Dark Places

Last night, we were talking about being in dark places with God. And at the time, I thought the worst thing about being in a dark place was how intrusive people are. How they give advice and try to get you out of it, when really you just need time to be sad and be angry and be hurt.

What I realized was that that is not the worst part. The worst part is that while you are sad and need to be sad, people get tired of you. They are trying to get you to stop being sad because they don't want tloisten anymore. It makes them irritated to listen, because you have been saying the same things for so long. And while all you need is for someone to listen, no one wants to be there anymore. The worst part of being in the darkness with God is when even His people don't want you anymore.

I Totally Believe in Dragons

Finals are done, woooo!!!! I have no idea about my future. Well, I have some idea, but as far as classes go, what? So anyways, I didn't really have anything brilliant to post after finals were over, and instead of thinking and trying I decided I'm going to watch endless episodes of What I Like About You (amazing show with Jennie Grath and Amanda Bynes if you haven't heard of it). I have also spent this time chilling with friends and my dad.

So yesterday me and my dad and my stepmom and brothers go to dinner, then get ice cream. And then I'm driving home on this little road and there's a TURTLE in the middle of the road! I dodge him but I see a truck go straight over him and I;m thinking, ohhh no. I have to save that thing. So I do a u-turn and pull over in front of the turtle because it looks like there's a long trail of stuff behind him and I'm thinking, oh geez, he got run over. But when I got closer I realzed that this thing is his tail! so the turtle is about sixten inches across from one side of his shell to the other, and this tail is about a foot long. Okay so, I'm just tsanding on the side of the road looking down at this turtle, who has made it about two feet deep into four lanes of traffic (two going each way) and then this little old couple sees me and pulls over. They also have no idea what to do so now there are three of us standing by the side of the road with a turrtle. The man goes and stands in the middle of the lane the turtle is in so that no one will run him over. That was a start. But me and the lady are just like, what do we do? And then she starts tapping her foot and he runs a little, and let me just say that turtles can BOOK if they have to. So we figured that chasing him worked pretty well and we figured we could do this across the whole road and get him into the embankment. However, turtle decided that at the yellow dividing line of the road, he needed to rethink because these crazy ladies weren't leaving him alone. The one lady nudged his booty with her foot and he starts snapping. He is now giong back the way he came because he is trying to eat us and he won't turn around and go the other way.

At this point, two more cars have pulled over. And the old man goes and gets a walking stick from his car and tries to get the turtle to bite it which sadly does not work. Then we start nudging him on his booty across the street. Picking him up was not an option. He had his little dragon tail whipping around and some fierce snapping happening. Then guy got a two by four out of his truck, which we could use to much more easily slide poor turtle. At this point a cop pulls over to see what we are doing. We explain, he waves, laughs, and drives away then turns around and pulls onto the shoulder in front of us all and just kinda sits there.

We have on elane to go and the sliding isn't working anymore. Poor turtle is out of his mind. So we rolled him. OUt of the lane, into the grass, then slid him across the dirt into the little embankent where the turtle friendly environment is.

All of God's creatures are precious. We should not run them over with our cars. Six other people in this world and a cop agree with me on that. Everyone stops for baby ducks. Most people stop for big turtles. A few people stop for little turtles. And you know, turtles are these timid critters. They don't start snapping and getting anrgy until they are in enough trouble. This turtle totally looked dragon-like. How much do we love dragons? We find them fascinating and beautiful, even though we think of them as fantasy. But this turtle was a little dragon in itself. We have to love the turtles of the world as much as we love the dragons.

Take this to people. Dragon people don't exist. We don't have perfect people in the world who are impossible to kill and are endlessly good. But we have turtles. We have people that are slow to grow and easy to hurt. We have people who need help to get across whatever their four lanes of traffic might be. God loves all the creatures of the world, turtles and dragons alike. And as Christians, CHRIST-like people, it is our duty to do the same. Take this literally and figuratively please. Becase if I'm standing in the road protecting a turtle, I'm not backing down for your SUV.

Discontent

I have a friend who is an ice skater and he has been all oevr the place in the world and he's really smart andI have spent enoguh time with him as of late to realize something very important. I don't want this life. I don't want the four years at college and then the career and the struggling woman then the getting married and making babies and keeping ahome and doing it all in that order by the time I am thirty five. I don't want that. I have never been sold on a major, my family knows that. I want so much more than just the typical american lifestyle. I want to live in New England and work fantastic places and dance all the time and do crazy things with someone tall and wonderful in Europe and I want a big backyard full of grass for acres and acres where no one can see us kiss on the ground. I don't want the hustle and bustle that is every day life. I want to see as much as I can and do as much as I can because I've only got at most another eighty five years in me and I want to see everything. What is there in Maryland? True it is the mini United States, but, it's so Maryland. There is so much mroe out there, places that get snow every winter, places that never go below eighty degrees, places where the roads are cobblestones and they drive on mopeds. Real sushi. I want to wake up next to a man that speaks Russian. I want so much. I want to pray ontop of a mountain. I want to be fluent in Russian again! I want to buy flowers in italy and oh my gosh I want so much and I can't stand being here stuck in dumb old community college for another minute. It just isn't enough for me.

FINALS WEEK!!!!

I do not like finals week. There is so much pressure. It's one huge test after another and checking your grades online and hoping you got hundreds on certain tests so that you would pass the stinking class. It's six AM and I am up studying. I wuld love to be asleep until my usualy seven o'clock but no. I'm up and studying. I was out studying until eleven thirty last night. This is not okay with me. I'm all about the studying. I am also all about the sleeping. I will tell you guys how it went on friday after a long long long nap. God bless and may He be with you too, especially if you have finals.

Signs

Do you believe in them, see them around you? Do you believe in coincidences? I don't. I think that everything happens for a reason. But that is a whole different post. Today I
m blabbing about signs. I totally think there are signs from God all around us. There was this one time I was on an elevator with a kid, and as soon as we got out of the elevator, he puked. But there was a trashcan literally right in front of the elevator so all of this vomit was neatly contained. I have never seen a tashcan in that sport before, and there has never been one there since. I refuse to believe that that was just a coincidence.

Same thing goes for this one time, I was dating this guy. And he gave my mom a little rosebush as an apology for staying at my house two hours longer than he was supposed to. The day after we broke up, this rosebush died. Maybe it wasn't a kosher sign, exactly, but it was creepy. This little bush hangs on through the same conditions for a year and a half, and then, just poops out. The day after we break u p. I felt like it was kind of a metaphor for our relationship, because it hadn't been getting sickly or anything, it had just died. And our relationship had been fine until he told me that we were breaking up once he got to college. I wasn't okay with that, because I see relationship as something you do to try and find out if this is the person you are spending your life with, not just for fun and games. A relationship with an expiration date? We broke up very shortly after that.

The biggest sign I have seen lately happened a few months ago. I was dating someone, who happened to drive aford focus, just like me. Everyone thought it was so adorable that we drove the same car. And some people took it as a sign that we were supposed to be together. And then, a couple months later, he totalled this car. Except it was a confusing situation, because it was totalled, and then they said it would be fine, and then a few days later it was back to being totalled and it stayed that way. Once they said that, something in my heart just said, this relationship isn't going to make it. And then I thoguht to myself this is ridiculous, it's just a car. And I didn't give it another thoguht. A month or so later, the relationship was cracking badly, and then a couple of months later, we broke up. And then got back together and things felt like they could be totally fine once again. Until something happened and we broke up for good.

You have to be careful with signs. Yes, they come from God. But the devil is a trickster, and he can make you think you are seeing a sign where you are not, like seeing a child that looks exactly like the one you planned with someone that you cannot handle a reltaionship with. The worst however, is when the devil gets into your heart and sounds like God telling you this relationship is good. Satan can make you believe that God is telling you to be with someone when in reality He is telling you run as fast as you can in the other direction. The devil makes things look pretty and Godlike. But they aren't. My advice to you today. Look for signs. Listen to those who are close to God, He speaks through them. Don't ever rely on just one person. God has signs everywhere. They just don't always look like what we want.

Do As I Say...

I was watching Gilmore Girls (fantastic show, entirely too addictive) and it was the one where Rory and Logan are having issues and she goes to see Jess in New York and they kiss and she says no, I have a boyfriend, I love him, yada yada yada. And at this point I always find myself yelling (in my head) WHAT ARE YOU DOING, GO BACK TO JESS!!!!! And then I realized, God always tells us that you can't go back. You can't change history, you can't go backwards and fix mistakes that you have left behind you. So why in movies, and television, and books, and hollywood gossip even, do we always ask people to go back? We never assume that there is anything better for them. Take Gilmore Girls. Jess pretty much broke Rory's heart and took forever to be a nice guy again. And yet we want her to go BACK to him. Why don't we assume that there is someone better out there for her? I feel like we do that with ourselves too. When we get stuck in a rut, we go back to what was comfortable. Even if it was the most horrible relationship for more than half of it, always fighting and being forced to do things you didn't want to. We forget the bad stuff when we are lonely and hurting. We don't feel like we have the strength to go forward so we roll back into bad relationships with not necessarily bad people. We stay in jobs we hate because it's too terrifying to try and find a new one in this economy. We hang out with friends that hurt us because we fear that if we leave them, we will never find any new ones.

We tell one another to do as I say, not as I do, because what I do is usually not the right thing. But look at little kids. How do little kids learn? They mimic. They don't have enough understanding of language to do what they are told. They do what they see being done. We still do that as we grow up. We do what we see others doing. And when we see people in t.v shows always going back to someone, what are we supposed to do? We think that oh that's just television, that doesn't affect me. But stop and look at your lfie. What are you doing? Are you single and afraid but gonig forward? Are you going backwards to a relationship that sucks or a job that you hate? Are you trying out new adventures, like eating sushi or learning to ice skate? What are you doing? Are you doing what you know to be right, which is moving forward and not worrying about not being strong enough, because you know that God has your back? Or are you doing what you see?

God has you. A friend of mine gave me this analogy. God has us in his hands. We are all a bunch of little pebbles scattered across the earth, but God the whole earth in His hands, so He's got all of us. At first, this didn't make sense to me. I was trying to move backwards and I insisted that pebbles belong on the ground and people step on them. He said that every pebble fits somewhere. I said that the pebbles get stepped on and the shape changes, some don't fit anywhere anymore. At the time, this made sense. I felt like i was getting stepped on right and left and front and back. My shape didn't even exist anymore. And youknow, this buddy of mine never answered the bit about how our shapes change, but I think I can answer that. You see, even if we do get stepped on and our shapes do change, you are still in God's hands. And as soon as He sees you are damaged, He will hold you and fix you until you are smooth and shiny and perfect once again.

We can't go back in time and go back to things that God doesn't want for us and still be shiny. Things of the past are in the past because God says, this is not part of your life anymore. You don't need to worry. We are human, so of course we all worry but God tells us not to. This comes back to doing as He says, not as He does. When people tell you not to worry it is hard because you can see their faces scrunched up in panic and the little beads of sweat on their brows and the very fake smiles on their faces. They worry, we see them worry. So we do what they do, not what they say. That's how we learn. But if you listen to God when He says don't worry, it is so simple. We look for signs of panic and distress on His face, we look for that doubt and anguish that says hmm, we may not get through this one. But it never appears. God isn't worried. He is smiling on you, His pebble in His hands.

I Ate Breakfast Today

Sorry about that. It's been too long since I updated. I was trying to get on here at least once a week and then you know, life happened. My main concern tonight is about trusting God. We can all say that oh, I've never doubted God before, I'm a perfect Christian, humdeedum, but let's face it, we all all falter. Let's retype that. WE ALL FALTER! The past couple of months have been a very trying time for me and God. We haven't really been speaking. I've been in this mindset where it's like, if You love me so much then why did this happen? If You love me so much, why do things keep happening? Why does it only get worse with time? I have been very angry with God. Oh yeah sure, He got me the job that I desperately needed where I am surrounded by all these awesome Christian kids. And you know, helped me and my mom bond. And you know, got me the strength to leave a truly unhealthy relationship. But all of this happened very painfully. And I was like God, seriously? You don't love me. You can't love me. I took everything into my own hands and was like pffffffft, forget you.

And then last night I slept over at one of my dearest friends' house in la plata. We went to church this morning. And my ex goes to that church. I wore this really amazing dress and straightened my hair and wore make up and smelled really good and acted like I was way too good for him and he just deserved t o look at me and think damn, I really screwed up. But once I got there, the sermon was about leaving things up to God. About the manna in the desert, where they only needed to gather enough for one day because God would always provide breakfast. And I realized I was so ridiculous. I went to church dressed up to make a guy jealous. A guy that doesn't deserve me. A guy that wanted me for one reason (and let's face it, we all know what that reason was). And I was all of a sudden really happy. I have no idea where my life is going. I have no idea what God has planned. But I'm okay with that. Because there will always be breakfast. And after breakfast, everything is possible.