Outside the Pigeon Holes

I added labels to some of my old posts and edited labels on others. You have to "publish Post" to save the changes and apparently some of them were posted as if they were all new posts...Sorry for the unintended re-runs!

You broke the bonds And you loosed the chains Carried the cross Of my shame Oh my shame You know I believe it But I still haven't found what I'm looking for ... -U2 Jesus is True. That's the one thing I know for sure. Because I've met Him. Beyond that, it's all just commentary (props to Rob Bell). Some random thoughts on life, love and faith from a girl who's just calling it like she sees it and who is done apologizing and hyper-spiritualizing her way through the journey. There are beautiful Christians who aren't Conservative Republicans. My daily struggles and questions and processing does not preclude me from being a good prayer minister. I can be a Charismatic without subscribing carte blanche to Pentecostal traditions. It's OK to enjoy the love I have been given. Everyone is a hypocrite about something. Chances are I am more annoyed at myself than God is. The Bible is not an object to be worshiped. The One whose li...

When I step outside of the tangled web of 'which version of Christianity is the end all be all' and trust God to know my heart, I find a place where I can breathe, rest, and hear His voice the most clearly...It's like moving from dysfunction into a realm of the sacred.

Yesterday I went to see my favorite head shrinker...I have known Dr. V for about 10 years. He rescued me from the craziness that is my brain by prescribing medication to me. I trust this guy. I don;t care that he isn't an outward Christian (I really have no idea what his faith is, but he does respect mine and speaks with me about it often). I just love Dr. V and I believe that God placed him in my life when I needed him. Yesterday he told me that the hypervigilance that I an experiencing right now is completely  understandable. Hypervigilance is: A n enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats. Hyper vigilance is also accompanied by a state of increased anxiety which can cause exhaustion.  The way this plays out for me is that I am in an almost constant state of fear that everything I hold dear is threatened and/or will be taken from me. I fear that my friends are mad at me, think ill of me...

I am in a wonderful, scary, being stretched place right now...It is all about trusting my Heavenly Father and Jesus and the Holy Spirit in ways that I never have. See, I used to have lots of rules and shoulds and shouldn'ts and a well crafted life plans that kept me in this false sense of self-security. In the last 24 months so many things have come in to turn those things upside down to make me look at them in a new way. It's like taking off the float-a-floats and swimming in the deep end. At first I thought I must be under attack from the enemy - and in some ways I was - mostly in the lies that came to mind about who I am and that God was out to mess me up or trick me. But now I am beginning to see Like being in the middle of chaos all around and God walking in front of me as things crumble around me saying 'look here...Focus...Focus....Eyes on me...Put down the play book and trust me completely no matter what things look like around you...' My theology is being mes...

Found this in my drafts but never published it...This was a turning point in my journey...And I don't regret at all having made this choice. I determined that I'm probably violating the will of God by even being interested in seizing the day and throwing worry to the wind.... Probably this is all a trick of the devil to get me to make a whole lot of bad choices. But if I were to be honest, the last 6 years of my life were the result of one colossally bad choice, but in it, I have found a closer, more authentic, relationship with Father God and company! So, bring on the bad choices! Ok, I don't really want to make bad choices...I just don't want to spend the rest of my existence trying to manage myself so microscopically that I forget to live.

I am coming to a place where I think that maybe God doesn't have one single thing that he wants for me to do...I mean, maybe he does for some. I believe he has plans for us, but I don't know if it's a spelled out destiny with some big job to do. I am coming to believe that maybe He created me with the purpose of letting me be me, making choices and flowing in the gifts He has placed in me. Yes, He wants to see me do wonderful things. And perhaps there's a 'right track' in some form or another that He leads me toward (whether that is a career path or a relationship, or a geographical location)...But the important thing is that I do everything from a place of love...And in that I can accomplish great things or small things, but when done from that place, from the heart of Christ, everything is worth doing. I am starting to believe that maybe the idea that we have been sold in Christian books and teachings is that each of us has to have some BIG THING to do. And ...

We have been studying sonnets which for those who have forgotten high school lit class are 14-line poems with ten syllables in each line. They're fun to write in the sense that it is like working a puzzle. You have a designated rhyme scheme that has to be met depending on the type of sonnet that it is (Shakespearean, Italian, Spenserian, etc)...So you have to make what you want to say work within that scheme. As a writer of free-form I find it frustrating on the one hand to have what I want to communicate come together in a beautiful phrase only to learn that it doesn't fit. On the other hand it's fun because it makes you think and challenges your creativity - to still say what you want to say within the meter without losing the flow and cadence that you have in your head. I do prefer free form but here are my two sonnets so far. Remember I am new at this... :) The first one was inspired by a recent news headline. The second is pretty self explanatory. Police found t...