It's a New Dawn It's a New Day

Hello, 2012. It has been almost two months since I have visited this blog and posted some thoughts. This is not out of pure laziness or neglect but rather just a period of rest and personal reflection for myself. I feel the pains that only growing can bring and while I would be lying if I said I am finding only joy in those pains, having them has brought me a sense of comfort in knowing that Christ has more planned for me than I would settle for. I anticipated that January would be a hurricane of spiritual attacks from the enemy and I did not anticipate wrong. The beauty in that is that Christ is enough and the armor of God is perfect for battle. He asked me to step out on faith in my job and as I did, with trembling feet, I wanted to badly find security for myself. I looked for ways to plan out the next couple of months on my own but He told me to wait and as I did He started to provide and work the way only He can. Praise God. 


February showed up just in time and I am finally starting to catch my breath long enough to be really excited about this year. There has been a lot of changes in the lives of my friends. People are moving, exciting life and career things are happening, and life changing decisions are being made. Sometimes I feel the need to jump in and do something crazy just so I can be apart of it all. I can not be more happy for all of them though and I am equally excited for the steady path that the Lord has put me on. I can finally see a tiny tiny light at the end of the school tunnel. Just one more year (hopefully). I actually believe I can do it. 


To touch quickly on writing I just want to say I have been working on a couple different things. The problem is they are very personal and I am reverting back to my old ways of squirreling them away. I want desperately to be able to share. I know that the best writers are those that can be vulnerable and honest but this has always been hard for me especially if the content deals with people. I am praying and fighting through it. :) 


Lastly, February is here and it's the month of love. If you go into Wal-Mart it looks like cupid threw up. I actually really like Valentines but I also know that many times it can bring out the worst thoughts about ourselves if we don't have someone doting on us on the 14th. I hope that as this Valentine's day approaches, if you start feeling left out of all the love, you will know that you have a Creator who IS love and wants to lavishly dote on you everyday ... not just one day in February. I like flowers and sweet notes (and sometimes I really wish for them) but I don't think it gets better than knowing that Love himself chose me. That is enough. That is priceless.


Thanks for trudging through that little recap of my extended holiday from this blog. It's some of the highlights of what's been going on in my life. I know it wasn't much to read or very eloquent but look for some things in the future to be posted! 


jes

Oh December

There are times when I feel Your presence more prominently. Right now is one of those moments. As I lay here on the couch under the warmth of my blanket and the slow breathing of my precious red bow collared little dog my thoughts are meditating on You. I can hear muffled knocking at the apartment next door and deep down I wish the knocking was for me. The faded voices from the TV seep out from under my roommates door into the living room and I am reminded of the excitement she is feeling as she gets ready to go see the person she holds close to her heart. She has had this exciting buzz about her all afternoon in anticipation of being reunited with him. I remember that feeling. A Birds of Paradise candle fills the room with a sweet smell and the flickering of the flame is the only other light that accompanies the Christmas tree.  I love this time of year and I love the feeling of this room. It feels still. It feels warm. And while my heart wishes there were someone here with me I know that I am anything but alone. I can fully feel Your spirit. I can almost audibly hear You telling me “I know, I know” as my soul whispers the hurts of my heart. And as I cast these cares on You, I feel as though I am no longer on this couch in this dark room but I am curled up in Your lap resting in Your presence.  It is a safe place. This precious moment is not lost on me. I only wish that in these times I could press pause and make the moment last forever. That if it were possible I could highlight this paragraph in the story of my life so that one day when I need to be reminded of why I love You and how You have loved me I can flip back the pages in my mind easily and this night be seen in my heart.

You'll Be Found In Me

Come here little darling  

Let Me take your hand

Cause I can see you’re shaken

Can tell you don’t understand

Why this world has got you running

Trying to find a place to stand

And all the earth is shaking

As all was good goes bad

You got a lot to carry

And even more in mind to hold

But you can’t make it out from under

When you keep adding to the load

You lay out your heart

Entrusting all you have

But all the ones who should

Won’t return it back

They take the things you share

And put them to they side

To only pick them up

And use them in a fight

But don’t add on to that wall

We worked too hard to tear it down

These troubles are just fleeting

Just remember what you’ve found

Remember what remains

And what will always be

Take hope, keep heart, darling

You’ll be found in Me. 

Thanksgiving

There is this thing that people are doing on Facebook. Since November 1^st they have stated something they are thankful for each day. I haven’t participated in this, but I have plenty of things that I am thankful for. I guess since thankfulness can be such a personal thing and since such personal private matters I usually write about as opposed to generally just throwing them out there I have ended up here. A lot of the posts I have seen have been thankful for things or people or events. I too am thankful for these. Home, good friends, and nice things are all blessings from God that I was never promised and many times take for granted. Over the last couple of weeks when I see a posts of thankfulness I reflect myself on these things but also on what as a whole I am most thankful for.

Faith Hope & Love

Faith is a big mystery to me. It is stirred up from the Holy Spirit from some secret well of God’s goodness. Most the time I feel as though I am spinning my wheels trying to muster up some small seed of faith. Then out of nowhere, when I am exhausted from my own fruitless efforts, the Holy Spirit plants a seed of faith and waters it with the word of God. Sometimes as it grows I am stretched and pulled to my limits but I am thankful for the gift of faith. It truly is a gift from God. In all honesty I wish I had more. It is the cry of my heart right now to have more confidence in things hoped for and assurance of the things not yet seen.

Hope is defined as a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. A person can have so many hopes and expectations. I find myself hoping for things all the time but this last year I realized it is not what you hope for but what you hope in that truly matters. All of the small little things we hope for mean and amount to nothing outside of our hope in Christ. All will pass away and return to dust but Christ defeated death and lives. I am thankful for a Savior that I can hope in and who stands when all else passes away.

Love. I hate to admit, since I spend so much time pretending to be unaffected, but I really am a hopeless romantic. I love reading Jane Austen and hearing stories of expressions of love, but these are just cheap imitations of love. He continually reminds me that He is love and that my desire should be for Him and no imitation.  I am so thankful for a love that died on a tree, for a love that calls and restores. I am so very thankful for a love undeserved and unmerited and I wish I could and would relay it to more people.  In a world that puts so much emphasis on romantic love and expressions of love, it can be sometimes confusing trying to figure out what love really is or what it looks like. Love looks like Christ with the woman at the well, like Christ as he healed the sick and dying, like Christ as he prayed for those persecuting him, and like Christ as he died on a cross. I am so thankful for this great love.

I don’t even think my words here, as honest and open a I try to be, can really show my heart’s gratefulness for all God has done. We go through seasons in our lives and with each season God is sufficient to supply our every need. This year God has continually had to remind me of what I have when all else fades away. The verses that rang true on pages now play in my heart in a new way.  I am thankful for those that will remain: faith, hope, and love. 

Hope

      I don’t think it is any coincidence that sometimes our expectations far exceed the actual result. Think about it. How many times have you been sitting in a theatre, popcorn in lap, drink in holder, lights dimmed, as you patiently sit through previews. You are just about ready to stand up and scream, “where is my movie!!”, when a preview captivates your attention and suddenly you are adding it to your “I can’t wait to see that list”.  You go home to Google or YouTube additional extended previews to the new movie. You read any articles that cross your path about it and then as soon as you know the release date you are making plans to see it. The day finally arrives but as the movie ends you realize that the hype has just been pin pricked with reality and it is quickly deflating into disappointment. We suddenly realize the great movie we had hoped and spent almost ten dollars to see was in reality not even good enough to shell out a dollar for at Redbox. The initial hope of anything is what drives us and motivates us. Without the hope of something great we just idly coast through life never really pursuing. We are alive but we are not living. We are functioning but not thriving. The thing about hope is that it isn’t always fulfilled and sometimes the disappointment of that can lead us to give up hoping altogether. We decide that if we don’t hope for anything then we won’t be disappointed when it doesn’t happen. If our hope is placed fully in Christ and he is our filter for where and what our hope motivates us to pursue, I fully believe that the disappointments we face will not deter us from hope but cause us to cling to it. When this happens I think the focus shifts from the landing to the leap. Our success isn’t defined by the destination but the purpose behind the journey. It isn’t so much about if we land on our feet or our face, but that we took the leap to begin with. That we trusted not ourselves but Christ to direct us in our leap of adventure, and if for some reason our timing was off or our speed not enough to reach our safe landing He was there to pick us up and dust us off. I think it’s okay to hope and dream big. It’s also okay to be let down just don’t let it keep you from hoping, moving, and living. Your heart will never beat faster standing still than when you’re taking the leap.