Cell Away from Cell

My dear girl,

Read your post late last night.
I wish I could give you a really big bear hug and tell you that you're alright and things'll be alright.
That I think you're really, really beautiful both within and without and I look up to you as a role model.
That I love you for being so honest about how you feel and I don't insist my role models be perfect.
In fact, I don't want them to be. I want them to be magnificantly human so that everynow and then, I can reach out and touch them.
When humanity is at its most beautiful.
Beautiful in its fraility. Because of its fraility.
Precious, you do make a difference in my life and I am grateful for that.

I identify with what you wrote but somehow I doubt I'd be able to put it down with such clarity. I still struggle to define how and what I feel or think. Seem to be going nowhere with blogging, and I've gotten feedback that my muddled musings are too incomprehensible. Ah well, practice makes perfect ya. Haha, can I just cut and paste from what you write? Kidding.

Anyway, I wanted to write about last night before it all just fades away. Seven of the cell members came over after dinner to hang out and after a few rounds of side-splitting Mad-Libs, we decided to break in our brand-new Pictionary set. Thanks so much for buying it that very day, mom. For the uninformed, we've been borrowing my aunt's set but she wasn't around on so we couldn't get it on time yesterday.

It was awesomely fun. As I told a few of them, it felt like cell away from cell. Or church away from church, or home away from home. After all, we are His body, and we carry His presence with us. I'm not saying that the atmosphere was super-charged spiritually, or that we were all consciously aware of His presence even. What I mean is that we were able to be comfortable enough to have fun and learn together and it was even ok to mess up. It was ok to not know alot of words, or how to draw, or how to guess what was drawn. It was ok to make mistakes like drawing an apple for the word orange, so that "...when I draw the orange, [the team] would be able to guess it" (What???) . Or drawing a rubbish bin for the word 'waste', instead of a wastepaper basket, a starfish and squirrel that well, was very abstract.

So, it was just a game. But I hope that it laid the ground for something greater. I want us to be able to come to cell and church and feel safe enough to drop our guards and our masks because we know that we're accepted in spite of all our flaws, weaknesses and unpleasant bits. I want cell to be a place where we can build each other up and help each other become more and more Christ-like. Where God's unconditional love can be extended to all, so that nobody has to worry too much about being put down or rejected or jeered at. I know that we're moving towards that, but there's still much room for improvement. I pray that I myself will learn to love each of them as God does, and it's happening slowly. It really is all about love, like I mentioned in one of my earlier posts.

I pray that as we draw closer to each other, we also draw closer to God. I used an analogy in cell before, where God is a circle in the middle, and we are all in a circle around Him, connected by a line to Him in the middle circle. As we move along that line closer to Him, we also move closer to each other and as we move closer to each other, we move closer to Him.

This is my vision for this little group of precious souls. Come talk to me, help me realize that vision.