joyfull all ye nations rise, join the triumph of the skies

This morning everything seems to be magic. Driving to work with my dad, the whole world seemed so silent and small, with every twig on every tree crystalized in the snow and ice like we are living in a world made of glass. It is wonderful to be happy just because you are alive, not because of anything going on in your life. That's what true happiness is, isn't it? It can't have anything to do with your circumstances, because those are constantly changing.

It seems that there are only rare periods in my life when I really trully want to live for God, and this is one of them, but I'm very afraid that if I stop talking and writing and praying about it for a few hours I'll forget about it and go back to living for me. That's how weak my heart is... it's so discouraging. I once heard a pastor say that the older he got, the less detached from the world and focused on heaven he became. That sounds like such a beautiful thing to me, to actually want to go to heaven with everything in you. I still can't see myself really wanting to spend that much time praising God. It sounds exausting. I wish that I had that kind of love for him and that he was that REAL to me.

Do you ever feel like God isn't real? Like even though you pray to him and read about him and talk about him with your friends all the time, the whole concept of the gospel is so big and radical that it's hard to accept that it actually did happen, at a certain point in time in the history of this very world that we live in now? I wish I beleived in Jesus being born by a virgin and dying on the cross and comming to life again the way I beleive that Pompey crossed the Rubicon and Cleopatra was the Queen of Egypt, but there is always this element of mystery that I stumble over. I have a hard time with mystery. I want things to be laid out, black and white. Sometimes after I'm done praying I try to wrap my mind around the fact that I was just talking to the same God who spoke to Abraham and Job and Isaiah, but I never quite can. It's a scary thing, and I'm sure that if I ever was able to understand it I would pray quite differently.

*sigh* It's amazing just how far I always have to go. The one thing I already can't wait for about heaven is never having to deal with sin again. To actually feel even my thoughts and my motives being good and clean and perfect all the time... I doub there is anything more wonderful than that.

he's gotta wear his goggles, cuz the snow really flies...

Well here I am at work, in a mall that is virtually deserted, having been here since 5:50 for the mad rush of Christmas shoppers we were expecting before all of this wonderful snow came! I say that cheerfully because I am working on not complaining, haha. But it's actually not that bad because I'll get off at noon instead of three like usual.

Lately I've been:

-looking for a new job
-reading Stepping Heavenward
-studying small portions of the Bible instead of reading a chapter a day
-not Christmas shopping
-getting very very sick
-racking up a horrendous phone bill for my parents with long distance calls to Black Diamond
-eating way too many Christmas cookies

and many other things I'm sure which I'm just not remembering right now.

and I've been thinking:

-I am really not cut out for sales. I LOVE helping customers when they come to me; trying to help them find the perfect phone for their needs and watching them walk out of there happy is a great feeling. But I hate trying to stop people who have a totally different agenda and force them into buying products witch they don't really know if they want. So I am not selling anything here, which is putting me on the fast track headed for getting fired. Thus the new job search.
-So much of goodness is acting. The girl in Stepping Heavenward (which every girl here really has to read, if they haven't already) is constantly telling her journal how much she hates certain circumstances, or what a hard time she has dealing with things, and she seems like someone who is barely a Christian or really struggling in her faith- but then she mentions other people who tell her what a saint she is. So I realized that the truth about people is always much darker than how they appear, and that a good deal of sanctification is being able to control the bad things in us and not give them any victory over us.
-Pastors are very, very inteligent people. It amazes me how they can take just a few verses and find heart-wrenching meaning and convicting application out of them. So I've been taking church notes in my journal and then choosing one passage from the sermon to study all week, and it's been amazing because these deep, deep truthes are actually working their way into my understanding. For example:

1. The Peace of God surpasses understanding. Philipians
4:7
2. As Christians, our lives should look different after
salvation. Ephesians 2:1-10
3. It is my duty to be content in my circumstances. Hebrews
13:5, not to mention the entierty of Jonah (sunday school) and Job 34 (morning
worship).

-Who needs Christmas presents anyway? Really, I did that last year.

-There is nothing fun about being sick when you're 19 the way there was when you were 9. But I like to think that when I'm better I'll enjoy life that much more.

-I am very loud when I talk to Christina on the phone. And Jacob and Raeshell constantly contradict her in the background.

-I would like to eat nothing but carrots and perhaps a candy cane for the next week.

-It is very annoying how blogger formats this post.

I've been thinking

Today I saw a scrapbook that said "life makes the best story."

And I started wondering weather or not this was really true. Because a good story has to have conflict and resolution, and while life has pleanty of conflict, it is often lacking in resolution. What resolution we do find never lasts for long. There is always more conflict that comes up later, and then we forget about the things that are already resolved and they have to be resolved all over again. And also, resolution isn't usually very climatic. It often comes just by thinking things through or by listening to someone else talk. Or, perhaps even more frequently, resolution comes by being so confused that you give up trying to figure things out and they simply fade into the past, and you realize in hind sight just how small and insignifcant your "giant" problems really were.

Not very much like a story at all.

So I am starting to find it a very strange thing that people try to put snippets of humanity into two hour movies or describe feelings in three and four minute songs. Even a book, with it's limited number of pages and cover drawings and footnotes, can never quite capture anything close to reality. But it occurs to me now that capturing reality isn't exactly the point. The whole reason art is so important to us is because it makes life look like more than it really is. And that's how we start to view our own lives- as stories with plots and heroes and other characters, or as songs with music videos.

Or at least that is how it is for me.

Reality and I have never gotten along well, I'm afraid. I'm just never quite sure what kind of a story mine will be in the end. I'm not sure if I want to be the hero, the victim, or the lovely Mrs. Right. I'm not sure if it should be a fairy tale, a soulful exposition of a girls thoughts and feelings, or an epic struggle pitting good vs. evil. I'm not sure if it should be poetry, prose, or something no one has ever heard of before. But I do think that if this story ever were to be told, it would take on a life that is bigger than my reality ever will be.

This is a horrily pretentious blog post. I want to write another one.