Admiring Grace

I like leaving my radio on when I’m not home. Coming home to singing just makes me smile. The right song at the right time can change a whole day. That happened today. I came home because I was so tired of school. Just being there was draining me. Seeing the same people I see every Tuesday – I just wanted to run and hide away. I ran home. As I walked into my room Matthew West was pleading, “Show me how to love the unlovable Show me how to reach the unreachable Help me now to do the impossible” My head tilted and I just stared at the numbers on my radio thinking they would help clear out my thoughts, explain the mess in my brain. I am unlovable. Maybe not to everyone, but to someone. There are lots of people that I have to pray to love well, to have patience for, ask forgiveness for bad thoughts. I hadn’t really considered that that person is me to someone else. Before repentance, that was me to God. All He could see where my imperfections. My lack of righteo...

My roommates left for Thanksgiving. It meant I got to spend time working on some research papers I’ve been putting off. Be impressed, I actually made progress. The first night was pretty lame though. I did absolutely nothing to further my homework goals. I did, however, make a delicious dinner and have too much dessert. I then spent some quality time with Facebook and music. Lots and lots of music. Before I turned off the tunes for the night, a chorus echoed through my room: “Who’d like to know, I’d like to know. Author of the moment, can you tell me, do I end up, do I end up happy? Do I? Not going to lie, it was a pretty lonely evening. Not having the roommates around to catch my thoughts and throw them back. Do I have to know how things end up? I would really like to know. Most days. Then again, this mystery has created some magic that my knowledge would have destroyed. In general, I like to know things: how things work, where something goes, what a word means, how s...

Cause I want to be with you but I need a place to start I'm surrounded and captured by the armies of your heart I’m in such an odd place. Again. I read two articles yesterday about Guarding Your Heart . I really liked them. I shared them on my social media sites. Now I think I need to add my thoughts to the authors’ thinking to avoid confusion of my personal views. They said don’t guard your heart. They said love people without bounds. They said you will get hurt. They said it is so worth it. They said it’s what Jesus did. I agree. However. People are stupid. Love is so ultimately important because God is love . We have been commanded to love others whether we want to or not. These authors don’t want people to fear loving, because God doesn’t. He loves without bounds. He does get hurt. He says it’s worth it. We’re to live in love. I will never disagree with that. My concern comes with the type of love. Romantic love is not the same as friend/family l...

My second semester of college I took a sociology class which the professor simply called “The Family.” It was a study of relationships, of marriage, of love, of families. The prof didn’t give us much homework beyond reading the text so maybe that’s why this assignment has stayed with me in the years since – or it could be possible that I was chewed out by this particular prof for not starting the paper until the night before it was due over dinner. I had the rare opportunity to learn about something so important from my father in a public setting. His big assignment was for the students to write a paper describing our family of origin followed by how we wanted our future families to be. My plan was to be ordinary. I wanted my future life to be utterly boring to onlookers. I wanted us to live our lives and go to soccer or ballet or school or church or wherever we happened to be headed without concern for much more. Part of me still likes a lot of what I wrote, but my direction was...

This will be the final part of my summer series. This is by no means a full account of the lessons I learned and as I have realized these past weeks I am still in the process of understanding why May to August was so packed full of education, but I know this summer has been a turning point in many ways. Skipping ahead several weeks from my Blessed Shock I was on the road back to school. A whole twenty-six hours on the road. For those of you who have never been on a road trip, that’s a long time – especially when you are alone travelling through many states. [Thankfully, I have wonderful friends who allowed me to stay with them letting me break up the trip into three days of driving plus plenty of hang out time!] My time in the car was spent listening to Matt Chandler of the Village Church’s Galatians series , [okay, yep, again. I needed to hear it again to actually get it. Also, I highly recommend checking it out] praying, listening to some music, and being freaked out of my min...

A continuation of the Summer 2012 series. Catch up on Part Two . My next upset came in the form of an article I read about how to Be A Blessing to Your Friends . I recommend reading it in full, but the title gives a great basic idea of the topic. I soon came across 2 Corinthians 13:14, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The verse was pointed out to me after I had read the article, but the intertwining of the two – and the fact that I heard them the same morning from different sources – got me to thinking how my application of blessing was doing. Not super well was my verdict. Paul was intentional when he wrote the final verse in Chapter 13. He meant every word to the Corinthians. How could I do less for those whom I come across, especially those I claim to love, be trying to love? I can’t. When my prayer for them is for them to be caught in the burning love of faith my consciousness of their souls beco...

A continuation of the Summer 2012 series. Catch up on Part One here . I’ll try to muddle through this posting, but it’s more complicated and detailed than most others and the things I can/am willing to share in this atmosphere are limited. This lesson came in Tennessee surrounded by high school kiddos. They were great. I loved getting to know them and spending time with them. I also loved being reminded how great college is. I am not the one who dreams of a do-over of the teen years. I had already realized a big fear when it comes to the L word talked about previously, but what I hadn’t seen was a deeply rooted anger attached to that fear. As the fear dissipated my anger became more apparent. There were people I was not only mad at, but hated. I had never thought that much about who I was mad at or what I ought to do about it. Obviously. My reaction was to seethe inside. Maybe rant a little to my close friends. But to fully-completely-totally surrender my anger/hurt to the ...

This just may end up as multiple entries; the thoughts bouncing through my brain seem to cluster by the dozen. But then again, maybe those thoughts are to remain mine and to be let out only in other areas of my life. Summer 2012 was one of stretching. Again. This is good, though I process things so much more slowly than they hit. The time at home flew by it seems with school for the first half then varied travels the second and work throughout. Lessons still managed to fit themselves in to my seemingly packed life. My prayer when I started out the summer [keep in mind this morning didn’t come until mid-July] was to grow in love. I wanted and still desire to become a woman who loves everyone all the time especially when I don’t want to. Trust me, I still have tons of work to do, but I can already see improvement in my heart. My desire to grow in love didn’t start out because I realized I lacked it – I wish I was that aware of my failings! – but rather because I was to be chaperoni...

A shocking amount may be said with a single photograph. Just as an amazing amount of freedom is to be found when such thin, defenseless scraps of paper are torn to pieces and finally laid to rest.

Life is about learning, and I love to learn. But I don’t always love life. That’s not to say I’m looking to the grave. No, rather I’m looking at Heaven. Days go by and more people I love now call it home. My paternal grandmother used to say she was lonesome for Heaven – she isn’t anymore. I am though. Not heaven, but Chris Tomlin did a great job leading worship at CHIC 2012 Heaven is something I love to think about, yet try to avoid. I could easily, have easily, spent hours daydreaming about what eternity will be like. How it will feel to sing praises to God as He sits on His throne. Imagine what a picnic with Ruth and Esther would be like. Tried to envision my heroes of the faith gathered around a campfire telling stories of how great our God is. Of just watching Jesus interact with the Father. What I picture is to me so filled with beauty there are tears blocking my vision and a cry choking my throat after having taken five seconds to write about them. “For now we see in a ...

Sensitive people get to me; in a negative way. I can’t stand the wishy-washy, back-and-forth mindset that seems to pervade their life. The “what ifs” and “if only I’d...” thoughts that consume, if slowly, entire lives, I cannot handle it. I have realized why: The mass confusion, the chaotic retracing maybes devour me regularly. Often I call it “stupid girl-brain.” And no, it isn’t always to do with a love interest, but 99 percent of the time it is about some sort of relationship (fam, friends, and love.) The stupid girl-brain has a habit of overanalyzing a situation, a sentence, a look, until every possible meaning has been taken out and looked into for accuracy – according to the stupid girl-brain. Sometimes this even includes adding expressions and words the SGB “knows” the other person meant. My baby sister would refer to this as a face palm moment and as much as I agree with her, I don’t know how to turn off my SGB. SGB: Even fries have something deep to say Even as I w...

We’re not really born with a fair shake, you know. We start out this life in teeny tiny little bodies that are completely defenseless then we grow into children who do not understand that cars whizzing by on the street are dangerous. Then onto teenagers fueled by junk food and raw emotion often ill-controlled. The twenty-something’s who think life is in the palm of their hands and their plans are the beautiful, world changing kind. Into our thirties we slow down a little bit, maybe have a family, maybe altered dreams completely, but the beauty is still there if a bit less dim. The forties and fifties, some say they’re the new twenties packed with whole new dreams about this new, wiser portion of life – the kids are growing up and that means more grown up time. Again. The sixties: grandbabies crying and the silver hair let’s opinions be heard with some respect. Seventy, eighty, ninety. The respect seems to dwindle as Let the journey rage on does ability. Dreams change to regr...

There’s a country song that talks about thanking God for unanswered prayers. I’ve always enjoyed it and looking back on my life I realize so many of my prayers were selfish and I am so thankful they did not come about as I had wished. But that’s not what I’m looking at in this point of my life. Today, well this season, I am looking at the prayers I fervently prayed that have been answered. Beyond just being answered, I even ‘got’ what I preferred. Now comes the second guessing. Should I have fought harder for option A even though I liked option B so much more? Was it because I wanted B that I let A slide by without actually attempting? Gah! This is a fun stage of life. So many choices lie before me like an endless hallway of open doors yet I know that walking through one shuts seven others. What if I don’t like the door I go through? I’ll never know if another door would have been better – not after it’s closed. I did mean it when I said I thought this was a fun stage, terrifyi...