It’s not even noon  yet and God has already taught me…

1. I don’t think twitter is worth it.

2. I need to leave things resting in God’s hands and step back and wait on His timing.

3. No matter what, He must be glorified.

4. I am truly blessed with far more opportunities than I realize.

For my children’s theatre class, we read a play this weekend that brought up some thoughts I wanted to put out there.

The play was two parallel stories about runaway slaves in 1839 and Jews escaping Nazi Germany in 1939. In my class, we raised questions about some of the morality that was justified and the presence of “religion” and prayer in the play.  In the end it was basically boiled down to a good starting point for talking to children about slavery and the Holocaust and a message of hope.

Here are some of the questions that were brought to my mind.

• Does persecution justify sin, ever? Do two wrong ever make a right?
  In the play the children talk about the boat the slave children stole and the fact that the Jew are going to lie about their names to escape. And my thought is this: If a Christian trusts God even in the hard things, that means that we should tell the truth. Even if it means our lives. I am by no means saying that I am better or holier then the Christians who hid Jews from Nazis in WWII, but it’s a thought, isn’t it? I mean, just because someone else does something wrong, like killing people simply because of their background or faith, or enslaving them because of the color of their skin, does that justify our lies? God did tell us not to lie. How does this work?
• The people in my class said the play was “a message of hope” and my question is, how do you define “hope.” (I fully blame and thank Pastor James for this train of thought.) I looked up “hope” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary and this is what it said:

  1:to cherish a desire with anticipation
  2:trust, to desire with expectation of obtainment, to expect with confidence:trust
  Synonyms: Expect

  At the end of the play, we don’t know if the Jews escaped. We desire that they did, but can we really say that we desire it “with an expectation of obtainment” or is it merely wishful thinking? I looked up hope on urbandictionary.com and most of the answers had something to do with believing in a better future. Now, to be honest, for a non-christian, life here on earth is as good as it’s ever gonna get, so the belief that it’s gonna get better is ungrounded and unfounded. But for a Christian, we do have a confident expectation that things will get better, and that hope is grounded and founded in the Truth of Christ and his love.

These are just a couple of thoughts before I do some homework, and aren’t fully formed, but here they are. If anyone has anything to add or contradict, please please do.

do i strike you as suburbia perfect princess who never says anything harsher than “golly” and would never dream of getting a tattoo because it wouldn’t go with my elbow length white gloves?

for some strange reason, God continues to bless me. I disobey him, dishonor him and me, and yet he still loves me through the people around me.

This morning he did this, by having my dear blood-of-Christ sister call and share these verses with me:

“This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.” – 1 John 1:5-10

I think far to many times I rag on myself, because I disobey God and in the process think I am being a crappy Christian. But I know that Paul experienced the same thing, which he talks about in Romans 7:16, 18-19, 21-25 -

“For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.”

And so now I have to go back to 1 John and walk in the light, knowing that if I confess my sins, he is faithful and just to forgive me my sins and to cleanse me from all unrighteousness.

And this, my friends, is why God is far too good and I am so unworthy, but then again, that is the nature of Grace.

i drove past your house today
both times, kind of hoping I would see you…
but of course, I didn’t

i want to tell you how I feel
to cuss you out, slap you in the face
whatever, something
just something so I don’t feel like there is
this funny fake friendship between us
it’s just so frustrating!

so anyway
I drove on the street where you live…

…an old friend calls and you’re able to just talk, without any formalities, just jumping right into the meat of the conversation – things like future school plans, marriage, kids, family, friends, freedom, silly professors, seattle – and talk for an hour in the blink of an eye.

…written in the silence of a sunday afternoon…

She looked across the room and saw him, that dashing boy, his deep blue eyes penetrating and his dark brown hair just long enough without being too long. He looked in her direction and looked right through her. It wasn’t a romantic, he-could-see-into-my-soul type moment, it was almost as if she didn’t exist. His eyes continued to scan the room and rested on a petite blonde with a pretty face – they smiled at each other and the plain, brown haired girl felt invisible.

Alone, on the swing she sat, wondering why it was people say someone fell head over heels. After all, aren’t our heads always over our heels? Shouldn’t it be heels over head?

All she really wanted was to get away, to seek out friendlier skies, to escape reality. She was like Blanche DuBois, she wanted to be like Blanche DuBois, she didn’t want realism, she wanted magic! She wanted a holiday from real.

With pen in hand, she started writing. Would that I had the courage to tell him how I feel. If that courage were housed within me, I would write love to him so passionately, this pen would break at the intensity. she paused, pen poised in the air above the paper. But do I have this courage? Indeed not, I am a simple, silly schoolgirl without a hope in the world.

…whore…

 

“she said, ‘I will go after my lovers,
who give me my bread and my water,
my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’
Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns,
and I will build a wall against her,
so that she cannot find her paths.
She shall pursue her lovers
but not overtake them,
and she shall seek them
but shall not find them.
And she did not know
that it was I who gave her
the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and who lavished on her silver and gold,
which they used for Baal.
Therefore I will take back
my grain in its time,
and my wine in its season,
and I will take away my wool and my flax,
which were to cover her nakedness.” – Hosea 2:5, 7-9

 

I have taken the things God gave me in love, like a husband gives his wife, and used them to worship and love other things, like a prostitute.

 

…however…

 

“And in that day, declares the LORD, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’ For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more.” – Hosea 2:16-17

I pray that God will allow me to forget the things I have worshiped other than Him, that I will be able to call Him “my God” as Nehemiah did.

“And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD.” – Hosea 2:19-20

Jesus, my beloved prince, help me to be faithful as you are, to love as you do.

I wonder constantly if anyone thinks I’m beautiful.

I’m not what you would call a beauty by today’s standards, but I just wonder, does anyone think I am beautiful?

Not that anyone will read this, and even if they did, they wouldn’t know me, so they wouldn’t know if I was beautiful…

this is what I get for staying up when I’m tired…

My dad always used to say that only boring people got bored.

I wonder if it’s true….

According to this ad,  I guess a lot of people must if it’s being used at an advertising campaign.

Does that mean that there are a lot of boring people out there?

I guess we all can’t be weird and melodramatic like me!