my own answers (part 2)

In January I asked-
What do you do when it feels like God has gotten your adventure?

I threw it out there and wrestled with it.  Then, I sort of forgot about it.
Until now.

After many months of planning and plans falling through, I am moved in with a friend for a few months.  (I'd like to pause the contemplative post to say: I am SO jazzed!  Yes, jazzed.  It's great!)  It took awhile to get here- eight months to be exact.  Eight months of feeling like there is no way this dream is ever going to stinkin' happen.  And then it did.

Sitting in a borrowed house, on borrowed furniture, with borrowed internet, it hit me that nothing is mine.  I am borrowing everything.  Not just this house or the furniture- but time.  My days are borrowed.

Everything I am, anything I have, whatever good I manage to do-
all of it is a gift from God.

My life doesn't always come together like I want it to.  My plans have a penchant for unraveling.  My dreams change.  My ideas aren't always the best.  And I'm so thankful that I don't always get what I want, when I want it.

"Many are the plans in the mind of a man,

but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand." -Provers 19:21 (ESV)

God knows what's best.  It sounds so cheesy, so greeting card-esque, but when push comes to shove, it's a hard idea to live by.  I don't write it because it's easy to believe.  It's hard to believe when the things that you want feel so off in the distance.  When all of your plans just seem to fail.  I write it because the idea is that maybe God has other plans.  Plans that we could never begin to dream of.  Maybe ours need to unravel so His can come together.

Maybe it's about how you respond to the waiting.
Maybe it's about watching your plans unravel and just
sitting in silence and trusting.

And sitting in this temporary home filled with grace and borrowing, I am starting wrap my hands around the edges of trusting.  I am starting to like this better plan.  I am starting to think that maybe my own answers don't matter so much after all.

[un]selfish love.

 “To love a person is to learn the song that is in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten.” – Thomas Chandler 

I've been brewing about love lately.  Not the romantic Byron kind, or the John Cusack Serendipity kind but a different kind-

agape

The kind that changes lives.

The kind of love that changed my life.

A deep, unchanging, unselfish love.  One that words can neither contain nor explain.

The love that says bring all of your flaws and faults and memories.  Bring your biggest dreams and buried insecurities and deep-rooted questions about life.  Bring everything you are and everything you've learned and everything you've ever been told about love.  See if any love story you've ever been told goes like this-

"Greater love has no one than this- that someone lay down his life for his friends." -John 15:13

Sacrifice.  Unselfishness.  Servitude.

In these words I find a love that doesn't require us to have everything together-

simply a willingness to give it all away.

we are.

[Last Wednesday, I went to a women's Bible study.  If you know me, you know that I'm cringing as I write this.  I wrestle with the idea of women.  I was raised in an environment where it was toxic to be honest, show emotion, or even be silly.  Being a woman was not celebrated- it was a weakness.

Wednesday was renewing to me.  To find that we can be exactly who we are, no apologies.  To come together and sit through life.  In the good and the bad and the stillness of being loved. We are.]

We sit around the table, each person a story that isn't over yet.

We bring in the luggage of our lives, our commitments, our worries, our celebrations.  We laugh, sharing silly tales and making cross-eyed faces.  We open our Bibles and read the stories, like they're the words to a song we love to have stuck in our heads.

We talk, breathe, whisper our dreams.

Do we have what it takes?

Are we worth it?

Do we have reason to be hopeful?

yes.

yes.

yes.

We are made in His image.

Every smile that turns up at the corners, every different shaped body, every sag of the shoulders.  Every voice that has its own melody.  Every girly-girl, every tomboy.  Every hippie, every quiet one.

Everyone who doesn't have a word that fits them.  Everyone who, at times, feels like too much and altogether not enough.

Each of them beautiful.

Each of them different.

Each of them His.

The collage of our lives is interesting- a mish mash of personalities and histories and backgrounds.  We come together to find the same thing.  There is a God who knows us and loves us.

We seek the God that calls us by name.  The one that created us from rib.  We believe the story is not a myth or a fairytale- it's reality.  We were created to create- whether it's families or homes or art or books.  Whether it's from a kitchen table or from an office desk-

We bring our lives.  We bring our hearts.

We are single, married, widowed.
We desire to be loved and respected and celebrated.
We are love songs and fight songs and everything-in-between songs.
We are silly and serious and extravagantly hopeful.

We are women.

And we are His.