For someone who’s been to the other end of the planet and back, and someone who has transcended the mundane for something heavenly, I do not show significant evidence of a changed person.

In 2007, my life changed dramatically and now only two years later, I can barely see straight from frustration. Every moment seems like a tearful moment of regret and loss and I know deep down inside this is not what God intended. Or maybe I am in the exact place he wants me to be. Maybe he wants to inspire again, to change again, to renew.

It’s a funny thing, you know – moving to a new place, new climate, new job, new church. I had forgotten how hard it is to be alone, mostly because I’ve never been alone like this. I thought I’d like it for a little while. Well, my time line for “little while” is like two weeks, not two months. I don’t want it to turn into two years either. I mean, every day I think, “I can’t do another week of this…how do I get out of this rut again? Where can I go?” Then I realize I don’t know anyone, and the people I used to know have moved on with their lives. I suppose what I should have learned in college is that people don’t stay friends after college. College is like a life away and somehow we can’t keep hold of those people and friends.

My problem is not that I didn’t have a great experience, it is that I cannot keep living as if it were yesterday. The purpose of those experiences and opportunities were for that moment in time, not for now, save for growth in wisdom. I have a hard time letting it all go – feels like a waste of all my time just to end up where I am right now – alone and hurting.

I’m not writing this to heal – I feel like every day I accept my condition but am still devastated at the depth at which I depend on other people for happiness. But you see Christ is my joy – my only hope. If I didn’t have him I would truly be lost – not just eternity, but now. I know that life is a gift and somehow I will get through this as well. God’s purpose for me is still unclear but I want to live to please him. I finally want that with all my heart. All my soul. Everything within me.

Whatever rut life’s got you in, turn to Jesus – receive His good counsel and steady hand. Weigh into Him as if it were for your life! Because it is and this is the battle for the lonely. The bruised. The forgotten. Afraid. He is everything you need at every moment in every minute of every day. Praise Him!

I wrote a song today. Actually I wrote three. Should I even try to take credit for it? I mean, when you are listening to a band over and over, they are bound to affect you musically! I think I was primarily influenced by an awesome band called Jackson Waters and the three songs are in the key of E minor. Weird I know, but the sound was awesome! I just kept jamming on the upright Yamaha in the Music Department. I’ve got to say it is one of the best feelings ever – when the chords are right, your heart is solid and pounding fiercely, and all your emotions are expressed in one fell swoop!

The hardest part about writing music right now is that I have to be extra vulnerable about my lyrics and what is really producing the sound. What if people hate it? or really like it? What if I’m not good enough to make it as an artist, or what if I am? Both conditions scare and excite me and I just want to maintain the feeling I get when I write. It’s like I have a live connection with God as I’m inspired to play and sing.

It’s a bit funny that since I was young, I fell asleep to the sound of my own voice. I’d give some oration or sing a song or speak in foreign accent. I still have that affect on myself. Signs of a loner, I know. But that’s okay. When I pray, I hear myself, and sometimes just my voice reaching up to God consoles me. That in itself is amazing and lovely.

I am feeling a bit of nostalgia today, this gloomy and rainy day. I think most people reminisce on days like this because their head and their heart is relaxed enough to handle it.

Last night I could smell Sydney everywhere. I could smell the trains and the buses and the city streets. I enjoyed the smell and feel, but it took me back in time, maybe a little further than Australia, to a time in High School when I believed in myself and I dreamed the world would be mine. I don’t know exactly what I thought would happen. Back then, I think I wanted to change the world. I wanted to make my imprint on society and I wanted to impact people’s lives wherever I went.

To some drawn out consideration, I have done that. I have talked to tons of people and loved people, people I would never have met unless God intervened. But deep down I’ve always thought I could have been more of a literary buff, someone who knew poetry, novels, and theology. It hasn’t turned out that way, huh? My heart has suffered a huge attack – I cannot do the things I used to think I could. In high school, I felt like a hero, like I had come out of something dark and oppressive to rise above the world. I graduated with three academic awards, top 2% of my class and an awesome GPA. I won 3 gold awards for Tower Building and I had spent my years the way I wanted to.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to compose and orchestrate. But I suppose my abilities have thwarted it. I could still fight right? I could still rise above like I did in high school. Maybe. I don’t believe the load of crap I used to. But then I watch characters like Peyton and Lucas on One Tree Hill, or hear music by Jackson Waters and other new bands making it in real life and I want to believe. I want to believe that there is so much more to success than school work and failed attempts at writing research papers. I want to believe there is something deeper to my soul, to my existence. Then inspiration rises within me and I want change. I want to move mountains and I know, truly, that I cannot do it the way I am. I cannot even do it. Not on my own or for selfish motivations.

I want to be a part of something huge.

I know its been a long time since I’ve written. I kinda feel like I’m making a confession here, guilty because I haven’t really shared or felt anything eccentric lately. I think that is what I miss most about Marist. I was always inspired by good and bad events in my life and my mood followed suit in a rollercoaster fashion. Most of those trials or blessings were trivial but God had his purpose for them to lead me closer to a greater understanding of him. I can’t claim that I know him as well as some inspired Christians or “spiritual” Christians.

However, I have learned some very important things about myself and about the experience I had in the first two years of college. One: I think too highly of myself and I really need to teach myself to be humble. Two: I don’t know many things although I seem to be good at doing many things. Three: I am one of those people who needs people around her all the time. I need relationships and people who care about me. Four: I like to hide in my mind and forget that as I live and breathe I am forgetting to communicate to people how I feel or what irks me. I just assume they can read my mind or understand where I am coming from. I was watching a soap opera and I realized what I can learn from it aside from foolish storylines and terrible acting. The characters behave and speak as if their egos aren’t at stake in every confrontation or conflict. They live without fear of depreciation and exclusion. I live every day checking out what others think about me because I want them to like me. My mom is different, but then again she isn’t trying to have relationships or talk to people other than family. Five: I miss elementary school days when we lived like we were tough and never let anyone spoil our good name. We didn’t stand for nonsense or meanness. Six: We have become wusses. We cry too often like its the end of the world. We forget who is our King. We are so quick to blame someone for mistakes or imperfections we have in us and quick to say we are perfect. But we can’t even suck up difficult decisions or do the right thing in circumstances that work against us.

Seven: Everything my parents said was true.

Enough said. Everything beyond this has been covered in Ecclesiastes: nothing is new under the sun and our toil for anything new is meaningless because we find all meaning in the creation of the world, everything that was started by God. Nothing that has been done was done without him, and our desire to be our own God is in vain because we cannot create anything new but make something out of what we have.

Praise God and bless his holy name. He is wonderful, magical, lovely, and worthy of all glory and honor.

Amen.

ps.
I miss this blog. I shall return and write again soon.
Farewell for now.
Seven:

I am very antsy today. Yesterday too. I keep feeling like the world is not my home and that I’m just a stranger. Everywhere I turn, I’m greeted by variant joy and smiles that come from temporary pleasures of the earth. My conflicting nature, where my heart doesn’t listen to my soul, is probably the worst turmoil one can endure. It definitely sucks to be me right now. Here I am living this “Christian” life in a christian culture, but not wanting at the same time to be hypocritical…being the super-Christian that’s fake and trying to have a relationship with God by doing all this stuff rather than dwelling with Him.

This is what I’ve been taught throughout my years in Church:
1. No one should say anything that may stir other people to do better, because its been tried before and it doesn’t work. People want to do what they want to Do.
2. Church is a place of unending complacency. Should we make the effort to actually start living by grace and faith, we might actually start doing the real work Christ asked us to rather than our made up version of Christianity. Besides, our Church is just a place to criticize people if they did attempt to try anything new. But what are we trying for? We now do things, work for the kingdom of God’s people rather than for God. We do sunday school because other people want us to…I don’t know which is worst, working so people will praise you or not doing anything even if they curse you.
3. God is NOT a spirit-being. He couldn’t possibly be in several places at once. We attend Church and talk about God like the kid who just did his homework that very morning in homeroom. Funny isn’t it? Our culture that has made Christianity comfortable? I start thinking everytime I experience a high in my relationship with God, how great I am, when a relationship with God isn’t supposed to have that affect on us.
4. I could go on forever about how I hate how our form of Christianity has tainted my view so that I have no clue as to what the Apostle’s actually did together. They were brothers and sisters in Christ. I feel more connected, more loving and loved by my CCF group than by any other. Why is that? Is it because sometimes at the right moments we are there for each other? Is it because by God’s grace we overlook our brethren’s faults and mistakes as Christ does and choose to love especially when its difficult? Perhaps. Perhaps Peter and Paul weren’t the glorious model of friendship but they were the greatest examples of the combination of enlightenment, genius and love. If I could but attain that, not by purposely making myself great, but by submitting myself to the true purpose of the Gospel, my life will have been lived well. Christ would be pleased.

My heart and hands directed upward…I still long for home. Bring my home, Jesus.

Seated among angels…

There are only three moments in my life I can name where I felt like I was one of the few people gifted to dwell among angels. Reading Donald Miller to Lyzz as she drove 7 hours through the east coast of the US, reading Donald Miller period, and reading anything written by my roommate Jess. If these people never meet in this lifetime, the one thing they have in common besides changing my life, is that they get their point across. Their determined to change the world without thinking too highly of themselves. Those are the most successful types.

My roommate has a way of captivating you with a part of her you had never seen. She amazes you because she doesn’t give a hoot who’s watching her, and she wants so desperately to be this entity, this person she speaks of, I can’t help but wonder if she hasn’t subtly stumbled upon the woman she’s been searching for all her life. The truth is we’re all wandering around, looking for meaning, wondering if God ever hears our cries for redemption and the truth is he Does. But he speaks in ways, in a romantic language that all can understand, the spirit. My spirit moves when someone steps out on faith to live a life that is more fulfilling than the life they once knew.

I wanted to leave my false religion of Christian and seek God in humble spirituality. But I had no clue, what was unknown God has made known to me. What I didn’t have, he has graciously given. My roommate and I are inseperable. We understand each other. We don’t talk about what we like, we share it, we love it, and I love her to death! God blessed me with a friend for life that has helped me know that I will be okay for the rest of the years here at Marist. i thought all my close friends, the ones who wanted to know the real me were leaving…I won’t name names, but Jess gave me hope that I won’t lose their friendships nor hers. Amazing is all I can conjure up to call her becuase anything more or less would take away from the wonder I have about her.

Lyzz has shown me that it doesn’t take a lifetime to grow bonds with people forever. God definitely wanted me to meet her. I know this. If ever I had been blessed it was being around her during the big break trip. When I met her, she reminded me of my cousin Lizzy. They have the same personality almost. My cousin and I had experience a horrible distance as of late, but hanging with Lyzz taught me that I was meant to have a friend named Elizabeth. God still filled that part of me, in a different person. He helped mend that part of me and HE made me whole.

His kind of filling, his love doesn’t ever fail, and I know it deep down in my spirit how much he loves me and loves you. Never, ever let anything get between you and God. If it does, its your own fault: b/c not even the devil, angels or demons could seperate us from the love of God. NOTHING!

April 1

What happens to a person when they haven’t been challenged in a very long time? How long does it take for talent and skill to build? Then how much shorter a time before it is all lost? My friend was playing a solo today and this great conductor, with little condescendence and much encouragement guided her to her part. She fumbled profusely, and upon the third time of its occurrence I realized that she has not been challenged in our band. I have not been challenged. I never practice and come in expecting to play magnificiently. How audacious my expectiations. I realized while I sat there in that brief moment, seeing for the first time that doing everything to our best is always admirable but few take up the task and succeed well. We need time and energy to do that which brings us most pleasure besides fully doing all the things we despise.

And deep down, I want to play every instrument known to man, but that’s unrealistic. Isn’t it?

But somewhere, this feeling goes so much deeper. There is a chasm between what I want and what I can truly have. Even if I believe that God can bring me into a situation or position to have my unimaginable desires, the pain of getting there frightens me. The pain I have suffered these past few months have been the epitome of all grief. For once, the realization has hit me: earth was always meant to foster change and growth, but a relationship with God doesn’t. He never leaves you or forsakes you, though you may feel it in your soul. I want to be so many things that I am not, not for selfish gain, but for true self-actualization…except, i don’t know how to get there. I’m not motivated to replace God in my life and try to do it on my own. I have to wait on his timing otherwise the heartache will be unbearable…as I leave my true love for a fancy.

This leaves me in a circular argument. I’m going nowhere fast and I can’t take it anymore. So I’ll have to jump. Not off a cliff, but from my balcony of contentment and safety and into the wild (a world unexplored by those who cower to the great unknown).

Where does your heart lead you? follow it, one step at a time, and never run ahead of the Spirit.

Grateful…old enough now to realize.

I was driving home in 1996 Red Honda Accord. I had left it on the road in front of church as I attended a Core Youth Specialties conference in Elmhurst, New York. That morning as I sat in my room about to leave for church, I began to realize this great thing, this gift if you may call it, that God had personally delivered. It was magically delivered, and I believe I have every right to boast in this. My parents were THE GREATEST thing God gave me. It’s so sad that I had to grow up first to appreciate their love and their unique wisdom. I have learned to be a young woman of God from my mother, I have learned to forgive from the reconciliation of my parents two years ago. I have forgiven myself for the many indiscretions of my adolescent years and God has blessed me four-fold. My mom didn’t yell at me for being so busy, but she did encouragement me to stay the night and go back to school in the morning. Mom paid for a nice dinner with me, and Dad filled my gas tank. The two don’t usually happen together or often, but they happened today for me. For me. I can’t help but speak without sounding too overwhelmed. I am. I am blessed and God has spoken truth into my life so that I can speak life into the lives of people just by being who I am. I praise God who is Lord of Heaven and Earth. All glory and honor to him.

Half-Priced:

When you try to live in the world, everything is on sale for %50 off. But God, in His glory and wonder, came down and paid the full price for each and every one of us.

I tried sold my PS2 a while ago, but as I was looking for a good merchant to buy my system from me, I was stumped by the fact that no one would pay anything higher than $50 bucks for it plus all of my three games. I was a little annoyed seeing as I had spent over $200 on it. I could have bought an ipod or something for my pc, but I bought this piece of crap not because I needed it to validate me but I thought it would bring other people to validate me. It definitely did not. No one noticed or cared. So when I sold it back, I felt like I had lost two things… my pride and my value.

The bottom line is that God needs to tell me who I am, otherwise I’ll go around begging for someone else to fill me up. The world will say I’m not beautiful, and that I’m short, and fat, and whatever. Trust me. I know this is what they would say, because I am guilty of having that mindset. They lied to me and stole years I can’t gain back.

I realized that my little silent fits…when I don’t speak at all to anyone…is my way of saying I need attention. I’m so averted to obnoxious outward displays for attention, I do the extreme opposite and never ask for it. Coming out of that shell isn’t easy, but the H.S. is bringing it to mind. He really is blessing me in my relationships with my housemates and many other people, which is great. I know it wasn’t by my power at all. But somehow, my flesh wants more. It wants to bring me back to that mindset of “I need people to tell me who I am” even when seconds before I was content in God. Amazing, this Devil is. So cunning and deceptive. But see…Jesus prays for us. He knows what we are tempted with and He is gracious and just. I love him. No, I really do.

I thank Him for changing my perspective and I trust that I am safe in his arms tonight. He’s the only being that loves me for my true value: that I am created and encompassed by the Living God of Heaven and Earth. Amen!