New Site Launched

Ok using iWeb I created and launched my new blog site..from now on I will be at emersedautumn.net Thanks!!

Matt

YES

YES!!!!! The MACBOOK is mine!!! I purchased my white macbook yesterday at 3..sadly i have been stupid busy since then and unable to play around with it..pictures will be coming soon along with maybe a video. Here’s what I need..I need suggestions as to what apps to download or obtain..if you have any suggestions let me know, and if you have anything else..email me. wow, i’m freaking pumped about this mac..its my first one! I’m in love… MACBOOK PICS!!

New Computer

Today will be my last day with my beloved IBM Thinkpad..sadly I am selling it to Northwest Baptist Church..The joy in this story comes when i reveal that I am going to buy a Macbook in its place!!  Woo hoo!! I’m not sure when I will go get it but hopefully sometime this week..till then read the story below!!

To Write Love On Her Arms

I came across this story on my friends site (clint are you happy?) ..please read and pass on

 

TO WRITE LOVE ON HER ARMS.
by jamie tworkowski

Pedro the Lion is loud in the speakers, and the city waits just outside our open windows. She sits and sings, legs crossed in the passenger seat, her pretty voice hiding in the volume. Music is a safe place and Pedro is her favorite. It hits me that she won’t see this skyline for several weeks, and we will be without her. I lean forward, knowing this will be written, and I ask what she’d say if her story had an audience. She smiles. “Tell them to look up. Tell them to remember the stars.”

I would rather write her a song, because songs don’t wait to resolve, and because songs mean so much to her. Stories wait for endings, but songs are brave things bold enough to sing when all they know is darkness. These words, like most words, will be written next to midnight, between hurricane and harbor, as both claim to save her.

Renee is 19. When I meet her, cocaine is fresh in her system. She hasn’t slept in 36 hours and she won’t for another 24. It is a familiar blur of coke, pot, pills and alcohol. She has agreed to meet us, to listen and to let us pray. We ask Renee to come with us, to leave this broken night. She says she’ll go to rehab tomorrow, but she isn’t ready now. It is too great a change. We pray and say goodbye and it is hard to leave without her.

She has known such great pain; haunted dreams as a child, the near-constant presence of evil ever since. She has felt the touch of awful naked men, battled depression and addiction, and attempted suicide. Her arms remember razor blades, fifty scars that speak of self-inflicted wounds. Six hours after I meet her, she is feeling trapped, two groups of “friends” offering opposite ideas. Everyone is asleep. The sun is rising. She drinks long from a bottle of liquor, takes a razor blade from the table and locks herself in the bathroom. She cuts herself, using the blade to write “FUCK UP” large across her left forearm.

The nurse at the treatment center finds the wound several hours later. The center has no detox, names her too great a risk, and does not accept her. For the next five days, she is ours to love. We become her hospital and the possibility of healing fills our living room with life. It is unspoken and there are only a few of us, but we will be her church, the body of Christ coming alive to meet her needs, to write love on her arms.

She is full of contrast, more alive and closer to death than anyone I’ve known, like a Johnny Cash song or some theatre star. She owns attitude and humor beyond her 19 years, and when she tells me her story, she is humble and quiet and kind, shaped by the pain of a hundred lifetimes. I sit privileged but breaking as she shares. Her life has been so dark yet there is some soft hope in her words, and on consecutive evenings, I watch the prettiest girls in the room tell her that she’s beautiful. I think it’s God reminding her.

I’ve never walked this road, but I decide that if we’re going to run a five-day rehab, it is going to be the coolest in the country. It is going to be rock and roll. We start with the basics; lots of fun, too much Starbucks and way too many cigarettes.

Thursday night she is in the balcony for Band Marino, Orlando’s finest. They are indie-folk-fabulous, a movement disguised as a circus. She loves them and she smiles when I point out the A&R man from Atlantic Europe, in town from London just to catch this show.

She is in good seats when the Magic beat the Sonics the next night, screaming like a lifelong fan with every Dwight Howard dunk. On the way home, we stop for more coffee and books, Blue Like Jazz and (Anne Lamott’s) Travelling Mercies.

On Saturday, the Taste of Chaos tour is in town and I’m not even sure we can get in, but doors do open and minutes after parking, we are on stage for Thrice, one of her favorite bands. She stands ten feet from the drummer, smiling constantly. It is a bright moment there in the music, as light and rain collide above the stage. It feels like healing. It is certainly hope.

Sunday night is church and many gather after the service to pray for Renee, this her last night before entering rehab. Some are strangers but all are friends tonight. The prayers move from broken to bold, all encouraging. We’re talking to God but I think as much, we’re talking to her, telling her she’s loved, saying she does not go alone. One among us knows her best. Ryan sits in the corner strumming an acoustic guitar, singing songs she’s inspired.

After church our house fills with friends, there for a few more moments before goodbye. Everyone has some gift for her, some note or hug or piece of encouragement. She pulls me aside and tells me she would like to give me something. I smile surprised, wondering what it could be. We walk through the crowded living room, to the garage and her stuff.

She hands me her last razor blade, tells me it is the one she used to cut her arm and her last lines of cocaine five nights before. She’s had it with her ever since, shares that tonight will be the hardest night and she shouldn’t have it. I hold it carefully, thank her and know instantly that this moment, this gift, will stay with me. It hits me to wonder if this great feeling is what Christ knows when we surrender our broken hearts, when we trade death for life.

As we arrive at the treatment center, she finishes: “The stars are always there but we miss them in the dirt and clouds. We miss them in the storms. Tell them to remember hope. We have hope.”

I have watched life come back to her, and it has been a privilege. When our time with her began, someone suggested shifts but that is the language of business. Love is something better. I have been challenged and changed, reminded that love is that simple answer to so many of our hardest questions. Don Miller says we’re called to hold our hands against the wounds of a broken world, to stop the bleeding. I agree so greatly.

We often ask God to show up. We pray prayers of rescue. Perhaps God would ask us to be that rescue, to be His body, to move for things that matter. He is not invisible when we come alive. I might be simple but more and more, I believe God works in love, speaks in love, is revealed in our love. I have seen that this week and honestly, it has been simple: Take a broken girl, treat her like a famous princess, give her the best seats in the house. Buy her coffee and cigarettes for the coming down, books and bathroom things for the days ahead. Tell her something true when all she’s known are lies. Tell her God loves her. Tell her about forgiveness, the possibility of freedom, tell her she was made to dance in white dresses. All these things are true.

We are only asked to love, to offer hope to the many hopeless. We don’t get to choose all the endings, but we are asked to play the rescuers. We won’t solve all mysteries and our hearts will certainly break in such a vulnerable life, but it is the best way. We were made to be lovers bold in broken places, pouring ourselves out again and again until we’re called home.

I have learned so much in one week with one brave girl. She is alive now, in the patience and safety of rehab, covered in marks of madness but choosing to believe that God makes things new, that He meant hope and healing in the stars. She would ask you to remember.

Thanks for reading.

Buy the T’s here

New book

Well I’m about to go buy a new book, VELVET ELVIS, from what I hear it will really challenge me and inspire me to think differently.  I honestly don’t really know what it’s about but I’m looking forward to reading it.  If you’ve read it leave me a comment letting me know what you think about it.  More to come..

Monster

So I had a little fun with this…

MONSTER!!

please pray for me that I dont kill myself with this

New Job

OK so yesterday I started my new job.  It’s pretty cool.  I have neat little half cubical and an IBM ThinkCentre with a nice flat screen monitor, and a phone and a printer and a scanner..man I’m moving up in the world!  It’s actually another ladies desk but she’s out till Thursday and then is going to have a baby sometime in the near future so I will most likely be doing what she does for a while.  Today I am suppose to have a meeting with the company that does our website.  In-case I have not told you, our website is terrible..here see for yourself..Northwest. ya, its that bad.  But I’m gong to talk to them and let them know that a template off of Frontpage isn’t acceptable at all.  Hopefully in the next few months a new site will emerge with some flash and interactive stuff.  I’ve been working on the calendar all day today, getting events scheduled and making sure there are no conflicts.  I really enjoy being up here and working here.  I just listen to Explosions in the Sky and Red Hot Chili Peppers all day.  It’s great!!  Anyways I hope this finds you well.  Be blessed

Matt

OK so yesterday I started my new job.  It’s pretty cool.  I have neat little half cubical and an IBM ThinkCentre with a nice flat screen monitor, and a phone and a printer and a scanner..man I’m moving up in the world!  It’s actually another ladies desk but she’s out till Thursday and then is going to have a baby sometime in the near future so I will most likely be doing what she does for a while.  Today I am suppose to have a meeting with the company that does our website.  In-case I have not told you, our website is terrible..here see for yourself..Northwest. ya, its that bad.  But I’m gong to talk to them and let them know that a template off of Frontpage isn’t acceptable at all.  Hopefully in the next few months a new site will emerge with some flash and interactive stuff.  I’ve been working on the calendar all day today, getting events scheduled and making sure there are no conflicts.  I really enjoy being up here and working here.  I just listen to Explosions in the Sky and Red Hot Chili Peppers all day.  It’s great!!  Anyways I hope this finds you well.  Be blessed

Matt

New Site

soon I will be launching a new site…http://www.emersedautumn.net..

Coming together

Today I had a meeting at Northwest and it went really well.  We talked about what we want to see happen in our youth and what we see happening in the next couple of months.  Then we went over the calendar and I got a leadership evaluation that I have to complete by Wednesday!  So everything there is coming together nicely.  Praise God!  Today I also enrolled at OSU-OKC.  It was cool except that I told the guy I only wanted part time and now I’m taking 12 hours, but whatever its cool I need to do that so I can graduate sometime in the next 5 years.  The only complaint I have about the school is that the people who work there are very impersonal.  They seemed like they were having a terrible day and didn’t want to be there.  The campus is really pretty once you get in it.  From the highway its kinda trashy looking but once you’re on it you find a lot of trees and plants and nice walkways, not a bad place.

I’m almost finished with the video projects that I’m currently working on!  It’s been like two weeks on one and three on the other.  Granted I didn’t work on them for hours at a time but they are finished and before the due date so that is good!  God is working and moving in many of my friends lives!  It’s exciting to see and hear about what people are struggling with and how they want to move past it.  Be blessed this week and remember that we have victory over everything!