stop trying

Where do you see yourself in five years?

Oh that's easy, I'll graduate college a semester early with my boyfriend who then will propose and we will get married. After that, we will move to a big city and get jobs we love together having free time and money to take spontaneous trips on the weekend and get our yearly missional trip out of the way during the summer, maybe Uganda or something....
"Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"--yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil," James 4:13-16. 

What then, do we do? We could sit around binging on Netflix and professional sports putting our efforts into things that matter very little in this fast paced society we have been shoved into. There's probably a special on cheese balls at the grocery store, a coupon for a free scuba diving lesson somewhere on the internet, or even a new recipe to try out...but these things mean nothing without God. Am I saying God is in the cheese balls? Yes, absolutely but thats not the point that's being made here.
We, as a culture, have to stop planning our lives putting an unrealistic amount of tension and stress on our lives and future when all we are is mist. God says that we live in arrogance if we believe we can predict the plans the Lord has for us. Have faith, His plans are good and prosperous...why wouldn't we take all of these gifts He layed out for us so perfectly. The cookie cutter life you so lustfully crave can exist, but at what cost to your soul?

Let go these earthly prides you call your future. Let God take our broken bodies and become anew through His spirit. Take the eyes full of sin we have and transform them into portals for Your vision, making all things we do directed towards Your glory and Your presence in our lives.
"Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he," 
Proverbs 29:18.

This is not a blog.

René Margritte was a French painter who created                "The Treachery of Images". It is simply a picture of a pipe with a French inscription that reads     "This is not a pipe."
His work culminated to the simplest of images because it became countless talk of introspection and what it meant to claim reality. This representative reality confused many people and he went on to create many images similar to this.

In much the same way, I propose my own introspective gesture.

This is not a blog.

Yes, it may look like a blog and I am certainly having to type all this stuff out sitting on my computer in the library, but this reality is clouding what you will really find on my small little subsection of the world wide web.

I can only claim this "thing" you are reading as an outpouring of God's infinite wisdom and grace and steadfast love for all of us. To put God into the containment and limit His unending presence in our lives to my blog (yeah yeah okay its my blog) would be a gross mistake and a depressing look into our reality.
"Oh God, you are my God; earnestly I seek You; my should thirsts for You; my flesh faints for You, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. So I have looked upon You in the sanctuary, beholding Your power and glory. Because Your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise You," Psalm 63:1-3.
We live in that dry and weary land, He is our water. Eternal water, I will give you living water and you will thirst no more He told the woman at the well. Come, follow me He says countless times.

He loves us so perfectly that He would die for us on the cross and cleanse us of all of our transgressions both past and future. But He also loves us so much that He conquered death so that He could live for us, a permanent fixture in our lives. The Holy Spirit lives within us and we become more than conquerors.

"Yeah He loves us, oh how He loves us, oh how He loves, oh how He loves," David Crowder.
This simple fact should resonate to the very core of our being. We are nothing, yet He gave us everything.

Thank you God for Your sacrifice, let me be a living sacrifice in Your name.

"Then Jesus said to His disciples, 'If any of you wants to be my follower, you must turn from your selfish ways, take up your cross, and follow me,'" Matthew 16:24.