battleground

they pull me in and spin me around, they chatter and scream at one another, they bruise me and shake me untill my teeth rattle loose against my jaw. every single one holds onto some fiber of my existence, inseperatably linked to me at every checkpoint, at every nerve. but they hate me as though they are not of me. oh how the hatred gloats and smirks, pointing and laughing at the horrific irony of the misery they have so much power to inflict.

and yet i am trapped. utterlly trapped by my own thoughts, a slave to their wrenching grip upon my conciousness. how is it that when everything else in life is exactly the way it should be, a simple thought can worm it's way into my conciousness and destroy the whole precarious balance of my hapiness? and then there are the other demons.

these slip in unoticed and take up a residence in the rooms i save only for the best of guests, and there they begin to grow and spread, until they are master of the whole palace. they come and go at will with no warning, they deceive with honney and sweets that disolve when i try to bite down. worst of all they dress in all sorts of disguises, miraging first from one form then to another, so that i never know when it is their handwork i witness or some other force- be it the Almighty force, the thought-demons, or the Evil One.

can i escape what i feel? should i try? is my reasoning sound enough to rely on without the help of wild, untameable, unreasonable, and yet always honest emotions? what would smothering these do? can i offer these to the Almighty? where would that leave me?

together they are at war, sometimes forming alliances with each other and with other powers, sometimes fighting united as sides and teams, forcing me to choose. and there is nothing, nothing that i can rely on inside of me to guide me- nothing at all. there is no third power. just fault fighting fault, deception fighting deception. helpless i grope for something outside of me to silence the battle within, but my fingers curl around weeds that are rooted in sand. searching for the Rock and the endless peace that must be found there, i plunge on, blind and helpless, broken and tearful, but somehow still alive, still hoping, still believing.

bondage

Here's something that totally confuses me.

People say that when you accept Jesus Christ into your heart and life, things should change for you- that you will turn your life around and start doing good, whereas before every thought of your heart was only evil continually. I beleive this no questions asked, because out of love for what Christ did for me I see no choice but to do my best to follow the commands he lays out in his word. So far so good.

Lately, however, I keep catching wind of this idea that upon salvation we are endowed with some kind of special ability to do good that we didn't have before. And also that once you are a Christian, you will be able to acheive levels of goodness unreachable to the unregenerate person. This is very new to me, and I'm not sure I'm really buying it. I tend to think that being good is every bit as difficult after you become a Christian as it was before, the only difference being that you have a greater motivation to do good and a greater knowledge of what goodness is after salvation. Also I tend to think that there are many unbeleivers who do a perfectly fine job of "being good," even though there is no true faith in their actions. They just want to live cleaned-up lives because it makes them happy.

So what's the difference between people like that and born again Christians, other than the motives and the state of the heart? In Born Again Colson talks about people who had already been saved but were still struggling with achoholism or drug addiction, until they were "filled with the Holy Spirit." And then they just lost the need to drink or smoke, like the holy spirit had actually performed a miricle in their bodies. If that kind of thing really happens today, I can see how it could be easier to be good after salvation. But I don't know if it does.

I think I almost understand this, but I can't quite put my finger on it yet. So there's some food for thought, follow-up post probably soon to come. Thoughts?

wildcats everywhere, wave your hands up in the air ;-)

Time to introduce another new reader- Blogglings, meet Matt, Matt meet blogglings. He's a friend of mine from chior at school. (No, not the Matt you know Anna.)

And for both Matt and Nathan's benefit, I'll introduce my other blog friends real quick:

Anna ("quenta tindomerel") used to go to my church, her family is (are?) looong time good friends with my family

Beth ("Bethany") is my cousin and one of my very best friends (all of these people are, really)

The Carlsons are my cousins from New Jersey

Kacy ("Verya") used to go to the co-op my cousins used to go to, and so obviously we're like best friends now. :-)

Lindy and Lucy ("Lindy" and "Missionary Girl") are sisters from a summer camp I've gone to virtually every year of my life

Michaela ("MJ") is Beth's sister and another one of my V.B.F. (very best friends) :-)

And Nathan ("{g4G}SomeThingWeird") also used to go to my church and now lives in California.

And that's basically it. I'm off to Ocean Shores until late tomorrow!

I wish I could explain what's been eating at me lately. I've spent so much time trying to get around it, either by brushing it under the rug like it's no big deal or by bustling around doing "good things" to cover it up, to make me feel like the incompleteness isn't there and like I've got all my ducks in a row.

But that's not quite true. I'm going to be baptized a week from Sunday and then the Sunday after that, I'll be accepted into the membership of the church I've been attending since I was six. I'm really excited to finally be at this point in my life, but I can't shake a nagging feeling that I'm doing it for the wrong reasons or that I don't really understand what this means between me and God. But it's not just a question of weather or not I'm ready to be taking this step, it's more a emptiness I feel in myself where I thought God was supposed to be... a hollowness in my religion that I thought was supposed to be vibrant and real and strong. That worries me in so many ways- I'm afraid of what this is doing to my testimony before my fellow Christians, my witness to unbeleivers, and ultimately to my own spiritual health.

Let me see if I can explain what I mean. I'm reading a book right now called Born Again. It's by Charles Colson, infamously known as President Nixon's "hatchet man" because he was willing to cut through the red tape and break rules in order to get things done in the White House. He was eventually charged with being involved in Watergate (a famous break-in to a Democratic safe, I think) and he ended up serving jail time for deliberately black mailing a Democrat which was somehow involved with the whole thing... The politics of this book are mostly lost on me, but I'm pretty sure that's about what happened.

But somewhere in the middle of this book, Colson becomes a Christian. Just like that. He goes from a life completely enslaved to selfish motives and sinister tricks with no religion or thoughts of God at all to giving all of himself over to the transforming power of Jesus Christ... starting when a friend gives him a copy of Mere Christianity and moving through a deep intelectual and emotional struggle lasting about a week. And then suddenly everything is different, he joins prayer groups and starts making decisions based on the Bible's teaching- though he's only a new Christian lacking knowledge, he is unquestionably different in character and personality. He talks about praying and feeling the moving of the Holy Spirit within him, and about this deep communion with Jesus Christ that is frankly unlike anything I have ever experienced.

See that's what bothers me- it seems like if I really beleived these things, I mean beleived that they were really real in every since of the words, I would live my life very differently. And it would mean something to me, other than just a pattern of life I go along with to maintain a decent status quo. It should move me to my very core, the realities of the gospel and what they mean for me.

For those of you who have been here all along, remember Sam's Narnia post? He talked about how he thought true Christianity was like stumbling through the wardrobe to find yourself suddenly in a world of wonder and joy and beauty. I thought that was the most amazing thing I'd ever read, and at the time it rang true for me. I was in a period in my life where I was very emotionally wrapped up in the things of God, but that was so long ago. I'm still here, and it's still winter. Always winter, and never Christmas. I'm still waiting to meet the roaring lion on the road, or to do battle face to face with the White Witch. I'm still waiting to see the snow melt and the truth and power of my cause to be revealed, to be crowned in the palace and to know for sure that this will always be mine- because once a queen of Narina, always a queen of Narnia. I'm still waiting to go on this wild adventure and find all of these things out for myself that I read about in the Bible and in spiritual books... but it's just not happening. I'm so disapointed and frusterated with myself.

So I don't know. I just don't know.

celebrate good times, common

My coffee isn't working this morning! It's horrible. Usually as soon as I have coffee I get really hyper and excited and awake, but today I just feel gross and tired and I have a headache, in SPITE of the enormous mug of coffee sitting on my desk right now. Ba-hum bug. Maybe I'm building up an immunity. I wouldn't be surprised because I have two friends who drink coffee non-stop and I've been hanging out with them a lot lately. NOT good for me. What's worse, they've both converted to BLACK coffee. Can anyone here fathom the concept of drinking coffee black? You might as well eat spoonfulls of baking soada, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, in case you were wondering, I'm at work (as usual) and really boared. When I came into work today I was sent straight to the shipping department (i.e. the other side of the room, which features a counter and a roll of tape) to do a big run of transfers, which is where we get huge boxes of merchendice droped off and we have to sort them all into neat piles by size and style, and then using pieces of paper with confusing numbers on them we have to sort all the merchandice into boxes for the individual stores, and then package the boxes correctly and print out UPS shipping labels for each one so that they can be picked up by the super-cool UPS guy and shipped to said stores. It can get interesting, especially since we don't really have any of our own boxes, we just have to figure out how to make it work with whatever boxes the merchandice gets dropped off in.

Because I'm sure you wanted to know all of that.

The good news is I got Thursday afternoon and Friday off, so I get to go with the Villa clan to their beach house for the weekend. If my parents say yes. Tessa is in town for one week (she's been in New York for six months and will be again for the next six) so we're hanging out a lot this week. So far I've been the only one around not related to her except for her brother's girlfriend, which is a little weird but no one seems to notice. And I like having two families. :-)

Jelly Beans

My old blog title is back! I missed it too much. Then I saw a girl at the baseball game with a sweatshirt that said Jelly Beans and I thought... you know, that should be me. It should be me!!

So all of the sudden I am really excited about blogger again as a social networking tool, not just as an archive for my thoughts. It's fun to go around to everyone's blogs and strike up conversations and leave random comments. I think everyone else should get into it too, but I know people are busy and stuff and some really annoying people don't even do online stuff at all. *mutters under breath for a while* Blogs die down during the summer, don't they? Oh well.

For the first time ever this year my mood is being affected by the weather. I walk outside and see the sunshine and it's the most exhilerating thing imaginable! Driving with the windows down, running on the track while kid's soccer games are going on, comming home to a house all fresh-smelling... how did I survive nine months of winter??

Random question: do you think your name fits you? If not, what would you change it to? Do you ever notice patterns with people who have the same name? I think I like my name and it fits me pretty well. It would be horrible if I had been named something like "Reene" which is too regal for me or "Jessica" which is too girlie.

PS. I just found this in my unfinished drafts from when I was working at T-mobile. Stories like this make me SO thankful that God put me where he did in life:

Today at work my co-worker Shaunte told me about a friend of hers who got married at 17. And her response to that was "Don't you realize that's the last person you'll ever be with?" as though it was a bad thing. And she has a boyfriend. That made me really sad because I tend to be pretty oblivious and I thought that everyone WANTED to find just one person they could be with for forever. It's such a weird concept to me that people can actually look at their significant others as purely temporary, like I might look at my phone or my favorite shoes.

Then later we had a customer come in who was buying a 400$ phone for her boyfriend. To me that was a clear sign that they were pretty serious, the kind that WOULD want to stay together forever. And yet at one point during the transaction she mentioned that she didn't trust her boyfriend at all, because men can't be trusted period. So apparently people have no problem just living with broken and messed up relationships. They think that's just the way is, and I'm nieve for beleiving otherwise.

Sad, isn't it?

can't get enough, shaking me up, turn it up

Lately life has been just peachy-keen.

I wake up (late) every morning excited to face the day. I eat good food, I go to work, I get my job done while chatting with my friends online and posting blogs, I go back home for lunch and wade in our pool, I go back to work and eat gumballs, I go home and do whatever I feel like doing all evening long.

I guess that's the same as usual but these past two weeks, I've been enjoying it. Maybe it's the weather, I don't know. Maybe it's just that for once in my life I don't have anything weighing on my mind, nothing to worry about or stress over. I've kind of just been refusing to let things become a big deal. I find a way to process the things that happen and deal with them once and for all the minute they come up instead of agonizing over decisions.

And so far it's working quite nicely for me. It sounds really lame, I know- me drifting along merrily merrily merrily merrily, because life is not a dream and lots of people have miserable lives. That does bother me. But I think it's important to learn how to deal with the valleys in life without letting them get you down before you can start really making a difference in the world. I'm not saying I've figured it out completely, just that these last two weeks have been a taste of how I want to live all the time, if that's even possible.

Without trying to sound too hyper-religous or superior here, I'm really really excited about my devotions right now. Most of the time when I come to read the Bible it's out of obligation or guilt or even desperation (I NEED something to get me through today, maybe this will work? That kind of thing). And- does anyone else ever feel this way?- when I pray I often feel like I'm groveling before God, trying to show myself humble and broken enough for my prayers to be heard. This is me trying to stand based on my own merit instead of Christ's.

It just occured to me the other day, if the gospel message is really true, and if I really have a share in it, why wouldn't I be inright outright upright downright happy all the time? Why shouldn't I come before God with complete confidence that my prayers will be heard, crying over the awesomeness of the sacrifice that was made in my behalf and giving thanks to God for it? Instead I come to him saying, yeah, well, I've been kind of undevout lately, so I know I don't really deserve much, so I'll only ask small favors. It's like the ultimate way to get around facing my mistakes. More faith, more faith, more faith. I'm constantly realizing how pathetic my faith is.

I get to drive to highline today. Yaaayy. See me jump for joy. Woohoo. :-P

na na na na-na-na naaa, na-na-na naaa, hey jude

I am so so so so so so sooooo restless right now. Probably having more to do with lack of sleep and caffine overdoes than anything else. But. I really need to learn to deal with restlessness in a practical way instead of roving all over the place looking for something that will make me feel content again.

So I'm writing this to re-focus my thoughts on the things that are really important. I don't do this enough, I'm sure.

I've been thinking: it's so important to fall in love with Jesus. As totally new-age and charasmatic as that sounds. If it's something I devote myself to enough, there is no way I can come away from thinking, writing, and reading about Jesus without being completely excited about him. This is the baby I kind of threw out with the bath water when I decided I agreed with my church's more dry philosophies on worship. I can't just understand things on an intelecutal level or go through motions on a practical level. I've got to "invest" myself in it, give pieces of myself to it every day until I am lost in it.

So I'm trying to ask myself the question, what is it about God that I love? I mean, other than everything.

First of all I think it's phenominal that he loves me. This is interesting because I'm a girl and I want to be loved more than anything else, and I have the tendency to love those who love me. And while that may seem like a very selfish reason to love someone on a human level, God says that this is exactly how it works in his kingdom. He is willing to love me just so that I will love him, and somehow that saves my soul. I think this is really cool.

Also I think it's cool that God is a God of TRUTH. I hate it when Christians get so wrapped up in being conservative good people that they can't consider the potential truth to totally oposite theories, like evolution or even something as radical as atheism. It seems to me that God wants us to view things as honestly as we can and hopefully, if we devote enough time and energy to finding the answers, no matter what persepective we are comming from, we will figure out that the Bible is right. And then even come to understand and agree with the reasons why we intupret the Bible in certain ways. He doesn't want us to put blinders on and accept everything we read or that pastors or reformed Christians say. I feel very liberal saying all of that, but I think it's mostly right.

So I think those two reasons are enough to start off with. God is incredible and because of that the whole world has incredible meaning and purpose. I love meaning and purpose. I'm happy if I have it even when my heart is breaking, I think.

If that makes ANY sense.

I got accepted into Pierce college, so I can finally go choose classes now! I hope I get into some kind of an English class. I really wonder what it will be like going back to school. I'll probably hate it. But. Just one more year and I'll have something to show for all this work.