So for the past couple of days my family and I were at the beach. What was supposed to be a relaxing vacation turned in to a run for cover and hope you don't get wet event. We woke it this morning to more rain..it had been pouring for almost two days...we decided to get the heck out of there. Unfortunately the rain literally trailed us all the way home and we are now sitting at home not looking forward to going outside any time soon.
School...
Well this week was my first week of my history class and it is going faily well. It is kind of weird taking an online course but I am rather enjoying working at my own pass and only having deadlines once a week instead of every other day.
Saving lives..
Tomorrow I will be certified to save lives. It shoud be exciting but it will be a long day of class. If you have a heart attack after tomorrow though I will be able to save you...well again, I am updating my certification. Why do they keep changing the rules of life saving?
Friday, June 29, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
"Seasons" - Donald Miller "Through Painted Deserts"
This is an exerpt that was read at the end of this school year. It is just a reminder that we all go through seasons in our lives. It is okay for things to come to an end because that is exactly had God wants it to be. We are put in a place for just as long as God needs us there and then we move on to our next season. Enjoy!
I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not just read the same page recurrently.
Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.
Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.
Here is something I found to be true: you don't start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath...
It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were...and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you will never again will be.
So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.
And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?
It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the world around on your tongue for a bit. It's a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.
I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave, has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God's way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains, and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change. Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.
I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not just read the same page recurrently.
Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn't all happening at once.
Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can't find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.
Here is something I found to be true: you don't start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now, just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath...
It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were...and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you will never again will be.
So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.
And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?
It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change, to shine out.
I want to repeat one word for you:
Leave.
Roll the world around on your tongue for a bit. It's a beautiful word, isn't it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Two Worlds
A year has past and now we stand on the brink of returning to a world where we are surrounded by the paradox of everything, and yet nothing being the same.
In days we will reluctantly give our hugs and, fighting the tears, say goodbye to people who were once just names on a sheet of paper to return to people that we hugged and fought tears to say goodbye to before we ever left.
We will leave our best friends to return to our best friends.
We will go back to the places we came from and go back to the same things we did last summer and every summer before that. We will come into town on the same familiar road, and even though it has been months, it will seem like only yesterday. As you walk into your old bedroom, every emotion will pass through you as you reflect on the way your life has changed and the person you have become. You suddenly realize that the things that were most important to you a year ago don't seem to matter so much anymore, and the things you hold highest now, no one at home will completely understand.
The memories and the stories from school won't mean anything to anyone at home and yet you resent them for that, that they can't share that happiness with you.
Who will you call first? What will you do your first weekend home with your friends? How long before you actually start missing people barging in without calling or knocking? Who will get pizza at three in the morning with you now? How long until you adjust to sleeping alone in a room again?
Then you start to realize how much things have changed, and you realize the hardest part of college is balancing the two completely different worlds you now live in, trying desperately to hold on to everything all the while trying to figure out what you have to leave behind. In the matter of one day's traveling time, we will leave our world of living next door to our best friends, walking across campus to eat, instant messenger, 8:00am classes, and the perpetual procrastination to a world that will seem foreign to us despite the fact that we lived in it for eighteen years.
But it is different now. We now know the meaning of true friendship. We know who we have kept in touch with over the past year and who we hold dearest in our hearts. We've left our high school world to deal with the real world. We've had our hearts broken, we've fallen in love, we've helped our best friends overcome depression, stress and death, and we've stayed up all night on the phone just to talk to a friend in need. There have been times we've felt so helpless being hours away from home when we know our families needed us, and there are times we know we have made a difference.
A few days from now we will leave. In a few days from now we take down our pictures, and pack up our clothes. No more going next door to do nothing for hours on end. We will leave our friends whose random email and phone calls will bring us to laughter and tears this summer.
We will take our memories and dreams and put them away for now, saving them for our return to this world.
A few days from now we will arrive. We will unpack our bags and have dinner with our families. We will drive over to our best friend's house and do nothing for hours on end We will return to the same friends whose random emails and phone calls have brought us to laughter and tears over the year. We will unpack old dreams and memories that have been put away for the past year.
In a few days we will dig deep inside to find the strength and conviction to adjust to change and still keep each other close. And somehow, in some way, we will find our place between these two completely different worlds.
In days we will reluctantly give our hugs and, fighting the tears, say goodbye to people who were once just names on a sheet of paper to return to people that we hugged and fought tears to say goodbye to before we ever left.
We will leave our best friends to return to our best friends.
We will go back to the places we came from and go back to the same things we did last summer and every summer before that. We will come into town on the same familiar road, and even though it has been months, it will seem like only yesterday. As you walk into your old bedroom, every emotion will pass through you as you reflect on the way your life has changed and the person you have become. You suddenly realize that the things that were most important to you a year ago don't seem to matter so much anymore, and the things you hold highest now, no one at home will completely understand.
The memories and the stories from school won't mean anything to anyone at home and yet you resent them for that, that they can't share that happiness with you.
Who will you call first? What will you do your first weekend home with your friends? How long before you actually start missing people barging in without calling or knocking? Who will get pizza at three in the morning with you now? How long until you adjust to sleeping alone in a room again?
Then you start to realize how much things have changed, and you realize the hardest part of college is balancing the two completely different worlds you now live in, trying desperately to hold on to everything all the while trying to figure out what you have to leave behind. In the matter of one day's traveling time, we will leave our world of living next door to our best friends, walking across campus to eat, instant messenger, 8:00am classes, and the perpetual procrastination to a world that will seem foreign to us despite the fact that we lived in it for eighteen years.
But it is different now. We now know the meaning of true friendship. We know who we have kept in touch with over the past year and who we hold dearest in our hearts. We've left our high school world to deal with the real world. We've had our hearts broken, we've fallen in love, we've helped our best friends overcome depression, stress and death, and we've stayed up all night on the phone just to talk to a friend in need. There have been times we've felt so helpless being hours away from home when we know our families needed us, and there are times we know we have made a difference.
A few days from now we will leave. In a few days from now we take down our pictures, and pack up our clothes. No more going next door to do nothing for hours on end. We will leave our friends whose random email and phone calls will bring us to laughter and tears this summer.
We will take our memories and dreams and put them away for now, saving them for our return to this world.
A few days from now we will arrive. We will unpack our bags and have dinner with our families. We will drive over to our best friend's house and do nothing for hours on end We will return to the same friends whose random emails and phone calls have brought us to laughter and tears over the year. We will unpack old dreams and memories that have been put away for the past year.
In a few days we will dig deep inside to find the strength and conviction to adjust to change and still keep each other close. And somehow, in some way, we will find our place between these two completely different worlds.
Two Lives Become One
Who would have thought that moving back home from college could be so difficult.
I sit going through things from this year, sorting through what I should keep and what needs to go. I find it difficult to let go.
Even harder then letting go of things from this year is making room for the things to keep by getting rid of things from the past. It shouldn't be this hard, right. It is just stuff. I find memories attached to everything, and I am not ready to let it go.
My two worlds are becoming one again. I have changed so much but this world is still the same. No one here understands my other world. For now I have to put that other world on hold and enter in to this world which seems so foreign but I lived in it for so long.
I feel out of place here. It is almost as if I have to learn things all over again.
I sit going through things from this year, sorting through what I should keep and what needs to go. I find it difficult to let go.
Even harder then letting go of things from this year is making room for the things to keep by getting rid of things from the past. It shouldn't be this hard, right. It is just stuff. I find memories attached to everything, and I am not ready to let it go.
My two worlds are becoming one again. I have changed so much but this world is still the same. No one here understands my other world. For now I have to put that other world on hold and enter in to this world which seems so foreign but I lived in it for so long.
I feel out of place here. It is almost as if I have to learn things all over again.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Where do I go from here?
I am speechless. I sit in my room and I just don't even know where to begin. I am alone and my mind is running a mile a minute. I run just to try and catch a piece of it. Where do I begin? How did I get to where I am right now? Where do I go from here? The tears begin to flow as I reflect on a year that was extremely trying and rewarding at the same time.
This year has literally rocked my world. God has tested me more this year then I ever expected. I have definitely had my ups and downs. There have been times when I thought that I just couldn't make it any more. I have made it through though. Some how I have survived this year of endless trials.
I wish I understood why things happened they way they did. Why was this year full of so many challenging situations? I know that I wont be able to understand the true impact of this year until later on in my life. Some day I will be able to sit and know why I was put through such a hard year, but that time is not now.
I find myself asking a lot of why questions. Mainly..why me? Why does my world constantly feel like it is being turned upside down? How will all of this play out in my life and what will it mean?
I am scared for the future...I am flat out terrified to see what this year will mean in the broad spectrum of my life. I cling to the hope that everything will work out in the end but I can't shake that feeling that this year has changed my life in ways that I never wanted it to.
More tears...
This year has been more then just trials, it has been filled with great blessings. The Lord has brought some amazing people into my life. Many of whom helped me make it through this year. So many memories are amazingly packed in to 9 months of my life. Times full of laughter and tears, smiles, walks with friends, talking for hours on end about everything and nothing at all, barging in on a friend without calling, fun-on-funs, gwinn dates, and one of my favorite things...HUGS! So much emotion so tightly bound in 9 months. This past year encompasses 9 months of my life that will forever change how I view life itself.
Silence....
Here I sit...alone...longing so much for those people God brought in to my life this year. I know that life is all about seasons...I just don't want to lose the people that were brought in to this season of my life. I hope that we will meet again. If we don't have the opportunity I just want to say thank you.
To the people God has brought in to my life and the ones that God has allowed to continue along the journey with me for another year.
Thank you
...for being there as I let out frustration because yet again I was thrown a road block
...for letting me cry as you hugged me and prayed that God would be my strength when I felt like me feet would not carry me anymore
...for being there to cheer me up and making me laugh when I felt like times would not get any better
...for saying hi to me when no one else noticed my presence
...for finding time just to sit/walk and talk about everything and nothing all at the same time
...for loving me for me, faults and all
...for being vunerable with me
...for telling the truth
...for all of the fun times that we had
...for most importantly being you
I am heading in to a new season of my life. Where will the road lead me? What road blocks might lie ahead? What lessons will God try and teach me this time and will I begin to understand lessons that I have already been taught?
Here I go...I am off. Wish me luck! I pray that God uses me in many ways and that I will be able to impact the life of another just as you have impacted me.
While this year has been trying I don't know that I would trade it for anything. I have been blessed...I am still here. For that I am ultimately thankful.
This year has literally rocked my world. God has tested me more this year then I ever expected. I have definitely had my ups and downs. There have been times when I thought that I just couldn't make it any more. I have made it through though. Some how I have survived this year of endless trials.
I wish I understood why things happened they way they did. Why was this year full of so many challenging situations? I know that I wont be able to understand the true impact of this year until later on in my life. Some day I will be able to sit and know why I was put through such a hard year, but that time is not now.
I find myself asking a lot of why questions. Mainly..why me? Why does my world constantly feel like it is being turned upside down? How will all of this play out in my life and what will it mean?
I am scared for the future...I am flat out terrified to see what this year will mean in the broad spectrum of my life. I cling to the hope that everything will work out in the end but I can't shake that feeling that this year has changed my life in ways that I never wanted it to.
More tears...
This year has been more then just trials, it has been filled with great blessings. The Lord has brought some amazing people into my life. Many of whom helped me make it through this year. So many memories are amazingly packed in to 9 months of my life. Times full of laughter and tears, smiles, walks with friends, talking for hours on end about everything and nothing at all, barging in on a friend without calling, fun-on-funs, gwinn dates, and one of my favorite things...HUGS! So much emotion so tightly bound in 9 months. This past year encompasses 9 months of my life that will forever change how I view life itself.
Silence....
Here I sit...alone...longing so much for those people God brought in to my life this year. I know that life is all about seasons...I just don't want to lose the people that were brought in to this season of my life. I hope that we will meet again. If we don't have the opportunity I just want to say thank you.
To the people God has brought in to my life and the ones that God has allowed to continue along the journey with me for another year.
Thank you
...for being there as I let out frustration because yet again I was thrown a road block
...for letting me cry as you hugged me and prayed that God would be my strength when I felt like me feet would not carry me anymore
...for being there to cheer me up and making me laugh when I felt like times would not get any better
...for saying hi to me when no one else noticed my presence
...for finding time just to sit/walk and talk about everything and nothing all at the same time
...for loving me for me, faults and all
...for being vunerable with me
...for telling the truth
...for all of the fun times that we had
...for most importantly being you
I am heading in to a new season of my life. Where will the road lead me? What road blocks might lie ahead? What lessons will God try and teach me this time and will I begin to understand lessons that I have already been taught?
Here I go...I am off. Wish me luck! I pray that God uses me in many ways and that I will be able to impact the life of another just as you have impacted me.
While this year has been trying I don't know that I would trade it for anything. I have been blessed...I am still here. For that I am ultimately thankful.
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