My Words Too

I plead for adventure, for the active and unknown. I ask to see beauty and find a deeper appreciation of what this world has to offer. But more often than not the most joyful moments I can remember involve no need of grand expeditions into unknown places, no picture perfect moments of unprecedented majesty, they are not once in a lifetime experiences with no repeat button, but rather the exchange of words on any given day. Funny thing is, I never know what it is I want to say until long after I start saying it, I am in general a pretty quiet person, and I realized sometime in the last year that small talk is not something I’m proficient at. I can’t convey my opinion on a subject in a two to five minuet conversation, and knowing what question to ask in order to keep a discussion alive is a rare thing for me.

And then there are those moments, when a conversation is fully alive and two people are willing to discuss life in all its beauty or lack there of. These moments when I would consider myself truly blessed to do nothing more than spend the day talking. More than likely you know the type of conversation I’m referring to. Those full days spent in a café with a friend, the two and three am but wouldn’t dream of going to sleep nights, the people must think were crazy to be sitting in my car hours, or perhaps this walk was not long enough thoughts. For me these are the experiences that truly build a friendship, the ones that make life worthwhile, the moments when I learn to let my guard down and process through what’s really happening in my life, or what seems to be missing from it.

And then I realize it’s these conversations that I should be experiencing with God on a daily basis. The message this morning at church was about prayer, about God knowing what it is we need but leaving it in our hands to ask for it. We may wonder why it is He does this, why He wants so desperately for us to be a part of getting Him involved, and I think maybe, He likes the conversation too. I’ve heard it said before, the one difference between Christianity and all other religions is the relationship we are given the opportunity to experience with a living God. It’s this relationship that was broken in the garden and restored through the cross, it’s this relationship we experience when we pray, it’s this relationship that allows God to move in our lives, and it is this relationship that we must take the time to build, the one that God longs for us to be a part of, the one that needs my words too.

                                       

Acknowledgement

I’m thinking about a lot of different stuff  today; still obsessing over my book but also thinking about church this morning, about worship and what I’ve been doing or not doing over the past weeks. Last week as I’ve admitted already I was a bit consumed with the Hunger Games, I don’t deny it or really even regret it but I also feel slightly empty without it to hold me anymore and that’s where I find my problem, my misguided worship as it were. Its not that the books are evil or me taking the time to read them was a bad thing it’s more like my act of ignoring God, making other things a bigger priority which was not cool.

One of my devotions last week was about sharing your life with God, in a sense making Him a part of the things you love, like discussing those things with Him, making Him a part of everything you do because He is already there sharing those moments with you even if you never acknowledge Him, so why not acknowledge Him? And that’s where I’ve found myself right now, that point of acknowledgement. I want desperately to be a girl so caught up in God that His presence is evident to me and those around me without the need to constantly be striving for it. I want the way I live and breathe and move to be directed by His presence and free from pride and religion, I want to be able to do the things I love, like get lost in a book without separating those things from my relationship with God because that relationship, His presence is connected to every breathe that I breath and every move that I make, He makes me who I am.
 

I don’t fully understand how to start this process, become that girl. I imagine it will be something like letting go of what I think is mine. I’ve heard it said before God is a gentleman and will never force Himself on you, I believe this to be true and the reason I need to start changing stuff up, start giving God the go ahead to be involved in every aspect of my life, because even though it is already His and I could never keep Him out of anything if I tried, He will also never force Himself into anything I might claim as my own, and that’s just it, I claim many, many things as mine. Maybe it’s this culture, or the way I was raised, perhaps it’s my personality, or simply human nature as a result of sin, I can really say and I don’t really need to know, after all the reason is not a solution but just another thing to let go of. So today my perspective would be something like, if I ever want anything in my life to be of true value I will need to let God claim it as His own first, because sharing with God is far more rewarding than obsessing by yourself.

The Pages of my Books

So for the past week I’ve been sucked into the Hunger Games trend and I spent pretty much every unscheduled free moment I had in the pages of these books. I finished Mockingjay just last night and now find myself in a small state of unrest, being happy to have found the end of the story and see it resolved but also quite sad that there is no more story left to read. It seems silly when I really think about it, that I could be so attached to these characters and this story I’m now obsessing over it so much that I wish it would come up in every conversation I take part in, and if I thought anyone reading this blog might want to share my obsession for a moment I would actually consider writing my own sort of book report on the matter, but alas that is not my plan (at least not today). That is however my perspective at the moment, which is what I try to focus this blog on, really processing my life, my thoughts and acknowledging how it is I see the world.

So what is it I see through the pages of my books? I could talk about the characters, I could talk about the quality of the authors writing, or perhaps make reference to my current obsession and this trend as a whole but instead I’ll widen the subject and simply say I love to read. There was a reason I made reading part of my list for this year, it always makes me think, it can make me question the way I live my life, and yes it definitely entertains me. I truly believe that a book if read at a certain moment in someone’s life, with just the right amount of openness to the story can change said reader forever. For some stories these changes can be quite large, for others rather small and for some when things don’t line up just so, whether it be the stories themselves or other circumstances’ at the time may have no effect in the least.

It is this theory of mine perhaps that draws me to reading, and then obsessing over what lies within the pages I have consumed. It is becoming a part of this theory that leads me to digging deeper into the hearts of these characters I somehow love, to find whatever it is I can learn from them almost as if they were real people. Okay so I don’t know if this current story will in fact change me in some grand way. I imagine, maybe if I wanted it to it could or possibly it already has and I just can’t see it yet. Whatever the case may be, big changes or small ones, one thing has indeed already came to my mind, if I take nothing else from the story, the process of reading it has in fact reminded me of how much I love to read and then almost more importantly why I desire that passion to be an unmistakable part of who I am.             

24 Goals for my 24th Year

Tomorrow is a new year, not by any normal calendar of course but for me personally because tomorrow marks for me the anniversary of the day I entered this world. Yes you guessed it tomorrow is my birthday. This weekend has already been awesome like my birthday has started early and birthdays always fall into that category of moments in the year we tend to evaluate our lives, well for me they do anyway, so that’s what I’ve begun to do. At the beginning of the year I made for myself a list of goals that I wanted to do, you know the whole new year’s resolutions thing, but I never posted it, so now four months later I’ve tried some of them, completely missed the mark on others and let most all of them fall right back down to the bottom of my priorities in life. But seeing now that the number I’m know as is soon changing from a 23 to a 24 I believe it’s a good time to revaluate that pervious list and take it a bit farther by adding quite a few more items to it, making it my 24 for 24 and this time its is most certainly being posted.

Now for the list ready?

 Journal everyday

 Read the bible frequently

 Do things independently

 Exercise regularly

 Keep a food journal

 Wear bright colors

 Read at least one book a month

Make time for myself

Pray without ceasing

Drink more water

Keep my space clean

Set aside time for worship

Take photographs

Cook more meals

Eat out no more than twice a month

Buy less stuff/ Get rid of things I no longer use

Set aside money for savings out of each check

Find something to be thankful for everyday

Write letters to friends and family

Acknowledge joyful moments

Embrace the adventure of life

Find ways to respect people

Keep the blog updated

Always make God my first priority

I know it’s a lot of stuff and I’m sure I’m not going to do it all perfect but that’s not the point, the point is to be thinking about all these things and taking steps to do them, for now the list is just that a list of vague goals for my life so over the next moth or so my hope is to break it down for you and for me as part of this blog you gotta love accountably and that’s my view for today and hopeful the next year or something like that enjoy.