He makes me...

There's something really special about my car rides. The short ones usually just consist of major jam time (usually including rolled-down windows and the music turned up LOUDLY) and/or a car worship session (worshiping Jesus, not the car... just to clarify). The long ones, like my trips to and from home, are about half-jam/worship, half praying and listening to my Jesus. Sometimes with a little audiobook mixed in.
Well this most recent long car trip I took was my drive back home from school, for Christmas break. and it was going all fantastic and I was semi-avoiding the praying & listening to Jesus bit, because I was being all selfish and enjoying the sunny day and the freedom that my heart was experiencing with every mile closer to home I inched.
And... Do you ever have those moments where God is speaking so loudly into your heart, you just KNOW the next step would be for Him to audibly speak, and that scares you, so you just listen to Him and obey? I feel like that happens to me a lot. A lot of times, I obey Him because I'm scared of what He could do if I didn't pick up on his whispers the first time (awful, but true). But that is not my point.
The point is, I had that moment. So I turned off the music and turned off my whirling thoughts and just waited. Then He told me to pour out my heart, and I did. I ranted about boys and school and friends and work and family and worries and hopes and everything else that was reigning in my thought life lately.
Then, I just shut up.
And He said:

"The Lord is my shepherd.

I shall not be in want.

He makes me to lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside quiet waters.

He restores my soul."

Of course, at this point, I had already cried a good bit, and then I just started crying even more because... okay, is it just me, or does it really throw you for a loop when you're being all bratty/selfish/vain/stupid and complaining to God and he just heaps love on you anyway? His grace absolutely destroys me sometimes.
Here I am, pouring my heart out, yes, but most of it was very whiney and complain-ey, when He just says... Hey. I am your shepherd.
I am good at that and I am good to you.
Stop worrying about where you're going and when you're going and how you're getting there.
I'm guiding you.
You don't need to want for anything you don't have because if it's something you need, I'll give it to you when you need it. And if it's something you don't need at all, I'm protecting you from it for good reason. And, sometimes, if it's something you want but don't necessarily need, but it's just frivolous... I give it to you anyway, just to show my love to you in a more tangible way.
Beyond that, Sometimes you just gotta lay down in a meadow.
 Just lay down with me and be beside me.
It's time for you to let me make you do things because I know they're best for you. This is best for you. Lay down beside me and breathe. Look at the sky, listen to the wind, feel the cool ground on your back. Eat and drink My eternal sustenance. Appreciate being with me.
Then, let's walk together by the quiet waters. I want the peacefulness of this place (be it physical or spiritual) to allow you, too, to be still and quiet and just know that I'm God. I'm good. I'm FOR YOU. I WANT TO RESTORE YOU.  And, sadly, I just can't do that when you spend every day holding on to your hurt, pain, regret, and sin. In order to be restored, you must first surrender.
You must first let me be your shepherd, so I can provide for you and lead you to rest, peace, and plenty. 


And it all just blew me away.
How have I never gotten all of that out of Psalm 23 before?
All the "make me"s, reminded me of one of my favorite songs, by Commonground Band, called Make Me. The chorus says, "Make me to know I love You, make me to know I need You, make me to dream of only You, only You, only YOU."
And as much as I try to take control of my life and avoid God's conviction and whatnot... when it comes down to it, that's a lot of what I want in life. Mainly, I want to live my life as an offering to God that glorifies Him alone... Secondly, I just want to learn how to love Him. I know for a FACT that I stink at unconditional love, which is the only love God knows I do believe... So me loving Him in even a SEMI-EQUAL way to how He loves me is clearly impossible. However, I want to try. I want to learn and just attempt to know for a fact that I LOVE him wholeheartedly, that I NEED him unashamedly, and that I dream of Him only.
So much to attempt (the beautiful thing is, I really don't have to 'attempt' anything except the self-sacrifice. everything else comes from Him and straight back to Him.) but He makes it well worth it.
HE MAKES ME WELL WORTH IT.

patience and opened eyes

I consider myself a patient person. Oddly enough, I'm pretty good at waiting contentedly on others and giving them time to do what needs to be done. Especially when it comes to kids... By God's grace, I am able to maintain a very even temperament and patient approach when teaching, so that comes in very handy, and often reassures me that I am, in fact, meant to be a teacher.
However.
When it comes to waiting on God, I'm one of the least patient people I know. Granted, I'm not physically hopping schools or dropping out and flying to London or sleeping around trying to find love, or even dating around... but emotionally, I kind of am all of that. In my heart, I'm always longing for London. Not necessarily a 'bad' thing to be longing for, but not the BEST thing to be longing for... which makes it a waste of time and energy. Same thing with looking for love, my future, etc. If in my heart I'm constantly turning away the consistency, patience, and goodness of Christ, and seeking satisfaction from other things, I'm letting them become idols and strongholds in my life. It's really much more serious than just wishing for something, in my perspective.
But I'm gonna be honest:
I want a boyfriend. I want to fall in love and get married and have adventures together.
I want to leave America. My first choice is London, but really anywhere except here is okay with me, as long as I'm GOING and DOING.
I want to be a mom. Whether it's having a biological child or adopting or being a maternal figure to orphans I hang out with or just being a loving teacher... I want it.
I'M READY FOR IT, GOD.

at least that's what I keep telling him.
but again with the honesty, y'all: He obviously knows what is best for me and what will lead to his ultimate glorification and the completion of His will. and since at this time I don't have a boyfriend, live in London, or work with orphans on a regular basis, it's obviously His will that I am exactly where I am at this time.
"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven... He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end." {Eccl. 3}

He is not currently rushing to make my life beautiful at this time.
He is not off working on someone else's life with my stale-ly 'beautiful' one sitting idlely by.
He is not attempting to find a way to tie all the knots together in the end and make this a beautiful work at some point.
HE HAS ALREADY MADE EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL.
The work is done.
I don't have to do anything. No adding or subtracting of the beautiful or ugly is necessary. I don't have to try to do everything myself and 'fix' the 'wrong' things that have happened in my life.
I just repent from the wrong. Turn to the right. and open my eyes.

I just have to let myself see it.

Be patient, redeemed daughter. Calm down enough to take in your surroundings and see the beauty God has made, that has already been planned and is slowly blossoming around you. Trust the timing of the omnipotent and omniscient One.  

LOVER of my SOUL

I had this brilliant idea today to pull out my old journal from 2008-2010 and read through it. It was cool to reminisce and whatnot, but it was probably more detrimental to my emotional status than beneficial.

Why? Because 1) I realized how little I've actually changed since then, in some ways. 2) My love life was much more exciting back then, which is definitely a depressing thought. 

As far as changing, I know that in many ways- such as goals, convictions, basic interests, and worldview- I am very much the same. However, the one area that I would hope to be most different is the one that I realized was most lacking in maturity: my everyday walk with Christ. Sure, my faith is more solid now and my convictions more sturdy and my experiences more widespread. But when it comes down to it, I'm the same 15-year-old girl who's scared to trust God and super self-focused. 

Grow me, God. 

A certain sign of grace is this: that from broken earth, flowers come up, pushing through the dirt.

SECONDLY. Let's get one thing straight: God is a GREAT romancer. If you read my blog semi-regularly you probably kind of remember my Valentine's Day post from a London Starbucks this year about being in love with God for the first time. Well I'm not really sure when it happened, but sometime between then and about a month ago, I'd kind of let that side of mine & God's relationship die. I mean, I'll do all the 'Christian' things to do, but when it comes down to letting my heart be wooed by this Being who created everything and still had my life planned before time began... that kinda weirds me out and I just let it go. 

And at some point, he got sick of not having it apparently, because all the sudden my heart was being pursued again. Not that he ever stopped, but I'd built such a wall of unbelief up that He couldn't really get through it, I guess. Well, being in the Word a lot and being vulnerable to his life-changing tends to alter that kind of thing pretty quickly. 

So a couple days ago, as I was having my nightly date with Him, I remembered a song we once sang in youth choir, the lyrics of which absolutely wrote out my heart's words. 

"And in the night I will sing Your praise, my Love. And in the morning, I'll seek Your face, my Love. And like a child I will dance in Your presence, Oh let the joy of Heaven pour down on me. I still remember the first day I met You and I don't ever want to lose that fire, my First Love!"

Though my life is far from perfect, and I am far from perfect... at the end of the day, I am His. I am loved by Him and NOTHING can stop that or separate me from that permanently. I love Him, in a way I can't thoroughly explain. If I could, I would just hang out with him one-on-one all the time and just sing and dance and write to Him. I don't want to lose that joy He's poured out on me- I really do remember the first day I met Him and gave into His pursuit... I DON'T WANT TO LOSE THAT.

So I'm just sitting here pondering how He could love me so greatly, and I remembered an old hymn that I really like: Jesus, Lover of my Soul. and it just hit me... HE IS THE LOVER OF MY SOUL. He is the ONLY Lover of my soul. He is the ONLY ONE who has ever loved my soul, and the only One who will ever love me/my soul to this great of a depth.

JUST WHOA.

I think the thing that most gets me about this is: I am kind of a boring person. I don't like any extremely out of the ordinary things. I don't do outrageous things. I like school and my family and I have a plain old  "got-saved-when-I-was-nine" testimony. My whole life, I've beens striving to find the one thing that will set me apart and make me more lovable/likeable/intruiging/inspiring/accepted/attractive/fillinyourownwordhere. I feel plain and boring and don't have anything necessarily special about me except for my fingerprints.

The fact that God knows that, and He made me this way, and He is THE SOLE LOVER OF MY SOUL- the only One who knows the most... yet still loves the most- absolutely KILLS me. HE IS SO GOOD! I'm really grateful that He not only created my vanilla-ness, but He celebrates it, and rejoices over it, and delights in it, and just LOVES it. Doesn't that prove all over again his awesomeness.

I wanna sit at Your feet, drink from the cup in Your hand, lay back against You and breathe, feel Your heartbeat. This love is so deep, it's more than I can stand. I melt in Your peace; it overwhelms me. 

face, meet ground. self, meet cross.

God is a funny man. er, spirit? Whatever He is, He's a funny one.
See what had happened was... Becca, for the longest time, has seen herself as "that awkward homeschool girl" or "the one that never quite fit in" or "little scaredy cat Becca"... and some more, much more negative things that I'm not quite ready to post on my blog. Honestly, it's such a normal thing for me to think these things about myself, I don't even realize, when I tell myself this, exactly what I'm saying.
Well, God decided somewhere lately that He was going to bring this back to my attention and laugh at how much I forget how in control and awesome He is... and how having Him in me makes me beautiful and worthy of love.
It's hit me several times lately just how fantastic my friends are, and how blessed I am to have the family and background I have. Honestly, it makes me feel a little guilty, because so few people have the pleasure of experiencing such an easy life. I've never experienced drastically life-changing things, except for the usual death of grandparents or moving away from a best friend or my cat dying. I was raised in a Christian home, by Christian parents, who've been married over 30 years. I'm not saying my life has been perfect, by any means. My older brother was a rebel who did some pretty awful stuff to myself and my family back in the day- but God is so much a God of forgiveness and redemption that even that story is changing rapidly. Basically, I'm just trying to get the point across that I'm INCREDIBLY blessed.
And then last night, through a roundabout chain of events that will be discussed in a later blog, I ended up just being really overcome with emotions and doubts and unsure of what I was doing and where I stood with Him. So like any normal, emotional wreck would do, I propelled myself to my room where I literally laid facedown on the ground and cried out to my God (including crying, whispering, whisper-screaming, etc.) on the hairy rug in my dorm room.
It was an oddly beautiful moment. I'm sure if I'd taped it, it would be on the AFV level of hilarity, because I looked like a ragged, tear-drenched nutcase, stretched out on the dirty floor appearing to talk to myself.
But that's a really cool thing about God is that no matter how silly you look, He doesn't really care. He just keeps pushing you to seek Him and wooing you into His embrace. (Heck, Ezekiel PREACHED TO A VALLEY FULL OF BONES and God used that!)
So there I am, completely overwhelmed and telling myself how I can't do this and why would I and giving myself reasons not to let all this new exciting stuff happen to me.
And the whisper came.
"You are more."
'You are more than the choices that you've made. You are more than the problems you create. You are more than the sum of your past mistakes. You've been remade.'
aaaaaaaaggggggghhhhhhhh.
I mean, how do you respond to it when THE God, the Everlasting One who literally holds the world in His hand and breathed you into existence, stops your pity party and says, "HEY. YOU'RE MINE. THAT'S WHY."
Cue world spinning in slow-mo and jamming to a halt.
It's heart-melting and earth-shattering and completely self-wrecking.
What do you say to that?
"Yeah, um, I try to love you too, God, but I'm human so I stink at love unless it's love of self and sin, so um yeah...Cool thanks."
Cause as much as I want to be able to say I truly LOVE God with every fiber of my being, it isn't true. If I remember, I kill my self every morning and let Him reign in me, and then I actually LOVE... but sometimes I forget, and sometimes I pretend to forget. Let's be honest here, truly loving is hard. It hurts and it's sometimes awkward and it's uncomfortable. And I'm still in the process of learning to/being used to LOVING everyone all the time.

I apologize for the choppy/disconnected/nonsensical/overdramatic aspect of this post. Another thing God is teaching me is how to ponder and meditate on what He's telling me, to the point that I can articulate that clearly to others, so thanks for being my guinea pigs.
Basically, He is awesome and I am His and I am undone.
auf wiedersehn!

wrecked!

God has started this thing where he completely wrecks me whenever I let Him. Which is really great, because I need to be wrecked. However, the sad thing is, I don't let it happen as often as it needs to happen. I blame it on busyness and tiredness and who knows whatever else when I get up in the morning and say, "Nah, I'd rather spend these 20 minutes eating breakfast than building a relationship with my Savior and dying to myself."
Because really, living for myself is easier and more fun most of the time.
At least at first.
But it's a guaranteed fact: every Sunday, every Bible study day, every time I start to dig into the Word, he ruins me a little bit more for this world and what it tries to sell me. These occurrences usually end in tears, and sometimes screaming/sometimes complete silence and lack of words, and always being totally humbled by Him and His presence and His grace.
Today looked a little bit like this:
I go to church. He stabs these lyrics of songs into my heart like daggers. I cry, the brokenness-being-healed-and-redeemed cry. The pastor starts preaching. Once again, my heart is overwhelmed by my selfishness, pride, and lack of Him. I cry some more. The pastor relays God's grace and goodness.

The everlasting truth is that God IS who He says He IS and He DOES what He says He can DO.
His names don't just tell us what he does, they tell us HIS NATURE and HIS CHARACTER. They tell us that He IS the very definition of that quality- healing, righteousness, providing, etc.- because He will NEVER not do or be that. He has always been, is continually, and will forever be EVERYTHING that is good in this life. EVERYTHING. 
That continues to blow my mind and wreck my life every time I think about it.

So there's all that. Add on to that my personal issues and mistakes and pains, and the fact that when I pour them out to Him, it's as if there's immediate healing poured into my heart. When I repent and ask for Him to forgive and heal me, I'm reminded that He always will be and do that for me, no matter how imperfect I am on a regular basis... just because He is good.
Once we get all that personal stuff added to the bundle, I am MESSED UP by the time I've finished my ranting.

In our Sunday night Bible study, we've been working on John 1 for a while now. We talked a couple weeks ago about verses 3 and 4 specifically, and how we were made through and by THE GOD, and Him alone. Claire shared this gripping story about her godmother's baby. The baby was born with some issues and went straight into neonatal ICU. The mother talked about how much she longed to be on the other side of that pane of glass, holding her newborn baby, but she knew she couldn't and that it would literally kill her child. Then the mother realized that's how God is with us. We are here, on this earth, separated from Him by sin. There is no way he can touch us or hold us like He wants to because He is so righteous and perfect, we would literally die (Exodus 33:5, 18-23). But then He sends Jesus, our Savior, our Messiah, to remediate our sins and reconcile us to Him that He may indirectly touch us and hold us. We don't physically die because we don't physically see Him, but we spiritually die to ourselves and this world because He spiritually consumes us to the point that WE, shattered creatures of darkness, can no longer live, and can only have Him living through us.
It boggles my mind.
1 Timothy 6:16 says He "dwells in unapproachable light"... but this is why we have the Holy Spirit in us, from the day of our salvation, so that we may be seen under Christ's blood as His spotless righteousness and may therefore "approach the throne of Grace with confidence." (Hebrews 4:16)

I'll stop there because my mind is whirling and I can't gather my own thoughts for the sake of His extraordinary self.
Keep your eyes on Him, my friends. Let Him consume you.

Let's get down to business...

Where on earth do I even begin? Let's just make a list.
- I miss London. a whole lot, obviously. But I've begun thinking about the logical aspect of moving there and it's really scary. Getting a student/work visa would be hard enough- let along finding a job, a place to live, and making completely new friends. and being away from my family ALL THE TIME. I mean let's be real, I'll probably only see them at Christmas if I live in England. I'm not sure if I'm ok with that.
- This bible study thing. I love Jenelle, and I'm so excited for God to start this exponential multiplication process. But I am so not ready to be a leader of a bible study ANYTIME in the near future, let alone next year. I just feel like I am lacking so much, and so unsure of how to respond to people, and so not a super-spiritual group leader person. Granted, I love Jesus A LOT... but I am super messed up and selfish. I'm just not sure how much of a success that could be. But then I guess I'm underestimating God when it comes down to it, huh?
- My major is consuming my life. It always happens, and I hate and love it at the same time. I love being dedicated to something and working hard for it and being wrapped up in it. But at this point, my major is coming before my relationship with God, which is NOT ok with me. And I really doubt any of my professors care. If it ends up being "finish practicing" or "go have God time," I practice to appease my teachers and get good grades. Which ends up happening. But even when I do get that 4.0 for the semester, 75% of the time, I look back and regret not having spent more time with the Lover of my soul.
- I love my little brother, and girls are messing with him and his friends are being mean and I want to punch someone for him. Nuff said.
- Also, work is tough. I'm wearing thin on my patience and enthusiasm now that I'm really getting to know these kids and it makes for some long, tiring afternoons- for them and me. They aren't progressing near as quickly as I'd hoped they would... and I just don't know what to do. I feel like a failure of a coach most days. My co-workers are good people, but I'm not super close to any of them and they're all like best friends, and it just makes me feel like the continual outsider. blehhh.

I'm an overcommitter. I'm in need of love.
"I'm wanting, needing, guilty, and greedy. Unrighteous, unholy... undo me, undo me!"

Still His unfathomable love and grace holds me together. His joy is my strength each day.

Hallelujah, grace like rain falls down on me. Hallelujah, all my stains are washed away.