I’ve realized the reason why my character sometimes seems to develop so slowly here is because that’s the downside about being a part of a community like cfc: someone’s always looking.  I have little chance to develop as a human being and as a Christian woman of character because I’m with people so often that I don’t even know who I’d be if no one were looking.

I need to actively seek solitude & time alone.  Until I can learn how to do this, my character will always remain stunted.  How will I ever know who I am when no one’s looking when I constantly put myself in positions where someone is always looking?  And if I keep putting myself in these positions to always be around people who will be watching, I start to be convinced that what they think of me is who I really am.  But it’s not.  And I’ll never know until I learn how to be alone.

or like…3 real ones!

in the meantime, go to www.dipdive.com and watch hilarious sarah palin videos and an inspiring obama video (yes we can). happy election day.

but now.. i have to go prep for biblestudy

sorry. he he… BOO!

The first thing God does with us is to get us based on rugged Reality until we do not care what becomes of us individually as long as He gets His way for the purpose of His Redemption. Why shouldn’t we go through heartbreaks? Through those doorways God is opening up ways of fellow ship with His Son. Most of us fall and collapse at the first grip of pain; we sit down on the threshold of God’s purpose and die away of self-pity, and all so called Christian sympathy will aid us to our death bed. But God will not. He comes with the grip of the pierced hand of His Son, and says – “Enter into fellowship with Me; arise and shine.” If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.

- Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest

I’ve come to realize something pretty simple: I just want what I want.  And when my heart is not right, it doesn’t matter what I do; I’ll just keep choosing whatever I want, simply because I don’t know how to base my decisions off anything else.  Unfortunately, when I’m in this state and I don’t get what I want, that’s me, falling and collapsing at the first grip of pain, saying I don’t deserve this and crying at how unfair everything feels.  But God doesn’t want me to care so much about myself anymore.  He wants me to see how tiring it is to be so self-involved.  And I’m starting to see it.  I tire myself out.  My insatiable desires, the crazy lengths they drive me to, my lack of self-control — I’M tired of me.

God’s purpose will stand.  If my shattered heart is a way for God to enter, I should be thankful that He has chosen to shatter me again.  His call to me is to arise and shine, not sit there and sulk in my misery.  He wants me to be the new creation I already am, and He won’t leave me alone until I’m there.  I need to remember that the darkness of the valley is passing, and I’m heading somewhere.  It sounds illogical from a worldly perspective, but I really do need to thank Him for breaking my heart.

In every season, He is still God.  I have a reason to sing, I have a reason to worship.  Somehow.  Just gotta find it.

crazy! dang im really behind. but you know how long it takes me to type?!!……. twice worst than it takes me to sPEAK! >< booo.

BUT. i would write. and i wanted to write after my hw. BUT..BUT. BUUUUUT! its taking me a loooong time want to sleep….want to cry…

but i just wanted to let you know. that a post will be coming.. its a coming jangalang..but now i go bak to gongbu

bye.

1 Peter 2:4-8

The Living Stone & A Chosen People.

As you come to him, the living Stone — rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him — you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.  For in Scripture it says:
“See, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and precious cornerstone, and the one who trusts in him will never be put to shame.”  Now to you who believe, this stone is precious.  But to those who do not believe,
“The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone,” and,
“A stone that causes men to stumble and a rock that makes them fall.”  They stumble because they disobey the message — which is also what they were destined for.

Peter said yesterday to get rid of all the things that are deceitful within me.  If I do, then I can crave what is pure and spiritual so that I can grow up in my salvation instead of staying like a baby.  Now that I’ve glimpsed that God is good, I need to keep believing that He really is and grow up in that faith.  As I come to Him with this desire to grow in my faith, I am being built into a spiritual house.  It’s something that is guaranteed to be done, so I don’t have to worry about whether it’s happening or not.  The only thing that ensures this growth is the fact that I keep on coming.  As I come to Him, I am being built.  He does it for me.  I just need to keep coming to Him and getting rid of everything that’s deceitful about me.

He IS the living Stone, and I am like Him.  It says that, though He was rejected by men, He was chosen by and precious to God.  If the same is true of me, I want that to mean something to me.  I’ve been obsessed with this Beyonce song “If I Were a Boy” where she talks about how she’d act if she could switch genders, just so she could feel what it would be like to take her guy for granted because she would always believe that he would be faithfully waiting for her.  I think that’s my thing too.  I feel like that’s how some people treat me, and I get really hurt and mad because I think that I would never treat people I cared about like that…but then I treat God like that.  There’s something about this guarantee that someone will always be there for you that makes you want to stop trying.  It’s sad.  I know it’s not permanent and that I do have a heart for my relationship with God because I always go back to it and I know I always will.  But it’s in the meantime that makes me sad.  It’s that feeling that I’m always the prodigal, needing to come back, over and over again.  I just don’t know when I’ll just stay.  Doesn’t it mean anything that I’m chosen by and precious to God?  That even if those who I wish would choose me don’t and those who I wish would see me as precious don’t, that GOD does and that that is worth more?  It doesn’t feel like that.  It feels like the things losers say to convince themselves that their lives mean something, that even if no one loves them, at least the one guy who has to does.  My mind is so worldly and unspiritual.

God is building me into a house, and the goal is to be a holy priesthood, someone who can offer spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God.  I guess that’s where the problem is.  I don’t see the big picture in the midst of my life.  I’m supposed to keep coming to God, yes.  In that coming, I’m being built into a spiritual house, yes.  But I’m being built into this house so that I can be holy and so that I can offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God?  I think I’m still wrapping my head around the first two that I forget that the thread that ties them all together is faithfulness.  God wants me to be faithful to Him, and I think that’s what true holiness is: faithfulness in the daily small things, and these are the sacrifices God wants me to offer to Him.  In the things that I do everyday, am I being faithful to Him?  Am I making the necessary sacrifices in which I die to myself to choose what is holy and spiritual?

If I do keep coming to Him and am faithful to Him, He promises that I will never be put to shame.  This reminds me of Romans 5:5 which says that hope will not disappoint me.  I’ve been thinking about what is worth believing in (my gmail status msg is “just stop believing”) because I remember that one QT from the first chapter last week where I realized that who I am is defined by where my faith & hope are.  The object of my faith & hope are everything.  And to a certain extent, I think that faith & hope are inseparable because hope is a natural product of true faith.  If you have faith in something, it’s a decision you’re making to believe, even though there are still doubts and other things that you’re not sure about.  And since you’re not 100% sure about it, then you have a certain degree of hope in it to believe that it’s real, to believe that the things you’ve chosen won’t let you down but that they are reliable.  I guess that’s what it is.  If I’m hoping in something, it’s because I have chosen to believe in it.  I’ve chosen to believe in unworthy people and unworthy things, chosen to believe that they will somehow set me free, that they’ll be my redemption and define my value.  And so they hold my faith.  That’s why I need to stop believing.  There are some things that aren’t worth believing.  If I keep believing in them, I WILL be put to shame.  Only Jesus is worth believing in.

And if I really do believe, then He will be precious to me.  Whatever I love will have my faith and hope, and he will be precious to me.  I guess I just don’t really believe anymore.  The gospel has lost its luster and has started feeling old in light of the other things in this world that have captured my heart.  If I still believed as earnestly as I did last semester, Jesus would be precious to me.  As it stands, I have almost cast Him aside as someone unimportant to me.  I don’t see His value, and if He weren’t God who didn’t need my love, I would probably have made Him feel pretty worthless.  I want God to be precious to me.  I want Him to mean something to me.  I think that’s what it comes down to: I don’t see Jesus as worth anything.  I can sing all I want about how worthy He is, but if I examine my life, there is no evidence that I really believe that.

I wish I could just stop believing. In the things that will only disappoint me.   Only Jesus is worthy.

We started reading through Matthew, and I thought it was all very interesting, you know.  And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward.  He wasn’t diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me.  Don, I can’t explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me.  I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio.  I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me.  But it wasn’t like that with Jesus.  There were people He loved and people He got really mad at, and I kept identifying with the people He loved, which was really good, because they were all the broken people, you know, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcasts or pagans.

- Don Miller, Blue Like Jazz.

This is an account of one of Don’s friends who was in the process of becoming Christian.  I don’t know why, but I think this book speaks to me like nothing else can.  Maybe sometimes the Bible is too heady and I’m not spiritual enough to understand it or something.  But this guy, no matter how many times I read it over and over again, it speaks to something inside me that’s dying, that maybe can only be reached in certain times in language that has been stripped of all its spiritual jargon and is just straightforward and real.  And this sounds heretical BUT I’m not saying the Bible doesn’t do that.  Just that sometimes I need Don Miller to be my friend. Hehe.

Anyways.  Don’s friend Penny was explaining how she used to hate Christians, but she met this girl who just seemed like Jesus was her friend.  She never seemed like she was selling anything or like she was ashamed to say she were Christian.  She was just herself and talked about Jesus like He was a real person.  And she started reading the Bible and discovered that Jesus was nothing like what she’d thought, as she explains above.

I haven’t been feeling very free lately.  I feel chained to my past, to the decisions I’ve made, and I feel like there’s no letting go.  I don’t even know why I hold onto things, whether there is godly reason to them anymore or not, but I just feel so chained — and worst of all, like I can’t do anything about the chain.  Because I don’t know how God can redeem anything anymore.  It’s that feeling of just being the prodigal ALL THE TIME, and you wonder if you’ll ever stop running long enough to just stay Home and know what real love is, not just the kind that welcomes you back after you’ve been gone awhile, but the true committed kind that remains no matter what.

I think people say “Jesus loves you” enough for me to have it drilled into my skull that He must.  I take it to mean that, no matter what I do, He’ll always be there for me.  That’s what love is to me: commitment.  Jesus is committed to me; He’ll always stay.  But sometimes, it feels like it has sorta like this negative connotation to it.  Like He’s committed to me so, even when I mess up, He’s like, Ugh fine not again, but okay I’m still here.  Just be sorry and I’m still here.  But it’s like the tone I picture Him saying it with isn’t necessarily always the caring kind because it can feel like He has to be there or something.

But the idea that, if Jesus were here today, He would LIKE me?  I know it seems shallow, but it speaks to a different part of me.  Jesus just is not the condemning kinda guy I often see Him as.  He understands.  Even though I keep doing the same stuff over and over again, He just wants me to tell Him about it, just like those broken people in the Bible who are tired of life and want to be done with it.  He doesn’t come at me with judgment; He understands me, and He likes me.  Sometimes I feel so worthless and like the things I say and think matter to no one.  But Jesus likes me and He values what I’m going through, and I want to be free in that fact.

When I feel like Jesus doesn’t like me, I think that is a pretty clear sign that the gospel is not real in my life.  Guilt seems like such a noble thing sometimes, to say that I feel so guilty so the Holy Spirit must really be working in me.  But I think guilt is dumb in light of the gospel.  Jesus redeemed me from that guilt so I wouldn’t have to feel like I need to earn something from Him.  He just likes me the way I am, even when I mess up.  That IS the gospel.  There’s no use in being one of those miserable Christians who just kicks herself around for everything she’s not.  That’s not the life God intended for me to live.  He came so that my sins would already be paid for, so I don’t know why I keep wanting to pay for them myself.

This year, I’ve never felt so much like one of those broken people who are tired of life and want to be done with it.  But the desperation’s been lacking because I’m so sick of trying and trying and reaping no fruit from it.  I think I need to find that desperation again so that I can have that vision of Christ again, just like I did last semester.  Even though the summer has past, my prayer remains the same: I still want to remember.  Jesus still likes me.

i just wanted to put up a post.

even though it lacked substance.

the substance is coming!

something i’ve been thinking about: “heart” is nothing without faithfulness.

mm.

bye!