Grace.

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life... It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

"Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for that name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything, do not perform anything, do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.’ If that happens to us, we experience grace."

Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations

QUESTION: When have you been struck by grace?

dependence: a personal note

i’m the “life-long learner” type. constantly curious and inquisitive. wide-eyed with ears peeked to any new wisdom, insight, or lesson that i’ve not experienced before.

independence has held on with deep roots since my early years. i’ve admired people who appear as if they could do everything on their own if they had to, and i’ve become that type of young lady in many ways. but i’m realizing, through reading the insightful words of a friend and spending time in introspection, that a heart and mind in pursuit of independence can be stifling to my faith, my relationships, and my professional success.

independence and abundant life cannot flourish within the same individual.

i need God, friends, and family to breathe fresh perspective, encouragement, and pure love into me.

seems kind of obvious, right?

of course there is value in doing life with other people.

of course there is value in letting them hold you accountable to your dreams and goals as well as receiving their love and affirmation.

it’s a message i’ve known in my head but not through-and-through in my heart. i’m finally grasping it. and it’s freeing, let me tell you what.

go live WITH people this weekend. tuck your phone away and enjoy face-time with someone. let them in and nurture real, raw community.

art.

Art, like life, is a challenge. It challenges all our resources, mentally and physically. It can’t be predictably created from a linear didactic formula. It eludes methodology, technology, or ritual. It is, like life, more about being human, being vulnerable, being imperfect, and about things unexplainable. It is not a science. Art is about surprise, about the unexpected, about letting go and risking. It is about taking steps towards places where there may not be any footholds, and falling and failing.

– J. Fred Woell

what.

head. ponder. fear of the no. heavy heart. no light at the end. please remember me. Do I hang here holding on for nothing? Or do I hope that one day this emptiness will be filled, my dreams will appear and the worth of that little girl will shine.

Please remember me.

broken.

hands.

raised.



music addiction lately everyone should listen:

in this silence.

I will sit here, drink tea. write lyrics. draw pictures. listen to music and not give up.

live.

(and stretch your comfort zone to demonstrate love more than you typically would)

Nice is Not enough

‘Niceness’ - wholesome, integrated personality - is an excellent thing. We must try by every medical, educational, economic and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’; just as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat. But we must not supposed that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls.

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world- and might even be more difficult to save.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do soL and at that stage the lumps on the shoulders - no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings- may even give it an awkward appearance.

from Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis