weblog the first: in which she catches you up and gives up 'busy'.

Where do I even begin after so many days and weeks and months (maybe not that long, but it feels like forever!) of not blogging? I obviously survived spring semester. MEANING I AM ONE SEMESTER AWAY FROM GRADUATION, YEE-HAW!

In the meantime I managed to smash my finals to pieces, get un-hired from the job I have been interviewing for (and planning on) since JANUARY, move home, get re-offered the job, decline the job, go back to work at my old gym teaching mostly preschool classes (my dream come true!), and have an oddly fantastic summer of humdrum and few excitements. Let me be that selfish person no one likes to read from and talk about all my minute life details for a quick minute (if you’d prefer to skip them, please move on to another blog post, heh) :

A best friend got married, another best friend weds in two weeks, and- oh yeah- I started dating someone :D (we’ll get to that in a minute). I went to the beach with friends (first no-adults-present beach trip and it was so lovely and surprisingly contained very little alcohol), and to Atlanta a couple times with my family. My boyfriend (Casey) came to my hometown and hung out for a few days. I saw my best friend off to Peru for a month, my brother off to Ecuador for five weeks, Casey off to camp for two months, and another best friend off to Ecuador for two months. For the first time in years, I didn’t watch fireworks on the Fourth of July. My little brother started dating someone that I actually like. I reinvented my iTunes playlist and committed new songs to my heart. I continued working on my New Years’ Resolutions and stopped biting my nails at one point. Sadly, that didn’t last very long. I worked on my spiritual and mental discipline and became accountability partners with my dear cousin. I wrote lots of letters. I moved into my first apartment with my dear college roomie (the most recent one {oh, and SHE started dating this wonderful guy that is so great for her and I love him so much and he loves her so much and it’s just splendid}). I started counting calories, eating healthily, working out, and cut out cokes. I started growing my hair out and tanning and biking and walking and actually feeling good about myself for the first time in too long. Preschoolers -and Casey’s campers that I don’t even know- stole my heart. I spent a lot of time on Netflix, watching HGTV, reading, drinking coffee, and laughing and crying with my family. I washed my car with my nephew and taught my other nephew to wink (almost). I went to antique malls, bought professional teacher clothes, and went to see movies in the theatre for the first time in months. I poured my heart out to my brother, my best friends, my parents, my boyfriend, my sister… basically I poured my heart out to as many people as I could because it’s good for me and for our relationship. I became obsessed with Hannah Brencher and the moreloveletters.com mission and hope I will be forever. I lapsed into futile, depressing, impure thought patterns and had to be saved (more than once). I held a funeral for one of my heart’s greatest dreams (also getting to that one later). I read a book that changed my life. I haven’t touched a piano in months and it has been superb. I bought a ridiculously soft blanket and fell in love with it. I worked beside adults and kids whose lives are absolutely devastating wrecks and am still working through how to process that, how to love them, how to pray for them, and how to convey how much I care about these people that I really barely know.

ALL THAT AND SO MUCH MORE! It’s been INSANE but in the lovely, un-busy way. 

I’m boycotting busyness this summer, and over my life in general. I'm tired of competing against my friends to see who is busiest, who has "too much going" to hang out, and the like. While I plan on being real about my commitment level (or lack thereof) to social activities, I refuse to use "busy" as an excuse. Maybe "making lesson plans" or "exhausted" will pop up frequently this fall, but I'm also going to be investing in people. Maybe those people are only my students, my colleagues, and my roommate, and I won't be very able to hang out with people that I am not forced to see. But I plan on trying dang hard to make time for people at every opportunity. I'm not using "busyness" as my crutch for being selfish and uninvested anymore.

(click to continue to weblog the second)

being a twenty-something in a Godless society

It's been so very long since I've blogged (or at least it feels that way) that I hardly know where to begin. A lot has changed, is still changing, and will continue changing for a long time. There are many thoughts that have welled up in me, many things heavy on my heart that continue to hold me strongly, and many words stuck just inside my mouth (or in this case, fingertips) that I can't seem to articulate. There is much inside of me, and very little of it that I comprehend. And even less that I can express.
Let me start with my worry. Well, not worry necessarily... maybe more of a concern? Or a recurring thought? Or just something I'm consistently considering. Whatever it may be classified as, here it is:

I look so different from this world.

As I should. I'm ok with looking different from the world, I enjoy looking different from the world, but it makes this specific time of life exceedingly difficult. As an early twenty-something, I'm deciding who I'll be as an adult. Deciding my specific convictions and goals and expectations and what is worth fighting for and what I'm willing to give up and how much of myself I will spend and how I will react and all those sorts of deep emotional/psychological adult-y things.

It seems to me that this age is a time to look to others for wisdom and advice. To say, "Hey, would you mind sending me that list of personal boundaries you made? I'm trying to make one for myself and I'd like some guideline ideas" to your parents or old mentor. It's a time to read articles and peruse books and ponder and make lists and decide things.

This is where I find the problem. Though I have God's Word, sometimes it's hard for me to accurately and directly apply that to my life. His Word, in its perfection, is too literal but too metaphorical, too mysterious but too straightforward, and too complicated but too simple for me to wrap my human brain around well. My next best option is human advice, and, as you may already see, there is a limited amount of relevant, Godly human advice for twenty-somethings hanging around.

There is all sorts of advice hanging around. It's just based on worldly standards.
The advice for twenty-somethings that I find all over BuzzFeed, Thought Catalog, and the like tends to sound good (and often witty to boot!) but look totally opposite than my life as a Christ-follower seeks to be.
Some of them are funny, like this one, but are rooted in some less-than-stellar ways of living life. Some, like this Thought Catalog article, boast (unknowingly) skewed views of morality and love, among other things.

Today I spent the better part of my afternoon reading through one couple's experiment of learning more about themselves by dating each other for a mandatory forty-day period. They nicknamed it 40DoD (Forty Days of Dating) and posted it all on their own website, complete with hand-drawn illustrations of words used and videos of moments together. They became transparent with the entirety of humanity and posted their experimental relationship (daily journal entries from both of them compared side by side) on the internet for all to peruse and learn from.

After reading every word of their blog for hours on end, and realizing how much advice I had inside my head for them (especially towards the end... I won't tell you how it ends because I fully believe you should waste a few hours reading it for yourself), I realized the futility of these types of 'we hope our experience serves as wisdom for you' articles.

The attempt is a noble one, but let me get one thing straight: what we lack in this world is God. What couples and articles and books often miss is that until we are filled with and compelled by His love, all our "wisdom" and experiences and hopefulness in the world is naught.
Until the things we say and do and share are grounded in Christ and His truth they are of no use.

So here I am: the twenty-something reading all the books and looking up all the articles and asking all the older friends and realizing I can count on one hand the number of adults (discounting family members) who I can go to for Godly, truthful advice. And I was raised in church and live in the Bible belt. How much more so do the other twenty-somethings in this world lack that Godly love and wisdom they need to live a fulfilling, purposeful life!

Anyway, my point is that I feel like with all the information out there at my fingertips that could help me in my stage of deciding my specific convictions and goals and expectations and what is worth fighting for and what I'm willing to give up and how much of myself I will spend and how I will react and all those sorts of deep emotional/psychological adult-y things and all that, I still am lost. I've found a lot of Godless information and a minuscule amount of Godly advice. I don't know what it should look like to be a Godly, but relevant, adult.

I don't know what my boundaries as a Christian twenty-something should be, because all I hear are the boundaries (or lack thereof) and expectations and goals that non-Christians my age have. I know mine should be different but I don't know how different and radical they should be, or can be, without becoming something irrelevant to those around me whom I'm trying to shine Christ to.
I guess the problem arises in that we all have different goals, convictions, and experiences. Each of our relationships with Christ and the world look vastly different from one another.

My goal is not at all to push my beliefs on others, but to share with them the Love that has radically changed my life. However, I believe part of sharing that Love means being a light for the ones who will someday be in my position, who in eight years will be doggy paddling through life trying to figure out where they belong in relation to the rest of the world's sense of normalcy.
Because of this, it's my hope over the summer to share these thoughts and convictions and decisions as I come upon them. I plan to be transparent (as per usual) and give too much information (as is also usual), and throw my heart out there in hopes that someday they'll be useful, or at least thought-provoking to someone in a similar position.

My heart goes out to you, fellow twenty-somethings, as we trudge along trying to decide what kind of adults we're going to be. "Seek Ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well." (Matthew 6:33)

in the subtlety and softness

There's one question that keeps popping up in my life lately that I'm beginning to hate.
What's God teaching you lately?
Usually this question wouldn't bother me. Usually I'd jump right in and talk about what I've been learning in daily reading or listening, or just start talking until something logical and answer-like came out of my mouth. 
But this week, at least three people threw this question at me and I was at a loss.
I don't really know why. It's partially because I haven't been faithful in my devoted Jesus time. It's also partially because of something else that I haven't figured out yet. 
And in that, I find my answer.

God's teaching me that I don't always have to have an answer. I don't have to know what I'm learning yet. I don't have to have an answer and be all figured out and know what I'm doing. I can just be. I can just live and be His and He'll give me words and solid heart songs when He deems fit. 

It's simple, and subtle, and rudimentary. But it's something I forget often and something God softly slipped back into my mind the way He does. 

One of my favorite movie quotes says, "Sometimes love isn't fireworks. Sometimes love just comes softly." And I love that because it applies to God's agape love just as well as human eros love. Sometimes his love, his lessons, and his leading don't rush in and surprise you and light everything up.
Sometimes they just slip in beside you and slide their gentle, soft hand in yours and start walking in step with you.

why I hate change... er, transitions.

Transitions are one of my least favorite things. I always thought it was change I didn't like, but I'm suddenly realizing it's the transition out of the old and into the new that makes things hard. The hardest part of a piece of music to memorize is the transition- because it bears similarities to things that happened earlier in the piece, but usually shifts tonal centers and introduces a new rhythm or pattern. The toughest part of managing a classroom is transition from different activities smoothly. Apparently I'm not the only one that finds transitions challenging.
And here I am in a season of transition. I'm getting ready to move off-campus (and basically be done with MC forever since I'll only be on campus for student teacher meetings), to hand over my position as Chaplain (and therefore an officer) for KT, to leave my friends and see many of them married off, to begin my life as a teacher, to start a big-kid job, to be done with college life as I know it. It's bittersweet of course, and some days I hate it more than others, but today, the thought frees me.
I can go anywhere. I can be anything.
Those cheesy lines from the Reading Rainbow theme song excite me to no end because I recognize their truth. This step into a new phase, as uncomfortable as it may be, brings me one step closer to my future, to London, to new adventures.
I want adventure in the great wide somewhere, I want it more than I can tell. And for once, it might be grand to have someone understand: I want so much more than they've got planned.
Yes, Belle, Yes.
I feel like surely someone in the Bible knew a thing or two about transitions, so I look it up.
Transition, I type into BibleGateway. Nothing.
Change, I try to vague-ify my search term. change of clothes... change of mind... change of name... change of course... change of behavior... change of countenance... change of color... "For I the Lord do not change".
And I stop. He's right, he doesn't change. If God doesn't change, why do we? Is that why transitions are so hard, because they don't exist or happen in God's character? Maybe God doesn't change because He doesn't need to, because He's already perfect.
Therefore, maybe we change because He is changing us to be perfect like Him. He calls us to be His imitators (Eph. 5:1-2). We know He also calls us to shed the things of this world, the old things, and live our lives for Him daily (Luke 9:23, 2 Cor. 5:17, Rom. 12:1-2) in "newness of life". So maybe this sacrifice of self (Gal. 5:20) demands that things change and that transitions, painful as they may be, happen in our life.
That is the byproduct of being refined by His fire (Zech. 13:9), this a little bit (or lotta bit) of pain for being a lot more worthy, valuable, and precious in His sight.

When I consider all this, all the things I have learned about God's heart and will for me, and see transitions that happen naturally in this world-- like the one I am experience now, the transition into adulthood-- I know there is good reason for the toughness and uncomfortability of it. The fact that this is hard to get through and hard to get the hang of and hard to do right makes it that much more valuable when I *do* do something right by Him. As difficult as it is to memorize how to transition and execute it smoothly and then implement that into my life, I know that I have grace waiting for me. I know I have freedom to mess up some and try again, that I have support and Love to help make this transition easier. He doesn't change, He isn't going to transition himself, but He is transitioning with me.
The power of Your love is changing me, Oh Lord. and I am so grateful.

bguyosbgslwlbtg sjk

It's one week until my recital jury, the day that determines whether or not I have my recital (and, in turn, when I graduate). My mind is constantly clogged with thoughts, worries, and music. My heart is overwhelmed with worry and hope. I want so badly to give up, or just be done, but I've come too far to not keep praying and practicing and pushing.
I know the Lord has brought me here at this time for a purpose, and I know He will continue to work in my life whether or not the jury goes well. I also know that my God is bigger than me and my worries and my unbelief- I know He is big enough to get past my own lack of self discipline and faithlessness and instead show me His glory through all this jury & recital preparation. I believe He is able to miraculously show up in my recital jury and give me strength and ability I thought I didn't have. "I believe; help my unbelief!" has become my heart's cry.

He is able. He will never fail.
Nothing is wasted; He works all things together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

I'm an emotional wreck and don't know what He's going to do, but I'm boldly and selfishly praying that He is obviously present in my recital jury. That my performance would not just be a performance but would be my spiritual act of worship, and that He would honor that with passing me through my jury and giving me a wonderful recital as well.

Please pray with and for me, especially over the next week.
He gives and He takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.

a vessel of Love

On this day every year, I stand in a very different category from most of my peers. Valentine's Day, I think, usually brings up very specific opinion groups and they go something like this:
1- In a relationship and enjoying the romance of Valentine's Day.
2- Single and loathing Valentine's Day and pretending it isn't happening.
3- Single and trying to make the best of Valentine's Day even though you're jealous of all those happy couples.

And then there's me.
I'm single, but I *LOVE* Valentine's Day! Every year. Sure, in high school it wasn't my favorite and I was a solid Category 3-er; however, I think after years of being there I've finally gained the ability to revel in Valentine's Day despite my relationship status.

I love seeing happy couples, and seeing boyfriends surprise their girlfriends, and seeing wives pick out cards, and seeing boys send valentines to their crushes. I just think it's the cutest, most fun thing to watch, possibly EVER.

Also, ever since London I keep thinking about my British Valentine's Day experience and how much it was my catalyst for changing from a Category 3-er. I had this somewhat life changing and still vividly memorable experience on the day before Valentine's Day while in London (which I blogged about here). Basically here's what happened: I sat in a Starbucks in a weird part of town at an odd hour, the only person in there for most of the time. I ordered a caramel latte in a mug and spent hours thinking and blogging and writing and praying. It was misty/rainy, I was exhausted and cramping, and it was a Monday the day before Valentine's Day. Really, I had every reason for it to be a bad day, yet I found myself exuberantly happy. I began to realize how Jesus had become my true love, even just in the first month of being in London, and how it was changing every part of me.
On the actual day of Valentine's Day, I ate dinner out with friends, went to a fabulous classical music concert, and made plans to meet in Covent Garden for some dessert. And they didn't show. They ditched me, and one other girl. There we were, unexpectedly alone in Covent Garden on Valentine's Day. It wasn't fun. We bought pity-brownies and tea and sat in the cold until we decided it wasn't worth it, and trudged back to the Tube to be surrounded by couples basically having sex for the whole ride back home. Again I say: not fun.

But, I say all of that to say this: Somehow it still turned out to be an enjoyable Valentine's Day and a memory I look back on fondly because of its oddity (and what a hilarious story it makes now). It was a day filled with love and adventure-- which, to me, is what Valentine's Day should be about.

Last year's V-Day (I'm so tired of typing the entire word Valentine. you try doing it about 14 million times in one blog post, and you'd abbreviate too) was quite different. I spent the afternoon observing and loving on kids in JPS, went to work and loved on kids there (and got to be with my coworker that I had this huge crush on... added bonus), and came back to school to be surrounded by friends that truly loved me and accepted my love. It was, as David Viscott so eloquently puts it, feeling the sun from both sides.
I was reminded throughout the day how much fuller it makes you when you give instead of get. Sure, I love receiving love and being doted on and need to be filled up emotionally.
But for me, showering love on others, especially those who don't often experience love, fills me up much more than chocolates and flowers will.

Today, I spent my morning in a bookstore, buying gifts for friends' upcoming birthdays; I spent my afternoon dining with friends and playing piano; I spent my evening playing with and loving on kids so their parents could go out. Then I played more piano and baked myself a cake... and this has been possibly the best Valentine's yet. I got chocolates and cookies and a coupon for a free donut, lots of hugs, a really cool tattoo of a puppy in a converse shoe, and made a new best friend (she's 7).
Please TRY to convince me that that doesn't sound like an utterly superb way to spend your Valentine's Day single-ly!

I'm grateful for God's provision to mold my heart and alter my mindset and send wonderful AGAPE LOVE things my way, especially on Valentine's Day. And as I look back and remember previous ones spent with homeless friends, or playing in snow, or making cookies with our homeschool group, or these past few half-grown V-Day celebrations, I can't help but feel my heart bubble over with the agape love and the ecstasy that comes with knowing the One who is the very definition of LOVE. Call me cheesy, but it's the truth.

There is bliss to be found in spending this day of love being used as a vessel of Love.