best lines//january joy

I want a warm handshake from a slow and simple life.

love//the first time around

Love, the first time around, is messy and fast and all together muddled and perplexing.

Love was the first time you put your hand on my knee and and I forgot entirely how carsick I was.  It was the last time you really looked at me like somehow I was magic as we sat together in the front of your Tacoma.  I had spent so much of our conversation looking out the window, only to turn and find you staring at me smiling.  That smile with those ever deepening lines around your eyes, it always got me.

Now, I can't seem to remember the very last time we spoke.  I don't think I etched that moment into memory, probably because I was too hurt and bitter after everything happened. What I think I remember is one of the last times we spoke, when you broke our coffee date because you forgot you had class that night.  I remember wondering how it is you could have forgot such a thing as having class?  However, it would be the same excuse I would use only weeks later to break a date myself.

I remember clinging to your grey sweatshirt when we sat together in the nosebleed bleachers of the baseball park about four months after we first met.  Everyone else we knew was spread out in the rows in front of us chattering away.  You had made your way back up to sit with me and my friends dispersed.  There we were together, in the beginning of it all, among a crowd, but feeling like we were the only two people in the world.  I pretended to be into the game, saying something about the runner on 2nd, and you said you didn't care about the game, you just wanted to talk to me.  You said, with your face turned toward me, while my eyes were fixed on the field, that you wanted to know everything about me.  My heart raced as I felt the intensity of your gaze and the weight of those words.  I smiled and pulled your arm into mine because it felt like such a very safe and natural thing to do.

The moment I got home that night, I penned those words in my journal.  They felt too important to not record. No one had ever said anything like that in my whole 21 years of life.  I didn't ever want to forget them, no matter how things would unfold from there.

Two years later, I threw that journal away, when the idea of us was no longer in question.

I heard about you recently. You found a wife that you met online.  You have a son and a daughter.  You work hard to provide for them.  You do the things you love while building that little family of yours.  When I heard the whole story, I smiled.  I was really, truly glad for you. 

A year after it ended, you told me love was a choice.  You had a beer in your hand and you were acting so nonchalant.  So many people surrounded us and the music was loud.  I felt dizzy.  I wanted you to come outside with me, but I couldn't muster the courage to ask.  I imagine you would have.  But you continued to wax poetic saying that we get to choose who we love, and I remember thinking, how do I un-choose you? You went on to lament the many girls who had walked away recently.  I wanted to ask why you didn't care that I was happy to stay, but instead I slipped out of the party and drove to the lake and parked in the dark of a late Wednesday night and cried.  I must have cried for over an hour.  I put way more hurt on your words than you probably ever intended.

The first time you asked me out was to a bbq at a friend's apartment.  We barely spoke the whole night, but I remember you watching me from the balcony as I sat with the other girlfriends in the living room.  And I thought, this must be heaven to hold a man's eye like this.  Every time I would glance up and catch your eye, you would wink or smile.  It was nice to be seen and known by you.  It was assuring in a way I had never known before.  I loved when you told the other girls you were going to "steal me away".  I took your hand knowing I would follow you wherever you lead.

Last night I tried to find the one picture I have of us together.  I started to cry when I thought I might have thrown it away by now.  But I hadn't.  It was buried in the bottom of a box of pictures from college.  We are in our graduation gowns.  You are wearing your cap and I am wearing my hair full and swept to the side.  My smile seems a bit sad but you seem genuinely happy.  Your arm is around my shoulder and your hand lays across my chest.  My hands are holding your arm.  We appear at ease with each other.  My head is resting against your neck.  I suddenly am startled by the memory that it was moments after this photo was snapped that you told me you couldn't come to my graduation party.  You didn't give a reason and I didn't ask.  I just accepted the broken promise all the while thinking that was when I was supposed to introduce you formally to my parents with the thought that you may just be the man I might someday marry.  

I stared at your face a long while last night searching to find the man that I thought I loved.  I recognize now that love stories digress in their course and sometimes they don't end with getting the guy.

I suppose it was the picture she posted on MySpace that shifted everything for me.  You and her and them.  Sharing a meal.  Playing games. You had told me the day before I saw that, that pursuing me was the best choice you had made that year.  And yet, those words spoken by you did not fall on my ears the same way.  There was always another her.  The whole way through.  I was just too naive to see it.

My therapist said it probably wasn't love.  But let's call a spade a spade and say it was.  It was for me because it was life-altering.  My therapist mostly heard about the ways in which what we had was so debilitating and crippling for me, so I can't really blame his conclusions.  But for you, I always wonder, maybe it was love, and you were just able to love many at the same time.

I don't actually know what to call that.  Maybe such an idea strips any authenticity from the love, but I can't discount the good memories.

I am pleased to hear that you have become the man that I think I always knew you could be.  I am pretty sure if I had to do it all over again, I might not even change one thing, if it means we both could end up in this same place and take the same paths that we did to get here.  I'd say it was worth it.

what i am listening to//the nightlab (oscar isaac in all forms)

belief//2017

This year I am choosing to believe.  I am deciding that belief is a path to a better life.  The idea itself seems so basic.  After all, I often refer to myself a believer and I often attest to the many things I believe in.  Yet I find what has really shaped the past year of my life is a lack of belief.

As the Christmas season rolled around, I revisited the story of our Lord's coming to earth as part of an annual tradition of preparing my heart for the Christmas celebration. And once again, the Lord revealed this story, His story through a new lens. And I don't take this lightly or for granted.  Because a story, one that you've known since childhood, one that you've read over and over and over can grow quite dull.  And after 25+ years of consciously reading it and understanding it, one might be hard pressed to find something new in it.

But alas...

this Christmas season, I prayed for new eyes to see and experience the story, yet again.

 I examined Luke 1, I watched The Nativity Story (2006) for the first time, I sat and listened to the Christmas story presented in our Christmas Eve service, I went to a Christmas concert in which one of the Jazz musicians took a break from his saxophone to wax poetically about the true meaning of Christmas (that is it being reflected in the belief of Mary and Joseph) and all of these experiences tied together lent themselves to once again reshaping my Christmas experience.

I saw the Christmas story through the lens of belief.
Simple? Yes.  But new.  New for me, anyways.  A new way of seeing it and a way that I needed to see it, because it convicted my heart so.

I recognize that this idea of belief is so essential to living a full life.

Belief is a part of a courageous and meaningful existence. 

A lack of belief equates itself with a life that is fear filled, full of doubt and more than likely some kind of self-hatred.

I can attest to this.

My lack of belief is shaped so much in being my own worst critic, in being doubtful and afraid.

Mary, a humble young woman was given an unbelievable promise that could only be fulfilled by Christ.  She did not let fear, doubt or self-criticism shape her response.  Instead she believed and her soul magnified the Lord: "My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.  For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed, for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name." (Luke 1:46-49) She pondered the promises in her heart.  Blessings came to her and those around her as well.  Eventually everyone who believed would believe because of her belief.

Belief can have a transforming impact on those around us.

Our belief can shape the belief in and of others. 

My belief is a response to trusting God at His Word, even when I can't understand how it will all work out.  This is my deepest prayer in 2017.  I pray that the Lord will help my unbelief.  Because it is there.  Constantly.  In all forms.  I trust that stepping out and believing God at His word will cause my life to take an entirely different shape, and I welcome that.

I know it will not be easy.  Because belief is easy to talk about, but it is much harder to do.

 I am believing in God.  I believe in His Son who was sent to earth, who lived and died for me to know Him and share Him with others. I believe that the Holy Spirit is my guide.  I believe in myself because of who God has made me, in His image.

  I am actively, moment by moment, choosing/praying to not let fear, doubt and self-criticism define me and my choices.

I am aiming higher because of belief.  I am not settling because I believe there is something greater as I follow closer after the Lord.  I want, like Mary, to be a humble servant of my God and know that He can tell, ask, allow whatever to befall me and know I will walk forward in unabashed belief.

Luke 1:45~"And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord."

To live in brazen and blatant belief in full view of the world around me is what I want.
It is what I need.
It is what I will honestly and openly pursue.

To believe, not out of naivety, but faith.  I want the Lord to find me at any moment, candidly, unhesitatingly willing to follow His call.  I want Him to know, no matter what is said or done around me, that I will believe and follow after Him.

I want Him to find me, without pretense, ready and willing, not crippled by self-doubt, but standing on my own two feet, saying "wherever You are, that is where I want to be."