Digging around...

It's amazing, the things one can find while looking through files on a computer.
This was fitting the day I made it, and I feel it's fitting now.
So I thought I would share it.

Dreams

If you believe that it will happen when you pray it, it will happen...If you keep on believing the dreams that you wish will come true...Anything can happen, if you only believe...The possibilities are endless...Even when you hit a dead end, turn around, try again, there is always a way to your dreams... Keep Swimming... keep dreaming... keep insisting on having more... BELIEVE. WISH. DREAM. MAKE IT HAPPEN.

When life takes over...

Life gets busy.
And the habits you try to form get tossed out the window.
Well I say forget habits, forget rules, forget outlines, forget ideas.
Just go with it.

I've been using a lot of my spare time on Pinterest. Love it.
It has inspired me to create a little more in a little different way.
I love words and I love pictures. So I am going to start putting them together.
The end goal is to put words to my pictures, but I have no problem using other pictures in my own way.
So here's the first creation of sorts,

be still my heart...

One of my favorite moments in The Notebook.

This is love. If you have love, but you don't have this, you don't have true love.
True love is truth, work, pain, trust, sacrifice, loss, and incredible happiness.
Love is two people trying to make one life. Two opinions, two ideas, two ways you like to do things, two thought processes, two preferences. But the joy is that you are two people making one whole. One life.

Pieces of an Author.

I have no computer at the moment, but it has been too long since I've posted anything!!!
Since I can't write (although 'can't' is a strong word and it's more of a 'wouldn't like to in my Mothers living room') I will give you something I've read. 
Not just anything mind you. These are words that I find very inspiring.


If our pictures of heaven are to move us, they must be moving pictures. So go ahead-dream a little. Use your imagination. Picture the best possible ending to your story you can. If that isn't heaven, something better is. When Paul says, "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor. 2:9), he simply means we cannot out-dream God. What is at the end of our personal journeys? Something beyond our wildest imagination. But if we explore the secrets of our heart in the light of the promises of Scripture, we can discover clues. As we have said, there is in the heart of every man, woman, and child an inconsolable longing for intimacy, for beauty, and for adventure. What will heaven offer to our heart of hearts? 

(The Sacred Romance , 180-81) 

The Thief Wants It All

Any movement toward freedom and life, any movement toward God or others, will be opposed. Marriage, friendship, beauty, rest-the thief wants it all.

So, it becomes the devil's business to keep the Christian's spirit imprisoned. He knows that the believing and justified Christian has been raised up out of the grave of his sins and trespasses. From that point on, Satan works that much harder to keep us bound and gagged, actually imprisoned in our own grave clothes. He knows that if we continue in this kind of bondage. . . we are not much better off than when we were spiritually dead. (A.W. Tozer)

Sadly, many of these accusations will actually be spoken by Christians. Having dismissed a warfare worldview, they do not know who is stirring them to say certain things. "Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel" (1 Chron. 21:1). The Enemy used David, who apparently wasn't watching for it, to do his evil. He tried to use Peter too. "From that time on Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things . . . Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 'Never, Lord!' he said. 'This shall never happen to you!' Jesus turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan!'" (Matt. 16:21-23). Heads up-these words will come from anywhere. Be careful what or who you are agreeing with.

When we make those agreements with the demonic forces suggesting things to us, we come under their influence. It becomes a kind of permission we give the Enemy, sort of like a contract.

Some foul spirit whispers, I'm such a stupid idiot, and they agree with it; then they spend months and years trying to sort through feelings of insignificance. They'd end their agony if they'd treat it for the warfare it is, break the agreement they've made, and send the Enemy packing.

(Waking the Dead , 154-55) 

Impending Birthdays

As far as unimpressive birthdays coming and going, mine included, I don't have a lot of words.
But I know someone who does... I would like to share this chapter out of Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist with you. It's worth the time of reading, trust me.

Here are a few thoughts on being twenty-five-ish, some that I knew, because smart older people gave me good advice, and some that I really wish I had known, that those smart older people probably did tell me, and that I lost track of along the way.
I know that age is, of course, one of the most arbitrary ways of measuring a person. I have friends in their sixties who continually teach me about discovery and possibility, and friends in their young twenties who are as crotchety and set in their ways as Archie Bunker. Age, like numbers on a scale and letters on a report card, tells us very little of who we are. You decide every year exactly how young and how old you want to be.
When you're twenty-five-ish, you're old enough to know what kind of music you love, regardless of what your last boyfriend or roommate always used to play. You know how to walk in heels, how to tie a necktie, how to give a good toast at a wedding, and how to make something for dinner. You don't have to think much about skin care, home ownership, or your retirement plan.
Your life can look a lot of different ways when you're twenty-five: single, dating, engaged, married. You are working in dream jobs, pay-the-bills jobs, and downright horrible jobs. You are young enough to believe that anything is possible, and you are old enough to make that belief a reality.
Now is the time to figure out what kind of work you love to do. What are you good at? What makes you feel alive? What do you dream about? You can go back to school now, switch directions entirely. You can work for almost nothing, or live in another country, or volunteer long hours for something that moves you. There will be a time when finances and schedules make this a little trickier, so do it now. Try it, apply for it, get up and do it.
When I was twenty-five, I was in my third job in as many years - all in the same area at a church, but the responsibilities were different each time. I was frustrated at the end of the third year, because I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do next. I didn't feel like I'd found my place yet. I met with my boss, who was in his fifties. I told him how anxious I was about finding the one perfect job for me, and quick. He asked me how old I was, and when I told him I was twenty-five, he told me that I couldn't complain to him about finding the job until I was thirty-two. In his opinion, it takes about ten years after college to find the right fit, and anyone who finds it earlier than that is just plain lucky.
So use every bit of your ten years: try things, take classes, start over. One of my oldest friends, Jenny, got a degree in child psychology from Harvard, and has worked for years at a bunch of fancy companies as a client account manager. A few years ago, she finally realized that what she's always loved is helping to heal people through massage. Now after work and on weekends, she's the world's best educated massage therapist, building up her clientele with every passing month, and happier than she's ever been.
My dear friend Rachel has been a makeup artist since she was eighteen, and after ten years, she decided that what she really wants to be is a therapist. So she's doing it now, getting her bachelor's degree, making plans for her master's, doing makeup all the while to pay for school. That's what this time is for, to figure those things out.
Now is also the time to get serious about relationships. And "serious" might mean walking away from the ones that don't give you everything you need. Some of the most life-shaping decisions you make in this season will be about walking away from good-enough, in search of can't-live-without. One of the only truly devastating mistakes you can make in this season is staying with the wrong person ever though you know he or she is the wrong person. It's not fair to that person, and it's not fair to you...
... Twenty-five is also a great time to start counseling, if you haven't already, and it might be a good round two of counseling if it's been awhile. You might have just enough space from your parents to start digging around your childhood a little bit. Unravel the knots that keep you from living a healthy whole life, and do it now, before any more time passes...
... This is the thing: when you start to hit twenty-eight or thirty, everything starts to divide, and you can see very clearly two kinds of people: on one side, people who have used their twenties to learn and grow, to find God and themselves and their deep dreams, people how know what works and what doesn't, who have pushed through to become real live adults.
And then there's the other kind, who are hanging on to college, or high school even, with all their might. They've stayed in jobs they hate because they're too scared to get another one. They've stayed with men or women who are good but not great because they don't want to be lonely. They mean to find a church, they mean to develop honest, intimate friendships, they mean to stop drinking like life is one big frat party. But they don't do those things, so they live in kind of an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than they were when they graduated college.
Don't be life that. Don't get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. Walk away, try something new. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don't lose yourself at happy hour, but don't lose yourself on the corporate ladder either.
Stop every once i a while and go out to coffee or climb in bed with your journal. Ask yourself some good questions like, Am I proud of the life I'm living? What have I tried this month? What have I learned about God this year? What parts of my childhood faith am I leaving behind, and what parts am I choosing to keep with me for this leg of the journey? Do the people I'm spending time with give me life, or make me feel small? Is there any brokenness in my life that's keeping me from moving forward?
These years will pass much more quickly than you think they will. You will go to lots of weddings, and my advice, of course, is to dance your pants off at every single one. I hope you go to very few funerals. You'll watch TV and run on the treadmill and go on dates, some of them great and some of them terrible. Time will pass, and all of a sudden, things will begin to feel a little more serious. You won't be old, of course. But you will want to have some things figured out, an the most important things only get figured out if you dive into them now.
For a while in my early twenties I felt like I woke up a different person every day, and was constantly confused about which one, if any, was the real me. I feel more and more like myself with each passing year, for better and for worse, and you'll find that, too. Every year, you will trade a little of your perfect skin and your ability to look great without exercising for wisdom and peace and groundedness, and every year the trade will be worth it. I promise.
Now is your time. Become, believe, try. Walk closely with people you love, and with other people who believe that God is very good and life is a grand adventure. Don't spend time with people who make you feel like less than you are. Don't get stuck in the past, and don't try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven't yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life's path.