mish-mash.

Oh it's been a rough week. Twice the amount of work and a handful of personal issues and three friends' birthdays and a cold....yeah, glad that's over. A friend of mine told me about this place in Isanti, it's a hermitage, I guess, and I'm thinking about going there this month if I can afford it (it's funded by donations, so it's technically free, but I'd like to at least give them something). I think I'd like to go just because it sounds cool, not as much that I feel like I need to (or want to, to be more truthful) go and be alone with God to try and tackle my own issues. I feel like my issues have become less and less powerful over me lately, and I'm glad for that. Maybe that's reason enough to go. Isn't that when our problems get the best of us? When we think we've got of the best of them?

Anyway, at church yesterday I spent the whole time journaling. Some Sundays I don't focus on the sermon and I find myself scribbling in my notebook the whole time. I was thinking about love, I guess, or more specifically, marriage. Two of my best friends got married this past summer, and because of that, marriage has been on my mind more and more. I guess I've always dreamed of getting married- always longed for that closeness with someone- that mutual place of acceptance and love and dependence. But in the last year or two, another sentiment about marriage has tip-toed its way in. And that is: fear. Horrible, awful, terrorizing fear. Mostly, I think, because I am very scared of vulnerability, and it seems the older I get, the longer it takes for me to trust people enough to let them close to me.

I guess I'm realizing though, that I don't actually want the relationship part of marriage- that's the part that's terrifying- I just want to feel valued, chosen, important, loved, validated. And marriage can't give me those things, or if it could, not in the ways I would want it to. Because obviously, Jesus is the only Person who can validate me. Literally. The only Person ever.

Problem is, I don't know how to do a relationship with God any more than I know how to do a relationship with anyone else in my life. But I like that He knew what He was doing when He created me the way He did- He knew He was taking a risk by making me so deeply set within myself. It might take me my whole life to trust Him and let Him in all the way, but so be it. He will wait.

Ultimately, if I didn't have to be close to people I probably wouldn't. People are scary. This week was an exception, for the most part, though. I missed my friends like crazy this week, and felt so grateful to know them and be known by them. I think that is starting to become a rarity for me, so I have come to appreciate it more and more in the places I do have it, even though those places are all over the state.

I've had a lot of different experiences this last week and felt a lot of difference emotions and learned a lot of different things. When it rains it pours, right? Maybe I need the hermitage more than I think. I'm tired. But, curiously, haven't been sleeping well the last few nights, and despite the hours I've spent awake in the middle of the night, cannot sleep past eighty thirty in the morning.

So, here's to sleep, binding up of wounds, and truth being revealed. Cheers.