Forward Thinking

I like to think. And not about small daily tasks but about big questions. I like to consider conversations that could take place, the what ifs of life, and dream big. Today as I was thinking big thoughts, I considered what I would tell people who may ask me, "Where do you see yourself in five years?" As a graduating senior, that presents a big thinking project and some good dreaming. I have a list of things that I hope to see happen in my life over the next five years. Dreams that I want to see come to fruition. But how do I answer that question the most honestly? How do I begin to introduce somebody to my dreaming plans without unraveling a lot more about my past, present and heart far beyond what they wish to hear? How in depth do they really want to know where I see myself? Do I even have the direction to give specific answers of where I could see myself? And the questions go on. So as I pondered this, I came upon this as my five year plan.

I will not be the same person in five years that I am today. I will have more knowledge, more experiences, more compassion, more love, and more life flowing through my veins than I do today. I will continue to be innovative. I will not have stopped growing. I will be more me than I am today as I continue to grow. I will be dreaming of the next ten years beyond that based on how far the last five had gotten me, or even the last moment has gotten me. I will be full of hope. I will be full of love. I will be full of grace and kindness. I will grow more and more into who I am so that I can help others become more themselves better; so that I can love and serve others better; so that I can be the best me that this world needs.  I will be on my way to changing the world. I will not grow complacent in any aspect of my life; I will be continuing to press onward, to grow more and better myself. 

Because, in reality, how many people as they leave college accurately predict their life five years down the road. Now, if highly regulated graduate school or career plans present a structure to follow, an individual may be able to predict better where they will be in their career in five years, but life happens. Everyday, life happens. The small things do not simply pass by unless an individual allows them to. And even still, more than likely some of those "small things" come back around down the line, for the better or worse. They impact your circumstances and can change the course of your life. Life happens every day, and I won't miss today's life out of worry or focus solely on tomorrow's. So perhaps my five year plan sounds vague or sounds like I don't have a plan or sounds like I don't dream, but it is just the opposite. I will not let life pass me by, but will seize moments and opportunities that will further this mission. I dream things bigger than reality or the limits of the mind. I do not constrain my dreams to the realm of practical life, but of a life that will literally change the world. My five year plan is one of dreams coming true and my paradigm of normal constantly changing and growing. "As a man thinks, so he is." Therefore, I think big things. I hope for great things. And I believe that nothing is impossible.

And to Die is Gain

**This is a paper that I wrote for my English senior seminar this semester. It came from a revelation which I had in the class two weeks before I wrote the paper. As I actually cared about my subject, the paper was a lot of fun to write and so, I thought I'd share it with yall. The paper is on John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14," quoted here for your reference.**

Holy Sonnet 14

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp'd town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

And to Die is Gain

Metaphor as a literary device is used to shed light on and understanding of concepts and theories that straightforward words cannot fully capture; it enables the author to paint a more detailed and accessible word picture for the audience. The problem arises in the fact that the metaphor is not the real thing and so, at some point, all metaphors break down. The line of similarity comes to an end and the audience can choose to glare at the differences between the two or embrace the meaning of the picture created, despite its lacking. In John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14,” Donne uses sexual allusions to paint the picture of his relationship and zeal for the Lord. It is not a matter of whether the speaker is literally having sex with God, as the simple words on the page may present, but the meaning behind the words that leads to the understanding of this sonnet – to live is Christ and to die is gain.

Michael Foucault presents the argument of how superiors exert power by means of death and sexuality in his book, The History of Sexuality. In a transition of what Foucault calls the symbolics of blood, the power that dominates a person’s life has the power to “foster life or to disallow it to the point of death;” however, Foucault notes that “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private’” (138). Through the transition of power then seeking to mandate life, another shift occurred in history, one from a symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality. Under this system, the Church created a mandated discourse on sex through the regulation of confession. Through this discourse, the West became obsessed with knowing “the truth about sex.” In this search for truth, Foucault discusses the Freudian principles of pleasure and the death drives. He concludes, “The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for” (156). Amidst this connection to the death drive and the idea of “le petit mort” – the little death, or an orgasm, you literally die to yourself in an orgasm and experience sex for everything it is apart from yourself; you are one with your partner.

            The notion of dying to oneself in order to gain truth, power and life is no novel concept. The apostle Paul writes in Philippians 1:21 “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (ESV). He further explains the concept of dying to self and sin in a spiritual sense in order to gain life and righteousness in Romans 6:11-14 and explains,

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness” (ESV).

What Paul depicts here is the image of giving your whole self – soul, mind and body – over to the Lord in order to gain life. Full surrender.

            An individual is only meant to die to self once, and in that death, they gain all life through the moment of completely losing self. As presented through Paul, dying to self comes through giving your whole life to Jesus. Once again, the metaphor of marriage given to the Church arises for people to understand relationship with the Lord better. The image of marriage is given in Genesis 2:24: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh” (ESV). Through Foucault’s addition of “the little death” in an orgasm, the couple is dying to oneself through sex to be one. This becoming one in marriage and sex is metaphorical for the individual to understand better what it means to die to oneself as called to do in a relationship with the Lord. Fully knowing God is coming to a moment where the individual completely loses himself or herself in the Presence of the Lord. The reason man and woman become one and are married is to help foster the metaphor further through the notion that just as Christ only died once for our sins and we died with Him in that death, we now have life and are not meant to die again. The intention for the Church and for the man and woman is to only die one time. The intention is not to die and resurrect and live life as one desires to die again to another (or even back to Christ). The individual is called to die once to their sin nature and join with Christ one time; man and woman are called to die to one self one time in marriage and become one through “the little death” (of what I argue occurs only in the first orgasm for argument and metaphor’s sake).

            In his sonnet, Donne relates his hunger and zeal for the Lord through sexual metaphor; he desires to draw so near to God that it would be as if they were having sex and becoming one as man and woman do in marriage to become one. He first describes this sexual encounter through a very physical submission to the Lord. He asks for the Lord to be rougher than He has previously and submits himself to God saying, “That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new” (Donne 3-4). His words create the illusion of a man being raped by being overthrown and then made to “bend” over to allow God to break and blow and burn him. The man requests to be taken by the subject in an overpowering way and therefore consents to be fully submitted to a strong and potentially orgasmic encounter where the speaker would die to himself or herself. Similarly, man and woman are given to each other in full submission to experience dying to themselves. In 1 Corinthians 7:3-5, Paul explains the submission of bodies to sexual encounters that is healthy and right for husband and wife so that they may remain both chaste and one. Neither the husband nor the wife has authority over their own body but must submit it to the other. The metaphor Donne creates in lines three and four clearly points to the strongest and most savage of sexual encounters, but the purpose behind the encounter is to die to himself in an attempt to gain more full knowledge of what, or in this case, who, he is experiencing – in a literal reading and as Foucault would explain, it would be the truth about sex; in the metaphorical sense of what Donne is working to achieve, an orgasmic encounter with the Lord would render him deeper into who the Father is through fully submitting and dying to himself.

            Donne continues his metaphor through the thrill of an affair that adds passion and zeal to his pursuit of the Lord. In lines five through ten, Donne illustrates the strain in lovers’ relationships that comes from the inability to give oneself wholly to the other due to a betrothal. The speaker compares himself to a town that has been stolen but is due to another, and so because of his ownership by another, he cannot be fully his lover’s. Once again, it is not in the mind where the speaker must submit alone but in every part of him, because “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, / But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue” (Donne 5-6). The speaker desires more than to give his mind or give his body but to submit everything to the subject of his poem. He even declares that not only is he betrothed to another, but the one who currently holds claim on him is the subject’s enemy, further complicating and raising the amount of sexual tension between the speaker and the subject. The moments can never happen so long as the speaker is betrothed. In Romans 7, Paul depicts the spiritual tension of believers as they wrestle with their sin nature: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me” (Romans 7:19-20, ESV). The struggle of the early Church and the speaker in “Holy Sonnet 14” is one in the same, the wrestling of who they want to belong to and be one with and the force to which they are currently obliged – the sin nature and the enemy, respectively. Sexual and spiritual tensions are brought into a single existence within Donne’s poem so that the audience may more accessibly understand the desire and passion the speaker has towards his love object, seemingly, God. The presentation of sexual tension exists, but the reason it exists within these lines about betrothal and desire works beyond the metaphor in creating a picture that human feelings can more readily understand.

Just after the turn of Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14,” the speaker blatantly illustrates the metaphor as a sexual encounter. In the turn of the poem, the speaker divorces the power he was previously betrothed to and allows for the last three lines to cry for the long and strongly desired encounter to come. Without being taken as a slave to the subject, the speaker “never shall be free” (Donne 13); therefore, the speaker must be taken fully and submissively captive of God to receive the freedom He offers. Foucault describes how the demand of confession imprisoned society to constantly discuss sex but in doing so, created a freedom for society to discuss and discover the truth about sex. The speaker, likewise, explains that unless he becomes fully imprisoned in his search for freedom through sex, they will never have the freedom that will come through the knowledge of the encounter (Foucault 60). These lines that the metaphor follows come from within Romans 6 as Paul calls the audience to be slaves to righteousness: “But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life” (ESV, Romans 6:22). Line 13 clearly indicates a complete submission of slavery as one succumbs to a sexual encounter and have a little death to self, but with the understanding of why the metaphor is there, the full picture of what Donne is looking to achieve comes to light in dying to self in order to gain eternal life and freedom in the Lord.

It is in the final line of the poem, however, where the fullness of the all three metaphors – the sonnet, man and wife, and dying to Christ – come into collision the best. The speaker of the poem declares that he shall never be chaste unless the subject ravishes, or rapes him, as it has historically meant (Donne 14). The word chaste contains multiple meanings. While in the sexual sense it means sexually or morally untainted; in a spiritual sense chaste means pure and pure of heart. To desire to be pure for the speaker, as a spiritual man, brings the blessing of seeing God (ESV, Mt. 5:8). For the speaker to see God would be the epitome of encounters with the Lord. The marriage metaphor comes back to better explain the strength and understanding of dying to self in an encounter in order to know the truth through pure ravishment in Song of Solomon 4:9 “You have ravished my soul, my sister, my bride; you have ravished my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace” (KJV). Song of Solomon is a book that is known to demonstrate the pursuit and relationship between Jesus, the bridegroom, and the Church, the bride. The speaker of Song of Solomon demonstrates how ravishment and seeing their love come together in this verse. Through the Beatitudes and the chastity required to see God, alongside the ravishment that occurs through the opening of the speaker’s eyes to their lover, the speaker of “Holy Sonnet 14” makes sense in asking to be ravished by the subject in order that they may be pure. The metaphor of a man pursuing a woman helps a Biblical audience to understand the bride and bridegroom metaphor of the Bible, to better understand the greatest love story ever told through the entire Bible. The metaphor of sex then in the sonnet helps to connect back to the Biblical illustrations provided by marriage, which takes the reader back to the relationship with God that comes only through dying to oneself, just the one time, as the speaker dies with Jesus.

Although there are clearly sexual encounters illustrated within John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14,” the sex in itself has no meaning or purpose because it is a metaphor for an encounter with the Lord. Donne uses the metaphor because it opens up the depth to his longing for the Lord in a strength that goes beyond saying, “I want more of you, Lord.” It creates a picture for the audience to use to empathize with just how badly he wants to know the Lord – to know Him in the most intimate of ways. If the question ends in simply if sex is occurring in the poem, then the meaning of the poem is lost unto the audience, and the beauty of really dying to oneself in order to inherit truth and encounter the Lord short changes itself for pure erotica.

Works Cited

Donne, John. "Holy Sonnets: Batter My Heart, Three-person'd God by John Donne : The Poetry Foundation." Poetry Foundation. 2011. Web. 04 Feb. 2012. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173362>.

English Standard Bible. LifeChurch.tv. 2011. Electronic Application.

Foucault, Michel, and Robert Hurley. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1988. Print.

King James Version. LifeChurch.tv. 2011. Electronic Application.

This Little Light of Mine....

This little light of mine,

I'm gonna let it shine.

This little light of mine,

I'm gonna let it shine.

This little light of mine,

I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Hide it under a bushel?

NO! I'm gonna let it shine.

Hide it under a bushel?

NO! I'm gonna let it shine.

Hide it under a bushel?

NO! I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Chorus

Don't let Satan blow it out.

I'm gonna let it shine.

Don't let Satan blow it out.

I'm gonna let it shine.

Don't let Satan blow it out.

I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

(Repeat chorus)

Shine all over (CITY)

I'm gonna let it shine.

Shine all over (CITY)

I'm gonna let it shine.

Shine all over (CITY)

I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Chorus

Let it shine 'til Jesus comes.

I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine 'til Jesus comes.

I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine 'til Jesus comes.

I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Chorus

Sometimes, going back and rethinking and rereading the lyrics of children's songs open up a whole new realm of meaning. As a kid, it's the motions and the tune that catch our attention. Is it fun for us to sing? Can we sing it enough to make it annoying for anyone to be around us? Yes? Perfect. That is our new favorite song. However, as we grow older and our thinking allows for more depth and critical analysis of words, thoughts and ideas, the lyrics to a song suddenly bring us to tears as their meanings penetrate our hearts. 

When I was a little girl, I loved songs about sunshine and light. My mom would sing "You Are My Sunshine" to me as I would lay down to go to sleep. Another one of my favorites was always "This Little Light of Mine." There were motions where we would hide our index finger of one hand under a "bushel" of our other hand and then SHOUT, "NO!" as we took the bushel off. It was loud; it was fun; and such an exciting thing to say as a child, "No. Nobody is going to change my mind for me. This is me and what I believe and I'm gonna tell the whole world."  Which, according to my mom, is exactly what I did as a young believer. I couldn't contain myself from telling others about this Jesus I had met, who saved me and loves me and loves them too. What a powerful and enabling song for a young child.

Now, fast forward to my current season. I was recently driving by myself and took the precious time in the car to be with the Father and talk about life and intercede and just be at my most raw with Him. Coming into my last semester of college, future plans and circumstances has been a popular topic between He and I. The last year and a half had been a challenging "growing" season with Him and who I am. I learned lies that I had been walking in about myself or just the pattern I walked in. In the moment of changing my thoughts, I did not always realize what I had believed; I just kept pressing in more to the Father.  As I pressed in, my mentality changed over the season and in the last three months, I have been able to look back and identify what I had been believing or doing and how the Father has grown me from that place. A lot of it had to do with trust, trusting that the woman God made me to be was exactly who He wanted me to be and that He has plans specific for me. I don't have to alter who I am to fit others' plans, but being perfectly me will bring to fruition the plans He has for me. So as I was driving, I talked about things and went in a loop of saying, "This would be cool. I'm gonna wait for you to move here. But I think it would be cool. I'm not gonna care or worry about it though, etc..." And as I thought about why certain things would be cool, I had reasons and questions and excitement for what the Lord is about to do. One of the reasons why I thought some of my ideas would be cool was how they seemed to fit with what I love and desire. As the loop progressed, a wall popped up, and I don't know that it was a wall that was supposed to be there, in that it comes from a place of fear from pain I have experienced in the past that I want to wisely move forward and away from in a way that prevents it from happening again. So the wall popped up to say, "If I have to sacrifice part of who I am for this to work, I don't want any of it. I've gone down that road before and it only harms me in the long run." As I had that thought, which wasn't a bad thought, "This little light of mine" popped into my head, and I laughed. This song that I have not thought of in forever came rushing back to me, and I realized that it was not just an evangelical Gospel song for kids, but also about how much the Father really desires us to be this bold with our identity.

In these last few months, the Father has also been teaching me so much about identity. Beyond just mine, He has been teaching me the importance of and responsibility we as children of Him have to bring others into their identity. A wise and incredible "big brother" in my life, Joel, often says, "You are the best you that will ever be. You represent an aspect of the Father's heart that nobody else ever will be." That truth makes our "little light" of identity crucial to this world. We have to let our identity shine in its fulness because the Father made us to be us and nobody else. At the One Thing conference put on by the International House of Prayer in Kansas City a couple of weeks ago, Stuart Greaves spoke a sermon called, "The Beauty of Jesus as the Servant of All." He spoke a lot about the servanthood mentality and humility - things about which the Lord has also been revealing a lot to me - and Greaves said, "Humility is rooted in knowing who we are, not in the denying of who we are. It's agreeing with who God says we are." So as we grow in our own identities and walk them out more and more, we are able to be more and more humble, more and more of a servant to those around us, because we are so fully rooted in our own identity in Him, and we know that that is the only identity that matters.

Part of the responsibility to our own identity is to call forth the true identity in others - our brothers and sisters who are believing lies and those who are lost and orphaned. James 1:27 (NIV) says, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." We are called to take care of the orphans in this world who live without the Good Father and do not know who they are because they are seeking their identity from other sources. We have to bring truth and real identity to those around us because we, as humans, are responsible to the identity that we know. 

A while back, I was complaining about having to do something that it felt like I always had to be the one to do. I wanted somebody else to step up to it for once. In a moment, the Father kindly told me that it was a part of my identity and that's why I did it. It completely shifted my perspective on doing that. It was no longer obligatory but part of who I am. As I processed that revelation of who I am, the Father then whispered, "And now that you know that, you are responsible to being that."

Boom. That was an even greater revelation. Now that I know this identity, I am responsible to walking in it. If I had never learned, I would be able to gripe about doing things and could walk under another identity, but one that is false and not joyful. Because, you see, there is joy in walking in the fulness of your identity, as it opens the door to walking and living constantly in the Presence where all the fruits of the Spirit reside. Then the Father spun the revelation again - "Those who believe a false identity to be true are responsible to walking in that identity until somebody calls forth the truth." Girls who are labeled (and that includes the means through which they are treated because their treatment leads to formulating reasons for why they are treated in a given manner) as not good enough, unworthy of love, sluts, manipulative, b****es, etc... are only responsible to that identity. A guy who is labeled as a convict, uncaring, not good enough, unsuccessful, unintelligent, no-good-do-nothing, etc... is similarly responsible only to the identity that other people or sources have given him. If nobody else has shown them or told them that they are more and better than that label, then they will continue to live in a way that manifests truth of the false label.

As the body, therefore, we are called to let our light shine. We are called to be royal priests (1 Peter 2:9) and minister to the world. But we first must be walking in our identity. Not a front. Not what we think the world needs us to be in order to impact it, but in who we know the Father has made us to be. He knit us together perfectly, to be the best us we could be, that nobody else could ever fulfill like we can (Ps. 139). The freedom that comes from shining our own individual lights opens up destinies. It fosters love because we can finally love ourselves as we were created to. How do we love our neighbor as ourselves if we do not know how to love ourselves or even more, who we are loving? So as we grow in our identities and therefore in our ability to love ourselves enough to be ourselves, we can love others. We can love our neighbors, both family and orphans. We can share with them how worthy of love they are and who they are so that they may be empowered to love themselves and walk in who they are. 

It's like the candle light service, or portion of the service, on Christmas Eve. The lights go down in the sanctuary and it's dark. One or two people have lit candles though. They walk over to somebody who has an unlit candle and share their flame with them. The other person's candle is lit. That person then passes their light along to the person who is beside them. And the chain continues. Meanwhile, the first few people who benefited from the original candle make their way towards the back of the sanctuary, lighting somebody's candle in every row so that that row may receive light. By the end of the lighting, everyone's candle is lit, and suddenly, the dark room is not so dark any more. In fact, one could argue that the flames are growing and slowly the room is growing brighter, like the world at the break of dawn, as the Son takes His place. The chorus starts:

"Silent night, holy night

All is calm, ALL is BRIGHT.

Round young virgin, mother and child.

Holy infant, so tender and mild.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Sleep in heavenly peace.

Silent night, holy night

Shepherds quake at the SIGHT

Glories stream from heaven afar

Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!

Christ the Savior is born

Christ the Savior is born.

Silent night, holy night.

Son of God, loves pure LIGHT.

Radiant beams from Thy holy face

With the DAWN of redeeming grace

Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth

Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth."

So family, let your light shine. The world depends on it. The Father desires it, more than you ever could. And Jesus is calling forth a generation of children no longer scared of the dark, but willing to be a light in the midst of it.

You Know You're a Wordy Person When....

The grace of the Father is perfect and beautiful. He shows it and gives it everyday. He gives it not out of pity but compassion. He desires the plans for our life even more than we do, no matter how much we believe to desire them. He wants us to be more like how He created us each day, and He gives us grace to get there through the process we need to go through in order to be able to understand and handle what awaits us on the other side.

I purchased a book earlier this week called A User's Guide to Bible Translation by David Dewey. To be honest, it was an impulse purchase. I came acrossed it somehow and after reading the description, felt the language lover in me rise up to purchase it. It came in the mail today! Immediately, I began to skim over its contents and felt a joy swell up as I read how the book goes through explaining the process of translation and different measures used to translate. The second half of the book discusses the different English translations of the texts. Now for anyone who doesn't know me, the reason I am an English major is not out of a place of love for literature but because of my simple fascination with language - what it does, that it's possible, the meaning of words, how they came to mean what they mean, what they mean mean, the importance of good diction, the wonder of grammar and how it affects meaning, translation and what the truest form was before it was translated... all of that. I am just fascinated by it. And in that, I know I am wordy - get it, it's a pun on "nerdy." Okay, point proven. Anyways, needless to say I find excitement in getting to read this book in the coming weeks (I have school and other personal reads currently going on to fit this into). My appreciation for words and language can generally be reflected in my loquacious lifestyle.

But the Father has over the past year been teaching me the art of silence - how much it says and what it allows for. The verse that has continued to be one that causes me to sit and mull over is Exodus 14:13-14 (NASB):

"But Moses said to the people, "Do not fear! Stand by and see the salvation of the LORD which He will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you have seen today, you will never see them again forever. The LORD will fight for you will you keep silent." 

In time with Him, I often am reminded Psalm 46:10 "Be still and know that I am God." But when I walk in the world, I often feel that I need to fight and share what's on my mind. I did this a lot growing up. Probably too much. Between me, my brother and my sister, I was the vocal child. I was the child who talked everyone's ears off at dinner, but also the child who when my parents told me something I did not agree with or did something I perceived unfair, I fought back. They knew exactly what was on my mind and I fought to defend myself in the times when I felt like nobody was fighting for me or that I was in need of being fought for. It came to a point with my mom when after years of this mentality, my brother finally got through to me with the advice to just stay quiet, let whoever say what they are going to say and be done with it. It's not worth the time or energy. So I tried this; however, the pattern I had set in motion led to the following argument:

[I sit silently]
"What are you thinking?"
"Nothing."
"Yes you are. Tell me what you're thinking!"

When I realized that I was getting yelled at for not saying anything, I figured I might as well say what was on my mind; at least that way they would know what I was thinking and perhaps some of my logic would land with them. So I was back to being the vocal child.

As I have grown in intimacy with the Father, this mentality and course of action has greatly subsided to the point of being nil. I hate being in disagreements and with discord. I have given this old way to the Father. But as I have been renewed in this area, learning to just sit when the world is in chaos has been a journey. Not just, "Don't worry." But, "Be silent." It's learning to trust in a new and deeper way. It's coming to a place where before I even talk to somebody about a given situation the Lord has already taken care of it for me. At times, it is just seeing it in the small, medium and then big things. Most recently, it was perhaps medium sized, dealing with graduating on time.

 I registered for my final semester this week. Even with senior status, I still had to request two courses because of some ridiculousness in the English department. The professor who could override me into those courses is one of my professors this week and for the past two weeks, he has mentioned the craziness of his life in this advising and registering period. I debated going and talking to him or email him about needing to be put in the classes. I planned to wait until after class the following afternoon to talk to him when he might have an extra minute. Hours before class, though, I went onto the registration site and found that I had been pushed in to the course I needed, which had rarely if ever happened before without some form of correspondence with a professor. I didn't have to say a word. I only needed to be silent and the Lord went before me to get me into this final required course. After class, I did speak with the professor to thank him for putting me in the course, especially when I didn't even have to speak with him about it. He was blessed by some gratitude, which I would guess in the high stress of registration is not something he gets to see all that much.

It's in the little things that we can see the Father's grace shine through. Grace in teaching me what I can learn from silence: His faithfulness and provision, what He is saying in the midst of a loud world, how silence can change a fighting heart to a servant's heart, etc... I am so thankful for His grace with me during my years of being vocal. I am so thankful for His love and kindness that silenced and softened my heart to make it more loving and like His. I am also thankful that in and through silence, He has taught me my voice and how to use it. I am thankful that He affirms me when I doubt of the power of the voice He has gifted me with and its potential in Him. And all of this continues to baffle me with how there is language even in its absence.

New Season, New Blog, Same Purpose

Isaiah 6:8 -
"Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?'
And I said, 'Here am I. Send me!'"

The Lord is so good. He is so faithful. And He has so much good for me to experience. He has recently brought me into a new season that has been a little bit like gold mining - sifting through parts of me and getting rid of the things that He does not have for me while at the same time finding true treasures of what He does have for me and how He sees me and who He has made me to be. So this blog is beginning as an honorary marker of this new season. The title of the blog is "Isaiah 6:8 Living," which has the same meaning and purpose as my old blog - going wherever the Lord sends me and doing whatever He has for me and loving everybody He puts me in contact with. I just desire to record who the Father is, what He is doing in my life, what He is doing in others' lives, what the Kingdom is, what love looks like, and share the amazing journey and life the Lord has for me, even in the times when I might not understand but know and do choose Him anyways. Or you know, a random thought or funny story in general. Just life in whatever form best fits the occasion.

So that's the dealio. Gosh, I love new seasons. In fact, season changes are always my favorite times of year. I don't know that I love just one season... well actually, I really do love fall a lot, but I LOVE when the season change comes. From the beauty of the colors of fall and the sweatshirt weather and football season to the first couple snowfalls of winter and the fires in fireplaces and hot chocolate and Christmas to the first budding leaves and blooming flowers of spring with the warmer breezes and sunny days and spring rains to the first warm day by or on some water (lake, pool, river, etc...) of summer and classes ending and outdoor adventures picking back up. I really love season changes and all the hope of the new and various things that those changes equate to. I love that the Father gave me a heart that loves change and does well with it. I love that He gave me a heart for season changes so that I don't scorn the change but embrace it for all that it means. And I have a feeling that this season I am beginning to walk into is just going to be ridiculously amazing. So huzzah for the fall to holiday season commencing! Hooray for jeans and sweatshirt weather! Holy moley for just registering for my final semester of college! And hallelujah that all of this is in the Lord's hands and time! Until I have a moment to share some more good stuff of what Papa is up to (because He definitely is up to some things), be blessed; walk in His peace; and dream wildly with Him.

Peace and grace,

Chels