Monday, September 29, 2014

Stranger Love

Rain was sprinkling the Monday ground. Traffic was bumper to bumper due to the slick roads. You came to my mind, as you do from time to time. I've learned to brush you off, but on this cold, wet morning you lingered longer than normal.

I remember that moment. I was in this very seat and I heard it rush out of you. You didn't realize the words that were coming out. You didn't know the weight or the impact of those words. You didn't know words could weigh so much. I didn't know they could weigh that much either.
I remember how I went numb, speechless. I'm never speechless, I alway have something to say. But in that moment, all I could do was listen. All I could do was sit and pick up each piece of gold you were throwing out at me. That's why they weighed so much, they were gold nuggets.

Then it hit me. I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but it hit me as I sat in traffic on a slick road full of red brake lights.

You were a stranger.

You never felt like a stranger, from the moment I met you, you never felt like a stranger to me.

But you were. You hadn't known me long enough to know the things you knew. We only had a few late night conversations under our belt, but not enough for you to see what you saw. I let people see what I want them to see, but you went deeper. You saw past the closed door.

You were a stranger that night. A stranger who poured a weight of love onto me. A love that is normally only conceived through years of conversation, minutes upon minutes of countless moments. 

But our moments were few, our time was limited and yet, I've never felt more love. 


I'll always remember that night. The night I was given pure love from a stranger. I'll always remember how I didn't know how to receive it. I didn't know how to take a love like that and tuck it away. Love changed for me that night. It took on a new face, it took a new name. All because of a stranger. All because of one stranger.

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Blankets of Colors and Metaphors

I'm a nerd.

It's true.

I love what I do and I love learning more about what I do.

When I was in school, I took a class where we took a particular career assessment called the Holland Assessment. Our professor actually had us do our own assessment of ourselves before taking the actual assessment.

I remember her reading off the different categories. When she read the one for Social, I knew that was me and didn't give much thought to any other category. When I found out we had to pick a total of three categories, I was baffled. I had no idea what to pick for the other two. I remember finally picking Artistic as my second choice.

The things is, I've never seen myself as artsy. I love everything about art. I love painting. I love music. I love poetry. And yet, I never saw myself as artsy.

Even though when I was a kid, I was all about coloring, drawing, painting.

Even though when I was in the 11th grade, my American Literature teacher made me fall in love with poetry and I found myself writing poems upon poems that year.

I have been obsessed with music as far as I can remember. I enjoy creating things.

Yet..... yet.... artsy was never a word I used to describe myself.

I recently started revisiting this part of myself. I can't describe to you how it feels to express myself through poetry again. I cannot describe the joy I feel when I sit in my bed (yes, in my bed) and pull out my little paint brushes and watercolors and watch as the colors collide and bleed into one another.

Finding this side of myself has been so liberating. It feels free to be here. To know there's a whole other side of myself, made of little pieces that just want to shine. They just want to shine.

I still wouldn't label myself as 'artsy', but I'm starting to claim it as a part of me. I'm making more room for it in my life.

I'm wrapping myself up in this thing called art. I'm lying in a blanket of colors and metaphors, smiling like a little girl on Christmas.

It feels good. It feels so good.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Sometimes

Sometimes,

You wake up and the warmth of your bed tells you to stay a bit longer.

Sometimes,

Your thoughts are like a never ending record, playing the same things over and over again.

Sometimes,

You can't help but smile.

Sometimes,

You can't help but keep smiling because nothing triggered that smile.

Sometimes,

Things break and you so badly want someone to come fix it.

Sometimes,

Someone will.

Sometimes,

You find the strength to do it yourself.

Sometimes,

You doubt your own ability to create.

Sometimes,

You look at yourself through others eyes.

Sometimes,

At the end of the day, when you are quieting your thoughts from your day, you hear a soft whisper that says, "You have no need to worry."

And sometimes,

You believe it.

Monday, September 15, 2014

For You.

"All you can do is love unconditionally."

Those were the words that came flooding out of my moms mouth. 

I was driving home, exhausted, and tears streaming down my face. 

I already feel things pretty heavily as it is but I feel them 10 times stronger when I'm tired. If all energy has been drained from this little body of mine, I tend to not have the energy to deal with my strong feelings and I can't help but overreact to how I feel. 


Loving unconditionally. That has been on my mind ever since those simple, yet not so simple, words found their way out of my mothers mouth into my ears. 

Unconditional love along with tragedy and truth. 

Unconditional love. Tragedy. Truth. An unlikely trio. 

Yet, they have been dancing in step with each other as if they were made for each other. As if their little feet are creating a symphony.

Maybe I think too much. Maybe it's a good thing. Maybe it's a bad thing. 

All I know is that everyday I have to tell this little big heart of mine to love you. Everyday I have to let go of the things I can't control. 

If I've learned anything about unconditional love it's that control cannot be anywhere in the recipe. 

Everyday I think more about you than I ever want to admit. I think about the gray in your hair and how life, love, and tragedy brought it out. I can't stop thinking how beautiful it makes you. It makes you so beautiful.

Everyday I dream of ways for you to be happy. For you to leave the devastation of tragedy and find that you don't need an arm to hold onto. You don't need someone else's arms. I wish you could see the beauty and strength in that.

I'm not always good at letting go. It's my biggest downfall. But everyday I try and I'll keep trying. Because if there is anything I could ever want for you, if I could grant you one wish, I'd wish for goodness over you. I'd wish rivers upon rivers of goodness for you. 


I'm not sorry for feeling too much. I'm not sorry for being the girl who will run frantically into your direction and dramatically knock the cup of sorrow out of your hands. It's all because I want goodness for you. That's all I will ever want for you.

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Tragedy.

Tragedy

Tragedy has been on my mind lately. It has taken human form and it has become a person in my mind. Neither male or female, it has taken form and shape and I watch it as it wonders.

I watch it walk around, sneaking up on the innocent, the arrogant, the prideful, the loveliest of all lovelies, and it strikes. The thing about tragedy, is when it strikes, it's strikes your very heart.

I don't care how strong of a person you are, tragedy will break you. Even the strongest rock in the world can't help but crumble when it's very core, it's stability is struck.

No one like tragedy. Tragedy brings nothing but scream, moans, and sharp shooting pains. Tragedy takes you to the center of who you are.

No matter how hard tragedy strikes, no matter the depths of its impact, I believe good can be found.

The heart. It strikes that heart of yours and it shows your true colors. It stirs up the bitterness, the anger, the pain and down falls of being human.

It's challenges everything you have stated you believed in. It tests that foundation of yours, it tells you what it's really made of.

Tragedy calls you out. Tragedy makes you see the truth. Every. Single. Time.

It makes you face the wickedness that lives in you. It makes you face it.

You'll never fall harder or faster than when tragedy hits.

Want to know who you really are? The ends and the outs of yourself? Invite tragedy in. It will show you.

I think of the story of Job and how he reacted when tragedy struck him. When it struck him again, again, and again.

Job questioned God. Job mourned, he cried, he asked why, but never once did he turn his back on him. Never once did he curse His name because Jobs foundation had God in  it. It was the solid ground in which he laid and wept on. He laid and wept and then was able to stand back up again.

As I've been thinking about tragedy, I couldn't help but think of something I said to a friend not too long ago, who texted me when she was feeling low.

Sometimes I surprise myself with the things that come out of me. They tend to come from the deepest, most tender part of me. A part of me that stays protected, so that it can always be soft and gentle.

In the midst of my friends low moment, these words came flowing out of my fingers into the text message box, "Even though it hurts, pain takes us to the very core of ourselves. It allows us into a place in ourselves we don't always want to go or always see. But it's in that pit, in that dark cold place that Gods love comes over us like a blanket and he says, ' I just want to love you. Right here, let me love you here.'"

I haven't been able to stop thinking about that after I sent that to her. How he just wants to love me, right in the middle of my wicked brokenness, he just wants to love me.

We ask God multiple times why he would bring tragedy upon us. Why he would take us to the lowest pit, why he allowed the fall.

I can't help but believe he allows it because that's where his love is the strongest. That's where the intensity of it is felt. It is there, in that pit of loneliness that we feel it and know that there is nothing, absolutely nothing in this world that we could ever do that would make His love change.

Absolutely nothing.

Monday, September 1, 2014

Lost In My Mind

My mind has been thinking about love lately. I've been thinking about what it's really suppose to look like and how you're suppose to know when you really encounter it.

Not just how to identify romantic love, but other types of love.

I mean, really, how do you know if someone loves you?

In a world where relationships and love are distorted through movies, books, social media, etc. Its hard to know what true love is and whether it really exist or not. 

I'm a firm believer that it exist and I truly believe it takes different forms. "True love", per-say, is not just a romantic relationship between two people. It's a friend relationship, its a parent child relationship, its a relationship between you and God. True love has many faces, yet we find ourselves looking for love only in romantic relationships. We believe we only have true love when we have a significant other holding our hand and telling us we look pretty when we cry. We have come to believe that the only satisfying relationship is romantic, that you are not fulfilled until you have found someone to validate you romantically. 

This breaks my heart. It breaks my heart because I've believed this lie. It hurts me when I find this little lie crawling back into my head. My heart trembles as I watch people I love look for validation in the arms of another person. Intense sadness fills my soul when a little high schooler walks into my office and believes he'll never amount to anything because in his 17 years of life, he's never had a girl agree to be his girlfriend.

Validation. It's something we long for. We look into the eyes of strangers, people we've never met, people who are just as human and broken as we are and we say, "Validate me."

What a weight to put onto someone who is just as fragile as we are. How dare we stare into the face of another and say, "I believe I'm nothing unless you tell me other wise."

What happens when that person leaves, whether by choice or by death. What happens when this person shows their human ways and screws up.

Divorce is not a foreign concept to me. It's been extremely present my whole life. I've seen relationships fall and break faster than a vase falling from a table. 

I've seen people jump from relationship to relationship, praying that this one will be right. Praying this person will complete me. 

There are many issues that cause relational issues but I have a theory that one of the main core problems is that we ignore the love we already have in our lives. We ignore the love we hold in our hearts that can be used to fill our own bones. We have love from a God who died so that he can pour mounds and mounds of love on top of us. Most us (if not all) have atleast one person in their life, whether it be a parent, sibling, friend, pet, etc.. who pours love, in the only way they know how to, onto us.

Yet, we dare to look these people in the eye and say, "that's not enough for me."

We dare to walk in our day to day lives and tell God through the actions of our longing for something on this earth that his love is not enough.

I've done it. I do it. No judgement here.

The truth is. The cold hard truth is that love, the love we have right now, is all we need. We don't need other people to validate us. We don't need a romantic relationship to tell us we are worthy of love. We hold that key ourselves. It's starts by believing it yourself rather than listening to the words and actions of other people in our lives. 

Whether you believe in God or not, I guarantee you that he shows you love in some way Every. Single. Day.

Sometimes I lay back and try to imagine things. I'll have visions and images come into my head. Some of these vision are ridiculously real. I feel the emotions of that moment, I feel the circumstances of my heart.


I've laid back and thought about living life so that I allow God to validate me and to live as if I truly believe it. I envision what this looks like and how this would form the condition of my heart. I then envision a romantic relationship entering into my life. To look into someone's eyes and know that I don't need them to make me feel good about myself. I don't need them to tell me I'm worthy. Then to hear these things anyways from someone who sees you and loves you, well it's only in my imagination, but I believe it's something worth striving for.