Who Do You See?

Well, it's late. And a school night. However, God seems to have His own schedule for when He communicates with us, and nearly eleven o'clock on a Thursday night seems to be the time He wanted to use with me. 

Just a half an hour ago or so, I was hit with a huge wave of feelings of inferiority, of worthlessness. I was beginning to feel like I was losing my intelligence, something that I have used to define me for so long. After many tears and texts to friends, I finally got into bed. Before I went to sleep, though, I felt this need to pray, so I did. I felt that I could hear God talking to me, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: God, I'm just not anything anymore. I'm really just not special.

God: That's not true. I think you are. I love you.

Me: But why?

God: Because I created you.

Me: Yeah, but what does that have to do with me?

God: Nothing. That's kind of the point.

Me: Huh?

God: When people look at you, they shouldn't see you. They should see me, and my love.

Me: Wow. That makes a lot of sense.

It was with this conversation with God that I realized that maybe I need to rethink my defining characteristics. The number one thing that I should want people to see when they look at me is how much God loves us, so I shouldn't care about the other things nearly as much. Seeing as it's so late, and that this just happened, I have very little commentary on this conversation right now, but perhaps God will have something to add about this topic at a later date. Until then, goodnight, and sleep well, everybody!

I Love You More

My senior year in high school will be starting in just a few days, and it seems like all of a sudden, there is very little in life, other than trying to plan for college and summer reading. 

The pre-college process is stressful.  I am currently looking at a short list of colleges, all of which are Christian colleges, and there are so many different details and options that have to be weighed when trying to choose the one that I want to go to.  Of course, if you know me, or if you are familiar with this blog, you'll see that I have a constant desire to know the future, to have life planned.  I have this deep urge to be able to plan everything in my life, and right now, not knowing where I'll be living or going to school in a year is quite daunting.  I haven't even visited all of the schools that I'm considering yet, but already I feel like I should have a college picked out. 

I'm so worried that I'll make the wrong choice.  What if my favorite school ends up being the most expensive?  What if I can't tell which school God wants me to be at?  Even worse, what if it really doesn't matter to God which school I go to, so long as I'm still following Him?  And how am I supposed to find extra time to pray about this process with school starting in just a few days, with my most challenging schedule yet?

And then, once I've figured out where I'll go to college, how do I figure out what I'm going to do there?  How am I going to decide what I want to do for the rest of my life?  What if I do what I love, but then I can't get a job?  What if I do what will lead to a lucrative career, but end up hating it?  How do I make all of these decisions before I'm even a legal adult?

On Wednesday, after I had just gotten home from a college visit, and feeling the pressure to know where I'll be in a year, I turned on the radio in the car, and this song came on.  There was an initial peace that fell over me when the song began, and the first verse said "I am with you wherever, and where you go is where I am."  The chorus was another part that really spoke to me.  "I love you more than the sun, and the stars that I taught how to shine, you are mine, and you shine for me too, I love you.  Yesterday, and today, and tomorrow I'll say it again, and again, I love you more."  It was like God telling me to calm down.  If He can set the stars and the sun to shine each day and night, He will surely guide me through this process.  He will guide me to the right decision, whether or not it matters to Him exactly which college I'm learning to use the gifts that He gave me to use in order to shine for Him.  He will also guide me towards finding what exactly it is that He wants me to shine with.  He loves me no matter what, and I am His.

Sunny Smiles

I'm sure this message won't be new, because it's advice that people so often give, however, everyone needs a reminder now and then.

Smile.

Even when life can't seem to get any worse, smile.  At the very least, the act of smiling tricks your body into releasing a small amount of happy hormones.  

My mom always gives advice about confidence.  She says "even if you don't feel it, fake it."  And the funny thing about faking confidence is that, after a while, you find that you aren't faking it anymore.  The same goes for being happy.  (No, I'm not telling you to never let anyone know when you're upset. People need that sometimes.  You can't always be happy, it just isn't possible to feel cheery every moment of every day.  However...)  If you're having a gloomy mood kind of day for no apparent reason, put that smile on your face, and fake the happiness.  Soon you'll forget that you're even faking.

Smile.

Smiles have a huge amount of power in the world.  Imagine, you're having a bad day, you're walking down the aisle of the grocery store, not paying a lot of attention to the front of your cart.  You're busy thinking about all of the ways that your day fell apart.  You run into someone's foot with the wheels of your cart, and drop your purse at the same time.  The person turns around, glares at you, and says sharply "Watch where you're going," before turning the corner into the next aisle.

Or, does the person turn around, and giving you a friendly smile picks up your purse for you?  Does the person reply to your mumbled apology with an upbeat "Don't worry about it!" and cheerily wishes you a good-bye before turning into the bread aisle?  Doesn't that sound like a much happier version?  That's the kind of response that can turn a bad day around.

It's incredible what a difference that someone flashing a smile at you can make.  Smiles say "You're worthy of happiness.  You are cared about."  In the same way that you would hope that someone would give you a smile on your worst days, be willing to shell them out as often as you can.  They're free, after all.

Smile.

You never know the difference that it'll make.

Time for God

Life gets busy sometimes.  It seems like there's always something that needs to be done, something that is next on the to-do list.  And when there isn't, there's TV, and Internet, and books, and journals, and all kinds of things to do to relax.  There's always friends and people to be around.  Time is always being filled.

When I made the transition from middle school to high school, I fell out of talking to God before I went to sleep.  I've never been coherent enough in the mornings to focus on Him, and with the start of high school bedtime turned into whenever I finish my homework, not after I've had time to read my Bible.  So I shouldn't have been all that surprised when I found that there was distance between God and me.

It wasn't that I decided that God was less important, consciously, at least, my prayer time just kind of...slipped away, I guess.  If you look back on all of my posts, there is a noticeable gap in the recent history, a gap during which I wasn't really making time to grow closer to God, so I had very little to share.  When prayer was no longer a part of my day to day life, it was only a matter of time until I couldn't write anymore, until I couldn't feel a purpose anymore.  God breathes life into me, and without Him, there is no life.

Starting to talk to God again, on a consistent basis, was the best thing that I have done recently.  I started a devotional reading plan on the YouVersion online/app based Bible, and starting taking some time to talk to God not only at night, but all throughout the day.  I'm making an effort to be in constant communication with Him.  Someone once told me that you are always moving when it comes to God, it's just a matter of whether you are moving towards Him, or away from Him.  For a while, I was moving away, but now I'm definitely getting closer to Him.

So today, I encourage you to make more time for God.  Do a daily devotional, read a Bible verse or two, take a few minutes to tell Him how your day is going, to thank Him for the blessings in your life, to ask for help in your trials.  He will breathe new life into you.

What I Know Now

I don't really know what to say about this song, except that it really spoke to me. The part that sticks out to me is the first part, to the "little girl, fourteen."  It describes a very common situation, and provides a lot of truth. 

I've spent a lot of my time this past year with a lot of amazing middle-schoolers.  I'm only a few years beyond middle school, but already I'm having moments of "if I only knew then what I know now."

I wish I could tell my middle school self to "put those magazines and makeup tutorials away, you aren't going to care very much about makeup in just a few years, anyway.  Go read or write.  You'll be wishing you had more time to do those things later on."

I wish I could tell that fourteen year old Abby to "stick with the friends who care, not the ones who constantly make you fight to keep them.  It's the ones who are comforting you on the sidelines who will be with you once you get into middle school."

I wish I could show that girl what studying looks like.  "You'll need those skills pretty soon."

I wish I could tell her "don't take the happy times for granted.  They aren't always going to be that way."

But then I wish I could remind her "the bad times aren't going to last forever.  Trust that God will bring you through whatever He brings you to."

I wish that I could tell her to "stop saying that you don't care what other people think, and work on actually believing it.  You can say that the grass isn't green as many times as you want, but that isn't going to change the truth."

Mostly, though, I wish I could tell her to "pay more attention to the adults around you.  They've been through it all before, they know what they're talking about.  Take it to heart."

Well, this isn't what I thought it would be at first.  I thought the song would have more to do with this post, but I guess it was just inspiration.  Maybe I'll talk about it again, later.  But I feel like I've said what I needed to say, anyway.