Beautiful in the Mundane

The other day I wrote about birds, but there is a whole other reason why I have become obsessed with birds.
The past week or so, I have felt this extreme desire, almost as if something is pulling me towards it, to experience the natural beauty of life.
I find myself fighting the urge to buy a bouquet of flowers for myself, going on walks in the middle of the night to gaze at the stars or at first light to watch the changing colours of the morning. When I go to bite into a peach or an apple, I am struck by the grandeur of something so simple, so mundane; I am overcome with the beauty of it.
Part of me wonders if I have finally snapped, if every stressor in my life has finally caused my mental strength to weaken to the point of giving in and return to that primeval place that something so basic in form and colour can fill me with pure euphoria.
And yet... there is that other part of me that is relishing this enjoyment of beauty.
When picking wildflowers is enough to brighten my whole day, or buying a $3 bouquet from the farmers market can make me smile for hours; when the orange glow of a sunset makes me feel a warmth and closeness to God, or the smell of a fresh summer's rain can clean a room better than any bottle of Febreze or Lysol ever could; when seeing a bird float and flutter across a blue sky makes me wish I could join him, or a gentle breeze can lift my spirits.
Is not that what beauty really is?
Maybe I have gone off the deep end. Maybe this is the start of some decent into becoming that hippie at the farmers market. Maybe this could lead me somewhere entirely different than I originally planned.
But for now, I am content to watch a sunrise.
I am content to buy myself flowers.
I am content to see beauty in the mundane things of life.
And maybe, someday, I will meet a man who feels the breath of God when he sees these things just as I do.

Birds

The past few days, I have had something very close to an obsession with birds.
Pictures of birds, the sight of them in the blue sky, any song or poem or verse I stumble across mentioning something about birds catches me.
I think part of it may be the fact that I often feel like a bird myself.
I don't want to be caged in by what people think of me.
I want to sing my heart out and not care who hears me.
I often think of my journey through life as a flight rather than a run or walk.
When I'm doing well, I feel as though I'm soaring.
When I'm not doing so well, I feel like I have been grounded.
This has been my general thought lately.
It as if I have been flying through a storm these past few months, these past few weeks, and have ended up with a broken wing.
I have been grounded.
Banished to muddle through what has hit me.
Figure out a way to heal, a way to lift myself up out of the mud, a way to reach the sky once again.
With God's help, I know I can soar again.
He just has to mend my wing first.

Maybe I'm a Hippie....

I had an interesting discussion with a friend of mine tonight about Christianity that may just make you think I am a flower-child.

We were talking about the importance of love in the everyday walk; the importance of grace versus legalism.

When I think about my Christian walk, I simply have to say that it is the times I have defined my relationship with Christ as a journey of love that I have felt closest to Him.

Those times when I let Him romance to me, those are my most intimate experiences with God.
And, I can't help it, when I get to talk about His love, those are the times that I can't stop myself.
He is my lover.
I could go on and on about His love, His grace, how He romances me...
I think at times this can be a foreign concept to the church.
We get caught up in the legalism of Christianity far too easily.
It's a power struggle that each of us has to deal with.
Christianity is so interesting in the sense that we can't do ANYTHING to win God's love....
We discussed how this can be both a relief and stressful at the same time.
It can be a relief in the sense that we think, "Wow, I don't have to do anything to get God to love me! He just LOVES ME for who I am!"
But at the same time, we stress out about it.
We are such creatures of control.
We want to be able to control our own fate, our own destiny, to be assured in His love because we deserve it.
It makes us weak when we realize this, and it's definitely a struggle to let someone love us in such a helpless state.
And, honestly, I think it's that way because we know we don't deserve His love...
Another issue I see with this approach is that we often associate words like "lover" or "romance" to a simply human expression.
For some reason it has become something that is not divine in our minds.
"Romance" is going on a date or when someone brings you flowers, not usually associated with how God relates to us.
But, when you dig down deep into the Bible, into the heart of God, into the Gospel, you find love at the root of everything.
How many times have we heard God described as love?
Or you look at when Jesus broke the ten commandments down into two; love God, love others.
My friend made a comment, something that I have thought for a while, that every sin is basically falling short of the love we should be showing God or showing to each other.
Think about that for a second.
Just about every hurt, every issue that we have had with someone, every sin that has been committed against us... they all go back to a break in love.
Who ever thought it would be so hard to love?
So, maybe I will be labeled a hippie, and maybe deep down inside I am, but I would rather live a life full of God's love and let that love overflow into those around me, to become so weak in myself that all that is left is the love of God, to lose myself in His love, than to live a life where I feel powerful in legalism and yet not love...
God, give me love or give me nothing.

Trust Fall

Do you remember the game of trust-fall we used to play as kids? One person would stand straight as a board, arms folded across their chest, eyes closed, and would fall back, the other player behind them to catch them? If they stayed straight, and let the other person catch them, there was trust; if they bent their legs and slowly let themselves to the floor, they didn't trust their partner. 

I've been thinking more about trust lately and how hard it is to trust someone.
How it's hard to even trust God sometimes.
I was sitting in church yesterday, and I felt God asking me, "Do you trust me? Do you REALLY trust me?"
It kind of echoed through my mind in a way that I began to think more about the question, what does it mean for me to trust someone, to trust God, entirely?
If I were to be honest about it, I would probably say that I haven't been trusting God fully these last couple months.
In this time when I know that I should be falling back on Him and giving Him everything that is weighing me down, I seem to be trying to struggle through, and hike it out on my own.
I think subconsciousness, I feel as though God has let me down, that for some reason His actions have proven Him to be untrustworthy.
And maybe that is how a human mind will process it, but there is so much more at work that I cannot even see, that no one effected by a loss or a tragedy can see.
Just because someone has died, it does not make God's actions unjust, or make Him untrustworthy.
It just means that I cannot currently understand His ways.
I guess I need to get back to the place where I can know and feel that He is always supporting me, always walking me through, always doing what is best for me.
Know that He knows better than me.
In some ways, I feel as though I am relearning the whole God thing.
The patterns of faith that I must walk by have changed, but God has not.
I guess it's simply time to let go, and fall back, knowing full well that He will catch me.

To Write, or Not to Write....

I feel as though a great deal of my blogging has been cut off since David's death in April.
I think that a good portion of that has to do with my desire not to make this a shrine or a memorial to him.
I don't want to constantly drone on about my loss and how I am walking through that with the help of my God, my family, my boyfriend, and my friends.
Something inside of me says that you would not be interested in reading about that. (Though why you would truly be interested in reading my musings in the first place is beyond me.)
So, with that desire in mind, it is hard for me to find things to write about once again.
Part of me thinks that the writing process would maybe help me, make me find my voice once again, and maybe that would be worth it.
And yet, part of me does not want to have to look back over these posts and read what I was walking through this summer when I look at them again years from now.
Do you blame me?
Who really wants to relive by rereading their mourning process?
Reread the things that you felt and mulled over in the months after a searing loss?

I know someday I will come back and be able to write lighthearted joyful posts about the experiences I am having, the laughter Jon and I share, the funny things I get myself into.
Someday I will come back to writing posts on what God is speaking to my heart, things that I feel need to be shared with my generations.
But for now, I think I still need a break.
Take comfort though, because who knows what tomorrow may bring.
I may be surprised by an experience or by something that God reveals to me and will feel the unexplained urge to share it.
Who knows.
Really, only God knows.

Of the Story

When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here am I." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."

Genesis 22:9-12

I have been reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins lately. 

Today I am reading a chapter called "The 'Good' Book and The Changing Moral Zeitgeist". 

In this chapter, Dawkins is basically attempting to tear apart the bible, saying that all the stories in it are irrelevant to our lives, that they are a bunch of irrelevant, irrational stories that should have no place in our lives.

One of the stories that he attempted to tear apart is the one above. 

He tries to make this sequence in Abraham's life seem stupid.

He tries to convince us that we shouldn't follow after a God who would command a man to sacrifice his only son and then turn out to be "only joking after all".

I think Dawkins is missing the point.

I feel as though most of the bible is a beautiful narrative of God romancing the human race. 

I read sections of the bible, such as this, and see the wonderful foreshadowing that God set up hundreds, even thousands of years before the miraculous event of my Saviour's death and resurrection. 

I see a constant thread running through the bible always pointing towards the life of Christ and the redemption that comes through loving Him. 

It's beautiful.

So, Dawkins, I hope one day you can see what I see. 

Beauty and love. 

Abraham's Sacrifice

Rembrant

Working to be Loved

I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine once, and I remember them saying how they felt as thought they needed to try, to strive to achieve God's love for them.
I do not remember what my response was. And I'm not going to try to make up one.
What I do know though is that we have all felt this at some point or another.
We have to work to be loved by God.
It's amazing to me that we feel like this.
When you think about it, when you get down to the basics of the eternally haunting question Why are we here? I can only think of one response.
We are here to love God and be loved by Him.
It's an eternal romance that has spanned millenniums.
But all our striving to be good enough for God's love, all of what we work for, what we think we need to be, it all gets in the way of that romance.
I was watching some of the second season of Grey's Anatomy last night with my family, and there is one scene that keeps popping in my head as I'm writing this.
Dr. Burke, a perfectionistic surgeon comes into his bedroom to find his girlfriend, Dr. Yang, eating Chinese food on the bed. He's asked her to move in with him multiple times, and yet she still refuses. (I do not condone this behavior, just recapping the situation.)
Burke looks at her and says, "I am Preston Burke, a widely renowned cardiothorasic surgeon. I am a professional. And more than that I am a good and kind person. I am a person that cleans up behind myself. I am a person that cooks well. And you, you are an unbelievable slob. A slovenly, angry intern. I am Preston Burke. And you, you are the most competitive, most guarded, most stubborn, most challenging person I have ever met. And I love you. What the hell is the matter with you that you wont just let me?"
I laughed at the time, thinking it was funny, but thinking of it now, I realize that's exactly how it is with God and us.
God is perfect in every way. He can love us like no other. And yet, we won't let Him love us to the extent that He wants to.
I certainly don't let Him love me the way He wants to.
I guess that's something that I constantly want to work on.
I want to notice the little things that God does for me that He means to romance me by.
A warm breeze, a clear night's sky, a song I love coming on the radio, little things that are wonderful that God put there at that exact moment for me to notice and remember His love.

Home Again

Home again, home again... How I long to be home again...
When I first came to college, I had this aversion to spending time at home.
I think I was afraid that if I went home, I was not going to want to go back to school, that I would start to slip back into how life used to be and I would give up on my dreams and passions, the things that I fight to hold on to.
I cannot truly say for certain that this is what kept me from the farm house in my home town, so separate from the rest of the world, but looking back from where I stand now, I can see how that could very well be my subconscious thought at that time in my life.
Now I view home differently.
This little old farm house that I now sit in, surrounded by fields, buffeted so strongly by the wind that my bed shakes ever so slightly, has become a sanctuary for me.
When I need a reprieve from life, when I need to rejuvenate myself body, mind, and spirit, it is the place that I long to run to.
And I hope to keep my parent's house just that way.
It will always be a place of peace and sanctuary in my mind.
Tonight, I stepped out on the back patio for just a few minutes to enjoy the (relatively) warm breeze and stare up at the stars.
I cannot see the stars when I am at school... At least not in the same way.
They're dull, blurred out, faded from the city lights.
But tonight, standing out on the back patio, the wind whipping around me, tossing my hair everywhere, I was able to see them so clearly, and for a moment, all the stress that has been on me, all the planning for my future, all the interviews, all the applications, all the disappointments, everything just melted away.
It was just me and the sky.
It was just me and God
And for a minute, I was reminded of how blessed I am to have a God who loves me so much that he tailor made that specific moment to romance my heart, to say, I'm still here, I haven't left, lean on Me this next week, regain your strength from Me...
Mmmm....
I get so caught up in life that I stop letting Him romance me.
He is my God, my father, my friend.... my lover.
Maybe I'll save that concept for another post.
For now, I am simply glad to be home to rest, relax, and destress.
Home again, home again... How glad I am to be home again.

Who I am

A friend said the kindest thing to me today, something that I really needed to hear right now.
He said that he was really proud of me.
He said he was proud of the fact that I have been able to change, to grow, to become closer to God, to become more sure of myself in who I am as a person and as a Christ follower.
I have been friends with this guy for years, went to youth group together, and it was good to just hear someone from my past recognize how much I've grown.
Over the past two years, I feel as though I have changed so much. People who know me now would not even recognize the Paige I was just two years ago, so they cannot even begin to comprehend this change. And there are so few cross overs from before to now, maybe two or three who were consistently in my life before and now, that other people only get glimpses of the "new Paige". Those people only know who I was.
And that is one of the things that I am not happy about.
I don't like who I used to be.
I was volatile, overly emotional.
I do not believe my anchor was as solidly in God as it should have been.
I guess the thing that was best for me was the fact that someone actually recognized that I have changed immensely, and that they liked that change.