I believe

I believe in sparklers at weddings.  Bird seed is messy and very slippery.  Sparklers also look pretty in photographs.

I believe in photographs.  Sometimes memory fails, sometimes you just want to gaze back on a blissful moment or a particularly pretty day, and a picture really does capture God's glory in a way that makes us stop and gaze upon it with sincere admiration beyond what we experience in our daily lives. 

I believe in cake.  Chocolate, rich but creamy, dark but smooth, and decadent should be the adjective that first comes to mind when it melts on your tongue.

I believe in spending time with people.  In investing in their lives.  In calling just to say hey.  In being there for the good and the bad.  In saying I love you every single day at every single opportunity. 

I believe in the minds of children.  Sometimes they may be strange, or it may not occur to them the same way it does to you, but the bliss of an unformed and unbiased mind is tremendously beautiful. 

I believe in pushing.  Through pain, through hurt, and through stubborn doors.

I believe in asking for help.  It is not always easy, and I am often reluctant to do so, but so often our experiences are part of our testimony and may just be so that in that moment where your friend comes to you in tears, you can say "I've been where you are, and God will carry you through it."

I believe in God.  The Holy Trinity, perfection embodied in Christ on earth, salvation offered for all those who ask sincerely, true Love defined, Father, Comforter, Redeemer, Creator, Friend. 

I believe in our power to glorify God through our lives.  To use the gifts He has given us to bless others, be it the homeless man on the way to church or a kid who doesn't have a great home life or just someone who needs to hear that they are Loved. 

I believe in family.  Family that you're born into and family that you create, friends that are sisters and brothers. 

I believe in love.  The big-L kind where God loves us and we cannot help but be overwhelmed with love for Him in return, and the little-l kind where you stick with someone because they make your heart skip a beat and because you see their heart and the call at 2 am can-you-come-get-me, it's all love, just different forms. 

I believe. 

PR

Also, please pray for a friend of mine.  She is in my bible study, and is such a beautiful display of Christ's love to everyone around her.  Her faith is so incredibly inspiring, and her strength is clearly a reflection of her close walk with the Lord.  Her sister has been diagnosed possibly with acute myeloid leukemia, and they have caught it early, but still.  This is a trying time for a family, and for a girl so young, but this woman of God, and her family, will only use this experience to strengthen their faith in Christ and glorify His holy name.  So if you read this, please just take a moment and pray. 

A change in the weather

Sometimes, especially towards the dog days of summer, when it starts to feel like the heat will never dissipate and the sunshine has burned through the atmosphere, we start to think that this is the year.  This is the year that summer is going to stay forever and we're never going to get to wear cute winter coats or see spring blossoms or lazy falling leaves ever, ever again.  However, if I think back really far, like, 6 months, then I remember that I felt this same feeling about winter!  Okay, so last winter was like, the longest and coldest and rainiest and worstest winter ever, BUT we still got a gorgeous (if short-lived) spring and a blistering summer.  Seasons change, it's a fact of life, it's how God created the world, it's a wondrous thing. 

So no, my revelation for the day was not that there are seasons, or even that there are seasons in our lives, with friends, with jobs, with everything.  I noticed as I was running laps earlier, watching the pretty sky and the moon and the white cottonballs...I mean clouds...that the clouds move.  One lap, they were completely covering the moon and the only real light I had were the nicely spaced streetlamps in the neighborhood (thank you Chapel Hill for your affluence!).  The next, the clouds had formed a cute little halo around the moon and were singing its' praises!  It's like those rainy weeks that come move in and drizzle on my parade and make me feel as if the sun has ceased to exist.  I mean, think about the worst, darkest, most awesome thunderstorm you've ever experienced.  In the midst of the lightning and the booming thunder, how on earth can we truly believe that somewhere else, the sun is shining and it's a beautiful day?  But that's kind of like faith, isn't it?  How can we believe, in the midst of pain, sickness, deep hurt, that the Lord is good and His love is beyond measure? 

Because that IS faith.  His Word testifies to it.  Our fellow believers testify to His goodness and provision.  Our own lives have so many examples of Him watching over us, guiding us, holding us up and blessing our boots off. 

The Son is shining. 


But Christ is faithful as a Son over God's house.  And we are his house, if we hold onto our courage and the hope of which we boast.  Hebrews 3:6

June 16, 2011

You know when an idea just gets in your head and takes hold of you and you can't even sleep for it consuming all your thoughts?!  That's what's happened to me!  Of course, it's VBS week at church and I'm dying from the not-sleeping thing, but who cares?  I just finished David Platt's book, Radical: Taking back your faith from the American Dream (Buy here!) and I'm hooked.  Platt explains how our American version of faith in Christ is pretty far from the example set for us by Jesus Himself, and how we can work to change that.  He offers his readers a challenge at the end of the book, which I've written on my mirror now so that I won't forget (which is also why I'm posting about this!), which is to do these five things for a year and just see if it doesn't open your eyes to a greater relationship with the Lord. 

1.  Pray every day for the entire world.  How often do I spend time in prayer for the tribes in Nigeria that have never heard the name of the Lord?  Without prayer, and with the way that Christians seem to skim over the Great Commission now, there does not seem to be much hope for the people of this world.
2.  Read the whole Word.  Most Christians I know have at least one Bible, if not more, and in the corners of the world where being a Christian is against the law or poverty is rampant, many Christ-followers have to memorize the Word because they cannot be found with it in their possession, or they cannot afford to purchase one. 
3.  Give sacrificially to a specific purpose.  Under the awning of this tenet, I've vowed to give up Starbucks for the next year and to give a portion of my weekly paycheck to a family at my church that I work with that is going through the process of bringing home a little boy from Rwanda.  I'm passionate about adoption, and this is a way that I can be held accountable for my giving and also that I can see it work. 
4.  Spend time in another context.  I don't know what true poverty looks like.  I don't know what a life without access to the Gospel looks like.  I want to change that, and take opportunities to serve others and show them the love of Christ outside of my personal comfort zone. 
5.  Be an active part of a multiplying community.  PHEW!  I'm so thankful that I've found a fantastic church to be a part of here and the ministry that I serve with could not be better suited to my gifts. 

A year.  Where will I be in a year? 

Also on the front of my brain is the "what are you doing after college?" question.  I'm passionate about teaching, kids, and I'm a little dismayed by the state of the public school system (okay, more than a little), and so I'm starting to mull over the idea of getting my master's in Christian Education and then going to teach somewhere off the North American continent.  Maybe South America, or Guatemala, or even Africa. 

This means I've got to learn a language other than Southern drawl...oh dear. 

Any way you want it...but what DO I want?

Today was a great day :) I went running in the delicious humidity (okay, that might be sarcasm, but it was a nice run!) and then went and hung out with a friend who is always an encouragement, whether or not he realizes it.  We went to see the horribly bad new Judd Apatow movie, full of laughs but SHEESH the language!  Anyways, as we were walking around the mall after the movie (and he was hiding from any screen showing the US-England World Cup game so that he could watch it in its entirety later), he asked me a question that left me rather speechless.  Speechless for me is a rare phenomenon, though my tongue is always one of the things I struggle the most with taming.  He asked me what I was looking for in a significant other.  I kind of laughed and went to answer and realized, I really don't know.  I know what I've chosen in the past, and through that I've learned a little about what personalities don't mesh well with mine, what traits I admire in someone, and I can easily make a vague list of desirable characteristics in a lifelong partner.  But what I want, what I'm attracted to...hmm. 

I guess what bothers me about this is that I believe without a plan, things fail.  I plan my days, my errands, my grocery lists; my Google calendar is color-coded and minutely detailed.  I realize that I have a definite issue with control (or rather the lack of it), and that as a Christian, I need to trust the Lord with every little thing, and not spend time worrying about earthly entanglements.  However, I also don't think that actively placing my trust and life in the Lord means that I should not plan at all...just that I should make plans that are a. centered around glorifying Him and b. flexible should He call me to something else. 

Tangent over, but I'm throwing this out there for those of us who rant, I mean define, what we don't want in a godly husband.  And, this seems to extend to other areas too...We can critique the way our churches do things, the way others raise their kids, the way a friend acts towards us, but do we ever stop to examine what the positives are?  Do you actually know what you do want in a friend, in a relationship, in your ministry, in your parenting?  Are we ruling out people because the qualities we see in them we associate with negative characters we've encountered before?  Are we judging others because of what they fail to do, where they've been in their past, or are we asking God to take away the burdens of our heart and cleanse away the hardened souls we develop over time? 

Are we too busy focusing on our sin to look up and see the beauty of the cross? 

The Christian radio station I listen to did this challenge a few weeks back for its listeners, asking if they could go 30 days without saying anything negative.  At first, I thought it would be easy, because I consider myself a positive person.  However, as the days dragged on and I caught myself thinking about ways that someone could have handled a situation differently, the things that I don't do well, etc, I realized that I am guilty of constantly judging God's creations, including myself.  One of my favorite verses, Psalm 19:14, reads "May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer."  In Phillipians 4:8, Paul commands us to think about whatever is true, pure, admirable, lovely, noble, and right.    Basically, when you boil it down, it's "don't waste My time thinking about the past, others' or your own flaws, spend time meditating on My Word, My love for you, My sacrifice, how you might better glorify My name."   Which is a great point.  We have only the rest of our earthly lives to further His kingdom and when we let the Devil drag us into focusing on things we can't change, things that God was in control of the whole time, then we are wasting His time, wasting the gift of life He's given us. 

I'm still not sure exactly what I'm looking for.  But I know that from now on, I'm going to pray for revelation in that area, and also for what I do desire, not what I'd like to avoid or what I coulda-shoulda-woulda done if things had been this way or that way. 

:)

The Pursuit of...

Tonight after my Bible study met (via video chat...how cool is that?!), my beautiful partner-in-Chacos and I were discussing boys...what's new right?  We're almost at the age where they're men, which is kind of scary to be honest, and only partly because so few of the ones we know actually live up to that description.  Well our chat focused on the things we wish the guys in our lives did.  Maybe we watch too many chick flicks, or maybe our free time is just spent differently, but we came to the conclusion that we would make great boyfriends.  We love planning surprises, making our own holidays to celebrate, taking walks outside (or really just spending time outside, under moonlight or basking in the sun, whatevs), car-dancing, writing each other letters and making CDs with encouraging songs, and whatever else we can think of...and we would love any guy who consistently did those kinds of things for us.  I say consistently there, because most guys are good, or even great, at the reeling-in-the-fish portion of dating, but once they get the fish, it's as if they don't know what to do with it.  Granted, a level of comfort is to be expected, and you can't live on the 'can't eat, can't sleep' high forever, but why is it that there seems to be a severe slack-off in the pursuing part of most relationships after the "hey, we're boyfriend/girlfriend" thing happens?

I wish I knew.  I pray for someone who, after forty years of marriage, still gets a kick out of making my day by bringing me home a flower, or something that he saw and made him think of me. 

However, that was not the revelation I had after our conversation.  Here I am, talking about all the great ideas I have for a relationship, and how nice it'd be to be blessed with a man who is intentional and consistent in his pursuit of me when I can't honestly say that that is how I approach the Lord.  The One who saved me, who took the Moabite widow out of the field and called her His own, who blesses and keeps me every moment of my life, who brings me daffodils in April every year and hydrangeas and tulips, I don't pursue Him like that.  I rearrange my quiet time to fit Him in my day, or I pray sporadically and without thanksgiving on hectic days, I don't sing Him love songs with my whole heart...

I don't know.  It's just a thought really.  But I do know that whether or not a man comes along and rides me off into the sun(rise not set, I think it's way more unique), my responsibility is to serve and glorify God in the way that I dream about being pursued. 

Why are convictions so...convicting?

Your steadfast love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, Your faithfulness to the skies.  Psalm 36:5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlhXsUVjMH4&feature=related 

When in Rome...

"Rejoice in our confident hope.  Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying."  Romans 12:12  
I have discovered Rome.  In case you weren't aware, it's apparently this really cool ancient city, where lots of nifty history comes from.  According to the apostle Paul, there was a really fantastic group of believers there too!  I mean, what's not to like about this place?  I wonder if I can go visit...oh wait, I have a reality that I'm presently attached to.  Whoops!

Anyways, Romans 12 has been my chapter.  I've been captivated by it, enraptured with it, and just absolutely cannot read anything else in the entire Word right now!  And for today, because it has been one big crazy snow-covered exhausting day, I am fixating on this verse.  Romans 12:12.  


Our confident hope.  The wonderful news that Christ brought when He was born in the manger, and told throughout His life on earth, and then made true for each and every one of us when He died and rose again.  The sacrifice that He made of His glorious self, the beauty that He was, the true love that He represented, and the sins that He atoned for.  It is truly incomprehensible.  


Be patient in trouble, and keep on praying.  Because God is going to come through.  He is going to do it in His time, and in His way, but His way is so much better, so infinitely wise and just, so great and marvelous, that you're going to wonder why you even have a brain and not just a large puppet-string contraption attached to this Awesome Creator Redeemer Savior Father and Friend that is watching over you.  Keep on praying while you're waiting too.  Show your Lord, and others around you, that you have faith in your God, and you just know that He is going to carry you through whatever storm you're going through.  Talk to God, tell Him what your fears are, what is troubling your heart, and He will not only listen to your prayers, He'll answer them in an even bigger way than you could have ever fathomed.  But, in the process, while you're doing all this praying and talking to Him, you might just get a little bit closer to Him.  You might develop a conversational friendship with the God that made the heavens and the hairs on your head.  And being close with God, knowing Him and feeling His love surround you, is something that may just make you forget what it was that you were praying so hard for anyways.  


Hey now, this is my desire, consume me like a fire, cause I just want something beautiful.
To touch me, to know that I'm in reach, I'm waiting for,

something beautiful.   

Something like You Lord.  




 

Redhead born, redhead bred, and when I die, I'll be a redhead dead.

Lord, You are a true Healer. Your love is beyond compare, and I cannot help but tell the world about it. I have nothing but delight when I think of how close You've been throughout this time, and I pray that I never turn from Your will and leave Your presence again. You are the Lord of my life, You know best, and I know not everlasting and steadfast love except that which You have shown me.

Lord, You created me exactly as You intended me to be. Thank You for Your wonderful design, even though at times I will confess I suppress it and try and change the daughter that You designed. Because of Your grace and majesty though, I am complete, forgiven, and overwhelmed by love and beauty.

LEC

I love to run, slowly and in sunshine, often without music, because the world is beautiful.

I think taking walks with special somebodies and holding hands is ridiculously adorable.

I love 90s country, Elvis Presley and Patsy Cline, Fall Out Boy and Akon, and all things indie.

I fold shirts like a normal person, in half.

I think the perfect day involves a delicious breakfast of banana-chocolate-chip pancakes, followed by a run, a scalding shower, chai tea and Jane Austen in a window seat.

I like hydrangeas, daffodils, and peach roses.

I love ponies, especially really really big ones that like Peeps and look gorgeous in hunter tack.

I enjoy singing at the top of my lungs, but only when the radio is turned alllll the way up.

I love babies, but I'd prefer if possible to birth potty-trained two-year-olds, and boys only please.

I am both incredibly naive and wary of others at the same time.

I dance in the street, badly.

I live in boots, cowboy, heeled, equestrian (which I have yet to get a pair of), etc.

I think guys in trucks with humongous lifts are downright sexy...But not if it's a Dodge.

I enjoy being a woman, and I like cooking and cleaning and wearing aprons and doing laundry.

I love the beach, but am terrified of water.

I wish I could tan, and sometimes I try, but I don't like the idea of melanoma, so it's a battle.

I think history is crazy interesting.

I am currently enamored with chai tea lattes, as I have given up my precious Diet Mtn. Dew (for now).

I like feeling short, and I secretly wish I were a few inches shorter.

I like guys that play drums, though guitar is nice too.

I hate irresponsibility in people, and dishonesty, and unreliability.

I dislike those qualities the most when I see them in myself.

I have a hard time saying no, but I'm working on it.

I want to move West, to Dallas or Nashville specifically, after graduation.

My dream house is an old white farmhouse with a huge porch, porch swing included, and a never-ending summer. There will be a barn in the backyard, which should be filled with puppies and horses. The driveway would be lined with trees, magnolias to be exact, and in the driveway will be a muddy Suburban for adventuring. Everything will be likely be partially askew at all times, but this home will be bursting with overflowing love, for each other and for Christ.

I considered dying my hair brown this week, to see if it would seep through to my roots and maybe soothe my feisty-ness.

Then I decided that I'm done not being who I'm supposed to be. I am the woman that God designed. I will never be perfectly put-together, I will forever be without a sense of rhythm, and I will always be striving to love the Lord more.

Salvation is Here

No man is worth crying over, and any man that is, won't make you cry.

It's funny how life works out. Sometimes it's ridiculously awesome, and then the next moment, things have completely fallen apart. I'm not a person that handles that well. I don't like being lied to, because when one aspect of something is a sham, then inevitably it feels like the house was built of mud instead of real brick. I don't like being hurt when I make a valiant effort to trust someone. I don't like feeling like I'm trapped in a sinkhole (like the one in The Lovely Bones where stuff magically sinks into the gloopy mess at the bottom!).

However.

I am not without a rescue. I have the Almighty God to pull me out. And thankfully, He does, every single time. He is so gracious and loving, so kind and understanding, forgiving and tender. He is the Rock that stands strong throughout every storm, and quiets the winds when the need arises. Our God is so great, so mighty, and the Redeemer of all the world.

A wonderful friend of mine made me a mix CD (how awesomely 2002...yeeeahhh buddy) that had on it Times by Tenth Avenue North, and I think that, considering the revisiting of a moment I thought had been put in the past, that song is yet again, comforting.

On a side note, it's raining again. It always rains here, but tonight, the rain is fitting. I hope it stays for a while and keeps me company :)

Psalm 23

The LORD is my Shepherd, I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul.
He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me, in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all of the days of my life,
And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.