People Are the Best Part of Life

Last Saturday, Sam, Anna, Andrew, Chad and I all spent an evening cooking dinner and watching a movie. It was good for my soul in so many ways. Here's a snapshot of our evening:

 Sam! One of the best roommates ever. With her ever-present cup of tea. We make a good pair, as I usually have an ever-present cup of coffee. Not at night, though. Don't worry. 

 We made stir-fry. Yum! Sam chopped vegetables, Andrew cooked chicken, and I stirred the fry. Note: when Andrew asked what we were going to make, I said "stir-fry," and he got nervous for a moment at the thought of eating a meal without meat.... No worries, Andrew. There will be chicken a plenty. 

Waiting for two things: the chicken to be done, and for Chad to get off work so we can eat! I would just like to point out that about four of my kitchens would fit into theirs. I love cooking at the boys' house. 

Anna set the table (again, about two times bigger than our table) With the strange fishbowl-meets-dog bowl centerpiece. 

What dinner would be complete without chocolate chip cookies? None, in my book. 

Nom Nom Nom. 

All-in-all, it was such a great night. Food, friends, great conversation, and the ridiculous amounts of laughter that seem to follow my little group of friends everywhere. 

It did more good for my soul than I can say. In the midst of a stressful, busy semester, there was a much needed rest. 

I do so love my God. He is so good. 

50k

I have a problem with commitment. I don't tend to like it. I'm all gung-ho about things right off the bat... and then things get hard and I want to run for the hills. I want to start over, because it isn't fresh and exciting and new anymore. It gets hard, and I no longer want it.

This is immature. I know. But it stems from much deeper issues, and they take time to overturn. What I did not understand was just how difficult it would be to change this. Granted, this was all Jesus and absolutely zero percent me. He's the one doing all the overturning here. But I'm the one who still has to choose to be committed at the end of the day... and that is getting harder as time goes on.

I'm running a 50k in April (8 weeks to go...) That's 31 miles of single-track dirt trail... 6 miles further than a marathon. My dad likes to run these (Ultramarathons) and I've always thought that'd be a cool thing to say I did. My dad and I also have a pretty horrible relationship that is proving harder to bridge than I originally thought (which wasn't very optimistic in the first place.) So, when he asked if I wanted to run this with him, I jumped on the opportunity. It gives us something to talk about, something to do together. It gives us the common footing we need, and as soon as he said it I knew that's where God wanted me to be.

That's all well and good. Except now I'm two months into training for this and I'm tired. I'm tired of being at home on Friday nights because I have to get up early to run on Saturdays. I'm tired of being too tired to hang out on Saturday nights because I ran all morning long. Running is my job, and it requires so much more than I realized. As the number of miles go up, I have to give up more and more things that I value to make time.

But I realized something. That pull? That voice that tells me it's okay to go over to hang out with friends tonight, because it is good for your soul and you deserve to have fun on a Friday? That's not God. Because as great as it would feel to blow off steam with my friends, that is not what matters most in the long run. God does not tell me that it's okay to go back on promises because following through requires me to give up something I want. I know the sound of his voice, and this is not it.

Investing in the people around me is good. And I need time to blow off steam with my friends. But never at the cost of a promise I made to someone else. I am realizing how often I do this. So, I thank God for teaching me to be a woman who can be taken at her word, someone who can be trusted to follow through.

This is very clearly where the Lord is leading me. And I promised to follow him. So, off to bed at 9:30 on a Friday I go. 

Take the Lead

Brandon Heath said it well when he said, "I wish you could see me now/I wish I could show you how/I'm not who I was."

The longer I love Jesus, the more often I find myself saying these words. I'm not who I was. It is amazing and wonderful and freeing to know that you are never stuck just as you are. I am constantly, always a work-in-progress. Alleluia.

Over the last month or so, God has been targeting my greatest sin: pride. He is teaching me to be soft. And it is one of the hardest and greatest things I have ever learned.

I have spent the last 20 years of my life lying. To everyone. About everything. About who I am, where I come from, even stupid things like what I can do and what I can't. It stemmed from my desire to control the only thing I felt like I could: me. But really, they were just walls I put up so no one would really know me.

God is good and faithful and merciful. He has been breaking down the walls around my heart. He has been tearing down the ruins of the girl I tried to create in order to reveal the captivating heart he created for me. It is utterly amazing.

It really started last semester, when God began softening my heart for himself. For the God who captivates me, whose face I see every day, whose voice I hear called me "Beloved," who sweeps me off my feet. Who makes my heart beat faster. Whose very name I cannot hear without smiling. With whom I am falling ever more, utterly, wholeheartedly, irrevocably in love with.

And out of that, everything else has changed. The softer my heart is for God, the softer it is for those around me. The less I find myself trying to be something I am not. The more humbly I am willing to admit that I fail, fall short, mess up. The more gracefully I am able to accept advice and encouragement, because I admit that I need every bit of it, and I do not know everything. And even the things I do know, I still need to be reminded of.

And with that, the more willing I am to nurture the femininity of my heart. To see that this heart was designed to be the companion, the helper, the lover, the follower. It is not debilitating as I once believed it would be.

It is freeing.

May it be every day, ever more so. 

If One Member Suffers...

"If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it..." 1 Corinthians 12:26

We all tend to have this idea that faith is a personal thing. And it is. But it is not only a personal thing. That's where we fall into one of Satan's cleverest traps without even realizing it.

It is true that my relationship with God through Christ is personal. It is intimate and unique and utterly, absolutely wonderful. And mine. But what it is not is only mine.

My faith is your business. Just as yours is mine.

What we fail to see is that while we all have personal relationships with God, they are all smaller pieces of one large living, breathing faith. We all share pieces of the same faith. And it is for that reason that where you succeed, I succeed. Where I fail, you fail with me.

It is our responsibility to encourage those around us towards Christ. To encourage them and challenge them and push them to know Christ more. We have been deceived into believing that one man's sin is his alone. What we fail to see, though, is that his sin belongs to him, yes. But it hurts us all.

Cain begged the infamous question "Am I my brother's keeper?"

The answer is yes, you are your brother's keeper.

Are you acting like it? 

Inked

In bible study this week, we looked at the Proverbs 31 woman. 

When they saw this, the other girls in bible study laughed at me :) 

I could say that this passage is the exception and not the rule, but it isn't. 

What can I say?

My bible is well-loved, well-read, and most of all very, very well-inked. 

When All Seems Lost, He Says...

I cannot count all the signs
You’ve passed away as mere coincidence 
And I'm running out of ways to break through
Like a lonely lover, Waiting by the ocean
Ill never give up on you

I know you wish you could see me
That’s the way it has to be
Someday you’ll understand, 
Don’t you lose your faith in me

I know you wish you could hear me 
Sometimes it’s so hard to do
But every morning sunrise says
I’m madly in love with you

Such a sweet reminder on my drive back to Nashville yesterday. 

God is good. 

Pine-ing

So, running away didn't work out quite like I wanted it to this weekend. But it turned out to be exactly what I needed, anyway. God knows better than I do... story of my life. :) 

My plan was to not have a plan. To get in my car and just drive until I didn't feel like driving anymore, and pitching my hammock and hanging out for a few days. Well, come Friday night, it was snowing and bitterly cold. Not great camping weather. Nor is my car reliable enough to take trekking in any kind of cold precipitation. 

So, I ended up at home. I didn't tell a soul that I was there. As much as I love making the rounds when I'm home, that was not what my soul needed this weekend. So I turned off my phone and took advantage of the quiet (though not at all wild) place I found myself. 

My weekend looked like this:

Homemade pasta. I've never made it before. Turns out it is really great therapy. It's just eggs and flour, so it's super easy. You end up kneading the dough like bread but without waiting for yeast. Perfect for my instant-gratification-seeking soul. 

I spent all morning yesterday kneading pasta dough, and cutting it into really thin strips. It was mindless and repetitive, and great for thinking. And then I enjoyed an entirely hand-made bowl of delicious pasta and tomato sauce. 

I spent the afternoon putting together the fire pit we got my mom for Christmas, and gathering up all the loose pine from the back yard. My mom burns the rest of the wood in the fireplace, but you can't burn pine inside because the sap can start chimney fires. So, I gathered it all up and sat next to the fire pit for a good two hours last night, reading my bible and writing in my journal. Pine gives off that really great smell, too. 

It was frigid and windy, and I was all bundled up. And after a bit the ink in my pen kept freezing, so I just sat really close to the fire and watched it burn for a few hours. Not one of my favorite wild places, but I did get to sit next to a fire. I'll take it. 

I woke up this morning and sat at the table in the dining room, drinking coffee and reading my Bible. And finally, after 24 hours of complete silence and stillness, my heart was quiet enough to have the conversation with God about the things that drove me to run away in the first place.

So, it was a good weekend. Not at all what I expected it to be, but exactly what I needed it to be. Of course. 

God is gracious and good, and my soul feels rested and rejuvenated. It isn't particularly happy at the moment, but it is ready to follow where God is leading me. To stillness, and some hardship, the terror of softening my heart to be pursued...and some really great ministry, too.

Back to Nashville I go. 

Runaway

I have what my roommate Sam and I affectionately refer to as a "gypsy spirit." I do not like to be still for very long, nor do I like to be in the same place for very long. I want to get up and see the world. I want to go places and do things and meet people. 

I have in me, constantly, the desire to drop everything and just go. Where? I never know, and it never really matters. I just want to go. 

In part, this is a really good thing. I am good at answering God's call to drop everything and follow him to the ends of the earth. What I am not good at, however, is his call to stay put. 

Because at heart I am a runner. I always have been. 

When things are hard, I have an almost overpowering desire to leave. To escape to the wild, quiet places I hear God the best and leave the rest of the world behind. I am loathe to make commitments and I hold most people at arms length so that I do not have to really, truly trust them. I leave myself an escape route, always. 

It's no surprise. I never had a home I wanted to come back to at the end of the day, so the act of traveling and roaming is home to me. 

God is clearly challenging this. He is calling me to stay put, to stick it out, to stand firm and not only love well but also to let myself be loved well in return.

 I am thankful for it, but I hate every second of it. 

So, I am running away for the weekend. 

But I'll be back. 

To the Ends of the Earth

I have never been much of a romantic. I like the idea of being swept off my feet. I like the idea of getting married and being loved by someone. But in reality? In anything more concrete than theory and the very far, distant future? It scares the crap out of me.

I would be perfectly content to kick it with Jesus and a really cool dog for the rest of my life. I have never longed for, or even really wanted a man in that picture. I have thought and been learning about what a husband should look like, but I never really applied it (more than theoretically) to myself. Deep down, I have always wanted to love Jesus, and only Jesus, for the rest of my life.

However, much to my current dismay, it seems that is not the plan. Because as content as I would be to love Jesus alone, I want it because it is easy. Because Jesus will never hurt me, and loving him doesn't require me to face the deep-rooted distrust I have for men.

And yet, God is very clearly preparing me to be pursued. He is teaching me not to run away whenever someone gets close to me. He is teaching me to allow myself to be loved, which is something I have never been able to do. He is taking that far-off possibility and bringing it into sharp, panic-inducing reality.

Who? I am not sure. When? I have absolutely no idea. Those questions, it seems, do not need to be answered just yet.

I thank God for his patience, because he has shown me a lot of grace in waiting for me to stop freaking out. He has mercifully ignored my pleas to be left alone, and has consistently brought me to my knees before him despite my attempts to run for the hills.

Because I just want to be left alone. I trust God to the ends of the earth, but that does not change the fact that this happens to be the one thing in the world that I am most afraid of. I do not like this, and I would love for it to go away. But, God is good and this apparently is too.

Whoever is being prepared to pursue me, may the grace of God be with him. He's going to need it. 

Rest and Recovery

After a week of complete and total survival mode, today was a day of rest and recovery (for my soul, anyway.)

I started my morning like this: 

Running 10 miles in a torrential downpour and a few inches of mud. It could not have made me happier. :) 

My afternoon ended like this:

My over-stuffed chair and grandma's afghan, my Kindle opened to "Desiring God," writing in my numerous journals, and french-press coffee. 

It has been a good day. 

Eno Time

On Thursday, I took my Eno (hammock) to the park down the street and laid in the sunshine, reading and writing and basking in the unseasonable warmth. I didn't realize until I got to the park and got my hammock strung up just how much I needed the silence and stillness.

God is doing some amazing things in my life. I do not even know how to explain fully. (I feel like I've been saying that for a while...) And the silence, the stillness, the willingness to just sit and be with the God who is the lover of my soul? It didn't make clearer any of the questions I have about his plan at the moment, it just made the unknown seem less important.

I have found the overarching theme of my life lately has been God telling me "Don't you know that I am bigger than all that?" to which I usually reply something along the lines of, "there's just no way..." To which he always says, and the only thing I heard quite clearly yesterday...

"Watch me."

You think I can't?... Just watch me.

Oh, my.

Big Little Lessons

As friends, we are supposed to call on each other. Friends exist so that we may call on each other for what we need. After a conversation I had a few days ago, I'm realizing just how much Satan feeds on our silence. On our belief that what we need, or what we want to ask, is unimportant.

But it is important. All of it. If it is important to me, it should be important to my brothers and sisters in Christ. For no other reason than just that: it is important to me. This makes it worth voicing.

I am terrible at this. God puts it on my heart to ask for very simple things, like prayer requests for me and my friends, but a second later I have convinced myself not to ask. Because they are busy, or it isn't a good time to ask, or they don't care, or it really isn't that important. Oh, but it is.

The purpose is not so much that they do anything for me, but that I would go to my brothers and sisters in Christ when I need them. In anything and everything, and that I would be confident that if it is important to me, it is important to them too.

God challenged me in that this week. He's had me asking for things all week, some big things and some small things like prayer requests. The more I do it, the more I realize the freedom that comes from being completely honest and open with those around me. The more I see the reason why God tells us to invite others into our lives and share our burdens, even if they are seemingly very small things.

It isn't about their reaction. I don't really need anything from them at all. They could not acknowledge me at all (though not preferable) and it would be okay. I just need to know that someone else knows my burdens.

However, for the most part, the responses to those needs and requests have been above and beyond what I expected. Oh, how my brothers and sisters come through when I just give them the chance.

It's awesome. I think I'll continue.