For Equilibrium

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,

May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,

May your gravity be lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of the moonlight restoring the earth,

May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect. 

As water takes whatever shape it is in,

So free may you be about who you become. 

As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,

May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,

May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough

To hear in the depths the laughter of God. 

John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

Loving Out of Brokenness

This semester has been rough so far.

I don't know how to explain it. I guess I can't really. I have felt disconnected, withdrawn, quiet, selfish, short-tempered. Basically they're all the walls I am so apt at putting up when I don't understand my own heart.

I'm being rubbed raw. Stripped down. Broken. Exposed. My heart is in a place of deep, intense sadness that wells from something much deeper than circumstance. A lot of it, I think, doesn't actually have anything to do with me but with whatever it is God is teaching me to break for. But I don't know. I don't know much of anything these days.

The temptation I face every day is to hide. I have always been a runner at heart, and this is no different. I do not understand what is going on in my own heart, and it makes me want to pull the covers up over my head and shut out the noise, the ache, the mystery.

Thankfully, God is bigger than my cowardice and confusion. He teaches even when I try not to learn, speaks even when I try not to listen, loves even when I am running away. Is patient even when I am trying to love him with half my heart, and keep the other half for myself.

Thanks to some insight from a friend, I know what I am: lost. But not in the sense that I don't know where I'm going. I don't care where I'm going and I don't care about the plan. I just want Jesus and to know him more fully and to share his love more and more effectively with the people around me. It's not that I don't know where I'm going next. It's that I don't know where I am right now.

It's that I'm lost in my own brokenness. Lost in nursing an aching heart that breaks for something I'm not aware of. I'm lost and wandering, because I don't understand a single thing about my own heart at the moment. And yet, there is no escaping it.

What I do know is that God is good. That he loves me more than anything, and that there is a good reason that I am where I am at the moment. And that if my instinct is to run away, then what I should probably do is walk closer. That tends to be the way it works. If I am afraid, do it. If it makes my heart beat faster at the thought of it and I am instantly tempted to walk away or make excuses, then say yes and do it anyway.

What I do know is that beneath it all is my ever-present desire to love Jesus and love people. To know Jesus, and to know people. And I am comforted by God's promise that he will never stop doing good for me, and that he is stripping away the things that keep me from Jesus and from people. So, I may not understand it, and I may be broken for reasons I don't understand, but I thank God for it. He is doing me more good and showing me more of himself than I know.

I realized in class today that what my heart longs for is comfort. Because my heart is uncomfortable, and it longs to be otherwise. But that's a lie. Because all the comfort in the world won't satisfy. And the amazing thing about God is that he can rub your very soul raw, and still overwhelm you with peace and comfort.

And I feel an invitation in my soul at that. To intentionally leave comfort, to walk away from familiarity and convenience. To let the brokenness I don't understand encourage me to lay down my life for the people God has given me such a heart for. Because I am not the only one in the world who is broken for reasons unknown. I feel that stirring in my heart, to stop hiding and let this brokenness fuel actions and love.

Oh. I get it now.

This brokenness is not mine. It's a gift. To teach me to step beyond my own white picket fence and love well, love radically, love unexpectedly. And probably a hundred other things I don't know about just yet. But the point is, my humanity wants to shut out everything until I can shut up the brokenness enough to ignore it. But God's been inviting me to step towards it, step into it. He's inviting me to experience the depth of Himself found in loving out of a place of deep, Godly brokenness.

God is so good.  

Deutsch, oder Alemán?

So...

I've been learning German. I love it. It's so much fun, and I just love learning languages. It's awesome, and is such a blessing to me.

However...

I am a Spanish major. Meaning, I speak Spanish decently well. So, en mi mente, in my mind, there are two categories. Native language, and foreign language. And all foreign language is Spanish, because that's the only foreign language that I know. Correction, was the only foreign language I knew.

So most of the time, if you speak to me in a language that isn't English, my brain automatically goes to Spanish. But that doesn't exactly apply when you're sitting in German class. So, I end up doing a lot of translating from Spanish to English to German. It gets a little confusing. But I've managed to keep all the various languages in their proper places so far.

The other day my teacher, Regine, asked me a very simple question that I totally knew the answer to. Wie Uhr is est? What time is it? As she pointed to the time she had written on the board: 14:30. So, 2:30. I thought, "Awesome! I know this."

"Dos y media," I said, totally confident.

Right answer. Wrong language. And I could not, for the life of me, remember the answer in German. It's "Halb drei," in case you were wondering. But what makes it even funnier is, I couldn't even remember in English how to further explain why I was speaking Spanish. My brain just kept thinking in Spanish, and there was no changing it.

Lesson learned today? Only one language happens at a time. And apparently, I do not have control over which language that is. It's like for every situation a little war is waged in my brain, and one language always slaughters the other two. There's no switching once a victor has won... That language  fought valiantly and wields all control. Like a dictator. The other two languages are left lying in a bloody heap on the floor, never to rise again... Until the next war is waged, anyway.

I just have to hope that the victorious language corresponds to the language of the situation I find myself in. If not? Well... Maybe everyone else should learn English, German and Spanish too. Just to be on the safe side.

No Thanks

I have a philosophy in life: If there isn't a good reason to say "no," then you should say "yes."

Whether you agree or not, I tend to live my life this way anyway. I find myself saying, "why not?" a lot. And it leads to a lot of adventures. Some very unexpected. I love it.

I realized the one exception to this rule, though: relationships.

What made me realize this? I got asked out on a date last week.

Long story short, I was walking back from German class with a new found friend, talking about life and school, when he asks if I want to go out sometime. My first thought was, "I don't know you, and that wasn't very specific." But, I thought, give the guy a chance. Maybe he's just nervous. Who knows. Give 'em a shot. So I said sure, and gave him my phone number. My expectations were pretty much non-existent, however. And rightly so.

We have class together almost every day (German happens every day but Thursday, and we also have photography together twice a week.) So, I walk into German the next day and... nothing. He says nothing to me about asking me out the day before. I walk into photography later that night, where we sit right next to each other, and still nothing.

I had to laugh. I hadn't expected much in the first place, but I sometimes forget how "uncool" it is to be intentional. How a guy will wait a few days before asking a girl out so she doesn't think he's pushy or too interested. What a load of crap.

But, that's exactly what happened. I finally get a text three days later, asking if I'm busy tonight. I was alone, driving home to Saint Louis, and I literally laughed out loud. My response was something along the lines of "No thanks," and "You might not want to wait so long next time."

My boss thinks I'm crazy. Actually, her response when I told her this was, "Geez Ally. It's going to take an incredible guy to get you to say yes."

Well yeah it is. And I'm not sorry. I have no desire to be discouraging or anything, but I also won't sugarcoat or say yes when I am not being pursued the way I, as a daughter of God, should be. Which totally does not include being half-pursued and then ignored for three days :)

Mark Driscoll calls it Godly rudeness. That it's a good thing, because we women tend to be doors. We let everyone through who comes along and we let them into our lives and hearts. We are open to everyone. I've been there. I know what it feels like to be a door. You don't realize it when you're in the middle of it, but it sucks the life out of you. And makes it hard to realize just how good men can be, and just how you are supposed to be treated.

And then there are the women who are walls. You say no. With Godly rudeness. To everyone. Until the Lord tells you to say yes. I am learning to be a wall. But the big difference being, I'm learning to be a wall who is willing to say yes should God say so. Not a wall who blindly says no out of fear, but one who has pursued God's will and has found that the answer is still no.

That's a process. As always. But until I hear otherwise, the answer is still no.

For the sermon on this, that I think every girl (and guy, for that matter) should hear, check it out here: http://marshill.com/media/the-peasant-princess/i-was-a-wall