...for they will be filled.

I have come to believe that when you experience a desire of the heart of any kind, it is because God has placed that desire within you and intends to fulfill it in some way. Of course, He may not fill your vision of hope in the way that you would want Him to, but He will indeed fulfill it in the best way possible (and likely in a much better way than what you've got in mind). It is a need, and He fulfills all our needs in due time. And if you look at it that way, every desire is really a subtle prophecy of something God will do. So what is it you are really desiring and longing for? What's the core need lying deeply beneath your hope for whatever it is that you are dreaming about? What it is that you truly need and want? What are you really hungry for?

Record the vision and inscribe it on tablets, that the one who reads it may run. For the vision is yet for the appointed time; it hastens toward the goal and it will not fail though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay. ~Habakkuk 2:2-3

So I wait upon the Lord for Him to fulfill my desires and visions of hope, to sate my hunger and thirst.

He has met so many of my needs and desires over the past year. He gave me a wonderful church home where I can belong and where I actually want to be associated with them and be proud to be a part of what they're doing. It has been so long since I have had that in my life. He has given me freedom from so, so many of the things which have kept me bound for so long. And He has just recently provided me with an amazing job that just keeps getting better and better...His Providence is dumbfounding to me somtimes.

So, with all of these testimonies (and more than what I have mentioned here) of what He has done in just the last year alone, I still need a reminder sometimes that He has promised to meet all our needs and fulfill the desires of our hearts. When I begin to wonder, I think back on the things He has done in my life that have been the unmistakable workings of His hands, and I am reminded that He does keep His promises, so I stand upon them when dissatisfaction or longing for something more comes knocking at my door (Heb. 11:1). Since faith is hoping for something more because of discontentment with the now, it stands to reason that discontentment is the foundation of faith. Therefore, could not health and contentment be his wrath, and discontentment be his mercy and calling whisper? (http://www.thevillagechurch.net/resources/sermons/043006_hebrews17.html)

If Chandler's logic lacks fault, then let me be as discontent as I can stand, for it only brings more opportunity to exercise greater faith and be filled by the hand of God Himself within His own timing. I will wait for it. Give me ears to hear and eyes to see. Give me an open mind and heart so that I recognize the appointed vision when it comes, in the case that it doesn't look like what I am expecting or looking for.


Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. ~Psalm 37.3-4

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. ~Matthew 5.21

birthday

had a pretty good one :) Hard to believe it's been a year already since I moved here, and since R and I got rum-dum off the best carrot cake icing ever ;) A whole lot has sure happened and changed in a year's time. Definitely for the better...good stuff.

I heard from a bunch of dear friends today...I do love all the crazy great people in my life.

Today was my last day at work...I will definitely miss those people. They were all so warm to me. Gotta love their silly office antics.

Tomorrow I start a new job and a new phase.

Here's to moving forward. :) It just keeps getting better.

evidence of growth

If I let You get Your hands on my heart
I knew there'd be changes You would wanna make
It frightened me to let down my guard
'cause I know how easily a heart can break

but the fear is slowly fading as I've begun to see
there's beauty you're creating and you know what's best for me

so I am not afraid to love You anymore
no I am not afraid to love You, my Lord
I trust Your plans, they are perfect like I'll be when You're through
so I am not afraid to love You

well, it hurts as Your'e remolding my dreams
and as You're reshaping all my attitudes
it's hard to bear but every change means
that little by little I am more like You

so I embrace Your vision come when I see what you have done
I can't deny Your wisdom or how far I've come

so I am not afraid to love You anymore
no I am not afraid to love You, my Lord
I trust Your plans, they are perfect like I'll be when You're through
so I am not afraid to love You

all that You create, and all that You would shape
I will give You all that's mine
I don't understand, but I know You hold my hand
so go ahead and take Your time

so I am not afraid to love You anymore
...

~FFH

Sweet Freedom

I started realizing a several months ago that, through all my heartache with N, I had almost completely stopped trusting God to treat my heart with care. Until recently, I didn't realize that I had been trying to take control of my own heart again, to take responsibility for protecting it and guarding it myself. It felt like He had allowed me to be given soul-piercing pain without offering any explanation of why the pain was necessary. I didn’t understand what He was doing until I came across a passage in a book I was reading earlier this year that suddenly made everything crystalline clear to me.

From Captivating, by John and Stasi Eldredge ~

Why did God curse Eve with loneliness and heartache, an emptiness that nothing would be able to fill? Wasn’t her life going to be hard enough out there in the world, banished from the Garden that was her true home, her only home, never able to return? It seems unkind. Cruel, even.

He did it to save her. For as we all know personally, something in Eve’s heart shifted at the Fall. Something sent its roots down deep into her soul – and ours – that mistrust of God’s heart, that resolution to find life on our own terms. So God has to thwart her. In love, he has to block her attempts until, wounded and aching, she turns to him and him alone for her rescue.

Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes;

I will wall her in so she cannot find her way.

She will chase after her lovers but not catch them;

she will look for them but not find them. (Hos. 2:6-7)

Jesus has to thwart us too – thwart our self-redemptive plans, our controlling and our hiding, thwart the ways we are seeking to fill the ache within us. Otherwise, we would never fully turn to him for our rescue. Oh, we might turn to him for our “salvation,” for a ticket to heaven when we die. We might turn to him even in the form of Christian service, regular church attendance, a moral life. But inside, our hearts remain broken and captive and far from the One who can help us.

And so you will see the gentle, firm hand of God in a woman’s life hemming her in. He’ll make what once was a great job miserable, if it was in her career that she found shelter. He’ll bring hardship into her marriage, even to the breaking point, if it was in marriage she sought her salvation. Wherever it is we have sought life apart from him, he disrupts our plans, our “way of life” which is not life at all.

God had hemmed me in with thornbushes, confused my way until I had no alternative but to fall to the ground weeping, and gave me no choice but to call out to Him for my rescue. I had been looking to N for my validation, my encouragement, my worth. I was thirsting for living water but drinking from an empty well. No man can replace my Lord and my God, and He will not stand for any attempt at doing so. He was drawing me back to His heart, which I had forgotten. And then I did it again with BT. I was looking to him to fill the places in my heart that only God can fill, and then I was upset when he couldn't do it.

So I began calling out to Him. I asked Him to reassure me that I could trust him with my heart after all. I began taking baby steps to trust Him with places in my heart again. I began releasing the direction of my relationship with BT to His guidance alone, no matter what direction it was leading to. I also began asking him to romance me in the way I so desire to be romanced – to be cherished, to be wanted, to be tenderly embraced and caressed and told that I am beautiful. Blessed be His name that He heard my cries and came to me, scooped me into His tender embrace, and told me that I am beautiful and still wanted. He has brought me back to the ultimate source of living water and given me healing to be able to receive love with rejoicing again.

When BT and I broke up, it was the first time in my life that I had complete confidence that, between the three of us, we had come to the right conclusion. While I will dearly miss things that BT and I shared, I know without a doubt in my heart that we made the right decision at the time. But while the Father had nurtured my ability toreceive love again, I was still terrified to give unconditional love. I was only comfortable with letting someone in so far. So when BT and I broke up a couple of months ago, I fully intended to stay single and avoid dating for, oh, around six months or so...at least. I was happy with that idea. I was content with that idea. I was comfortable with that idea. As selfish as it sounds, I was grateful for the chance to not have to worry about anyone else's heart for a while, where there were no worries about whether I was doing the right thing or making sure I treated that person exactly right. After so many years of heartache, singleness looked inviting...it looked safe.

And then God surprised me with a gift – M. And He is gently nudging me out of my hiding place through him. As a convict grows comfortable and secure within his walls, I had grown comfortable with the solitude of the wilderness. But God intends no one to live life either content or alone. Contentment brings stagnation, and solitude brings numbness. So M and I found each other in the wilderness, and he is walking with me out of the wilderness back toward home. Where fear of intimacy had grown in my heart, He began replacing it with a desire to love deeply and unconditionally again. He has gifted me with a new relationship -- one that is Christ-centered. Who am I to receive such a gift, as one who has sabotaged her previous relationships through so many mistakes? Who am I to be trusted with M's invaluable heart? But that’s just it. I am not responsible for either of our hearts! That is the vocation and joy of God Himself! That beautiful realization finally leaves me unhindered to love in sweet freedom when He asks me to.

Blasted Neighbors.

So I woke up this morning at about 11, thankful it wasn't past noon yet. I layed there for a while longer to let myself wake up -- on that edge between sleep and wakefulness that I do so enjoy -- when after a few minutes I started noticing a noise.

It was an irritating little noise, sort of like clicking, or ticking, but too slow to be a clock, and it was coming from the window next to my bed. I thought maybe the blinds were swinging and the noise was the blinds hitting the windowsill, so I grabbed them to make it stop. Well, it kept going, so I looked out the window to see if there was someone (or something) outside making the noise. No one. Maybe it rained and there's water dripping on the ground outside? But the ground is dry and no puddles in sight. Okay, maybe it's a bug chewing on the wood in the walls. I thumped the wall a time or two to scare it away. No change.

Finally, I can stand it no more. I throw back the covers, huff out of bed, and stomp to the front door to look outside. No one in sight. Fine. It looks like I'm going to have to freeze my feet after all, so I gingerly step onto the below freezing concrete outside my front door with my naked little toes in order to look in the direction of the infernal noise, to see if I can find something -- anything -- that will explain and/or stop the awful torture. After a minute or two of intense listening and scrutiny, halleluia! I finally spot it! And blast it, it IS water dripping. Grrr.

The wall has set up a lovely little drainage system. A drop of water is hitting my windowsill approximately every two seconds, falling from exactly the same spot on the sill from the apartment above mine, which has condensation oozing off a very foggy window.

MY window is not dripping condensation! It is perfectly dry. Why is THEIR window so irritatingly dripping condensation?? Probably because my upstairs neighbors were at it again late last night, fogging up the windows and enthusiastically announcing their virility to all within hearing range (mainly me), keeping me awake then too. So my sleep has been the victim of their shenannigans twice in the last twelve hours. Geez.

Who in their right mind neglects to build soundproof apartment complexes? The architect of my building should be forced to sleep in one of these rooms for a whole, long month, directly beneath the bed of a very agile, very active newlywed couple. He would never neglect to make the floors soundproof again. Of course, I know that the condensation on the window above mine is likely there simply because they have their heat turned up higher than mine, but it's so much easier --and so much more satisfying -- to blame them for something I'm already irritated by when my peace is disturbed into exasperation yet again, by the existence of the same people it was disturbed by just a few hours before.

And NOW, someone next door is hammering away at something, as he, she, or it seems to do about every other day (what is he, she, or it DOING over there???), AND my doorbell just rang...again...because it still rings every time someone uses the remote to their car door right outside. God, I hope someday to have the means to live in a house on the outskirts of town where it's quiet and peaceful! This sucks.

"As a man thinks in his heart, so is he."

Why do I so love hearing and reading other people's thoughts and writings? Because it tells me what they care about; because they put a piece of themselves in it, and I feel honored to have access to that piece and place it in a treasure chest of precious tokens from those cherished people in my life; for the reaction they get from me, and the happiness I get from knowing that my reaction has satisfied so fully the person who sought that reaction, because they "ached with caring" about the subject and so desperately wanted someone else to "ache with caring" about it too...someone to understand their passion and validate it. Or someone to laugh with them over a funny thought that he just can't contain because his own delight in the thought bubbles up so beautifully over the cusp of his own heart and mind that it must escape and seek out another heart to fill up too. My life is about coming to know people and nurturing relationships with them. I truly ache with caring about meeting their needs; supporting their endeavors; discussing their struggles; holding them up when their heart is weary; and laughing with them when they are happy. I simply ache to care. For this reason I place a tremendous amount of value upon words -- thought, spoken, and written -- because I know that any and all words that come out of someone's mind, pleasant or unpleasant, are precious glimpses into who that person is, and they give me insight for how to best understand and honor that friend. It is for this reason, I listen.

I'm a Toys-R-Us Kid.

How many young adults out there will exuberantly claim "I don't want to grow up!" as I myself just did the other night?

This was brought on by a conversation about my new job, which is my first "real" job, full-time with a salary and everything. It feels like I'm finally hitting the "growing up" threshold. And it's strange because I feel very isolated in that. I'm about to start as a 23-year-old (the usual age of a kid just out of college) doing the job of a 30-year-old (teaching college, as opposed to being in college). It feels very strange. But then again, I have never really run with the norm or fit in with what the other people my age were doing, for some reason.

So why, as a whole generation, are we resisting growing up as fast as our parents did? I believe it is a shift in sociological maturation, and in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy, that we young adults of the late 20th and early 21st centuries really don't want to "grow up." In a sense, we are refusing to cross the threshold between adolescence and adulthood for as long as possible. An avoidance that becomes increasingly easier as the time spent in college and grad school keeps lengthening. Yet we seem to choose only some aspects of adulthood (i.e. sex, citizenship, alcoholic responsibility, etc.) as are convenient, but still avoid the majority of adult responsibilities (i.e. marriage, kids, long-term jobs, etc.) like the Black Plague. It amazes me to think that I know people whose grandparents got married at 14 and 17 and were having babies and running whole farms by themselves in their twenties. My aunt had three children by my age. Terrifying. Can you imagine? Here I am nearly 23 years old (the age my sister was when she got married -- even more terrifying), and marriage still feels like a dream on the horizon...and yet it doesn't. It feels like it's everywhere around me. I knew 45 couples (COUPLES! multiply that number by 2 and that's how many people I knew!) that got married last year, and they all seem so young to me. Way too young to be getting married and taking on all the 'adult' responsibilities. But why do I feel that way? Why do they all seem too young to do what our parents were doing at a much younger age? I find myself wondering quite a bit lately when I will be the one to find someone who's right for me and take the plunge. Are marriage and kids even in my future (and I hope they are)? And if so, just exactly how far into the horizon are they? And an even harder question: How far do I want them to be?

Maybe I won't feel as young after this next year when I'm forced to grow up and behave like an adult. Did our parents feel as young as I do when they hit this stage of their lives? Maybe they did.

But back to the question at hand. Where is our sense of purpose? Our generation seems to be so divided, only united in the one common goal of "I don't want to grow up!" Surely our purpose cannot be fully realized by the concept of just "not growing up"; or can it? Is our common mindset to "seize the day" and grab life by the coattails, enjoy it to the fullest like a kid on a swingset -- taking advantage of all the beautiful and rich flavors of life that our parents sacrificed by getting married so young? Yet, most of us who are refusing to grow up, I would posit, are yet unfulfilled and are longing for a higher calling. Whereas the goals of our grandparents and parents were usually 'get married, get a job, raise a family,' it seems that fewer and fewer of our generation are after that, and if they are after that, they're waiting until later and later in life to do so.

So, are we refusing to grow up only because we lack a worthy cause for doing so? Is it that the causes of our parents' generation, like peace in Vietnam, and Civil and Women's Rights, are somehow not worthy enough for us? Or just not applicable anymore? Or is it that we do not fully comprehend the inspiration and worthiness of their causes and are waiting to claim that inspiration as our own before "going out [our] door," as the epic philosopher quips?

Are we looking for those same causes, like freedom and equality, but they have disappeared in our changed and revolutionized society? or have been so morphed and changed that they are barely recognizable anymore? Or are their causes simply not suited to our generation, being that their purposes have been mostly fulfilled and we now must seek out our own purposes and noble errands? -- like scientific advancement and enlightened spirituality, which seem to be the things that rule our generation today. Ironically, these two things are often claimed to contradict each other by the very people who practice them. (I tend to disagree, but that's beside the point.) But on the other hand, I suppose these things could be viewed as the search for freedom and equality, but in a different medium than that used by our parents.

So, what is our generation about? What are we all doing while we mill about and avoid growing up? What are we going to accomplish and have to show for ourselves when our children look back at us? What legacy are we going to leave behind? I'll be very intrigued to find out in a decade or two what the salient effects of our generation have turned out to be. In the meantime, I bet nearly every individual out there between the ages of 18 and 28 knows the theme song for the Toys-R-Us commercials, and sings it heartily.