I pray for you who I know not

To whom it may concern:
Patience is a virtue.
Patience is a virtue.
Patience is a virtue.
Patience is a virtue.
etc.

At this very moment...

"Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground."
[Jalaluddin Rumi]

"now I lay me down to sleep"

"Justice is what love looks like in public"
Where do you see, hear and feel God the most?
-Go to those places, Serve in those places, love the people in those places.

When the day is over and I can finally lay my head down on my pillow,
there are many unresolved questions, many worries, many fleeting thoughts,
wishes, regrets, dreams...but there
are a few things I am sure of.

Regardless of the fact that I don't have the job I desire...
Regardless of whether or not I know where I will live next year...
Despite the fact that I have 1 year left until I graduate and I'm still not sure if what I want to do has a job title that corresponds with it...
Although there are many tainted relationships, gaping wounds in my soul, and unsurities (apparently unsurities isn't a real word) floating around in my mind...

I know that I serve a God who is inevitably good.
I know and believe that he has my best in mind and great things in store for me.
I feel loved and can rest assured in the fact that He has all of the control that I so badly try to manage in moments of weakness.

I can turn all my lights off, shut my eyes and sleep- covered in the light of a God that had mercy on me, gave me grace, has called me to leave all behind and follow (blindly at times) Him one step at a time and to trust that my future is in His hands and not my own.

Goodnight

On a napkin in a pizza restaurant

One day last year I was eating in a pizza shop in Charleston and written on a napkin, I found this poem.

" I know the moon is disturbing
to stand beneath the shower of its brilliance
and have absolutely nothing in your pocket
except maybe pocket lint or the few pennies you've managed to collect off the cold concrete,
hoping because they are heads up,
something about your life might change irreversibly,
and how enough of those pennies might buy you something,
or nothing,
an air conditioned bus ride into the next town where men and women pass you by while pressing their coats against their bodies,
as if you were nothing more than a cold breeze:
How if you stood beneath the moon,
it might convince you there's just not enough beauty in the world to go around."

While I find the poem beautifully written, image provoking and visually tasteful, I must disagree with its content.
I must plead that in fact the world in its entirety is beautiful. How each fleck of dust when caught in the right light can sparkle on its own. How every child has the beautiful mark of its maker. How each day begins and ends with the flame of a medium sized star we call the sun. Life is what you allow it to be. I can decide to burn like a sparkler or dim like a half lit stick of incense.

Cracks in the sidewalk

"The only people for me are the mad ones,
the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk,
mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time,
the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing,
but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see a blue center-light pop and everyone goes, "Awwww!"
[Jack Kerouac]

"Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborers hands."
[Kahlil Gibran]

"Put down your 'New York Times' and your 'Gone with the Wind' and come outside with me, the sun is delicious today"

Things I am learning:
1. It is okay to ask for advice.
2. It is not okay to let other people make decisions for you.
3. Discernment is learned not accomplished over night.
4. Friendships are way more complicated than I ever knew. When you invest in some one, it is your friendly obligation to hold them to the standards they set for themselves. Accountability is hard.
5. Being distant and vague is much easier than letting people know you and getting to know other people... but it is never fulfilling.
6. I am more and more like my mom every time I go home.
7. Frustration is amplified when you allow it to be visible.
8. All things are a process.. Life takes time.
9. Being pursued is way more fun than being a pursuer.
10. I have no idea how in the world I should go about living out what I am called to do and I am totally fine with that.
11. God uses me for my weaknesses not my strengths
12. This body and personality of mine are but dust and to dust they will return.
13. America makes it incredibly hard to be yourself. (errr 'sin' rather than America. )
14. I love to cook for other people.
15. I am really excited to see what tomorrow holds.
[I can't wait to cook for my husband and my children. I can't wait to sing in the kitchen. I can't wait to learn to love selflessly. I can't wait to yell "honey I'm home" every time I walk in the door. I can't wait to convince my husband and kids that sleeping in sleeping bags in the backyard every once in a while is a great idea. I can't wait to have a consistent job. I can't wait to graduate. I can't wait to see my friends fall in love. I can't wait until I'm a mom. I can't wait until I meet another broken but mended soul to spend the rest of my life with. I can't wait to act like a child even when I am old and gray.]

How many times today?

Today I was told by a professor that children laugh approximately 300 times a day.
Then came the startling statistic that adults laugh approximately 17 times a day.

What happens in the transitions of life that make us lose our sense of fascination?
It's as if we are born with this tremendous sense of humor, and then within a matter of years, we lose it.
Has my imagination really depleted that much?
I wish I still thought it was hilarious to throw tennis balls on the roof of the house.
I wish I still laughed at my parents old school jokes.
I wish I still chuckled when I said words over and over and over until they didn't sound like English anymore.
I wish it was still appropriate to coat my sisters face in lipstick and send her around to all the neighbors houses asking for rash irritation ointment.
Am I allowed to refuse to grow up?

I think I will start praying for more laughter.
I for one will not let laughter evaporate from my adult life.

The Sun Never Says

by: Hafiz
translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Even
After
All this time
The sun never says to the earth,

“You owe
Me.”

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the
Whole
Sky.

Untitled

Sometimes, in the event of disaster,
there comes a break in the clouds,
-A lull in the wind,
an unsettling silence that hushes the world from within.

I am standing in that abyss.
Nothing moves, things just...Are.
I can hear the far off whistle of a moving train
and the color of life brightens to an unearthly hue.

At the sight of it I have to tell my lungs to consume air.

(I am bad at titles... )

Psycho Mike

There is a homeless man in downtown Knoxville who is known on the streets as Mike the Psycho. I talk to him on occasion and tonight we were talking about the Ark of the Covenant. The first time I met him he pulled out a piece of paper with numbers and fractions written all over it. He told me that it was a coded map to the site where the Ark of the Covenant is buried.
When I saw him last night I asked him if he had finished working in his map. He told me that he had to burn it because it was too dangerous to keep it with him. In the middle of our conversation he started speaking in tongues. After he stopped I asked him what it meant and he said, "The eyes of the Lord are upon you. You are righteous in the eyes of the Lord."
Things like that remind me that everything...EVERYTHING is spiritual.
The people on the streets humble me more every day.

"This world is where I breathe -may I never call it home."

Sometimes when God teaches me something new...
when he alters my character, I go through an extreme phase.
Over the past few months God has been teaching my little passive self to be mega-confrontational.
To be completely honest... I feel like I have been such a Bitch the past few weeks.

I don't mean in a rude, uncaring sort of way, more in a brutally honest kind of way. It's a weird kind of paradoxical feeling though because I feel entirely in the will of God... and I don't think God has called me to be a royal bitch* (sorry for the language... but seriously)

One of my friends mentioned that when God teaches us things, or corrects flaws in our character, we tend to see the extreme's of it in the beginning so that we really get it and THEN we begin to find a medium.

So here I am, in the extreme stages of learning confrontation. I'm trying not to be too anxious about finding a medium because I really do value the act of confrontation and want to fully learn it.

So I guess I am not apologizing for the way I am handling things...(things that I would typically be way too scared to ever say or address) I'm just asking you to bear with me... I'm learning.

(side note- I was thinking today, and sometimes my "titles" have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of an entry)