A Perfect Feeling

Have you ever gotten that feeling, the one where you are driving down the street and you look around, and suddenly you feel like you are living in a book. The trees are on either side of you, the leaves are changing colors, and for that little bit of time it seems everything is perfect. The kind of perfection one reads about in novels. It's a feeling of quaintness. One of elegant simplicity.

It's almost like stepping into Stars Hollow, or some other town written to make people want to live there. You almost feel like you need to have a script infront of you, and a bunch of guys carrying around big cameras and microphones... ok, so I don't know too much about the movie making industry, oh well...

Anyways, I got that feeling today, that feeling that everything is perfect... that if I looked really fast to my left I would see Huck or Tom heading to the river or white-washing fences... Everywhere you look people just seem happy.

The only sad thing that happens is the next feeling... Kind of like a Sunday afternoon feeling. You've had a great, wonderful day, and then you realize that the next day you'll have to go back to school or work, and it almost ruins the rest of the day for you... Almost, but not quite.

A Matter of Snow

Do you smell that? Mmm... Snow. The first snow of the season, any day now. What an amazing time of year. Oh, snow! There is just something so beautiful about snow... something magical and fantastical about it. Great things happen when it snows. And snow, one of the truly best things about it, is that it transforms the entire countryside. Something once brown and drab now becomes white and beautiful.

There's something almost poetic about snow. And not only that, but it gives one a great excuse to wear amazing clothes, coats, scarves, hats, gloves, and generally you can get away with wearing little to no makeup! Which is a definite plus...

Oh, the best is to wake up, Christmas morning, and the first thing you see is a perfect snow. Not that there is ever a non-perfect snow... but the type of snow I'm talking about is the type that as soon as you see it you want to run out the doors and join it, even if it is six in the morning.

Oh and the crispness of the air, it's so refreshing. Taking a walk through snow, oh is there anything better? Especially if it's late at night, maybe even with a full moon. The moon is so bright in the middle of the mountains, and when it's full, the light reflects off of the snow, and the world is brightened a little bit more. And walking on nights like these, lightens the heart a little bit too, which is always a plus.

And then there are the winter sports, which only come with the snow, downhill skiing, ice-skating, sledding, tubing, snow-mobiling, and of course, the great snowball fights. Oh the times that snow brings.

The first snow of the season, it brings the hope of all the wonderful times yet to come, there's nothing bad that comes with the first snow. And that is a beautiful, wonderful thing.

A Matter of Loss

Have you ever lost your best friend? The person who was the closest to you, who you could call at anytime of the day, to share whatever, even if it was just to laugh about something stupid you did... You can't share that with anyone else because they wouldn't really understand just how funny it was, or how it relates to past experiences... you would have to sit the new person down, explain everything, and then share the experience, and by the time you do the experience is no longer funny. Losing a friend, that is something I would never wish on any person.

It's so hard. It hurts. Especially if the friendship is irrepairable... Something happened, that can't be taken back, and that neither side can fix. Forgiveness has been given and accepted, but the friendship is gone, everything. But it's hard, because now you have no one to laugh at yourself with, or so it seems. Maybe I made the mistake of making my best friend a guy, for some reason we just could always get along. We could say the hardest things to each other, and even if we hung up the phone or walked away, the next day we would come back together, pick up the phone again, whichever, and talk it all out.

It was one of those friendships, the really rare kinds, that you don't find too often. And when you do you want to hold on for dear life. Because you feel like, through all of the chaos this world is throwing at you, some other person out there feels the same way you do, and whatsmore, can help bring a little sanity into the mix. You feel like you finally have some common ground with someone else, and it's refreshing. Almost like you can breathe a bit easier now, knowing that you're not completely alone... whether it's in your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, trials, struggles, pain, burdens, any of it, or all of it, you are no longer alone.

Aren't those instant, fast friendships incredible? They just brighten up the day, even if it's a thunder storm, and the sun appears to be millions of miles away, somehow you still feel warm inside, and it's not a romantic love, but that friendship love, that brotherly love, that thing which you have been craving... it's finally yours. We all crave romantic love too, but brotherly love is something I feel like we truly can't live without. Romance is hard to live without, but it's doable, whereas if we didn't have brotherly love, I feel like we would be a much more depressed and lonely people here on this earth. We have God's amazing, unconditional love, and I think that's why He created brotherly love, He knew we'd need it... not as much as His, but still a little. Maybe.

And I guess that's kind of encouraging, knowing that we can never lose the love that we truly need to survive, God's Love. But it doesn't make losing a brotherly love of a friend any easier. I miss my friend. I miss being able to call him at two in the morning just to laugh about a funny dream or thought I just had. Just to be able to wake him up and wish him a "happy birthday," even if he is irritable and grumpy that I woke him before noon. It's being able to cry to him, knowing that he doesn't judge my tears or the choices that caused them. It's him being able to cry to me. It's knowing each other so well that we can finish each other's thoughts and sentences, and we can answer each other's questions before they are even asked. It's going out to get donuts at three in the morning just to have an excuse to walk in the peace that comes before the dawning of the day. It's sneaking out of cabins to lay in a field in the middle of the mountains just to look at stars, and make a few wishes. It's knowing that he knows everything about me, the good, the bad, the pain, the joy, he knows it all, and whatsmore he's been through a lot of it with me... has helped me get through a lot of it as well.

He knows my fears and my dreams. He's seen me as I've grown, and I've seen him. Maybe this is starting to sound like some epic romantic love story, but it's not like that... at least not for me. He's just been the best friend I've really ever had. He's always known when something was wrong with me, has called, just to make sure that I was ok, and if I needed to talk and vent for four hours, he was more than happy to just sit and listen.

But this is all how he used to be... We didn't talk or see each other for over two years... met up with each other again this past summer, I've mentioned him before I think actually. The problem is that neither one of us acted like we had spent time a part, we just pretended almost like no time had passed... so everything that had happened in those two years we just overlooked, when really we shouldn't have. We should've taken some time to delve into each other's lives again.. or to just get to re-know each other. But we didn't...

The loss of a brotherly love, I must admit to be tragic. Why else would I cry? It's a pain to the heart, you will hurt in places you didn't even know you had. You'll wonder why you can't get out of bed in the morning and then it hits you anew, you're precious friend, who saw you through so much, is gone. And the worst part is, you immediately want to turn to someone, someone who can listen to you, who you can cry to, who knows every part of you, and you immediately think of going to that friend... And then fresh pain hits you anew, and tears you didn't know you had will show themselves. Generally they are silent, all of it is silent. The world doesn't see the pain of losing a brotherly love, but oh how the world would feel it if every brotherly love was gone!

A Matter of Stepping Out and Away

Stepping outside today was a bit like stepping outside of myself. I didn't stay for long, it was just a short trip, but it enabled me to see things differently, maybe even through "rose colored glasses." I smiled at the people that I passed, and they smiled back at me, but I didn't know them and they didn't know me. I didn't try to blend in, but instead wore my green sneakers and my bright orange coat. I didn't care who saw me, because I had stepped out of myself for a bit, ready to view the world a little differently.

It's freeing, in a sense, to be able to walk the isles of a grocery store and not know or even recognize a single person. I looked around, and realized I could create a completely different identity from that which was mine and these people would never know the difference. I could be whoever I wanted to be, they didn't know me, my past, my failures, my accomplishments, or the things in life that had brought me pain or joy. They didn't know any part of me, and therefore I could just be someone completely new... to both them and me.

Maybe that isn't a right way to look at it, but it sure was nice, for an hour or so, to not have to be me. Not that I don't want to be me, I trust that God's plan in my life, whatever it is that He is doing in all of this, will be good and ultimately glorifying to Him. And I want that.

It was just nice to take a step away. I didn't take a step back, or forward, but I stepped away. For one hour I was able to just take a break from it all. And that was amazingly refreshing. To look at life through the eyes of someone who wasn't hesitant to fully live it, to see things, like the different shades of yellow pushing aside the greens in the leaves. The cold air conquering the heat, and the shouts of children to each other across the streets as they went home after a long day of school. To see the world as innocently as it had once been to me, to desire to live fully once more. It is a beautiful thing. And sometimes we have to step away from it all, look through a different pair of eyes, to see what it is that's right infront of us, that's good. When so many bad things are facing you head on it's hard to look around them. But if you step off to the side, you can easily see that these things won't last.

Eventually there will come a time when the pain and trials, fears and struggles, will all just be done, they will have faded into nothingness. Life will be worth living again, and even more than that, there will be this unbridled desire within you to live it to the fullest!

I for one, cannot wait.

An Unrecognizable Matter

Have you ever looked in the mirror and wondered who the person was looking back at you? Sometimes if you turn your head away and then back really quickly you think you glimpse yourself, but all too soon that glimpse is gone and you are left with someone staring back at you who you don't recognize at all. And you're not even sure why you can't recognize yourself, but you can't. You stand there staring at yourself, wondering what it is about your reflection that makes it unrecognizable.

Is it something in your eyes, something maybe hidden by the tears that fill them? Or is it the way you tilt your chin, holding your face at an angle that hides it as much as possible from the world? Maybe it's something that can't even be seen by the naked eye, either way that something is there, changing your very appearance.

You jump when you run into someone you know and they know exactly who you are. Somehow it feels like if you can't even recognize yourself, then no one else should be able to either. You start to question how well you know yourself if everyone can recognize you, except for you. Is everything you're going through really that invisible to the world? Do you really not look any different from your normal regular self? And isn't that how it's supposed to be? Yet somehow it doesn't seem fair or right? You feel like to some extent someone should know that something isn't right in your life... And maybe they do know, but they just don't show it, maybe they too are going through something, and they too are wondering the exact same thing as you are... How does this person know who I am, because I don't even recognize myself.

An Uncertainty of Desire

Have you ever had a plan? Not necessarily a plan for a day, but a longterm, semester type of plan, or maybe even a plan for a year? You set a goal, something you will have achieved by the end of the year, and you don't expect it not to happen. It's a plan. It's set in stone, it's imminent. And it's good. Generally the plans we make for ourselves our good, right?

So what do you do when that plan can no longer happen? When something comes out of the blue and broadsides you? Something you didn't expect, didn't plan for, and it's too big to just overlook, or sweep under the rug? What do you do? When the plan for the semester, for the year, is forced to change? What do you do when you look at where you are in life, at what has just happened to you that's so huge that now life has to change in some way, somehow, and you don't really know what that's going to look like? Do you get overwhelmed, over-anxious, to the point where you can't do anything? You're stuck. And it's not that you want to be stuck, you want to move, to do something, to live life, but you don't know how. How do you change that? Do you just wake up one morning and an idea hits you as you get out of bed? Suddenly you know how to dress, you know what you want to go after, to pursuse, to desire, and you're finally able to follow through. Is that what happens? Or does it have to be more forced? Is it something you have to force yourself to do? Do you have to wake up every morning, the end nowhere in sight, and make a temporary plan for your life, for the semester, the month, the day even, just so long as there's something, some sense of some accomplishment?

Or is it a balance of the two? After weeks of forcing yourself to get up, do laundry when needed, grocery shop, make food, etc... then will there eventually be the day when you wake up and you just know? When you finally have a desire to do a specific something, instead of just desiring? When you know what the day holds? When you know where to work, when you desire to be there? Does that time ever come? Forced or not, does it ever come? Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? Is there ever a time when you don't have to question anything at all, when you can live the life that is set before you and no longer ask any of the "what if's?" or "whys?" that you have been asking every day for so long... does that time ever come?

Is there something to look forward to? Or will there always be this feeling that there's something better, something to be desired, but that that something can never quite be grasped?

I want to be the best possible version of myself. And I know that means immitating Christ, and living every day to glorify Him. But what does that look like? I feel like I can study it every day for a lifetime and still not have the answer to that question. When life hands you lemons, you're supposed to make lemonade. But what if the events in life are just too sour, nothing good can really be made out of them, except for now you know to not use those lemons, to not go about harvesting lemons in the future like you did those. Does that make any sense? I guess what I'm trying to say is that, sometimes there are events in life, which just hit too hard. Which knock you down flat on your face, they knock the breath right out of you, and leave you bruised and crippled, broken on the side of the road. You feel like you're dying.. and it's not necessarily that you want to die, it's just that's what you expect the end of life to look like... So how do you keep living, when you feel like you're dying? When you want to get out of your house everyday, but you still want to be by yourself, because you're not strong enough yet to defend yourself once again from the world. It's too hard, too frightening, to step outside your front door... and yet you want to...

I used to have a place where I could go when life threw me a hard event. I love being able to have time to myself. Time in which no other person can even be seen, much less heard. Here, where I am now, I can't have that unless I'm in my bedroom... and I think all of us know that if we stay locked in a small room for too long, depression is imminent. But see, I used to have a place, a whole mountain actually, to escape to. The mountain has healing powers for the heart. I would go there broken and bruised, I would cry my heart out to the Lord while sitting on His mountain, and I would let Him, through His creation, mend my brokeness. He would put the pieces of my heart back together, gently, tenderly, slowly, and then the healing process would begin. And by the time I got back to my house, I wouldn't mind so much being around large groups of people, I had had precious time to myself, time in which I the depression and pain life had tried to strangle me with, had been lifted from me. My heart was lighter, and it was being healed.

It's so much easier to step outside when you can still hide away even while out of doors. It's so much harder in a big city. Escape isn't so easily found. And yes there are bike trails, and places to go hiking, or boating here, but all of those places people will be seen and heard, and getting to those places isn't easy on top of that. So that method of healing, at least for now, while I'm here, isn't too realistic.

I was once told that the best things in life were often the hardest things in life, but that just meant that they were worth fighting and suffering for. I hope that means that through this suffering and pain which my heart is having to go through right now, a best thing is about to happen. I hope. But I do not know. Uncertainty is a blessing, and a curse. It's something we love in some situations, but it's mostly something we cringe at. When someone tells you that they can't really say whether or not something did or didn't happen, it's crushing and discouraging to say the least. You want a 'yes' or a 'no' not a 'maybe.' We didn't even like 'maybes' when we were kids, if your mother told you 'maybe' it just meant she didn't feel like saying 'no' and arguing with you about it right then... and we all knew that.

It's harder still when we get 'maybes' in life, as adults. Will this get better? "Maybe." Will there be a good period, a time of blessing and happiness, and just enjoyment now that there has been this awful time? "Maybe." So does that mean it will get even worse? "Maybe." There's never a definite. "Yes, you will have an amazing time of prosperity now in your life." or "No, it's going to be very hard for quite some time yet to come, and it may never be as good as you want it to be."

So do you we still make plans for ourselves, and for life, even after we've been knocked out cold. Do we still get up in the morning and plan. And if we do, do we plan for life to be good, for that day, that week, that month, that semester, that year, to be good? Or do we hesitate? Do we instead make plans of uncertainty, planning on something else to happen, to knock us down once more? Or do we go back to the outlook of life we once had, and plan on life to be good, to always be good? Or do we not plan at all?

Do we add a "maybe" to the plan, and make it so it could go one way or the other, plan on uncertainty, pain, trials and tribulation, but at the same time hope that they will not occur? Or do we plan to have hope? Do we plan to live life, no matter what? And then do we strive to figure out what that looks like exactly? And then, how do we figure out what that looks, while at the same time living it?

And then of course there's the matter of dreaming dreams for yourself once more... Of not being fearful to say, one day, hopefully even soon, I want to be doing this... I believe this would give me a sense of accomplishment... This is what I desire to do, and even more than that, I'm not afraid to do it. Wouldn't that be an amazing blessing in and of itself? To finally be able to dream once more? I hope that time comes. The time in which I again find myself desiring and dreaming for my future. I hope that time comes soon. Because I desire to desire. I desire to dream. I desire to have dreams for myself. And I desire to not live other peoples' dreams for me, but to let God give me dreams for life, for Him to help me dream, because if I'm dreaming His dreams for me, then they'll happen, won't they?

A Matter of a Raindrop's Life

As I sit here on my couch in my little house, watching the rain pouring down from the skies outside of my windows, I am reminded that life never stands still. We are never given a time of just complete nothingness. Something is always happening, life never breaks until it ends. The rain picks up speed, bringing down the leaves hanging loose among the trees. It thunders the ground, you can hear it in every part of the house. It picks up such immense speed, but only for a couple minutes. It returns to a more normal pace, the rain falls into a pattern, it doesn't stay falling at one speed for too long a time... soon it changes once more.

Have you ever thought of just one single raindrop. It gets released from the cloud, and rockets down to the earth. Never losing speed, but going faster and faster and faster, traveling to the ground as though it's life depends on it, when in actuality, the life seems to end with it's final drop to earth. It seems to end, but does it? When it finishes it's fall, when it comes in contact with the earth, it does burst, but is that the end? Or does it mix with the other waters, and satisfy the thirst of the earth? Forever alive? And then, when the water evaporates into the air, traveling back to the heavenly clouds, does it all begin again? Does the life of a raindrop ever end? It's a cycle; sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but never completely stopping. There's always movement. There's always life.

To be a raindrop. To know the aggravating waiting, when life itself seems to have ended because it's moving so slowly. Impatience begins to take root, and aggravation becomes the controlling feeling from day to day. And then, the clouds open, the rain released, life picks up immense speed. Unbelievable speed. For a moment, just a moment, the wondering if life has actually ended presents itself, but soon it fades, the raindrop sees the earth, looks around, sees the world, and knows it's living the peak of it's life. The most exhilarating times of a raindrop's existence is when it is able to fall to earth, that is what it considers to be living. And then it must work, and water the ground, then travel back to the clouds and wait. Wait once more until the time comes, until it has the strength and power to fly back to earth.

Is the life of a raindrop something to covet? Is it something to envy, to desire? To have those breaks in life, when life is at it's highest peak? When exhilaration is the dominant feeling? And life is fully lived? After work and waiting, the knowing that something fun, exciting, and borderline terrifying is right around the corner? That would be a blessed thing. To know that eventually a break will come. A new day will dawn, and with it the cloud will release you, and life will be exhilarating. On that day you will want to get up, and therefore each day you rise hoping that it will be that day. A day where you find yourself living, instead of wishing life would stop because it seems so incredibly pointless.

That would indeed be something, to know the life of a raindrop.