The first line of this blog was originally "I have regrets."
But after having a sort of revelation the other day after hearing yet another song lyric, I decided that the phrase above isn't entirely true.
There are things in my life I would have done differently, for sure. Haven't we all been there? There's always some situation that happened, we just wish we could have a re-do on. Like when you're playing Super Mario on the NES and you enter the Game Genie code wrong... you hit "reset" and everything starts over, all mistakes washed away.
But what I realized is that regrets require maintenance.. they don't just have life on their own and continue to haunt you. You have to invest in them, give them thought and attention, for them to continue to exist.
I don't have time to maintain these regrets.
I don't have time to make myself sad about things I've done wrong, things I can't change. There is no point in being sad over something that's done, gone, finito.
I need my time for working out the present and the future. The past has taken enough of my time.
There are lessons to learn from the past, I agree. And for this reason alone, maybe it's good to analyze what went wrong. Not dwell, just objectively assess, decide what would have been a better choice, and move on.
And now it's time to set the bar higher.. and resolve that the present and future are not going to follow the same distorted pattern as the past.
No way.
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Pride, Bananas, and Lip Injections
Have you ever asked God to break down your pride a little bit, make you more humble?
Oh boy, does He listen to that one closely...
All the little things I was placing my security in start to degrade. And all around me, the pride of others seems to inflate! Oh man, I'm feeling tiny.
But that's ok.. wasn't that the point? :)
A couple weeks ago I kept thinking, "What's going on here, why is it everyone's personal mission all of a sudden to try to 'put me in my place', especially when they are obviously not in a good place themselves, or when they barely know me?" And I remembered praying a little, fleeting, genuine prayer to God a month or so ago to "break away my pride".
"Oh yeeeahhhh.. he he he. about that one, God.... um, I actually meant, 'break down OTHER people's pride. yea, that's kinda what I meant."
Nope, not good enough. You asked, you got it.
I came to realize that when you ask for change, God can use anyone to accomplish His will in you - weak, strong, humble, proud, dictator, president, friend, enemy. Luckily I avoided the dictator one. But the validity of the change isn't negated because of the spirituality, or lack of it, in the ones God uses to help you change. Otherwise, how would He ever use me to help others? I'm not perfect either. It's a great system. Bump a few of those crazy imperfect humans around together for a while and they start to sharpen each other up.
Hmmm. No matter how few bananas I buy, or how determined that I will eat all of them before they go brown, one always turns bad on me. Every time. Banana bread!
While I will not pretend that it's fun to start to realize, and then start to lose, the sheer quantity of things in my life I was misguidedly trusting in (or finding my personal value and worth in), it is strangely refreshing to see them go, and also appropriate for this time in my life. I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish this year, and it would be incredibly hard to do it while trying to hold a pile of unneeded things in my greedy little hands.
Something worthwhile to note is that when you ask God to diminish your pride, He doesn't leave you empty. We only THINK that we need that pride, and as it starts to leave, He fills the space with new dreams, with promises, and with more knowledge and revelation of who He is. The tiny little world we boxed ourselves into and held on to with all our might became a vast universe of possibilities when we let the box get cut away.
So, if diminishing your pride has been on your mind lately, go ahead and ask Him for help! It's kind of a constant process. It can be hard, yes, but really, aren't some things just worth fighting for?
And it doesn't happen overnight or last forever...kinda like collagen injections. You have to get them touched up every 3 months or so. But aren't the results worth it? ;)
Bucket list:
Hawaii. August. Surfing.
I hate blogs without pictures. So here's one:
Doesn't it make you relax, just looking at it? sigh.
Oh boy, does He listen to that one closely...
All the little things I was placing my security in start to degrade. And all around me, the pride of others seems to inflate! Oh man, I'm feeling tiny.
But that's ok.. wasn't that the point? :)
A couple weeks ago I kept thinking, "What's going on here, why is it everyone's personal mission all of a sudden to try to 'put me in my place', especially when they are obviously not in a good place themselves, or when they barely know me?" And I remembered praying a little, fleeting, genuine prayer to God a month or so ago to "break away my pride".
"Oh yeeeahhhh.. he he he. about that one, God.... um, I actually meant, 'break down OTHER people's pride. yea, that's kinda what I meant."
Nope, not good enough. You asked, you got it.
I came to realize that when you ask for change, God can use anyone to accomplish His will in you - weak, strong, humble, proud, dictator, president, friend, enemy. Luckily I avoided the dictator one. But the validity of the change isn't negated because of the spirituality, or lack of it, in the ones God uses to help you change. Otherwise, how would He ever use me to help others? I'm not perfect either. It's a great system. Bump a few of those crazy imperfect humans around together for a while and they start to sharpen each other up.
Hmmm. No matter how few bananas I buy, or how determined that I will eat all of them before they go brown, one always turns bad on me. Every time. Banana bread!
While I will not pretend that it's fun to start to realize, and then start to lose, the sheer quantity of things in my life I was misguidedly trusting in (or finding my personal value and worth in), it is strangely refreshing to see them go, and also appropriate for this time in my life. I have a lot of things that I want to accomplish this year, and it would be incredibly hard to do it while trying to hold a pile of unneeded things in my greedy little hands.
Something worthwhile to note is that when you ask God to diminish your pride, He doesn't leave you empty. We only THINK that we need that pride, and as it starts to leave, He fills the space with new dreams, with promises, and with more knowledge and revelation of who He is. The tiny little world we boxed ourselves into and held on to with all our might became a vast universe of possibilities when we let the box get cut away.
So, if diminishing your pride has been on your mind lately, go ahead and ask Him for help! It's kind of a constant process. It can be hard, yes, but really, aren't some things just worth fighting for?
And it doesn't happen overnight or last forever...kinda like collagen injections. You have to get them touched up every 3 months or so. But aren't the results worth it? ;)
Bucket list:
Hawaii. August. Surfing.
I hate blogs without pictures. So here's one:
Doesn't it make you relax, just looking at it? sigh.
Monday, January 3, 2011
Holy Hands, Batman!
I heard a song today on the radio that made me think.
(I don't normally listen to "Christian" radio, sorry, but I just don't. I was shamelessly trying to catch a peep of one of the radio spots for The Uprising Conference. No luck so far.)
It said "I raise up holy hands."
Anyone who's ever heard a worship song in their life probably instantly has the whole thing running in their heads right now, but it was that one part the really stuck with me. Holy hands.
A devotional I was reading today encouraged me to take a look at my hands, my feet, my physical body, and think about the ways it can be used to serve.
My hands don't look or feel particularly holy. In fact, they look kinda pale and scarred up. They've participated, along with the rest of my bad self, in things that do not even remotely resemble holiness.
But then again, I think that sometimes we tend to think of holiness as some angelic, zen state, a way of being so perfect and so wonderful that we are literally radiating goodness and everyone around us wants to bask in our warmth.
Example: Chelsey and John reading the Bible in Hawaii when they could have been out surfing. See the holiness literally radiating off of them?
Yea. Holy Spirit fall.
According to the Bible, to be holy is not to be surrounded by a creepy yellow ring of fire (thanks, Photoshop!). It's to be set apart, free from impurity, pure, innocent.
Alright, who isn't already innocent and pure?? We're done here. Time for a new subject.
The downside if this is that we are all lacking in innocence. Some more than others. *meaningful look*. I think we all feel at times the weight of our own impurity in the face of God.
But we don't have to.
The upside is this: simply put, "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
Namely, Jesus. Sinless man became the embodiment of sin for all of us who have done wrong. We are the "righteousness" of God just by accepting the sacrifice made for us.
Righteousness: "integrity, virtue, purity of life, rightness, correctness of thinking, feeling, and acting."
Done, and done! My hands are holy indeed, no matter what they've seen in the past.
Just like yours. Let's go out and do something good, maybe even something sacrificial, for our fellow man today in honor of the sacrifice that was made to give us those holy hands.
(I don't normally listen to "Christian" radio, sorry, but I just don't. I was shamelessly trying to catch a peep of one of the radio spots for The Uprising Conference. No luck so far.)
It said "I raise up holy hands."
Anyone who's ever heard a worship song in their life probably instantly has the whole thing running in their heads right now, but it was that one part the really stuck with me. Holy hands.
A devotional I was reading today encouraged me to take a look at my hands, my feet, my physical body, and think about the ways it can be used to serve.
My hands don't look or feel particularly holy. In fact, they look kinda pale and scarred up. They've participated, along with the rest of my bad self, in things that do not even remotely resemble holiness.
But then again, I think that sometimes we tend to think of holiness as some angelic, zen state, a way of being so perfect and so wonderful that we are literally radiating goodness and everyone around us wants to bask in our warmth.
Example: Chelsey and John reading the Bible in Hawaii when they could have been out surfing. See the holiness literally radiating off of them?
Yea. Holy Spirit fall.
According to the Bible, to be holy is not to be surrounded by a creepy yellow ring of fire (thanks, Photoshop!). It's to be set apart, free from impurity, pure, innocent.
Alright, who isn't already innocent and pure?? We're done here. Time for a new subject.
The downside if this is that we are all lacking in innocence. Some more than others. *meaningful look*. I think we all feel at times the weight of our own impurity in the face of God.
But we don't have to.
The upside is this: simply put, "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
Namely, Jesus. Sinless man became the embodiment of sin for all of us who have done wrong. We are the "righteousness" of God just by accepting the sacrifice made for us.
Righteousness: "integrity, virtue, purity of life, rightness, correctness of thinking, feeling, and acting."
Done, and done! My hands are holy indeed, no matter what they've seen in the past.
Just like yours. Let's go out and do something good, maybe even something sacrificial, for our fellow man today in honor of the sacrifice that was made to give us those holy hands.
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