a visit to grandma’s…

Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life:
gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.
To be certain of God means that we are
uncertain in all our ways,
we do not know what a day may bring forth…
We are uncertain of our next step,
but we are certain of God.”
– Oswald Chambers

That quote from that wise old man seems to be the story of my life right now.

I spent the night/days at my Grandma Carter’s house. She’s a very nice lady and i love her to death, but she has so many ideals about what life in my family should be, such as go out of state to college ” to meet a mate” ( cause you know…all i want is my M-R-S degree). That has bugged me immensely.

the biggest thing that bothered me was a lot of the talk about Stephen. She says she is certain God will bring him back to Himself, as well as Tara and the baby, Laura. She says that God started as good work in him and it will not go unfinished. The problem is that that is what she wants. I mean, i do too. I do not want my brother, one of my best friends going up to die without knowing the Lord, but i need to have faith and hope that God’s plans are HIS and His alone. I know i need to wait on Him, but if i wait with my selfish expectations, i’m putting my ways and plans right up there with Gods. I do NOT want to do that; i know very well where it leads to: disappointment and doubt in God in the midst of immense sadness. I need to trust that He’s going to do the best thing. But i can’t do it all the time. i can barely do it half the time. But, i am certain of God and i am certain that He is good and can, does and WILL make all things good in His perfect way, even if they’re not in the way i would have chosen. He proved that with the birth of my niece Laura Mae and my faith and hope remain…

Isaiah 55: 7-9

Let the wicked forsake HIS WAY and the unrighteous man his thoughts…For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are YOUR WAYS MY WAYS, saith the Lord.  For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are MY WAYS higher than YOUR WAYS, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

TRY AS I MAY, i just can’t look away.

it’s been a good week.

That is to be expected when going to the NCF Girl’s retreat, which i returned from yesterday, but in quite a different way than years previous

I almost didn’t make it to the retreat. Yes, i knew about it ahead of time, i just kept putting off sending in my flyer; “too tired to do it tonight,”; “been really busy this week,”;”gonna get to it soon…” so on and so forth. And then my Dad asked me in the middle of a stressful time-crunched haircut if i was free on the Monday of the retreat to go to a local hair show. I answered with a SureOkayWhateverHelpMeI’mLate. So, when i found out that the two dates clashed, i was put in a hard place. I could ditch the eighty dollar ticket price and go to the retreat or go with dad and not cause any stress in my family with long drives, low budgets, and tight schedules since it’s been pretty bad this year.

So, i was thinking it over, making a mental pros and cons list. There were a lot of reasons to go to both and a lot of reasons to not. But the one thing i kept coming back to, was worship. Yes, i am a good Presbyterian and know that the entire service is for worship ( Thank you Bryan Kemper). BUT…i missed the joy in worshipping. i missed not having to feel so stoic on Sunday morning. I missed the witness all those girls were to me to see them worship God with such an immense freedom. So, i decided i could not go another year without it.

I went in to it with a, at the very least, NOT good attitude. All the talks were good, but the things were going around my mind and doubting many of them, especially pertaining to boys and modesty. I have such a hard time finding clothes that make me feel like i’m remotely pretty and not immodest. In fact, i could count on one hand how many articles i’ve encountered in my life that have found that middle ground. And with boys, i found the flaw that my parents aren’t as great as most of the girl’s parents. Do nott get me wrong, they’re great–they are just extremely biased and reaction-able about boys and dealing with so much anger, bitterness and sadness right now, i would be greatly burdening them if i told them everything that was going on with me, which i have seen. So, with these self-justifications in my mind, i let the talks register, i took notes and was done with it.

it wasn’t like a defining ” Oh this is why I’m so wrong moment” **spiritual mountain top;angelic halleluijahs”** God just kept putting words and phrases back in my mind. Things i had written down during the talks for all intensive purposes. They were chorus line-ing through my head and making me think so hard it hurt. And me, being me, didn’t tell anyone, wrote a very confusing journal entry during story time and then went to sleep, my mind still abuzzing.

The next day, things started to click. Not from bad to perfection, but my eyes were opened so greatly to the unhealthy relationships i have with both guys and girls in obviously different aspects, the selfishness i have in those, my want for MY justice over hard situations like my brother in relation to our church and his salvation, my want for attention when God just doesn’t seem to be sustaining me enough, my spirit of self-hatred, my tendancy to hold everything in because i don’t like being emotional and i don’t like it when people don’t want to give me advice…the list is seemingly eternal. The real miracle was how releaved i felt when i started to see this stuff so so so plainly.

I talked to Shaina extensively about all of this, and that opened up a brick wall i had put around myself with out even knowing it. I hadn’t talked like that about things that mattered to someone who actually cared about them and me in a very long time. I NEED to talk to people like that, people who genuinely care about me and dont make me feel like i’m wasting their time. i do the listening and advice-giving so much, i had nearly forgotten how to do the other end of it and that’s a dangerous, as well as suffocating, place to be.  I need to let things be said because when they are said, the Enemy can no longer use them in my head, because that’s what he was doing. He almost stopped me from going to the whole retreat itself! He’s made me think that i need to hang on to the boys in my life NOW at age SEVENTEEN because there’s OBVIOUSLY not gonna be anything better out there for a girl like YOU. There was a sheet given out at the retreat with a list and the title ” The Lies We Believe” Boy…did i and do i still believe so freaking many lies.

But praise God for hope. Praise God that He hasn’t and won’t leave me in those lies. Praise God that He pursued me and continues to pursue me when i run as fast as i can in the other direction and when the Devil just seems to have won the battle, He is faithful and just. He’s good. He CAN be trusted even when it seems like all hope is lost.

He has captivated me. And though my old nature constantly tries to stray, I just can’t look away.

And a final prayer:

“Beholding is becoming, so as You fill my gaze
I become more like You and my heart is changed
Beholding is becoming, so as You fill my view
Transform me into the likeness of You
This is what I ask, for all my days
That I may, never look away, never look away…”

“Yeah, she has a puppy…only old…so… a dog”

Kimberly and Becca came up from Wilmington on Sunday night. They stayed at Sam’s house and in the morning, after my eight o’clock spanish lesson, i met them in town and we went to DC with our new cameras. We met Megan from New Jersey on the train and went around DC for the day. We went to Becca’s old school because she needed to pick up some papers, to an apartment of a family Becca used to babysit for and to the zoo with the two twin boys, Nico and Pippo, from that family. We came back to Fredericksburg and met Tim, Lou and Daniel at El Charro, went to Walmart to wait for the Quanns to call, and ended at Dennys with the Quanns and a very grumpy waiter. It was a good time, as it always is with that crowd. Good to get away, especially on a week like this. And now, for some pictures ) I recently got a Canon Rebel XT 350D and Kimberly had just gotten a Canon 40D; these are a few of the results.

mucho gusto de conocerte! i must not speak Mexican, i must not speak slang, i must not give up…

I’ve recently started private Spanish lessons.

Well, you can’t call them ‘lessons’ per-say. My mom used to teach an English as a Second Language class, and one of her students from Peru, Maritza, wanted to get to together with my mom and I and practice Spanish and English. In other words, i can only talk in Spanish/Espanglish and she talks in English. I’m enjoying them a whole lot more than i thought i would. I have absolutely no one to talk to in Spanish, even in my Spanish class, and that has been incredibly discouraging and frustrating. It leaves me on a level below where all my other friends who speak Spanish well, which would be all of them. So when i’m in environments where i might have the opportunity to practice, i let them dominate the conversation, which isn’t very hard. But finally, i’ll have a chance to go over all the random Spanish i’ve missed along the way. Which is a whole lot. I realized i have a fairly good grasp on the subjunctive and know just about every vocabulary word related to cosmetology, but i didn’t know all the months. Sad, i know.

i just need some peace…

Hello world.

i’m actually doing one of these things. i’ve written random blogs here and there on the various time-wasting web sites i’ve joined over the past few years. They were so sporadic because i never thought i had much to say. Always fancied myself a listener, which i do quite often…quite a lot more now. So much in fact, i don’t feel like i can just talk about how I feel or what i think anymore. i’ve lost any kind of articulating skills i might have had.

Now, for a meager attempt to redeem them.

This week has been incredibly painful for me, and it continues to be. For the past two years on this very date, i have been in Mexico City, which is one of my favorite places in the world. In fact, exactly a year ago at this time, i was lying at the end of a row of hot pink, barrack-style bunk beds in a super hot and cramped cement room with the sounds of howling dogs, rogue roosters, and snoring Mexican girls to drift me off to sleep. I never slept well in Mexico, especially at the kid’s camps we would put on in the mountains near the City, but those many of those sleepless nights were spent in the Word or just quiet time with me and my Father. They revived me and renewed me; they helped me in ways a person like me who is not accomplished with words could not even begin to express.

And then it was all over. I went on tour, i went home, and i returned to school. Not a day went by that i did not think of my brothers and sisters in Mexico City. On some days it was happy and fleeting reminiscing, others i was contemplating purchasing cheap one-way tickets to El D.F.

But lately, it’s just been pain. In the forms of sadness that i am not returning this year, old memories that burn into my mind like painfully beautiful movies that flash on and off, panic that i am wasting precious time and not doing what I’m supposed to be doing, which is not limited to my being in Mexico or not. The worst part of it all is that i feel hopeless right now. And i know that God won’t leave me here. I just need some hope. I just need some faith and peace that God knows what He’s doing. I know He does, but sometimes He operates in ways that are incredibly hard and frustrating. For this week, those ways seemed to be by frequent emails and instant messages that brought up enough ‘feeling’ to have me up at two o’clock in the morning reading those passages i discovered in Mexico last year. Oh well. There is much worse to be done, and i enjoyed reading Ecclesiastes again.

“And You know the plans that You have for me
And You can’t plan the end and not plan the means
And so I suppose I just need some peace
Just to get me to sleep.”