hello sunshine

I read seven chapters of Blue Like Jazz last night before bed, and then I finished it off before work today. I read it a couple summers ago, and I remember how it warmed my spirit. It warmed me again today. I like the idea that we can be friends with an author, though we have never spoken or seen each other in real life. I admire Don Miller because of his vulnerability with his audience. They're making a movie of Blue Like Jazz, if you didn't know, and I'm really excited about it. I have high expectations, but I have a feeling I'm really going to love it.

Today, though plagued by headaches and two hours of work, was a good day. I don't embrace good things often enough. So today, I'm making a point to mention that today was GOOD. The kind of good I've always called good. The kind of good that reminds me of previous goods. Which is good. I need to be reminded of good. I need to be reminded of peace, of happiness, of contentment. I think I don't often let positive experiences or people influence me positively. I'm not sure why. Possibly because I'm afraid that positive experiences will somehow hurt me and consequently become negative. Blah.

I don't know why Blue Like Jazz always gets me to see and embrace the good in my day. And I just mean today. Today I am just referring to today. Today I am experiencing good and giving good, being good. What a revolution. :)

Today I see beauty. In everything. I see potential good to be done. Today I see how things can be seen in more than one way, and reacted to in more than one way. Today I see more than what I saw yesterday, or the day before that. Today people are interesting, and funny, and new. And not intimidating or frustrating or difficult. Today I am one of them, one of those fun, beautiful, light people.

It's been a sort of stumbling time for me lately. I've not been sleeping well. But today...I walked without tripping.

Today I am different. The change is subtle, but I feel it. And I will smile about it.

seeing with more than our eyes

I open my eyes and there is a soft glow to the room around me, the kind that you see with more than your eyes. In all the darkness and the messiness of life, there is yet a light, always a light we see with more than our eyes. And we will always see it when we aren't looking for it. We'll sit in darkness and close our eyes because we're scared, and then when we open up again, there we see the light, that mysterious light we swear wasn't there a moment ago.

I feel it in the way a song can sound like a rainy day. I see it looking across the room, in between me and the walls, glowing the darkness warmer. It's a beautiful living stillness, a glittering, tangible hope that my eyes and my spirit can detect and respond to.

Suddenly I see the colors again, breathing me back to life.

i want to be honest

It's been a stirring day. Ever since last night, I've been on the verge of tears. I've been walking around in them, sitting in them, breathing through them. It's an impossible feeling to match with a song. I cried last night from a broken place. From a place of fear and sadness and loneliness and shame. I went from reading a novel to crying for twenty minutes straight without being able to stop. I've wanted to write about it all day.

Love. A holy, sacred word I don't feel worthy of.

I cried for want of it. Not from self-pity. Not from anger. I cried for want. I cried fearing it would never come. That there was none. I felt so much unbridled fear that a man would not come along. That there would never be a great love for me. That a man would never choose to be with me. That a man would never figure me out or even care to try. It hit me in the face that I am alone, as well as the possibility that a man would never try to break my barriers, never try to pull me out of myself.

I feel so inferior. I don't deserve to behold that sacred word, and there may never be a man so well-pronounced as to speak that word to me with his eyes and his hands and his smile. Love is not just a word. Not just a relationship. Love is a living thing, breathing in and out through our bodies and souls. A thing chased but not contained. A thing that moves through us and then moves us. A thing pure and mysterious and beautiful. And I am unworthy of it.

I've wanted to vomit all day. How I'd love to vomit up the blackness inside of me. I've imagined it coming up like ink, but swirling around like oil in the water, this living blackness. Were it that simple. For my stomach to contain all the gall of my soul, and then spit it up. Oh that my body could reject sin in that way- reject it as though it were a foreign substance. But it isn't foreign. And I am not a beautiful thing.

And so I cry.

the struggle.

How hard is it to unlearn something? I'm finding it really difficult to forget the things I think I know- the things I think are the truth. I've been a Christian since I was a freshman in high school, and I have been doing it all wrong! I have not really loved Him, believed Him, trusted Him. It's taken all this time for Him to get at my heart- all this time for me to back down, to get it, to discover my need for a Savior. And even after I have been convicted of all this- even after I feel the genuinely desperate need for Jesus, I still find myself giving into sin, giving into the lifeless non-relationship with God that I had before.

I know that reading the Old Testament or even the New Testament seems like those people really lived in a different time- in this ancient world that we can barely fathom, and so it seems like we can't relate to them- like we don't have much in common with those people. But we do! Their rebellion against a God who loves them looks an awful lot like my own rebellion. And though God was tempted to scrap His efforts with the Israelites and just start over, He didn't. Despite all of Israel's disobedience and unfaithfulness, God loved them.

"After all our hands have wrought, He forgives- He forgives!" -DCB

The truth is, I don't want some lame non-relationship with God. I think that's why my life has been such a battle for me- because I want all or nothing. I want to be in community with God or I want to be in community with sin. I get so upset and angry when things between God and I are sabotaged- when my efforts fall short- when I'm disappointed that loving God can be such a difficult struggle.

But I'm comforted that God wants the same things that I do. He is not content with a lukewarm spirit. I don't want to just follow the rules or just be a nice person- I've lived that way and the concept of life becomes incredibly dim. He doesn't want me to talk to Him because I feel like I should, or because I know I'm supposed to- but because I need Him, love Him, appreciate Him. He's the only person in existence who is completely concerned with my well-being- whose whole life is built around me. It isn't possible for a human being to love me as much as He does, in the way that He does.

Why isn't that enough? Why do I always search for other things to fulfill me? Why do I seek out love from everyone else but God? Why are there other things that I want more?

goodbye.

It's a difficult thing to let go. Not because you feel like it, or because you want to- but because you need to. I had a moment sneak up on me just a minute ago- the moment when you know that it's time to move on. It's not an easy thing to swallow, and even though it isn't what I hoped for, it feels freer than holding on. It's a kind of freedom that is tinted with sadness, you know?

Sometimes it's difficult for me to let the present become the past. Usually the previous year of my life still smells like the present to me. I think that's because I feel more in control of my present than I do of the past- so the longer I can make myself believe that the past isn't really the past, the more in-control I feel. I'm kind of tricky. I figure out things like that about myself almost every day.

I'm never going to make total sense. That's comforting tonight.

I can see it walking away from me now, like it has been for the last year. It's time I stopped watching it go. Stopped wishing it would come back. It is what it is, in the past. It was what it was.

Goodnight.