I Guess I Wanted You More

It's a strange feeling to look back over the past few years, to really peer into them, and see what it was that drove me to be who I was. To not just look and suppose, or hide and minimize, or hide behind and defend; but, to really, honestly and truthfully, evaluate myself and my choices. I am a remarkable human being with intricacies that I cannot for the life of me untangle.

It's fascinating to be in a time of such mental clarity that I can memorize 3,000 words of study materials, nearly verbatim, and look back to a time when, during the semester, I honestly could not remember what classes I was taking. I suddenly have discernment and sense, and it throws the whole picture of "past" off its axis. I can see clearly now where I went wrong and where others wronged me, and the exact moment that I stopped caring and became completely incapable of choosing.

One particular set of circumstances has me particularly baffled at the moment. Like the others, I see where I went wrong and where he went wrong and she went wrong and they went wrong, but I have yet to see how it could have gone any other way. If even one element were changed, I would not be standing here, standing with the people I am, and that would be the worst fate I could imagine. Did God know this? Yes. Did He choose my destiny before all time and thought aside from His own? Absolutely. Am I angry with Him? Absolutely not. As much as I try, my finite brain cannot yet rectify how He can choose and I can screw up, but all I know is that it happens and I cannot possible understand and that it is perfectly okay that way.

What can I say? I wanted something more than God, and He fixed me. It hurt like...well, hell. Separation from God is what it was, but it brought me back closer than I have ever been. In the midst of hell, I found His love and I'll never go back. He cured me of my (literally) damned loves and wishes and desires, crushing all vestiges until I could be whole again. He loved me enough to crush everything ugly from my hands. He knew what He was doing, and, now that I can see clearly into that dark night, I know it was not a waste. He loved me too much to leave me.

I love You, Lord

And I lift my voice

To worship You

Oh my soul, rejoice!

Take joy, my King

In what You hear

Let it be a sweet, sweet sound

In Your ear

"Let's Be the Quiet Realization that Our Time Has Passed"

I'm in the middle of a massive life-dilemma, and I figure that, potentially, the only way to solve it will be to talk it out. Nothing but nothing in return seems to be fairly objective, so let's start here.

In six months, I will be graduated. That's four long years (that remembers like two but feels like seven) of stress and assignments and figuring each teacher out to get away with doing less and learning how to listen with only 10% of my attention while taking in 50% of the content (and let's be real, who remembers any more than that anyway?). So the dilemma. I want to go on to graduate studies, I've picked the school (if they'll have me, of course), I've nearly picked my degree (MCS majoring in Old Testament or Theology), and all that is left before me is to choose the "when."

When?

When I go, I tell myself it will be different than here. Less credits, less classes, stuff I actually want to learn instead of stuff I kinda wanna maybe sometimes learn. But who am I kidding? I will put too much on my plate, as always, and die trying to get things that at one time would have been a snap but are now a marathon to Mexico.

So here are the options:

1. Because I have to decide by January, which is far too soon to know if I'll want to be there in September, I can actively choose to take a year off and wait until next January to apply.
2. I apply and (granted that I get in, because otherwise all dreams are squashed) I only take one course my first semester and see how it goes. From there, if I take two courses each Fall and Winter semester and one in Spring or Summer, I will finish in four years. Piece of cake. How could that possibly stress me out? And, if for some reason I decide to take time off in the middle, I have a two year time buffer (I have a max time of six years to finish).
3. I apply and go, and make it my mission to kill this thing. I do three courses each for Fall and Winter, and two Spring or Summer. That completes it in two years, with only my thesis left to do. And who am I kidding? I could knock that thing out in a month...but I could give myself an entire year. Or two. I could be done in three years, still never even becoming a full-time student, and enabling me to have a job and a life outside of school.

So, what do I do? Objective nothingness, what do I do?

Right. Answers out of nothing are no answers at all.

But I Couldn't Stay Away

I know it's time to blog when I'm sitting here, staring at a wall and trying to decide what to do, but knowing on a deeper level I'm staring at my life trying to decide what to do.

So, umm, here's a smudging of my life right now, completely random and superb.

There is this one part of me that is happier than I have been in a very long time. There is someone in this world who loves me, really and truly, even though he doesn't have to. I can drink coffee again. I feel like, more than ever, I am moving into a place with God that is beginning to look like what it should look like in the end. I am looking to the future and not seeing darkness or endless sand.

There is this one part of me that is more confused than I have been in a very long time. What to do next year is high on the list of question marks, as are the questions of if I should go to Grenada, where I am going to get a steady income from once all my money pays off student loans (hooray, though, for graduating debt-free!), and the ever-nagging "is what I'm doing now leading to where I want to go?"

I like lists. It's because this one part of me likes to be super organized, while the rest of me likes to let things lie in ruin under the guise of organized chaos. So here are a few lists that came to mind and make me feel like my life is in slightly better order than when I started:

10 Things I Love About Myself (it's always best to start there):

1. My sense of adventure and ridiculous spontaneity. It has led me on some of the most amazing adventures and I never want to stop being that way, no matter how old I get.
2. My love of cooking and baking. Not only will it always come in handy for the rest of my life, I'm so glad it's not something that's a chore.
3. The colour of my eyes.
4. My ability to memorize. If I could have 5 books of the Bible memorized by the time I die (which I think is completely attainable, btw), that would be amazing.
5. The way I act like a complete child. Sometimes, yes, it's definitely more on the tantrum side than the cute, but I love that I still like swings and sunsets and looking out airplane windows and wearing costumes and making inanimate objects talk.
6. My love of knowledge and truth and justice. To me, those are God-given qualities and I hate when people put them down.
7. My passion for life. I also hate when people put that down. It equates to putting down the essence of my being, and that I cannot stand for.
8. My 10 second attention span for things that ultimately don't matter, and my decades-and-counting attention span for things that matter ultimately.
9. That I have a past. It's not pretty; actually, it's pretty damn disgusting. But it has turned into a beautiful reminder of how good my God is.
10. That I look pretty when I cry (except when it gets to sobbing, then I'm done for). It sounds silly, but my lips get all red and I look in the mirror and say to myself: "well, at least I look pretty when my world falls apart." Then I wipe my tears and it doesn't look like I was crying at all, except for some leftover, natural lipstick.

10 Things I Dislike About Myself:

1. The way I hold onto the things in my life that are dead and buried. Someone or something has moved on beyond me, and yet I can't help but to humiliatingly hold on until I feel satisfactorily debased and finally let go with a silly and heavy heart.
2. My insensitivity. It's been getting better in the last year or two, as I've actually been developing a feel for empathy, yet I still tear people down. I hate it.
3. That I am so critical. Lately, I've realized that, especially when it comes to church issues, my ego blows up and I believe I am the smartest in the world about everything ever. Wrong.
4. How many people I have let slip out of my life over the last few years. Consciously. I knew it was happening and I let them go. Part of it was that I didn't have any fight left in me, but part of it was just laziness. I'm sorry.
5. My inability to follow through on all my promises to God. I hate it. I need to face them and to do them. It's so much easier to ignore them, but I know that some day He will look me in the eye and ask why I didn't do what I promised of my own volition. Silly, stupid me.
6. My propensity to sin in ways that hurt others. Unfortunately, I do not tend towards inward sins that don't do much damage except to me; I tend towards those that hurt others deeply and take a good deal of time and energy and humility to mend, if they're fixable at all.
7. My propensity to sin craftily. I don't usually sin in ways that are directly laid out in the Bible. I like to do things, instead, that I know I am not supposed to do. Or I sin by omission. Or I do things that ride the line so I can pretend I'm on the good side when, the truth is, my heart is usually on the bad side of the line.
8. My lack of style sense. Every once in awhile I have a glimmer of something, and then it's gone. I'm one of those people who wears red with pink and brown with black and socks with flats and the wrong kind of jewelry and shirts with big holes.
9. That I have a severely negative heart-attitude towards my body. 1000 compliments are always cancelled out by one bad comment, even if it's only my own. I regularly only see the bad, and that bothers me.
10. I tend to not appreciate what I have. I am definitely actively trying to change that, but it's a struggle. I could use a good douse of the third world, I think.

Things I Don't Do Anymore that I Used to Love:

• Draw.
• Paint.
• Write.
• Read books for fun.
• Lay in the grass.
• Drive somewhere special just to watch a sunset.
• Listen to music simply because the moment demands a soundtrack.
• Go barefoot.
• Create things.
• Put on fun make-up.
• Eat gross things that make me feel gross but taste so darn good.
• Drive just to drive.

Things I Want to Accomplish in the Next 5 Years:

• I want my Master's. I want to be educated by people I trust surrounded by people who really care about what they're learning. That's not to say that my current situation is the opposite, not by any means. All I'm saying is that I'm thirsting for more knowledge, and I want to do it right.
• I want to have Romans completely memorized. Right now I'm at 4:16, and if I stay on course I'll be to the end of 5 by the end of the semester.
• I want to be married. It's not really something to accomplish, per se, and if it doesn't happen by then I will really be okay. Really. But to say that I want to get married between 23 and 28 doesn't sound like a huge request.
• I think I'd like to go on a fairly long-term missions trip. That's never been on the list before, but now it is. There's been a burning in my heart lately and I think this is where the flame is leading me.
• I want to be depression-free. Wow, I think this is the first time I've actually come out and said the "d" word on here. But there it is. I want it good and gone, never to return. I am not putting a time limit on it, but it is definitely a huge desire of my heart. Sitting around in a pile of my own mess and tears is not for me anymore.

I am at a crossroads. Again. I am starting to get the feeling that these are going to come up often in my life. I look around and like too many options, it seems. Thankfully, though, God has spent so much time refining my desires and priorities over the years that it is becoming easier to see which way the street sign is pointing. I feel confident about the future. That is such a good feeling.

And by the way, I love someone in this world too, and not because I need to. This gives me deep joy.