Blood of Christ

Every Thursday night is Common Meal. I look forward to it all week. All my friends are there, it is only a $1.50, and the food is great. Besides all that, we do communion. My roommate was sitting next to me and when it came time to pass the blood/wine/grape juice, she said "the blood of Christ poured out for you, now get it yourself." She said that because she was having trouble holding the tray and handing me a cup at the same time, but it was just hilarious, ironic, and ever so true. The blood of Christ has been poured out for all of us, but in order to receive the benefits of that great love and sacrifice, we do have to get it ourselves.

Busy

"If the devil can't make you bad, he'll make you busy."

People Suck

“People suck. I do too, and so do you. They may not suck tomorrow but today they do.”

Nursing Home Secrets

It feels like the people in the nursing home have secrets. It's almost like they are so close to the other side that they know things that we don't yet know. The stuff that they tell you when you go in there is rather simplistic but considering the source it seems to speak volumes. For instance, there is one lady in the nursing home, who whenever I am there to see my grandmother, always says to my mom and me before we leave, "have a great time." She doesn't say have a nice day or take care or any such thing as that. No! She always says have a great time. Maybe its just me, but I really do think there is something to that. It's like she knows how short life is and is trying in some small way to convey that to us.

Don't Suffer

Our lives seem to be controlled by whatever blow hits us next, sending us lurching from headache to heartache to horrow story. But we can choose how we respond emotionally. We can choose to hold on to the One who promises never to leave us.
~Barbara Johnson

God is my crutch

Some people say that people just use God and religion as a crutch. You are damn straight! Why should it be any other way? This world is too terrible a place to make it through on your own. To tell the truth, I can't imagine trying to make it through even one day without God. I can't fathom a world without his love and protection and wouldn't want to have to. Nothing gives me greater happiness than to know with complete confidence that the Lord is in control of my life. That means that no matter what comes, good or bad, I will always be taken care of. I can always have hope for the future and no situation will ever be so bad that I can't make it through. Jesus came "that we may have life and have it more abundantly." As Christians we should know that if our lives don't turn out like we wanted them to, it doesn't mean that they haven't turned out just as God wanted them to, which is infinitely better anyways if we will just look for what he wanted us to see when he changed the course of things.

My Cut Runneth Over

So I was talking to a friend of mine online about the meaning of happiness and feeling truly blessed. I was trying to quote the Bible and say, "My cup runneth over." However, I ended up typing, "my cut runneth over." The first thing that I could think of was how hilarious that it was and how that had to be the most ironic typo ever. The next thing I thought was, "my cut runneth over, but at least nobody poured salt in it. At any rate, I just thought of God as having a sense of humor. I think he created us primarily for his own entertainment, which explains free will. Can you imagine if you owned everything, were in control of everything, and had no equal, how bored and lonely you might find yourself at times? That's why I think God has us. He gets to look down from heaven and watch us make the same mistakes over and over again. I could be wrong, but I like to think of him sitting up there smiling down, shaking his head, and saying, "you stupid, kid, will you ever learn?" I guess there is a possibility that he is angry at us when we mess up like He was in the Old Testament, but since Jesus came and saved us from the sins that were seperating us from God, I think that is no longer the case, especially since it was only the sin that God could not stand and never us.
I think more than anything God wants us to see the joy and beauty all around us, which he has created, and he wants us to reflect those same two things in our own lives as testaments to the work that He is doing in us daily. I also think God wants us to see the humor in everything and to appreciate each breath that we take. I intend to do just that; as Rudyard Kipling once said, "I've taken my fun where I've found it." "There is no duty that a man so underrates at that of being happy." All other animals know that the principal purpose of life is to enjoy it."

Life Is a Trip!

Life is a trip and a hell of a ride. The destination is nothing; the road is all. " All paths lead no where so choose one that has heart." The entire experience from birth to death is entirely crazy. It is completely impossible to go through it without ever experiencing any sort of suffering or pain. That being the case, live it out loud. Don't live your life in worry or fear of the consequences of your actions. Make a mess. Have the courage to royally screw up your life. Just be sure to enjoy every minute of it. No matter what you do, you are going to screw it all up, so why not have a good time with it? "Twenty years from now, you will regret more the things you did not do rather than the ones you did." Furthermore, "You are only given a little spark of madness. You musn't lose it." We are all crazy; at least, the best of us are. I would rather be crazy and know it than to think myself sane and have doubts.
I think failure used to be my greatest fear. I don't believe that it is any longer. I think my greatest fear now is that I won't live the moments of my life well. All our lives are is a series of moments and to live each one well is to have suceeded and to have had a blast for what litle time you are here. My goal in life is to do the best that I can for each day. I want to work hard and play hard and do the best by other people as I can. I want to be stupid and silly and make a fool out of myself. "I want to dance like nobody is watching and love like it's never going to hurt." I want to see the humor and the beauty in everything. "Your life will never be extraordinary until you can the beautiful tucked inside the mundane." So much of all that is around us is such a blessing and a miracle but we often fail to see it because we are too wrapped up in ourselves to raise our heads up and look around. "We are all in the gutter, some of us just tend to look up at the stars."
Jesus is my Lord and I want to do my best to keep his commandments and find his will for my life. Other than that, I want to "party all the time, party all the time." I hope to be the eighty year old woman sitting around in the nursing home laughing all the time, saying, "That was a hell of a ride." It's like the Sister Hazel song, "I'm in the moment. The one where nothing else matters and everything is alright." Do the things you want to do today. Tomorrow is not guaranteed and right now is all you have. "It is shining like a star in your hand and melting like a snowflake."

Elsewhere

For awhile, I did not understand how my grandmother and her roommate could sit in the nursing home in their wheelchairs all day long without any entertainment....no television, no radio, nothing. Then I thought that maybe being in their mental state was like being in the kind of daze you have when you first wake up. It's where you are not completely focused on anything, nothing is terribly important in that moment, and you don't really feel particularly good or bad. In the mornings when I first wake up, I don't care if I just lay there and stare at the ceiling or if the television is on. I feel completely content to be devoid of external stimulation. Perhaps that is why my grandmother expresses no interest in being entertained. At least that is the way that I like to think about it.

The Natural Course

Today I saw one of the saddest, yet most beautiful things I have ever witnessed. My grandmother recently had a stoke and is in the nursing home dying. We are all dying, given that we begin to die the moment we are born. However, she is considerably closer to that end of the spectrum than I believe myself to be. On the other hand, I could go tomorrow. At any rate, my mom holds on to the hope that she is going to get better and go home. My mom fights to keep her here and she is ready to go home to her Lord. My mom sits and stares at her the whole time we are there and scarcely takes her eyes off her. My grandmother looks right back at her, as if to say "let me go." I am not upset about the condition of my grandmother because she has let go of this life and is ready to give up "the good fight." The only thing that upsets me is to see how deeply it affects my mom. My grandmother has been trying to tell my mom the whole time she has been there that she is never going to get better. She says I am old and I am not getting any better. Today my mom said to her, "you have to stop getting up on your own and falling or you will never get any better," and her reply was simply, "so." My grandmother expresses no interest in leaving the nursing home, of reading, watching tv, listening to music, playing on the computer, or knitting, which are all things she used to enjoy. To me that is the surest sign that you are not long for here: when there is nothing left that you want to do.
I will miss my grandmother when she passes away but I have a real peace about it. She is saved and is at peace about dying. For instance, my grandmother has periods of rebounding and then worsening again, and on one of her bad days, one in which she wasn't very lucid, she looked at my mom and me and said, "I'm slipping back again, and ya'll are worried, but I'm just enjoying it." Knowing that she isn't afraid and that she is going to heaven makes it all okay for me. "Wouldn't you be happy for your friend if she were going to Hawaii? Heaven is a whole lot better than Hawaii." I love to be around my grandmother right now. It's like she is not completely in this world, and that part of her is already in the other world. It makes me feel like she knows a lot of answers that I do not yet know. I am just thankful to have this experience because I know that it will give me a foundation for letting going of my parents when the time comes.
Death is a part of life. It's the natural course of things. If you live to be twenty years old and your grandparents are still alive, consider yourself lucky. If you yourself live to be at least seventy, consider yourself lucky. The Bible gives us seventy years to live, which means anything on top of that is bonus. We live only to die in the end, making it a part of life. To me, that is not sad. What is sad is people who are dying to live rather than living to die. Life is precious and fragile and short, so truly live yours. Allow yourself to have the experience of truly being alive. You think life is hard and not worth the living? Go spend about ten minutes walking through a nusing home, and you'll learn to appreciate it and to complain a little less. Being that close to death allows you to see life more clearly.

The Off Chance

As a Christian who is daily experiencing the blessings of Christ and the joy of being one of his children, it is hard for me to believe that anyone would not seek him out for those reasons alone. However, even trying to look at salvation and the existence of God objectively, I find it hard to believe that all would not come to Christ. For instance, it seems as though they would believe in Christ on the off chance that he does exist. After all, nothing bad happens to you if you die and find out that there is no God. For if there is no God, there is no afterlife and you do not have an eternal soul so you just return to dust and there is nothing more of you, which would not be a painful process. However, if you die to find out that there is a God and that his Son was meant to be your Savior, your only ticket to heaven, yet he is not, you will then be relegated to an enternity of separation from that God and Savior you refused to acknowledge, leaving your eternal soul to continously writhe in misery.

I'm Not Smoking Rock, but I Know the Rock

Most people that have been around me thinking I'm smoking rock. In other words, I am so happy that they think I must be on some sort of drugs. However, that's not the case at all. In fact, the strongest thing I am on is caffeine. For the most part, I don't even take Tylenol or Aspirin. I think the reason that I am so happy is because I have the truth rock in my life. That rock is Jesus Christ, and he is the only foundation upon which you can build anything of value. I tend to think of happiness as having a sufficient amount of everything that you need, not lacking in anything, but not having anything in excess either. This is what the Lord promises us. He promises us that his grace will be sufficient for us, and that he will never allow us to be burdened with more than we can bear. In addition, he promises us that he will provide us a way out so that we will be able to stand up under our burdens. Happiness is not the absence of difficulty, problems, or struggle in life. Those things are guaranteed. Besides, "too much sunshine in life makes a desert." I tend to think of life in terms of comparisons. For instance, no matter what is happening to me at this present moment there is always a whole host of things that I am thankful are not happening to me. I truly do believe that there is always something to be thankful for and "that there is nothing that can happen that is so bad that good may not come of it." A little exercise that seems to keep me happy on a daily basis is when things don't exactly go my way and I'm not exactly having the best of days is to think of how it could have been worse. I do this even in the most miniscule of circumstances. For instance, I spilled my drink all over my shirt and I thought well that's not all that bad because I still have time to go back home and change. I got stuck in traffic and I thought well it could be worse because I could be the car involved in the wreck that is backing up traffic. Now that is a compartively worse day than mine.
Earlier I mentioned how happiness is having just enough of everything. This can also be carried down to the most ordinary aspects of your daily life and bring you a smile. For example, you go to brush your teeth and you have just enough toothpaste left to brush with or it's lunch time and you have four bucks in your console with which to get a hamburger. I don't know but little stuff like that always makes me happy. On the other hand, it's also important not to have too much of anything, even wealth. For instance, Jesus tells us, "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven." This is because his wealth ties him too much to this world and makes him love the world and money more than he does God. It is important to have some degree of strife in our lives so that we never forget how truly fragile life is and how dependent upon God that we are. After all, the Bible tells us that we are but a breath. Besides, if things went too terribly well for us in this world we would most likely think we could do things all on our own and that we did not need God. "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" In other words, we would love this world too much and forfeit our very souls for it.
We should never expect anything of this world to make us happy or to satifsy our seemingly unfathomable longing. We are not of this world. We were created with eternal souls that long to be with their Creator. This world is the kingdom of the devil so it is place of evil and sin and pain, and the devil will do his best to make sure that you continue to experience these things. In fact, by assuring your misery, he will assure your seperation from your Father in Heaven. The devil does not mind if you have temporary happiness, the kind that is found by amusing ourselves with the sinful things of this world such as sex, money, and drugs. However, he will do everything in his power to make sure that you do not find true and lasting happiness, which can only be experienced by those who are continously fellowshipping with their Lord and Savior.

Christians Are a Damned Mess

Christians are human. They are just like anyone else. They have the same sinful desires and just like everyone else, yes, they still sin. Christians are in no way perfect. In fact, the only way in which they are different from anyone else, the thing that separates them from the rest of the world, is that they have acknowledged Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. They have said, "Lord, I can't make it on my own. I need you to come into my life and fix me because I am a damned mess." Furthermore, Christians are forgiven for their sins so that they no longer have to be separated from God. Jesus has paid the price once and for all. He has paid it for everyone and all anyone has to do to accept this miraculous gift is to ask for it. I went to church last night and the pastor laid it down something like this. "You only have two choices. The price of sin is death and not just death but eternal death, as in you will continously experience death throughout eternity. Because this is the case, someone must pay that price. You can pay it yourself, which means you will spend eternity in hell, separated from God, or you can let Jesus pay it for you and go to heaven."

God-Sized Hole

I think that the reason why people are not happy is because they have a God-sized hole in their lives. He put it in all of us so that we would seek him. It's the reason why people feel unhappy, depressed, lonely, lacking, etc. It's the reason why human beings feel like all is not quite right in the world and why they constantly feel like something is missing or that they are incomplete. This feeling is not limited to non-Christians. People attempt to fill this lacking with a multitude of earthly methods, which sadly will never really do more than address the surface characteritics of the more complex issue. Many individuals feel like success, fame, fortune, sex, relationships, love, therapy, drugs (prescription and non), food, alchohol and any number of other things will "fix" them. They think I will be happy when I get this job, when I get my new car, when that girl goes out with me, when I have my first child, etc.
Most of a human being's focus is inward. What's wrong with me? Why am I unhappy? Who is at fault? The one thing that people do understand is that they are missing something, which is an intimate relationship with their creator and savior, Jesus Christ. Earlier I mentioned that being a Christian does not mean you will not feel an innate lacking. There are many many Christians walking around today who are saved and are going to heaven but who aren't getting to live the life of abundance promised them in the Bible. This is because they don't realize the power that God has to be an active part of your every day life. Our God is a God of details. He says to us, "ask and you will receive, knock and the door will be opened, seek and you shall find." However, nothing will be given to us by our Lord if we do not seek him and do it daily. He gave us free will so that it would be our choice to come to him, and while he waits on us, he cannot bless us until we ask him to. I found a quote from an unknown source that says, "God gives every bird a worm, but he does not throw it into the nest." Basically, that means what my mom has always told, which is that "God will do anything for you but you have to meet him halfway." Meeting God halfway means believing that he has the power to do everything, that his will is best for your life, and that by praying and earnestly seeking Jesus Christ you will experience true peace. I read another quote that says,“When I turned myself over to God, I took my life out of the hands of an idiot.” You have to really learn to put faith in God in order to be happy and to learn how not to worry. This is embodied in this quote: “If you pray for a Cadillac, and God sends a jackass, ride it.” Furthermore, pray unceasingly as the Bible says to and “When you pray, claim what isn’t as if it were, till it becomes.”
There are very few truths in this life, and the greatest and perhaps only truth I know is that Jesus Christ is Lord of all. This means sickness, death, pain, stress, and fear are all under his dominion and that he can rescue you from all of these things.