a dreamer's sleep.

A whole year.

I can't decide if I'm lucky, or stupid, or blessed.

Really, I can't even wrap my head around the situation. How did I walk into this church to just... experience a Pentecostal megachurch...and end up with a comparatively impeccable attendance record, and a volunteer gig? How is that even possible?

I have a whole year's worth of blogs that say that I'm a person who thinks about, and seeks after God. What is that? What am I supposed to think about that?

Is this really my life? Reality is getting fuzzy.

I feel as though I want to get away from all of this, away from schoolwork, and church and friends...and just sit with God. I just need to sit with Him. And to ask Him what's going on. Can He just explain to me just a little bit of what's been happening in my life? Because I don't understand it.

It would be one thing if I could look back, and say "Ah, well, I did all of those things so as to understand these Pentecostals better." It's true, I do understand them better. But that's not why I did all of the things I've done. My heart has changed. I see it in my self. I feel it, sometimes. God is making me more of the person I've always wanted to be, but could never seem to master. Not that we're even within sight of the finish, but, I'm closer. Yet, I didn't do any of this to be a better person either. I didn't actually do it.

Do you ever look at your life, and feel that God has just been doing stuff? That you can't explain why or how you made particular decisions, though you definitely made them, and that truly, oddly, God seemed to have...well, He, He just.. He changed it? He changed you?

I feel that way. The last year has been a blur. I went to DFL, and three womens' rallies, and joined a Life Group, and then another, turned in a praise card for my salvation that was read on the day my Dad happened to come to church with me (oy vey), and was baptized (!), and claimed to be the modern (and mostly normal-looking) embodiment of a Pentecostal to a classroom full of leftist classmates, and started volunteering in production, and prayed to pray in the spirit, and made fast friends with two Christian roommates in a row. That's not even counting the funny stuff, like going to my first ever evangelical bachelorette party, and being asked if I've ever lusted after a man, and seeing Joyce Meyer speak, and traipsing around a field on my first ever prayer-walk. Nor the theological stuff, like deciding that Christ actually lived and died and rose again to pay for my sins.

It has been a year.

A beautiful, whacky, painful, and confusing year.

I don't understand.

Sometimes, it really, truly feels as though this has just been some huge experiment of my dreams, and I think I'll wake up tomorrow the person I came here as. Like it was someone else who did all of that stuff, some other Ashley.

God, don't let it have been a dream. Please don't let it be a dream.