The Family Room of Humanity

It's Christmas Eve and I'm at my parent's house in Marietta, GA. So far the break has been a whirlwind of shopping, wrapping paper, cooking, family and friends and longing. Longing for perfection I think. I just wish it was easier to love people. Why is it so easy to love and accept your friends with all their faults and imperfections and so hard to love your family. It's just hard to stay engaged, committed to not just showing up to family functions but committed to actively loving, serving and being involved in people's lives. It's easier to watch tv, write on my blog, check my facebook, or listen to music than it is to have meaningful conversation. Maybe the reason its so hard is: #1 I'm selfish #2 I the people who are closest to you and know you the best have the greatest power to hurt you, even with a look, or a few words #3 I like to be the one to decide who and who is not going to be close to me and with family you don't decide. But my family needs love and encouragement just as much as any student that I minister to, and because I do know all their junk and because their junk has affected me, my love for them is probably that much more powerful. Alright... big gulps, Lord help me to stay engaged and thank you for not being a distant God but for being a God who came down into the family room of humanity and loved on dirty people who really wanted to shut you out. Thank you for breaking through the walls and barriers in my heart with your love. Help me to be like You Jesus help me to love my family where they are- in the family room, here I go....

Burning down the House

I think too much... I mean I really enjoy thinking but overthinking is just unhealthy. Failure is not something I enjoy, I like to be in control and I hate to be in situations where I don't know the outcome. Recently there's been quite a failure in my life and I've gotta stop thinking about it, and ask the Lord to help me learn from it. Nice... this song - Control Freak by Copeland just started playing, how appropriate.

“To fail is a natural consequence of trying, To succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying”
David Viscott

" Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing."-- Denis Waitley

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.- George Bernard Shaw

"You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there." -- Edwin Louis Cole

“Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach.”
Roger Von Oech

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.”
Sven Goran Eriksson

My So- Called Life

All I can do is laugh. My life is one big fat pickle. My parents have tag-teamed two yelling sessions at me this week, once for almost getting a puppy and secondly for having no car insurance (whoops!). Tonight I did my last bible study of the semester with the Alpha Gammas and I got so tongue-tied that I'm not sure if I made any sense and we had a potluck dinner beforehand and I didn't have the money to buy anything so I made stuff that I had around the house (hotdogs, a mystery rice mixture, and corn- it was a poor man's potluck). I invited one of my best friend's to a semi-formal Christmas party this weekend and she was so excited and she bought a new dress. Then I found out that I had forgotten that I'd bought concert tickets for a show on that night like 2 months earlier so I wouldn't be able to go. AAAAAAH! I can't seem to get anything right this week. I'm having a little trouble trying to figure out how to be a responsible adult. It seems like there's just so many things to think about and take care of. What is responsible. Well, responsible means worthy of trust or held accountable (I looked it up). Held accountable- that sounds scary. Anyways, you wouldn't believe what happened in our house last night. We killed a full grown rat with our rat trap. Its been terrorizing us, everytime we turned around it was in our kitchen , bathroom, and Saturday night it slid under my bedroom door. So, I bought some mouse traps and 1 rat trap just in case. We put it in the kitchen and less than an hour later we were all getting ready for bed and we heard the trap go off and the twitching of a rat body. After next semester I'm seriously considering a move. Matt has been telling me that I need to take more chances, that I don't take any risks, that I don't give myself room enough to fail big and learn from it. I think that sounds good I mean I'd love to try something risky that could either be really good or terribly bad, but I don't really know what that would look like. Most of the risk that comes into my life comes from my forgetfulness or because I've ignored something I should have dealt with. Oh well, I'm growing - baby steps right? Baby steps.