. We walked past Boston Commons, and even the concert hall where the Hillsong Concert was going to be that night. We would all loved to have gone, but the tickets were $73. So we opted out!

Our surroundings began to get slightly sketchy and we figured out we were in China Town. We redirected ourselves and ended up in a nice area. We walked past the really pretty park which I don’t remember the name of. Then we hit Newbury St. This was a really upscale shopping area. We pasted many stores: Chanel, Burberry, Giorgio Armani, & Vera Wang to name a few. Luckily, we found a reasonably priced place for lunch. At the Mediterranean place we ordered grilled octopus for an appetizer. I ordered a scrumptious pasta dish and we had a great time! I felt so under dressed and out of place with my frizzy ponytail but it was so much fun. Grace said we need to have a pack that we will be friends for life and not get married yet. She was the only one to put her hand in the middle! Ha! But really there are no prospects heading my way now anyway! :) Her point was that we needed to do fun stuff like this and travel etc. When I do get married I hope I can still have fun girls nights and weekends away!

After lunch we passed even more stores on our way to Forever 21. After seeing Kate Spade & Lilly Pulitzer I was nearly drooling. I had to tell myself, “It is good for me to not get what I want.” We finally reached Forever 21 and it was packed! After scooping out all 3 floors, my pile of clothes was weighing my arm down! In the forever long line to the dressing room I talked with 2 girls from Northeastern that were in a sorority! This is when I remembered these are my types of girls! :) (Not girls discussing Chilean pesos...)Lord as long as I work on a campus with girls who love watching tv, cooking, dressing up and eating out I will be set!

Lexie, our new friend that moved from Florida to help with Aletheia joined us for our girls day! Then after purchasing some cute jewelry we went to JP Licks for ice cream. We headed for the T and made our way back to the hotel where we freshened up. We meet up with our whole group and then went to the North End to the Italian District. We ate dinner at a restaurant the L’Esperance’s told us about. It was fun to watch the people who worked their b/c it looked like they were all related. I got lost looking for the bathroom and thought the waitress told me to go into the dark broom closet... she thought this was funny!

After a fun dinner Grace and I went out to go see her sister Dana. It took us forever. We had to ride on a different part of the T line we had never ridden before. We made it but then walked about 4 blocks further outside then we needed to, walked back and then eventually found Dana’s apartment. She goes to Boston University. Her apartment was a part of the school’s housing and was in a Brown Stone. It was really cute. It was really good to meet her and talk to her. Grace wasn’t going to see her in a while so I know she was really glad to see her and that made it special. Riding back on the subway I was surprised how non scary it was at night. All of the people riding the T looked like normal people just riding the train late which was reassuring. We got back to the hotel around 11:30 and I know papa Jones was happy.

Boston Day 6 :)

Today was Harvard’s day where the freshmen figure out what house or dorm they will be in for their next 3 years. Most Harvard students live on campus, it’s the exception when they do not. It is sort of like Harry Potter when, there was a lot of life, camaraderie, celebrations, etc going on outside of the Memorial Hall & Science Tech Building.

I don’t know if this had anything to do with it or not, but the people we talked to on campus today seemed more open to talk.

We walked towards a section of campus we were unfamiliar with, behind the science tech building, and came across a girl there. Lord I pray she will come to know you, I don’t remember much about our conversation. Then we tried to walk near Divinity School but got lost. We found a neighborhood about a block from campus with big beautiful houses. There we meet Kirk. He was a freshman from Northern California. We had a great natural convo with him. Then we talked to another girl. Lord I pray she will come to know you. Grace and I were able to share our testimonies with her.

Our follow up meeting with a girl went well. (I had some Yerba Mata, its a type of tea I saw on the Sarah Snow show on the Discovery Channel so I was excited to try it. It had a really woodsy taste.) She had some questions for us that we tried to answer. One I remember was “What part of the Bible are we me associate with the most “~tried to tell her that the God of the Old Testament is the same as New Testament... We also tried to explain the importance of Jesus vs just living a morally good life. My favorite part was when we were able share our testimonies. After we shared our testimonies she asked where the church was again. So we told her and gave her a card and then we talked some more. Lord I pray that Ruthe will come to know you! She really was really sweet and open to talk.

Then Grace and I ate lunch at the clover. It was uber modern, delish and super fun. I have never eaten anywhere like this before. After this we went back to the church and then set up to give out free candy bars and hot chocolate again. This was fun and a good way to invite people to the church and strike up conversations. One guy asked me why we had a name for our church and why we had to differentiate ourselves from the body of Christ. I was glad Donny stepped in to talk to him, b/c I didn’t know how to discuss that and kept thinking who cares, we have to have a name to idetify what body of believers we are in the community.

Then we all walked to the Fishers house for dinner. Janna and her sister made bbq, sweet tea, and dump cake! It was all delish. Aaralyn and Elise were super cute. They were being snuggly and sweet. Then we place the bowl game. This was fun and I wrote out instructions for us to play here in Greenville!

I am honestly relieved to not go back to the Harvard campus. It was really hard just to get people to stop and talk to us. I am definitely glad we did and think the conversations we had were great but, glad to not go back. Honestly, I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb.

I didn’t mention earlier, but the first day we did evangelism on campus, Grace, Calvin and I were asked to not talk to students on the Harvard Yard again. We were actually talking with the girl we meet with today for the 2nd time. They told us we could talk to student around the Science and Tech building. The guy who told us had a golden retriever with him. His shirt only said “Landscaping Services” so he wasn’t a real security guard but we got the message. Grace later said, she wished she would have said “what authority do you have to make me leave, you are just a landscaping guy.” Ha! Well ever since that altercation, I felt like a terrorist on campus. My mind went into overdrive and I even thought their was a school-wide email sent out to warn students not to talk to us. So Day 5 on campus was not fun! I felt like I looked suspicious and that people were looking at me weird. This was not the case but how I felt! So I was so glad that today went better! Thank you Lord for sending people our way to talk to!

Boston Day 5

This day on campus was hard. Calvin and I were matched to be buddies again. No one I talked to wanted to be my friend. So we ended up going into the Harvard bookstore a few minutes then ate lunch with Nick and JT. I felt really sick all day and didn’t feel like eating anything. If you know me, I love to eat so this says something. All i ate for lunch was a cup of white rice and a banana. Then after going on campus, we all came back to nap. After our nap we were going out again to pass out candies (as Madge says) near the Harvard campus. I didn’t feel good at all so I stayed back at the hotel. I made a run to CVS for medicine and Whole Foods for dinner. Then campus back and cuddled up with my laptop and the remote. Nothing does a body good like a little screen time. ;)

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I'm already home but I had this one waiting to post, still finishing writing about the rest of the week and am excited to post those as well! :)

I forgot to add that I did have a good conversation this day with a guy that worked in the dinning area of the Science and Tech building. Lord I pray he will come to know you for who you really are!