I don't know how much you can see of this....but i just have one question....

When did our faith become about numbers and not love?

I see this and ask myself...Would Jesus, the loving passionate son of God, who over turned tables in the temple and ran people out of the temple with a whip of rope, would He really be okay with something called Judgement House...I'm sorry, I think they forgot to put the part where Jesus used scare tactics to save/heal/resurrect/love/forgive people in my bible....oh wait...that's right...He never did that.

And ask me what I think about re dedication sometime.....but make sure you have a minute or 15....

We serve a God of Love, He is a God, a Father, the Groom to our Bride....not an accountant.

bah.

Rain: The sound of Love

I'm sitting here in my living room,

listening to it..It's a beautiful sound,

it's the sound of God

quenching the earth, comforting his children,

answering their prayers.

It's one of the numerous sounds of love that He offers us,

along with the sounds of our friends laughing,

the sound of loved ones clapping,

and three very simple words.

And sometimes those words are so so hard to say.

And sometimes still, they're the absolute toughest to hear.

They are words of grace, and of mercy, of forgiveness.

They are the words that say so much more.

They say,

I accept you, as you are,

I don't see your flaws, but your perfections,

I don't see your darkness, because I'm blinded by your light.

I embrace your brokenness because I accept your breaking.

I Lived for you, so you can Live for me.

My God, O' God, Help us now.

Selfish desire, deceit, gossip, apathy, bitterness, cynicism, loneliness.....These are not things that should be found in a church, but yet these are things that my church has found in its self. This makes me want to cry for two reasons, tears of sadness over the fact that we have let things get like this, but more than that, tears of joy that we have noticed it, that we have admitted to these things and that we have taken measures to fix our brokenness....

Joy, Light, Love, Support, Friendship, Forgiveness, Grace, Mercy....these are things that I have experienced tonight....Thank You Lord, You have been with us, and are with us still. I pray that You continue to be with us through all of this and that You guard our hearts from our enemy and that You give us love and grace to pour out on each other and others around us as these hard times end and begin...

"And oh my God, I know you can hear us, we're just tired of changing like seasons, we feel your love, if we could love ourselves, we don't love ourselves..."

Wow..

I can't believe the roller coaster I'm on right now. I feel like I'm on the road to becoming who I want to be and to getting my crap straight, but I feel like I keep running of track and then running back, and I'm not making a lot of progress. I want to be more consistent, and I think I'm getting there, mainly because of some self realizations, but also because I want to be the person and man and man of God that the amazing people in my life expect and need me to be. And I want to be that person, even more so, because I expect and need myself to be that man.

I read your blog just now, and you did one of those silly things where you talk about people but don't let them know who they are by name, just explanation.....and I wasn't one of those people, and that kind of hurt/broke my heart. And that's not fair to say to you because I've done nothing to be one of those people in your life. But maybe if I had focused on God and you a little bit more in the past couple of weeks then I could have been. Regardless I miss you, and I love you, and I've realized that I want you to be part of my life, as a friend, nothing more, but I need you there as a friend, and I feel like maybe you need me too, and maybe that is arrogant thing to say, but I feel like it could very well be true, because it's been true in the past. I hope it is. I hope I'm right in all of this, and I hope that we can both handle it....

o' the Glory of it all

I'll never fully understand God's love for me, I say that over and over again, but it's true, and constant. He is, after all, my one and only constant. David Crowder sings this song "Oh The Glory of It All" and in it he says "after all our hands have wrought He forgives" that's so true and so beautiful and so unfathomable to me. I can't go any number of days with out feeling like I have put myself in some pit that He has to reach down and pull me back to the surface. But yet, time after time He does this.

Life is getting more and more complicated, and I'm getting confronted with adult life more and more and it's starting to terrify me, yet I keep looking back to my freshmen year when I was just as afraid to being going to college and taking classes and working. I got through that year with my sanity in tact by taking it a day at a time. Its not that I never looked forward, I just didn't worry as much, I actually focused on not worrying. I paid much more attention to my day to day interactions, got through each day, trying my best to complete all of my duties and live my life as best as possible, and went to sleep hoping and praying that the next day would be as good if not better, and it did get better. It got easier, simpler, easier to handle, to carry, to deal with. God would carry more and more of my burdens at my request, and they were uttered often. I just have to continue asking, and praying, and hoping and having faith. Doing little things like cleaning my room, finding a job, researching papers when I should, going to class.....those help, and I need to not over look them.

I think I just remembered why I started blogging in the first place, it helps me organize my thoughts, put things and order and sift through them. Thank you God. For all of it.

I think I might successfully journal tonight...this is far more exciting to me than it should be.

Have a good night or day to all of you.

In peace and Love.

I need FOOD!

So, I had quiet times regularly for about a month once...
That's really all I have to say about that.

In related news I remembered a quote from a book tonight that challenges me in uncomparable ways. It's actually the book that I named this blog originally after, and it's where I get my url from too. It's called the perks of being a wallflower. this book changed my life. This is the quote "people accept the love that they think they deserve." it's the most adiquate, appropriate, and applicable statement I've ever read in any book.
This is another quote from another book that thousands of people have read. This book is called The Bible. The quote is "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. This statment is part of what we call the great commision. It's the first part, the second is to love your neighbor as yourself. That second part is what we most focus on, but tonight, the first really stuck out to me, and I realized that it is a very looked over passage because it is so familar to all of us followers of the way. but it is JUST as IMPORTANT as the second...if not more so. After all, we do follow a jealous God. But thankfully He is also very forgiving. Now, back to the original topic: I feel that I never really grasp that who concept of Loving God...I mean, it's not complex, but it's big...really really big.
I think that I'm going to try to grasp this, I'm going to try to Love my God with all of my being; heart, soul, mind, strength..all of it, also I'm going to really try to see and acknowledge my body as temple for the Holy Spirit.... I realize that these are big things, but honestly..I'm tired of milk.

Scripture// love

What is it about God's word that is so beautiful and at the same time so terrifying. I'm about to go off on this leadership retreat and realize that I have not read a word of scripture in almost a week.
I think it's the Truth that we find in scripture that is so amazing and so fearsome. The truth we find there reveals truths about ourselves. When we read His word and reflect on all God has done, all His work, His creation, and His sacrifices, and even more His promises, it provokes us to reflect on our work, what have we done, what have we sacrificed, how have we lived? And we grow to know and expect this from the Bible, and so sometimes it becomes the hardest book to read, even to open. Because between it's covers is reckoning, truth, freedom, and most fearsome of all, there is love. And Love holds the power to break, humble, reckon, tear down and build up, heal, make us new creations and give us a salvation from ourselves and our enemy. The scripture really is in it's essence: love. But we have to continue look at it as our freedom, even when that freedom comes at the price of personal sacrifice, and the pain of realizing how we have been living.