Winter of the Soul

All my life I've waited

to grow out of sin,

divorce pain

cancel lonliness



I believed a day would really come

When it's all over.

In the winter of the soul,

I realize how much it's going to take

to make everything better.

There's a reason why we all die.

The final restoration is nothing short

of completely wiping out

and restarting over again.

We live in the not yet.

When this life is so good

I'm bursting to hold in my joy,

Sometimes I Forget what the winter was like.

But, in the winter of the soul

every moment is consumed

with memories of the summer.

What it was like to be happy

                      peaceful

                joyful

    sufficient

Life is longing for joy, peace, sufficiency.

Longing never reaches.

It is in itself a kind of pleasure.

To long for the pleasure of heavan is pleasure of itself.

As I long to get there,

      to get to heavan 

How I realize the getting there is half the journey.

Mountains look stunning from

low down here on earth.

When you're among them,

you can't see them so well.

You forget that you're in mountains.

In the winter of the soul

we are conscious only that we long

to reach heavan

In heavan,

Why should we think of anything else?

It's like being in the mountains.

A few times in this life-

    glimpses of heavan

moments of joypeacesufficiency.

And we forget, for a little while, the winter.

The Illusion of Freedom

\

So I went out with a friend and we saw Sherlock Holmes- A Game of Shadows the other day. Now, I could immediatley launch into a debate about its strengths and weaknesses (the final scene by the waterfall was not only stunning- it was profoundly stunning!) but one very insignificant scene that no one will probably remember happened in the wine cellar between Holmes and a troubled anarchist whose name I never really picked up on. 

The anarchist spoke of freedom- freedom from rule. Not freedom from tyranny, but total and absolute freedom from rule. As if there is such a thing? They wanted to rule themselves, these anarchists. They wanted to be their own kings. There is, in all of this, a myth about freedom.

There are two types of freedom in this life. I'm going to come to the point quickly, if bluntly, and state:
1) freedom from God, or
2) freedom in God.

Masks, Shel Silverstein

Good Guys, Bad Guys

"I seen bad men do good things and I've seen good men do bad things."

Sometimes, the good guys do really bad things. For some reason, they're still good though. I don't know why that is. A bad guy can do as many good things as he wants- had can do good things all day long!- but he will still be a bad guy.

This kind of surfaced this week while I was with my friends. Some of my friends are good kids and some of them are really bad. That's always the way it is. In every group there are "good kids" and "bad kids." It's not like the bad kids are going to bomb my school tomorrow or anything. I'm talking social preditors. I'm talking kids who are really messed up inside.

The Ashes of my Ex-Life.

I was digging through some old posts and I found this one that never got posted for some reason: 

I'm an obsessive journalist. I write down e v e r y t h i n g that happens to me- as it happens. You can find almost all my important thoughts stuffed into binders and boxes in my room. It's really important for me to build life perspective. I do this by writing down what I feel and then digging it back up again six months later and reading about it.

There are parts of my life that aren't important anymore.

Those parts get edited out.

Every life is a story and every story has parts to it- good parts, bad parts, happy parts, sad parts.
Every person has to live through good times and bad times.
Every person has to cry... every person wants something and is brutally crushed in the process...
Everyone faces disappointments. 

Joy to the World

There is always a place for joyful,

if sometimes solemn,

carols for me in this season.

I find myself exhausted from 

Coldplay, Lopez, and Sliversun. 

Carols are rest for me-

 rest from my boombox, rock and roll,

addicted lifestyle;

because, honestly, hip-hop takes

so much emotional energy!

 

I had a dream the other night that I was standing 

in a beautiful avenue between 

a row of buildings late

one night just before Christmas.

Snow was falling deep around me.

The trees along the avenue were decorated

with lights and an unseen choir was

singing this song:

It was so beautiful I wished I would never 

wake up. But, of course, that couldn't

be helped. Long after the beautiful lights and voices

had faded away, I still held onto the feeling

that buried deep in this season 

there is a gift, made especially for me 

before I could walk or talk, before I knew 

my own name, and long before 

I even existed. 

When I sing Christmas Carols I am most

conscious of that gift. They always

have the amazing ability to transport me 

all the way back to my very first Christmases

before I had yet opened that gift

and it lay there, wrapped in festive paper. 

I'm still opening that gift- the gift of a friendship

that will last me this whole life and beyond. 

This is my friendship with Christ Jesus.

Life is an Equation.

I've had my dreams... my aspirations, my disappointments. I expected so much out of life. The funny thing is that the one thing life turned out to be was the very thing I never expected:

My life is just another boring math problem.

It's a problem I have to get to solve every day. I take all the pieces of this equation, line them up on two sides of an equal sign and try desperately to make them match. I work the problem out, first one side and then the other, until it finally occurs to me that I don't even have all the pieces there to begin with.

So, I go out in life gathering experiences to complete my equation but somehow they never seem to be enough to say all that there is about myself. I know I'm going to sound totally arrogant when I say this, but this equation I'm trying so desperately to solve is ME! Not in a lifetime will I be able to solve this equation totally.

The thing about magic is that it works every time. 

Einstein

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." -Albert Einstein

From My Journal Tonight.

Just as there was no reason why we should have been friends to begin with, so there is no reason now why we shouldn't go on being friends.

Secret Meadows and Sweet Messages.

I was at school today, waiting for Mom to pick me up. I love my school. It's located in my favorite place in the whole world... downtown Littleton. I love downtown Littleton. I fell in love with it three years ago and I've never grown out of it. 

Of all the things I love about downtown Littleton, the thing I love the most are the secret, hidden places under the roads. Okay, so all over Littleton are these gullies and streams. Whenever the road crosses over a stream, a secret wonderland is formed. Paths and walkways run under the roads as well and wherever the two cross, you get these really cool tunnels. So, imagine you're walking along the road and you come to a bridge. Lean over the side of the hand railing and look down into a secret meadow below ground level, filled with golden sunlight.

From My Journal Tonight....

"I told myself that a kind and generous man sat in this chair and spoke from his heart the words that woke me every morning. But all I heard was the voice of an awkward girl who never felt comfortable in her own skin."     

Walking in Cement Boots.

I have to laugh at myself at least once every day. My young life pretty much consists, right now, of...

Learning how to park a car


Putting the keys in the SAME PLACE every time so I don't LOSE them


Struggling to get the words in my head out of my mouth in a sensible fashion.


Remembering to put my name on quizzes... so I don't get marked off!!

Saying all the wrong things.

Walking in Cement Boots. 


And, frankly, just being a kid. The toughest thing for me to do right now, and I'm not even sure why this is, is simply to relax and enjoy all of this foolishness the way I should. 


I wish I could enjoy my life now, but I think too hard and too much about it. I'm too worried I'll lose something...what? What do I have to lose? 


Everything it seems.... everything and nothing. I was wondering about what it means to have something. I was thinking about all the things I have and realizing that I don't really have much.


All the things I thought I had I don't really have at all. What I thought I lost I never even had to begin with.


That pretty much sums up friendship. If I understand friendship, I know that it is spontaneous. You cannot ask for it, even if you want it more than anything else in the world. You cannot control it. And, when it is ready to leave, you cannot keep it from going.


There is only one thing that you can do. You can take what you've been given for a short while, love that, and let it go when the time is right. 


Only then can you really relax and enjoy what you have. I'm afraid I've been so worried that I'm going to lose what I have that I haven't spent any time enjoying it.


That's a shame, really.   

I Failed This Time.

So I've been going through old diaries and compiling a notebook of my high school years. There's a lot for me to go through in my life. Frankly, I just want to forget that whole time. When it was really good, it was really, really good. When it was bad, though, I would lose all hope. I don't like going through my past like that. It goes against my grain.

However, there are certain things that if you don't deal with them right away, it will screw you up for years and years- maybe the rest of you life. For me, it's my anger. I've pretty much come to the point in my life that I cannot move on until I've dealt with my anger. There are things that I wanted- things I had my heart set on and they were ripped right out of my grasp. When I want something that's really, really good and I don't get it, I just stew on it forever.

That pretty much sums up my diaries. What I wanted. How bad I wanted it. How much it hurts that I don't get it.

I feel like a grape between the pavement and God's thumb.


God has this incredible way of squashing my dreams.

He also has this incredible way of showing me for who I really am.


Reading my diaries forces me to look at myself. It forces me to see the mighty hand of God in my life. Those diaries are just a long and selfish complaint against God. He gives me good things, and I covet them. He takes those good things away and I lash out at him.


I have so far to go still.

I Failed This Time. This Time..... I Failed.


God has broken my pride. I've told you before and I'll say it again. I've lost so much this year. Really, I had my life all worked out. All my friends were right where I wanted them to be. I had the next ten years of my life all mapped out.

Then, guess what? God slammed the door in my face.

It not about you, Tina. It's not about you and your amazing ministry. Your gifts are just that- gifts. They can be taken away as easily as they are given.

I have failed as a friend, as a sister, and a daughter. My life is all twisted in knots sometimes. Honestly, I don't know what's around the next corner. I'm just going to school and doing my time. One foot in front of the other. That's the way it goes.

Failing is a human thing. Rome wasn't built in a day. Edison took years to see the light. For every person that has summited Mount Everest, I'm sure there are two that have failed.

Right now, I just feel so human. I feel really, really human and really, really young. I feel so young. I feel like I have so many years to go. I feel so finite. And God feels really infinite right now.

I don't know how else to describe this. Success and failure... what do they have anything to do with eternal things? These are waves on our graph of the progression of redemption. Everyone fails sometimes. In the end, we will look back and see what exactly was the purpose for all of these failures.

Failing helps me remember I'm human. It humbles me and brings me back to what really matters in my life.

I won't always fail. Sometimes I will succeed. But, the little things I succeed at in this life are not where everything ends.

What if.... instead of failing I had succeeded?


What does that profit me? What I have now is a sobering lesson in the realities of life. What I have gained from failing I never would have learned by succeeding:

1. I'm Human.


2. This is not where life ends.


3. It's not about me.