invitation from my first love

It is time for some honesty on this little blog of mine:
I have been struggling a lot throughout this past Advent season.
Advent is a season in the church calendar that is set aside for waiting on the coming of the Lord. This short season of waiting ends in a celebration on Christmas morn as we celebrate Emmanuel, God with us. Often Advent is talked about in this joyous and hopeful way. It seems light and maybe even magical that we are invited to four weeks of intentional hoping. Hoping in the incartnation of Jesus Christ. I have felt that light, blissful hope before. It is beautiful and necessary. There should be joy in our waiting.
But this year was just different for me. This was my fifth year of being intentional about partaking in the season of Advent, and it was my hardest yet.
This year I found myself a little bit angry about the waiting season.
I felt desperate and needy, like waiting for Jesus just causes agony.

Come Lord Jesus

Come Lord Jesus

Come Lord Jesus

This has been the rhythm of my heart over the past couple weeks.

I think the best way I can describe it is as if the needyness and the agony of waiting somehow stretched my spirit to its breaking point. And in the painful process of begging the Lord Jesus to come and be born in my life, to come and bring intimacy, my spirit was shredded, no longer maintianing its nice, neat form. And in that shredding I found myself in a familiar place, a place of tenderness. 

A tenderness that is so sensitive that touch is painful. 

That is where I am at at the end of this Advent season.

I hear my tender Abba inviting me to come to him.

"Come with your shredded spirit.

Come and fall forward."

I want to fall back on my butt and land sitting down, on my own, away from any touch. 

Falling forward seems painful these days.

I hear the truth of grace and love.

I notice His faithfulness. 

I desire. 

Rough Seas.

heav·y

 

1. of great weight; hard to lift or carry.

2. of great amount, quantity, or size; extremely large, massive.

HEAVY. That is a perfect word to descibe how I have felt for the past couple weeks. Heavy.

Jesus says, "Come to me, all you who are weary...I will give you rest... Learn from me... you will find rest for your souls...My yoke is easy and my burden is light."

I have CLUNG to the promises in this verse before. Clung to it as if my life depended on it. Probably because a lot of days I feel so heavy that my life does depend on someone taking the burdens for me.

But I have questions and thoughts, somehow this verse doesn't quite make since to me. How can any burden be light? and how and what is Jesus' yoke? Is his idea of " light and easy" different then mine?

Questions are valuable.

Write down the questions.

When I think 'light and easy' a picture of whip cream pops in my head. Pretty sure that isn't what Jesus was thinking when he said those words.

So I open up my hands.

Knowing that God is good and that he is my sustainer,

Knowing that God holds all things together,

Knowing that I don't know,

I open up my hands, ask the questions, and trust in his answers.

Satan fights a battle over trust.

And I'm feelin' it.

I will drink my tea and remind God of his promise.

I will lay all that stuff at the cross and trust that God's idea of "light and easy" is good. Good, good for me, and good for God's glory.

Open HANDS,

Open HEARTS,

and

LOTS of Hope.

I love sunshinecause it brings GROWTH.

These weeks this mountain top has been awfully foggy.

foggy and gross.

I struggle with the fog. I struggle with it because I love the sun. Sun brings warmth, comfort, and growth. Fog brings questions. I struggle living thankfully in the questions.

HARD thanks.

Enter into hard thanksgiving.

Hard thanksgiving on the rough seas.

Glitter!

Study. Study. Study. Take A Final. Study. Take A Final. Study. Study. Younglife. Study. Take A Final. Study. Take A Final.

I feel like life has been on pause for a bit.

And when it finally started moving again,

it all crashed in on me.

"Once you feel dead it is hard as hell to wake back up."

Wake up!

Wake up, you sleeper!

AWAKEN.

I am thankful for Christmas.

For Jesus being born into the messiness of this world

through a woman's birth canal.

He was born into my messy and broken world.

And this Christmas that was comfort for me.

It was less about celebration and more about THANKSGIVING.

Thankful that he didn't leave me alone, but that he came.

HE CAME! and today that is enough for me.

I am not alone:::

That manna feels like a five course meal.

I love my family.

I say it all the time,

but thats because each time I am with them my heart expands.

I cant believe I missed some things for years.

Family is always hard,

but it is also full of love and joy.

This is family too! and I miss them all...

a lot.

"LIVE IN THE QUESTIONS."

I would rather ignore the questions.

These tiny little sentences pierce my heart and make it fully uncomfortable and out of control.

And to be blut- I hate both of those feelings!

But questions bring me to the feet of Jesus.

They ask me to cling to something firm.

They remind me to be thankful that my identity is given to me.

and that I dont have to earn it!

But how do I love the questions?

This I need help with.

“I believe that this way of living, this focus on the present, the daily, the tangible, this intense concentration not on the news headlines but on the flowers growing in your own garden, the children growing in your own home, this way of living has the potential to open up the heavens, to yield a glittering handful of diamonds where a second ago there was coal. This way of living and noticing and building and crafting can crack through the movie sets and soundtracks that keep us waiting for our own life stories to begin, and set us free to observe the lives we have been creating all along without even realizing it.”
― Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

Glitter! this has been what God has used to talk to me lately.

"Im not a glitter person," I tell her.

"What does that mean?" she asks.

Little did I know

that God was gonna use that little question

to bring transformation into my life.

Glitter! has NO fear of Man!

It is that kinda thing that you either hate or love.

But it doesn't care that people hate it,

it still kinda screams:

"HERE I AM WORLD! see me!"

It also spreads faster then gossip.

Light reflects off it!

and it is radically beautiful.

And it cant hide.

No matter how hard I try to hide, God constantly calls me out.

This time he is saying... "Wake up! Wake up! I made you to be like glitter em.

I MADE YOU LIKE GLITTER!"

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven." Matthew 5: 14-16

NO FEAR,

Ya'll.

P.S. I miss my girls. Im thankful for them!

"You gotta big your fairy tail baby."