Undone.

"[...]Then you pray the prayer that is the essence of every ritual: God,
I have no hope. I am torn to shreds. You are my first and last and only refuge.
Don't do daily prayers like a bird pecking, moving its head up and down. Prayer is an egg.
Hatch out the total helplessness inside."
-Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) 

and here i am. broken. rubble at your feet. 

in pieces before you. 

fully alive. in every way human. 

feeling nothing and everything at the same time. 

i am unraveling. 

the threads of my old self are slowly unraveling and i am undone in your presence. 

i come undone. 

you are love.

you are beauty. 

you are hope. 

you are all i need. 

you are my light in utter darkness. 

you are what I cling to. 

you are everything. 

you are freedom. 

you are redemption. 

you are the one who spoke, who spoke the world into motion. 

you are the author and creator of life. 

you are life. 

you were, are and always will be. 

you are everything i am not. 

you make flowers grow out of concrete. 

you make the impossible possible. 

you are an interfering God. 

you hold everything in your hands. 

i have been here before. it is different this time. 

this time. i believe in your goodness. 

this time, i trust in your mercy. 

this time, i am leaning on your grace. 

bring me back to life. 

breathe life into my dry bones. 

awaken my heart. 

make it beat again, stronger. 

make it beat for you. 

i see you ::putting me back together::

i feel you ::molding my heart like clay::

so here i am before you. 

with nothing and at the same time everything to offer you. 

take it. 

i trust you. 

i need you. 

and i am here.  

held in your hands, caught in your perfect embrace. 

whole once again. 

On Joy

God taught me a lot while I was in India about joy. About the fact that happiness is fleeting, yet joy is something lasting, and is something we choose. Jesus spoke into my life about joy, and where joy comes from. Joy is not something that happens to us, or that is really an emotion.

Joy is more than happiness, it is more than just a fleeting feeling that comes and goes. It is a constant way of life. There are so many ways that we seek what we think is joy, but is really only happiness. God spoke to me as to what joy is and what happiness is, as they are not the same.

I am seeing now how much of my life is going from happiness to happiness, hoping to be fulfilled, hoping to find sustainment and joy in a thing, or in a person. In reality the only place I can find true fulfillment is in Jesus. The only way to have true joy is to choose to seek out joy, to seek out my creator who is the only thing that could ever sustain and fulfill me.

Joy is about choosing to love and who to put my hope in.

I was working tonight and saw a magazine that made me think. It was Oprah's magazine, and it was her favorite things issue. Underneath the title of "Oprah's Favorite Things" was a little tag line that said: "You're looking for joy, you've come to the right place."

The entire night I could not get that saying out of my head. "You've come to the right place." As if we could find true, lasting, legitimate joy from things. As if Oprah had the answer to joy, as if all this  stuff she  called great could ever be enough to sustain us, to bring satisfaction. As if the answer to lasting happiness, lasting joy was in an object. As if we can just buy joy with money.

Yet society is in a constant state of telling us that in order to experience true joy we need to buy more stuff. That in order to find joy we need to have more, better, newer things.

The newer, better car.
The newest ipod.
The bigger house.
The better computer.
The name brand clothes.

I am reminded of a line of a poem by Katie Makkai called "Pretty." She says near the end of the poem: 

"This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in. About women who will prowl thirty stores in six malls to find the right cocktail dress, but haven’t a clue where to find fulfillment or how to wear joy, wandering through life shackled to a shopping bag, beneath those two pretty syllables."

What would it look like if we figured out how to wear joy?

It almost seems as if we hide behind our things. We collect all of this stuff and hold on to it so tight that we have no room to fully grasp and embrace joy. It is so much easier to find comfort in material things. If we have stuff, why do we need to find joy in God?

It is so much easier to jump from happiness to fleeting happiness, hoping this next new thing will be what brings us fulfillment and joy.

I am so guilty of this. I hold on so tightly to my stuff, convincing myself that I need it or that it is truly bringing me joy.

The reality is that all the stuff in my life holds me back from that joy. It distracts me from what matters in life, it tells me that I can settle for temporary happiness when infinite joy is offered.

I obviously have nowhere near perfected choosing joy, but seeing that magazine today was a good reminder to me of the ways in which I tend to find temporary happiness in things and call it joy. I was reminded of how easily I often do not choose to live in joy, how I do not choose to be joyful in hardship. I often choose worry, I choose not to live in the truth that I can be joyful because of my savior and his goodness and sovereignty.

It reminded me of just how much I use material things to try to fill a void in me, to try to fill my emptiness.

I want to learn to wear joy, to choose to live in joy.  Joy is not wrapped up in what I have or material things. My joy is found in working to bring God's Kingdom here on earth. My joy is in relationship with Jesus. My joy is in seeking God's heart and seeking his justice. My joy is in seeing broken things renewed.

My joy is in him, and I am learning what it means to be joyful through hardship. I am slowly learning what it truly means to choose joy.



Sidenote: Watch Katie Makkai's poem, "Pretty" which I quoted from earlier. So incredibly good.
Watch it. Do it.

An Iconic Moment

Last night at church during worship I was reminded of one of the iconic moments that I had while I was in India. Our director had challenged us to find different iconic moments throughout our days and weeks while we were living in the city. He challenged us to look for the ways God may be trying to speak to us and to actively seek the joyful things, the beauty amidst so much brokenness and hardship.

I remember so badly wanting to find all these iconic moments and kept searching and looking so hard for them. 

I think I tried  a little too hard at times. 

One afternoon though I was traveling back to the apartment after a full day at my placement. I was on the metro and was standing there thinking about the day and what had happened and how tired I was and how crowded the metro was and wondering if the train was going to be hectic and whether or not I would be able to find the right train to get home on right away or if I would have to wait or how many people I would have to ask before I found the right train when I got to the station. 

The metro is underground for the most part where we would usually ride it. Going back to our apartment we would be underground for about two stops, until you reached the third and last stop where we would get off the metro and hop on the train (more like be shoved in a giant mob onto the train). 

There was a moment where you would be on the metro and come out into the light of day, before reaching the train station. Before this point the metro noise would seem to build and build until you suddenly emerged into the sunlight, where you could see your surroundings and watch the scenery fly by. This was always my favorite moment on the metro, bursting out of the darkness into the light of day once again. 

This afternoon was different. As we came into the light, I was looking at all the buildings that I had seen many times before on my travel on the metro. Yet this particular day I was hit by the beauty of them all. They were all these old looking buildings that were colorful but looked to be falling apart. They had peeling paint, were dirty and looked old and broken down.

I found them absolutely stunning. 

It hit me at that point; Jesus does the same for us. 

He sees all of our imperfections, our broken parts, our dirtiness, the areas where we are broken down; essentially, he sees everything that is wrong with us. 

He sees everything and he still loves us. Despite all of our imperfections, he sees our beauty. 

He could look on us with disdain and decide that we are not good enough. He doesn't though. He instead looks at us and calls us worthy and valuable. Every single person. No matter what.

It was such a simple thing, yet something I needed to hear at that moment.

It was another lesson God was teaching me on that trip about the beauty found in brokenness, his perfect love and redemption.

Life Taking Shape

The future scares me and excites me all at the same time. Thinking about the future right now is like looking into this big, gray-black blob, just floating on the horizon. It is this unknown thing that I just keep staring into, hoping for some clarity as to where I will be, or where I am supposed to be.

It is terrifying.

The unknown is the scariest part of something. Not knowing what to expect out of an experience or time in life is hard. It scares the crap out of me.

Yet that is what life is all about. Being willing to step into the unknown. Taking chances, taking risks.

The haziness of my future is beginning to clear a bit. I am slowly getting a glimpse as to what my near future is potentially going to look like. It is exciting. As I start to prepare for this next step in my life, all at once the blob that is my future starts to take shape, starts to form into something recognizable. I am starting to step ahead into that future, allowing it to take shape, allowing it to become something. I am not entirely sure what that thing is going to be, but I know that it is going to be beautiful. It is going to be meaningful. It is all going to be for my God.

As I step out into the fog of my future, I can be confident that it is going to be messy. I know it is not going to be easy, that it is going to involve me taking some risks. It is going to involve me learning how to rely on my Savior for everything. I want it to be about following Jesus into the hard places and seeing Him transform brokenness into beauty, to see His work being done in the world and in me.

The blob is taking shape and as it does, it brings along with it more questions, more uncertainty.

Yet I can be certain that my God is good, and that he is transforming my black blob of a future into something other than a black blob, something with a purpose. It may not always be beautiful, or easy, but I can be sure God will be faithful.

I am learning what it looks like to walk into the unknown after Jesus. I am learning to follow him into the darkness, into the hard places of the world. I am learning to trust.

I am obviously never fully going to know what my future will ever fully look like. All I can do right now is cling to my one and only hope, to learn to walk into the unknown, knowing that I am held, and that everything will be okay.

Here Goes Nothing...

I have been putting the whole starting a blog off for a long time. I keep saying to myself that I will start a blog eventually, and then I never do. I start to make one and get stuck trying to find the perfect title for it, knowing full well there is never going to be a perfect name. So I go back to doing my other typical monotonous activities that allow me to run away from the important things in my life, allow me to hide out for just a little bit longer. 

I have known for a while that I tend to idolize fear in my life. It slowly starts to take a hold of my heart, inching its grimy fingers slowly but surely around my heart until, more often than not, it overtakes me and I end up giving in to its grip. I am so prone to letting fear grip my heart, which essentially paralyzes me and continuously speaks lies to me. 

I am afraid of vulnerability, of what others think of me. I am terrified to start this blog and put myself out there. There is a huge part of me that wants to, but a part of me that keeps screaming not to. It is screaming at me to run, to not tell my story, that no one else cares, that no one will read it, that people will think I am a bad writer. The list goes on.

I am going for it. I am going to step out and learn to not walk in fear, but to walk in the confidence that I was created not to be fearful, but to be courageous. I am loved and treasured by my God. Slowly I am learning what it means to be a daughter of the Most High King, to be valued, loved, and sought after.

I am learning to let go of my fear and to fall into the arms of grace, learning to trust and know that I am enough.