To Know God

The old man stopped by last night.

He told me to relax.
He told me to sleep.

"Everything will be easier in the morning," he told me.

But I slept through my alarm.

I can still hear his voice, telling me that what I desire isn't different than anyone else I know. "You only want what all others have. What could be so bad about that?"

But the voice sounds like a dark murmur today--the old man wants to be the new me, but I know better.

What is wanting?
What is having?
What is living?

To know God.
To know God.
To know God.

Shoulda Been Writing

I'm in the holiday spirit.
Trying to make the season bright.

I've got an essay due in about 17 hours and I'm going to go for a run before I get involved in it.

If I were smart, I would skip working out today and focus on my school work. But I get so lazy and sloppy and tired if I don't work out, and I have no idea where or how that would hit me...or when. So I'm going for a simple three or four mile run. What I hate about my work ethic this semester is that I can't find it. It's like that thing I packed up in a box last January and moved all the way to Bowling Green and never unpacked. Those things. {I actually have a stack of about ten boxes full of miscellaneous items that were only of use to me in my past life as an office robot}

I've got my birthday party tomorrow night & I couldn't be happier. Happy friends and maybe happy music and definitely happy sweets like cookies and cupcakes. All those things add up into one sweet happy me, hopefully.

There's a lot to be said for rounding the corner on another birthday. A lot of things I haven't figured out yet. But, like mildew on a toilet, there's a lot that's been growing undercover over time that I totally forget about. I ran into a girl at school who practically rained down the joy of Christ on me today while I ate my lunch. She says that she doesn't necessarily always make a perfect "disciple," but her enthusiasm was totally contagious and gave me a good reminder that I need to keep my heart focused on loving God.

I could sit here and kill time until my 17 hours turns into 2 or 3 {which is how I handled the last essay}. I'm going to play this one smart and go away from this den of sin {read: house of sleep & TV temptation}, and I already made sure that I had finished season one of my latest TV show fetish before the paper would be due so that I wouldn't be tempted to throw in the essay towel and sit on my recliner watching TV. Yeah, that's what I was doing all last week instead of my homework...I was preparing myself to be emotionally and TValistically free to do my paper tonight. Some might call it procrastination or distraction, but we both know it was preparation. One man's procrastination today is another man's preparation for hard work tomorrow.

There's a verse in the New Testament that says "Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts." Sometimes you've got to tie your own hands behind your back if you're too weak to do what you need to do. If I stay at home to do my essay, I'll do everything except my essay. {I thought I was past this type of negligent, weak-willed, undisciplined crap, too, don't worry}. So if I plan to stay at home anyway, knowing that this place distracts me, I'm basically planning on not doing my essay. And as much as I'd like to mess up my grades in the last two weeks of school....yeah. Nope.

If I could do anything tonight, and not have to do what I have to do, I would get dressed up in a black dress that I don't even own with a good pair of heels and a lot of hairspray and perfume and I would be out at dinner at some cute little restaurant. Then I would go back to some house that looks a bit like the interior of Restoration Hardware and crash in my UGG boots and lots of layers on a giant, deep couch to watch romantic comedies.

Do you see what's happening to me lately? I'm locked in a glass case of fantasy.
Don't get me out, though.
At least not until the semester is over.

Wish List

One last thing.
Christmas shopping has been funny this year. I keep seeing all these things that I want and am not buying. Maybe I used to buy more things for myself more often. Yes, I know I did. But I also wanted different things.

I used to want really fancy, useless things. Now I have all these needs.

Like...

I need these because walking to and from school in the icy weather is ridiculous in Tom's cloth shoes, as I learned today:


I need this for the same reason as the boots; too too cold:


I want this, Britt understands:


I want something like this:


I'd like to wake up on my birthday to find a drawer full of new socks and underwear and a new scarf. I'd like to have a new bottle of perfume and a fresh selection of pajamas to wear. I'd love to have a new, warm blanket.

New eyeliner I need. New lipgloss. New blush. More cotton balls. More nail files. More Starbucks. More cupcakes. More chocolate soy milk. More eggs.

There's really no end once you start listing it, right...

Ahhhh, that was fun, though.

Old Birthday Reminiscing

My birthday is almost here again. How weird.

Reading through my old blog from years past, I really liked one of the birthday posts I cam across, from two years ago. If you were reading then you may remember {I remember those days as my brilliant, witty days, before the onslaught of my boring blogger personality this spring}. I hope that some of these things are more true and that some are less:

"So today is my 29th birthday.
And I'm looking over my old journals, to see who I was last year, and the year before. I'm pretty much nothing like who I was a year ago. How scary is that?

Sometimes I want to lay on the brakes and shout, "NOOOOOO, STOP!!!!" Just because the speed of change is rocking my boat and tearing at the fabric of my very life.


But I don't. I just go to sleep, wake up, make a few commentaries and deal with it.
Am I doing the best job?
Gosh, I don't know.
I wish I wouldn't be self-destructive, that's something new that I'm coping with. I let things fall apart, just to watch the glass break. I play the role of outside observer in my own life sometimes, and it could possibly ruin me if I let it. I hate that.

But I see beauty.
And goodness.
I recognize an ambling butterfly for what it is, and I am delighted by warm breezes.

I have virtue.

My heart is not abolished within me.

It lives and is growing.
Fast and quietly.

My new favorite quote is from Rainer Maria Rilke, from the book that Andrea gave me, "Letters to a Young Poet." He says in one of his letters:
Be patient and without resentment.

How great is that. Simple, refined and monumental. It is the best advice to start a new year with.

Be patient.
And without resentment."

Oh Past & Love

I just got a love blast from the past.
Someone I adored. How I adored him so pointlessly. Sigh.
I'm sure he really cared for me, in one of those ways that didn't mean anything but he thought was still supposed to mean something to me.

In a way, it's hard to remember hoping for something to happen with him. I was naive about him and so fruitlessly optimistic. There was what I believed was going to happen between us, and there was what I believed had already happened to us and when nothing came of it all, I severed my connection to fruitless optimism once and for all.

I suppose a lot of things have changed since then. In those days I was like low-hanging fruit, easy to grab and take. There were so many things I wanted and so many dreams that I thought I had no way of achieving on my own. I was waiting for someone to come along and change all that, and just about any person could have convinced me that their dreams needed my partnership to make them come true. When you don't have any plans of your own, it doesn't take much for someone to convince you to go with them wherever they are going.

These days, everything I want is in the palm of my hand and I don't need anyone else to ride in and save me from living the dream, so the stakes are a lot higher. Also, I used to work hard for men; I'd be where they wanted me to be and I'd wear what they wanted me to wear and I'd be who they wanted me to be. But I'm not a 25 year old girl and I don't work hard for men anymore.

I suppose I wish I knew about all this at 18 or 21 (or even 27). That a good man doesn't run you around the tree and make you do all the work, just so he can say he has you on his leash. That the best men, and they are out there, are the ones confident enough in themselves that when you're around them, you forget about what's wrong with relationships and you feel more like a woman than you've ever felt before.

I remember being young. And I remember wanting to be someone's ideal; wanting to do all the things that an ideal woman would do and wanting to be all the things that an ideal woman would be. I've found over the years that the only women that men think should be ideal are the ones in the Victoria Secret magazines, and almost any other woman can win the heart of a man by humor and a little empathy. Men are simple creatures, really, which I like. They don't like being criticized or mocked. They like to be flirted with. They don't know how to act properly around women and they're absolute fools about the women they like. I wish I would have known these things when I was young enough to want to win the heart of men.

Now, I'm not sure what I want from love. Not enough, probably. I'm not interested in winning the hearts as much as the minds of men. The rest is up to them.

A Good Start to December

As I was reading the Psalms for the day a minute ago, Psalm 61 grabbed me, so I'll put part of it here for you:

"1 From the end of the earth I will cry to You,
When my heart is overwhelmed;
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.
3 For You have been a shelter for me,
A strong tower from the enemy.
4 I will abide in Your tabernacle forever;
I will trust in the shelter of Your wings. Selah
5 For You, O God, have heard my vows;
You have given me the heritage of those who fear Your name. "

This is exactly how I feel about my relationship with God--about my journey so far.

He has been the rock that is higher than I am, when I feel overwhelmed.

He has been my tower of defense that I run to.

He has been my shelter during storms.

Changes and Chances

There is so much life left to live.

There is something hopeful in that. Something optimistic.

Sometimes I feel like I've lived and died and lived and died a thousand lives. I feel like I'm an old wineskin, and yet I'm still here, still being recreated into something newer and incomprehensible to all I've been. It's difficult enough to accept the changes and chances of this life. Without having to keep adjusting your dreams and re-analyzing your situation again and again. And no matter how prepared I feel, sometimes the plainness of life and the complete and utter lack of influence I wield over it can be shocking. I hate to feel powerless.

When the going gets tough, it seems easier to take whatever comes at me and turn it this way and that until it fits into everything that I've already seen and felt and understood. It's much harder to take a new thing and say to myself, "This, this thing...it's a new thing. It's something I've never felt, never known. I can't respond in the typical ways. It's something I don't understand."

It's hard to look at my world with fresh eyes and see it for it's problems and it's beauty. It's hard to ask that of myself every single day.

I guess that's the difference between reacting to life and responding to it. Or to living it.

My roommate has a poster in her room that says something like:

The goal of life is not to find yourself.
The goal is to create yourself.

I know there are better, more spiritual ways to say something like that that don't ruffle our theological feathers. Yet I like what it's getting at. We can't wait for things to come at us and then look back and define our lives according to what we let happen to us. We have to dream and have a vision for our lives, and we have to pursue it with God as the master architect beside us. We cannot let ourselves become just anything, considering our lives were bought with real blood for something very specific and very personal. We're not just statistics.

I've been really touched by some of the gospel stories out of Luke this past week. We can choose who we will be--the throng of people that stood around Jesus listening to his weird parables and watching miraculous things happening--or the leper who came to Jesus from the crowd and said, "If you are willing, you can make me clean." I don't know why those words mean so much to me. But what a thing, to want something different for yourself that bad. And to go get it.

There really is more to life than changes and chances.