The Spirit's Whispers

Happiness is good, and there's days where I crave it,

But those days are usually dark and lonely 

Where I forget that the root word of happiness is happen 

And that happiness is connected to circumstance and what we can get out of life.
On those days I forget that joy is what I really need.
That joy is a seed planted in my heart by a loving Father,
That no matter how unhappy my circumstances may seem,
That seed of joy will grow into a tree with hope as its roots and peace as its branches.

And somewhere in that growth my heart will learn to love again
And see people despite the sin that plagues them. 

For it plagues me too.
Because aren't we all the same?
Stuck in this disease called humanity that grips our minds
And in time we stop seeing the truth.
Though it affects most things we do, it's not who we are,
For we are more than our actions and scars-- 

We are souls seeking refuge in a stormy sea, 

But despite what we're told and despite what we think, that refuge is never the boat
That teeters and rears and tries to stay afloat atop the waves.
While our bodies want the boat's "safety," our spirits long to be saved.
Through the cries of our flesh, the Spirit whispers underneath,

"Take hold of his reach. Cant you see? 

The creator of your soul has asked you to be not of the storm but above it,
Walking the waves as if it were pavement."

The Devil's Favorite Tool

"Just because it scares us or we don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't real."
This seems a little obvious. I mean, you may be scared of outer space, rottweilers , or taxes, but no matter how much you do not understand or are scared of these things, they are still there and no amount of pretending they aren't will make you not run into them or something regarding them from time to time. Obvious, right?
So, so then, how come we live much of the rest of our lives this way in regards to truth and beauty?

That quote is a line that stood out among all other profound thoughts expressed in my Partner in Crime's newest blog post, entitled The Ache of Beauty. In it she describes how we all experience this longing when it comes to beauty, because we were designed for ultimate beauty. But this longing scares us because we cannot understand it, so we put up walls around our hearts and hide, just like we do with many other things that scare us and threaten our minimal understanding of things.

I have talked a lot about walls over the last couple months. I've talked about how we build walls and masks around ourselves to hide who we really are, why we do these things, and how we should tear town these barriers so we can embrace who we are meant to be. I have talked about beauty and how we are scared to show our beauty to others for fear of being judged. But something I didn't realize until now was it's not just our own beauty we put a mask over but beauty in general. As Miss McCall said in her post, we turn away from beauty and put walls around our hearts so as not to feel the ache.
How many times have you read in the Bible that someone "hardened their heart" and wondered what it looked like? I think it looks a lot like this. Because the ache stems from a longing for more, a longing that we have to leave our comfortable places to pursue. And we, as humans, are oh so scared of leaving the known and the comfortable for the unknown and potentially uncomfortable. We are scared that our actions would not be worth it and that we will make a disastrous mess and fools of ourselves. We are scared because we have bought into the lie that we cannot walk on water. I mean, surely I can't be the only one who has a hard time believing that story sometimes.

But the devil works on this fear. We think he's been getting more and more creative with how he personally attacks us and tears us down, but his tactics haven't changed. Since the beginning of time, his methods have always been fear and lies, fear and lies. So why do so many people seem much more hopeless, lost, and longing for more than ever before?
It's because in the busy, who has time to seek truth?  And who would want to, really? I mean, truth disrupts our busy lives with our meetings, soccer practices, dinners, and even relaxation time planned to a T. You don't even have to look at a working adult to see this. Look at a grade schooler. From school to piano lessons to baseball games to play dates, it's no wonder kids are more stressed than ever and more and more people are growing up to never know how to appreciate beauty at all.

Jesus said we must become like a child to be able to enter His Kingdom. But with kids being scheduled more and more like adults, where has the wonder and inspiration gone? We are being introduced at younger and younger ages to lie that says you aren't important unless you are doing everything. Lies that tell us that the truth is a lie.

But this isn't the first time the devil has used our fear of the unknown to keep us from pursuing beauty and instead keep us pursuing things much less worth our hearts and souls.
In Exodus 5, Moses follows God's leading and goes to Pharaoh to ask if the Israelites can go into the desert to worship God for three days. In response to Moses' request, Pharaoh orders the slave drivers to make the work harder for the Isrealites so that "they keep working and pay no attention to lies." In the same way, our society has told us that busy is better. "Pay no attention to the truth," it says. "You must work, work, work so you can be the best."

With so many people saying this and living this way all around, it is very easy for us to slip into the same rhythm and have trouble believing truth and seeing beauty altogether.

But we must not let our fear of the unknown and the judgement of others keep us from living the lives full of wonder and beauty that we were designed to live. We must start a revolution and start breaking free from the molds we've been put in.
I challenge each of you personally to slow down and embrace beauty when you see it. Let it make your mind run wild, even if that takes you into parts of yourself you haven't explored in a while. Let yourself dream again, but don't stop there. Pursue the dreams and longing for a deeper meaning of Beauty, Love, and Truth that can only be found in the One we cannot fully comprehend.

Sticks and Stones

If you've been reading my blog from the beginning, or even just a few once in a while, you've probably heard me talk about a writer's conference called Re:Write and how things I learned there and the people I met changed me so much for the better. Well, what I haven't mentioned in my blog is the steps that came before that. The things that lead me to the huge weekend of self discovery that happened to me at this conference. Part of why I never mentioned these things is because until recently I wasn't even sure what started this chain reaction. It's hard sometimes, even once you've reached the end of a road, to look back and see the journey. The road snakes back on itself, sometimes parts of it are hidden. But sometimes it's good to revisit parts of your journey just so you can see how far you've come and learn new things from old situations.

Now, I'm not saying you should revisit everything, because there are certainly things that should remain only in the past, but there are still some things that you may appreciate more or learn more from now than you did when you first discovered them.

A few weeks before Re:Write, my sister shared a very impacting spoken word video on facebook.

I'm not sure if this began the domino effect of seeking myself and God in a deeper way, but I do .know it was an important domino somewhere in the chain. Emotional after watching the video and truly appreciating the idea that I recently realized would later evolve into the quote I shared in my last post about beauty, I decided to bare my soul to my large group of friends and acquaintances on facebook.

So, without further explanation, here is the video and the post that followed:

Growing up I was called obsessive, freak, crazy. Why? Because I was passionate and my mind moved a million miles a minute, causing me to have difficulty expressing myself and things that I loved in a "normal" way. Because of these names, I felt less than normal. At first that was okay. I retreated into my book, my fantasies, and my mind because I didn't even really understand myself.

Seventh and eight grade I saw people had friends, people shared what they were interested in and found people with common ground. I had been quiet and to myself for so long, I forgot. I forgot the labels they had given me. I spoke up. But still, I didn't understand me, not even to share who I was easily. So it came out in messy bursts of extreme emotions: excitement, anxiety, and passion. These things aren't normal. Or at least they aren't in middle school, where if you aren't painted in shades of the same boring gray as everyone else, you're abnormal.

Freak and crazy, some called me. But these didn't bother me as much as obsessed. I love words, I always have. And as a thirteen year old, I looked up the definition. "To think about something unceasingly or persistently; to dominate or preoccupy the thoughts or haunt persistently or abnormally"

There was that word again. Abnormal. So who was I then? I didn't belong to any bigger puzzle. I was not a masterpiece. I was abnormal. Broken. A discarded extra piece that didn't make sense.

Wanting to be loved and understood desperately, I put on a mask of shades of gray, hoping it would hide my crazy. But I found that I still couldn't relate to people, because I wasn't giving them me.I shut down emotionally to avoid the pain that came with the severe isolation I felt. I was lost in in a sea on shades of gray. I needed help. I was crying out for acceptance, but my mask had become so good at hiding who I was, that those around me couldn't even see I was in pain. Finally, through much pain, I threw the mask away, and exposed the deep emotional wound to the harsh air. Grace and love pored in. For the first time I had hope.

I was sixteen.

Since then, I've come to learn more about myself and how my mind works. It's a mess, and it doesn't make sense to even me sometimes, but I have found a way to harness that mess and turn it into something beautiful. I am writing a book. I do what some still call obsessive research and reading so I can improve my skills as much as possible. I'm still excessively loud, overly passionate, and into some things that aren't classified as "normal."

Although I'm not called these names that frequently any more, to this day, they still make me flinch. The way I thought no one understood me, or really saw who I was for so long affects how I think about my relationships. It still makes me second guess the genuineness of some of my friendships from time to time. I have to remind myself that those lies I once believed are not true.

What were your names?

I wrote this post six months ago. No longer do I flinch at these names. But watching this video and reading six months ago me's thoughts, I understand a little more about what I've been learning about myself, God, and beauty now.
After rewatching that video for the first time in six months, I was hit especially hard when the speaker said the line, "She's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word Mom."
And yet she still doesn't see her beauty because of the names she was called and the masks she wore to hide her pain. How many of us does this describe?
From the twenty years of life I've lived, it looks like too many. More than it should be, anyway.
I was one of these, I tried to cover myself up, because the names they called hurt too much and I couldn't bare to let the people see that my heart was nothing more than an unwanted flower trampled in the street.

And when I think about where I was, and where I still see people today, I can't help but identify with the last line of this poem, "Our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty," because if you think about it, that's what we were and are doing, isn't it?
We put on masks to draw attention away from the pain in our eyes at the cruel words spoken. We put make up on our scars and build walls around our hearts, because if someone saw our stories, lives, beauty, then maybe they would disapprove and call us names to make themselves feel less broken.

For isn't that all they are? The same as us. Broken souls in a never ending struggle with beauty.

So, just as I asked six months ago, what were the jabs made at your beauty?
What were your names?