Danger Face.

Growing up, I went to a very small, conservative Christian...

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:33:34 -0400

Growing up, I went to a very small, conservative Christian boarding school in rural Iowa. Attending Cono Christian school was instrumental in my upbringing, and both the staff and students that populated Cono shaped my life in lasting ways.

Cono was founded in 1951 by a group of families who believed that true education must be based on scriptural authority, and be in harmony with the teachings of the home and church. One such couple, was Mr. and Mrs. Belz. While Mr. Belz passed away long before I arrived at Cono, I had the absolute privilege of being a student of Mrs. Jean Belz.

Mrs. Belz lived in one of the original homes on the campus, that always smelled of applesauce and a wood burning stove. In addition to living there herself and parenting a small dorm in the upper level of the home, Grandma Belz also housed the school’s suspension room. Being the infinitely naughty 13 year old that I was, I spent most of my 8th grade year in Ms. Jean Belz’s basement. One of my favorite things about her was that no matter what new, awful crime I had committed to land myself in suspension, she never, ever seemed shocked or angry or disappointed with me. She would just sigh and say “You’re better than this. When are you going to cut it out?” It wasn’t until many years laters that I could truly appreciate the infinite hope contained within that sentence. She never wrote me off as a lost cause. No matter how many nights I spent in her basement [43 to be exact, and yes, that’s a school record], she would still say “When are you going to cut it out?” not “If you ever cut this out…” but WHEN.

I was also lucky enough to take Latin from Ms. Belz in 9th and 10th grade. She was an incredible teacher and spent the time to help me learn to conjugate my verbs in all the tenses no matter how long it took. When I’d finally be able to get through reciting them correctly, she would reward me with a new pencil, or a juicy orange.

Mrs. Jean Belz passed away today, and in one way, it’s an incredibly joyous thing to know that she is now in Heaven celebrating her life with our Father… but I can’t help but deeply regret the vast hole her lost presence leaves for us here on earth. Either way, I am so thankful that I had the honor and privilege of getting to spend the time with her that I did, and I am absolutely a better person because of her influence in my life.

You will be missed Mrs. Jean Belz, I’m so glad that you’re finally home.

Las Vegas Ladies...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:48:00 -0400

I just read the book Captivating which was seriously incredible and so, I would like to read it again, only this time I would like to do the accompanying journal.

So, I would like to invite any and all ladies who live in Las Vegas to read it and do the journal with me! I was thinking that we could meet at my house on Tuesday evenings at 7pm [if that works for everyone!] We can just do 2 or three chapters per week and discuss them and have snacks and paint our nails and talk about boys [just kidding about the last two. ; )]

You can order the book and journal here and here.

Please e-mail me at krisseedanger@gmail.com if you are interested! If it goes well with Captivating, we can keep it going and do other books as well!

"I can’t disguise, I was hypnotized. Lost the track, struggled back. I wanted easy stuff to..."

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:07:01 -0400

“I can’t disguise, I was hypnotized. Lost the track, struggled back. I wanted easy stuff to please me but something in the dark began to squeeze me. I’ve seen it there, been there in the mirror… totally focused, no hocus pocus. Dare I give in to this thing gripping my skin to win… As the lights of the cars go by in the stream, seems like I stand pretty much unseen but I open my eyes and beams come out. Give me, give me symphonies. Give me more than the life I see. Score adds up, angels play, let my loneliness get blown away. Give me, give me symphonies. Give me more than the life I see. I lie down in the dust just under your eye, a scrap of paper, thin as vapor, filling my clothes with smoke, a couple of the wires in my heart are broke. I throw, I miss. Something, nothing. Dreams, schemes, moments wasted, taste that tasted, fate I’m fated, re-edited again, then copy, pasted. As the lights of the cars go by in the stream, seems like I stand pretty much unseen, then I open my eyes and beams come out. Give me, give me symphonies, give me more than the life I see. Score adds up, angels play, let my loneliness get blown away. Give me, give me symphonies, give me more than the life I see. When I want to quite I suffocate it. Chew bubblicious, stress repetitious. Vicious, I’m one outside you, up above the streets on a wire. Higher. Fire in my guts. In a rut, but what I’ve got is in a can, no other human. But I do get lonely, scared I’m phony. As the lights of the cars go by in the stream, seems like I stand pretty much unseen, but I open my eyes and beams come out. Give me, give me symphonies. Give me more than the life I see. Score adds up, angels play, let my loneliness get blown away. Give me, give me symphonies, give me more than the life I see.”

- Dan Black- Symphonies

"I know you through and through. There’s no need to hide. I want to show you love that is deep..."

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:14:47 -0400

“I know you through and through.
There’s no need to hide.
I want to show you love that is deep and high and wide.
For I am constant.
I am near.
I am peace that shatters all your secret fears.
I am holy.
I am wise.
I’m the only One who knows your heart’s desires.”

- From “I Am” by Jill Phillips

Zombie Brains vs. Alien Eggs

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 02:28:43 -0400

I used to keep a blog called The Rhythm of my Footsteps, and I found it the other day and found this post from Fall of 2007. What a strange 20 year old I was. I think I was spending too much time alone…

“Last week I was walking home from school and I was down by the river. On the walkway there was a bit of bubbly orange substance and my immediate reaction was ZOMBIE BRAINS OR ALIEN EGGS! It is not likely that these were zombie brains because those are usually green, but it was the same consistency. The substance was, however, the correct consistency and color to be alien eggs. I tried to step on in and it didn’t move. As soon as I stepped on it, I regretted it because what is some of the baby alien spores attached to my shoe and now I have tracked aliens all over Grand Rapids?! I walked by the same spot again today to see if they were still there and they were!!! Do you have any idea what extraterrestrial incubation time is?”

“Living in an out of body fashion creates and artificial understanding of ourselves. Our...

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:46:13 -0400

“Living in an out of body fashion creates and artificial understanding of ourselves. Our self-concept becomes ‘enshrouded’ in temporal distractions that can cloud our direction and even make the ground beneath us an untrustworthy place to stand. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn argues that this isn’t living at all, but rather the acting out of a very unsatisfying personal fiction that we inhabit like disembodied spirits. No wonder we’re often confused about what we should do with our lives. There can be no clarity of direction without clarity of self. If we don’t wake up to our life, warns Kabat-Zinn, we can miss it all together.

‘No one else can do this job of waking up for us, although our family and friends sometimes try desperately to get through to us, to help us see more clearly or to break out of our own blindness. When it comes down to it, wherever you go, there you are. It’s your life that is unfolding.’

Our lives unfold, moment by moment, and the only way we can truly experience them is in the moment. Being always-on [as in connected to our networks via text, facebook, twitter, etc.] can thwart awareness of the present moment, keeping our attention ever focused on the new rather than the now. Endless facebook-checking, email-checking, texting, updating, posting- it all serves in keeping us ‘disembodied,’ unable to get a tangible grip on ourselves in relation to those around us. Rather than truly living, we’re simply reacting to whatever colorful object happen to flit into our periphery.”

-Jesse Rice, “Church of Facebook”

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Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:45:36 -0400

Today is a VERY special day. Today, August 4th, 2010 marks my...

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 10:27:00 -0400

Today is a VERY special day.

Today, August 4th, 2010 marks my FOUR YEAR anniversary of having won my battle against Trichotillomania.

I developed TTM when I was 12 years old and obsessively pulled out my hair [ALL OF MY HAIR] for the next 7 years. I don’t know what your thoughts are, but I think that junior high and high school are hard enough years, without adding “being bald” to the list.

On August 4th 2006, my dear friend Sarah and I prayed and laid our hands on my head, begging God to heal me, and He did. I stopped that very day. If I ever needed any proof that we serve and active and compassionate God, that was it. I was at the point where I thought “I’m not going to have hair on my wedding day.”

So now, 4 years later, my hair is down far past my shoulders and I am so, so thankful for every strand of it. Sometimes, when I dream, I still dream that I don’t have hair, and when I wake up, I am so, so thankful that it’s there. I rarely get hair cuts, despite being a cosmetologist, because I don’t want to part with any of it.

So anyway, don’t mind the photo above, I just wanted to show you what my hair looks like, 4 years later.

Thank you Jesus!

My need for this little guy is becoming critical. I shall call...

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 09:37:51 -0400

My need for this little guy is becoming critical. I shall call him Roman. Please get him for me?

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Sat, 31 Jul 2010 18:27:38 -0400

A disjointed quote...

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:18:36 -0400

“Instead of withholding love to change somebody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that love would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson…

And so I have come to understand that strength, inner strength, comes from receiving love as much as it comes from giving it. I think apart from the idea that I am a sinner and God forgives me, this is the greatest lesson I have ever learned. When you get it, it changes you…

God’s love will never change us if we don’t accept it.”

-Donald Miller; Blue Like Jazz

From Blue Like Jazz...

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 02:59:53 -0400

What great gravity is this that drew my soul towards yours? What great force, that though went falsely, went kicking, went disguising myself to earn your love, also disguised, to earn your keeping, your resting, your staying, your will fleshed into mine, rasped by a slowly revealed truth, the barter of my soul, the soul that I fear, the soul that I loathe, the soul that: if you will love, I will love. I will redeem you, if you will redeem me? Is this our purpose, you and I together to pacify each other, to lead each other toward the lie that we are good, that we are noble, that we are not redemption, save the one that you and I invented of our own clay?

I am not scared of you my love, I am scared of me.

I went looking, I wrote out a list, I drew an image, I bled a poem of you. You were pretty, and my friends believed I was worthy of you. You were clever, but I was smarter, perhaps the only one smarter, the only on able to lead you. You see, love, I did not love you, I loved me. And you were only a tool that I used to fix myself, to fool myself, to redeem myself. And though I have taught you to lay your lily hand in mine, I walk alone, for I cannot talk to you, lest you talk it back to me, lest I believe that I am not worthy, not deserving, not redeemed.

I want desperately for you to be my friend. But you are not my friend; you have slid up warmly to the man I wanted to be, the man I pretend to be, and I was your Jesus and, you were mine. Should I show you who I am, we may crumble. I am not scared of you, my love, I am scared of me.

I want to be known and loved anyway. Can you do this? I trust by your easy breathing that you are human like me, that you are fallen like me, that you are lonely, like me. My love, do I know you? What is this great gravity that pulls us so painfully toward each other? Why do we not connect? Will we be forever in fleshing this out? And how will we with words, narrow words, come to the knowing of each other? Is this God’s way of meriting grace, of teaching us of the labyrinth of His love for us, teaching us, in degrees, that which He is sacrificing to join ourselves to Him? Or better yet, has He formed our being fractional so we might conclude one great hope, plodding and sighing and breathing into one another in such a great push that we might break though into the known and being loved, only to cave into a greater perdition and fall down at His throne still begging for our acceptance? Begging for our completion?

We were fools to believe that we would redeem each other.

Were I some sleeping Adam, to wake and find you resting at my rib, to share these things that God has done, to walk you through the garden, to counsel your timid steps, your bewildered eye, your heart so slow to love, so careful to love, so sheepish that I stepped up my aim and become a man. Is this what God intended? That though He made you from my rib, it is you who is making me, humbling me, destroying me, and in so doing revealing Him.

Will we be in ashes before we are one?

What great gravity is this that drew my heart towards yours? What great force collapsed my orbit, my lonesome state? What is this that wants in me the want in you? Don’t we go at each other with yielded eyes, with cumbered hands, and feet, with clunky tongues? This deed is unattainable! We cannot know each other!

I am quitting this thing, but not what you think. I am not going away.

I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God’s own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chambers where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to the death it may bring me.

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.

God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.

To my friends and enemies, who could have been anything, titans and heroes who found survival in...

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:30:34 -0400

To my friends and enemies, who could have been anything, titans and heroes who found survival in cause and effect behind counters, behind windows, striving just to be people with bitter ideals of justice. Do we only need to keep working because it pays rent? There’s a height beyond skyscrapers, there’s a distance beyond the freeway. More than pictures in a magazine, more than tragedy in a rock and roll song. It’s more than the actions you know it’s safe to make, it’s more than money could ever buy. Are we living to work and die in American cities?

Incredible.

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:48:16 -0400

Incredible.

The battle for pure motives.

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:49:36 -0400

I’ve never really come right out to say it, but it’s not like it’s a secret that I struggle with eating issues.

If you have seen me, you have probably been able to see that I have an unhealthy relationship with food.

This isn’t something new, this is something that I have been dealing with consistently for as long as I can remember. And you know what? It’s time to get free.

As a Mumford and Sons lyric so beautifully puts it, “I need freedom now and I need to know how to live my life as it’s meant to be.”

An awesome friend of mine, who has also fought the long battle with food issues, suggested that I try Setting Captives Free; a 60 day, online devotional for those struggling with all sorts of bondage. I am doing the Lord’s Table series for those struggling specifically with food issues.

I just finished my first lesson, and I would say that I feel real hope for the first time in a long time. The main thing that they stressed in this lesson is that we need to be doing this for God’s glory, not our own, and I’ve never looked at things that way before. I’ve always wanted to lose weight to get a guy or fit into a certain outfit… never for the glory of God, and it’s why I have been unsuccessful. What is my weight loss wasn’t about me or something as trivial as a boyfriend or a bikini? What if it was about glorifying God with my body? This is a totally new concept to me, and I don’t even know what it looks like exactly, but I trust that God is going to honor my desire for freedom from this and show me exactly what it means to do this for His glory and not my own.

Let me close with this, the same verse that they closed my first lesson with:

”Though I walk in the midst of trouble, You will revive me.

You will stretch out your hand against the wrath of my enemies

and Your right hand will save me.

The Lord will perfect that which concerns me.

Your mercy, oh Lord, endures forever.

Do not forsake the works of Your hands.”

-Psalm 138:7-8

"Roll away your stone and I will roll away mine. Together we can see what we will find. Don’t..."

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:13:38 -0400

“Roll away your stone and I will roll away mine. Together we can see what we will find. Don’t leave me alone at this time for I am afraid of what I will discover inside. You told me that I wouldn’t find a home beneath the fragile substance of soul. And I have filled this void with things unreal and all the while my character it steals. Darkness is a harsh term don’t you think? Yet it dominates the things I see. It seems that all my bridges have been burned, but you say ‘That’s exactly how this grace thing works.’ It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart, but the welcome I receive with a new start. Darkness is a harsh term don’t you think? Yet it dominates the things I see. Stars hide your fires, for these are my desires and I wont give them up to you this time around. And so I will be found with my stake stuck in the ground marking the territory of this newly impassioned soul. And you’ve gone too far this time, you have neither reason nor rhyme with which to take this soul so rightfully mine.”

- Mumford and Sons

Krissee: What do you believe that God has to say to those who are addicted? Rob Bell: You are always...

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 23:46:05 -0400

Krissee: What do you believe that God has to say to those who are addicted?

Rob Bell: You are always with me and everything I have is yours.

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Tue, 08 Jun 2010 15:31:37 -0400

So, I am reading “Remember Be Here Now” by Ram Dass...

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:45:00 -0400

So, I am reading “Remember Be Here Now” by Ram Dass on the suggestion of a friend. At first I was highly skeptical, seemed like a bunch of hippie bullshit to me… but honestly, it’s pretty incredible. The ideals within it, though primarily rooted in Eastern religions, can be applied to pretty much any form of spirituality. I’d say it highlights a great deal of what I would call “transcendental truths.” Any way, it’s an easy read, more than half of the book is a series of pen and ink style drawings… pick it up and let me know what you think!

"We’re disconnected from each other, and we know it. It’s not how things are supposed to..."

Tue, 18 May 2010 19:07:10 -0400

“We’re disconnected from each other, and we know it. It’s not how things are supposed to be. Even people who would say they have no faith in God or in any sort of higher being or supreme power still have a sense that there is a way things are supposed to be. And a way that involves us as humans being connected with each other… We’re severed and cut off and disconnected in a thousand ways, and we know it, we feel it, we’re aware of it every day. It’s an ache in our bones that won’t go away. And so, from an early age we have this awareness of the state of disconnection we were born into, and we have a longing to reconnect… Our sexuality, then, has two dimensions. First, our sexuality is our awareness of how profoundly we’re severed and cut off and disconnected. Second, our sexuality is all of the ways we go about trying to reconnect.”

- From Sex God by Rob Bell