How to do it well

I talked to Joey today over Skype about Amsterdam and what we will be doing over there this June. It was a good conversation, and I'm glad we've got the ball rolling on practical things. It was also just nice to reconnect and talk to Joey, to hear his heart for the needy of the Netherlands. But I'm left, most of all, with a challenge.
It's such an exciting challenge. I'm beginning to feel again like Jeremiah; His Word is like a fire in my bones, and I cannot contain it. But here's the challenge: Joey's heart, and now mine, and I think God's, for the trip is that we would really teach the kids at the young church how to live "missionally": how to serve, to be Jesus' hands and feet to the people that live around them. How do we best do that? How do we teach them to serve, when we are learning to do so ourselves? Where can we be most effective? How can we best disciple these kids we've never met and reach people in a country we've never been? Most of all, I feel the challenge of needing to have a life that is doing what we need to teach them.
Please tell me, how do you do this? How can I do it better? What does it look like, for me on Hillsdale's campus, to live as though Christ is the only thing I live for?

Valentine's Day flowers from Dad :)
Visiting Clara :)
Clara's exotic decorating- like our room freshman year :)
My room on a Sunday afternoon

The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

~by T.S. Eliot, the year of his conversion

Another Article

I wrote an article for the Collegian on students with siblings in the Greek system who also go Greek and why they choose the houses they do. It's not wildly exciting, but I have enjoyed learning how to report and write lately. :-)
Here's the link:
http://media.www.hillsdalecollegian.com/media/storage/paper1270/news/2009/01/29/Focus/Greek.Legacies.Can.keep.It.In.The.Family-3603583.shtml

Do check out the rest of the paper. :-)