An Open Letter to the Girl Who Took My Seat

Dear Girl,

     I know that we aren't in elementary school anymore, and we have not had assigned seats in school for eight years, BUT I have sat in that very seat you're sitting in for every day this semester so far. We have been in this class twenty two times already and twenty one of those times I have sat in that seat. So, that brings us to today, day twenty two, and to you, sitting in my unassigned assigned seat. 

     I don't think you quite know that amount of effort and decision making that went into me sitting in this seat the very first time. On the first day, I came to class an extra ten minutes early beyond the normal twenty that I usually try to get there. I carefully thought out the way that the room was set up, where the professor would stand, and where she would face when teaching the class. I thought about who would try to sit next to me and how to avoid the weirdos, and about the possibility of a friend showing up and making sure I had room for them. 

     I carefully thought out sitting next to that lefty desk that no one will want so that I could use it to put my coffee and my phone on while I take notes on my own desk. I decided to sit on the third row because that is close enough that I can see everything and pay attention, but far enough away that the professor wouldn't call on me every day of class. 

     Like I said, I know that we do not really have assigned seats. I also realize that this may be your first time coming to this class, as we do have a test next class. Maybe you just didn't know that this was my seat. Maybe you just thought that it was an incredibly perfect open seat that no one had claimed for themselves yet, but that is not the case. 

     I carefully picked this exact seat to be mine. I have sat in it everyday up to now. I know exactly how it feels to sit in it. I know exactly where to rest my arm, how to reach for my coffee, and where to look to not get called on. After all of these weeks, the things that come with sitting in this seat are automatic for me, and you have taken that away. 

     However, I know that you are a soul, jut like me, broken, and in need of saving. So, instead of giving you a death glare and maybe even confronting you about taking my seat, I will let it go and smile at you. But that is only of this once, when time comes around for our next test, if you are sitting in this seat, it's going to get real. 

Much love,

The Girl Who Cares Too Much About Where She Sits

Sometimes I get angry about silly things, I get too caught up and excited over things that don't matter. So sometimes, I have to remind myself that I am not perfect and I can't expect other people to be either. I'm broken, and so are the people who drive me crazy. We all just need a little Jesus, and not to get mad about it. 

Music III

Another song that has been replaying in my mind this semester is call A New Heart by a band called a treehouse wait (sic).

"Right by your disorientation, stands your Creator, 
He says, "I know who you are, and I'll show you the way"
And in the midst of your heartache, stands you Savior
"I am the Potter," He says, "and you are the clay"
So, let me shape you, form and create in you
A new heart
Please, let me shape you, form and create in you
A new heart
She's been anxious forever, 
She's been crying for days,
She's been waiting for You to take it away,
And You tell her You love her,
But the questions won't go,
And at midnight You whisper,
I will make you whole
...
Watch me making all things new, 
Beautiful and just for you.
I give you a heart that's just like mine
That breaks for people all the time."

I really like the second verse. I get anxious about everything, and when I'm anxious I cry. Sometimes I don't even know why I'm anxious. It just happens, and I love the line "at midnight You whisper 'I will make you whole'" because that's always how it feels when I find peace from the Lord, it's a whisper when I'm at my lowest. I also really love "and You tell her You love her, but the questions won't go" because even in the constant reminders of the Lord telling me that He loves me and is going to do what's best for me I am still bombarded with questions that I can't answer. But it really finally gets me when she says "watch me making all things new, beautiful and just for you." It reminds me of the song Beautiful Things by Gungor, heck, it reminds me of the whole gospel, the Lord taking broken things and turning them into something beautiful, and then giving us the want to bring other broken people to Him so that He can make them beautiful too. "I give you a heart that's just like mine, that breaks for people all the time."

Another song by A treehouse wait (sic) that I really love is the song Someone is Dancing

"Someone is dancing,
Lord is it you?
Someone is singing
A song I once knew
It speaks of a promise
Whatever may come
I'm in the arms of my Lord. 

There I stop turning, 
Staring at me
And my wounds are hurting 

For what I have been
In whose arms will I be kept 

When I've burnt every bridge
In none but the arms of my lord

Nothing is certain, 

Colors will fade
Summer goes autumn 

And autumn turns gray
Play then your violins 

That tell me of spring
When I am at home with you lord."

I'm not really sure that I can explain why I love this song. It just really speaks to my heart. The song is slow and quiet, it is sweet and comforting. It sounds like what it feels like to be in the arms of the Lord. 

Lastly is a song called You of All Friends

"To you of all friends

I look back and think 'bout

how our roads have changed

And how our lives turned out

So different

From what we had planned out or thought

While I saw the sky in million colors

It all caught my eyes

and you took the blame and believed all the lies

That people had told you must be the truth

So I took your heart and held it

oh I took your heart and held it close

I held it close

Your heart turned to stone

When nothing But actions without love was shown

Wherever you went there were people who spoke

Of one thing then did the complete opposite

You needed to know why God had ran off and just left you alone

But there was no room to ask questions that dumb

So you went away to be strong by yourself

So I took your heart and held it

oh I took your heart and held it close

I held it close

How low can you go?

How weak can one be

Without crashing completely?

Why should i play the songs in major?

I can Never be your saviour

I can never give you any life

But like oranges and how you peel them

He can take your wounds and heal them

He can take your broken pieces

Make it to a heart that breathes

In and out and out and in"

I like this song because I relate to both the girl singing and the friend that she sings about, at different times in my life, heck, at different times today, sometimes even at the same time, I am both of these people. 

I see the sky in a million colors and I follow what others have told em must be the truth.

I've needed to know why God had just left me alone, and at the same time, I've known how incorrect that question is. 

I love the line "He can take your words and heal them, He can take your broken pieces, make it to a heart that breathes", I like it especially when I don't just feel like I have broken pieces, I feel like I am broken pieces. But the Lord is consistent in taking broken me and putting me back together into a heart that looks more like His. 

This all brings me to one idea, the Lord sometimes works in me by taking my heart and letting it break in to pieces so that He can form in me a new heart that looks much more like Him and that continues to break, but starts breaking for better reasons. Rather than breaking for the hurt that I inadvertently cause myself, it begins to break instead for the lack of love and the broken hearts of other people. I break for people all the time. 

The Isolation Cabin

Do you remember how in The Parent Trap, while the girls were at camp, they got sent to the isolation cabin, but that's where they started to become friends and finally realized that they were twins? Well, I have a feeling that God is attempting to do something similar with me this summer.

I am working at a summer camp up in the mountains and I feel very alone. I rarely have cell phone service, but even when I do, my boyfriend is working at a different camp and is busy most of the time, one of my closest friends is in Kenya, and one of my other closest friends has been in Israel. On top of not being able to reach people back home, I worked here before, however, I took a few years off and now I have come in knowing essentially no one.

But because I worked here before, I know how people act here, at the very beginning I began to fall back into the gossip and cliques and really everything but love that tends to make up this place. After a little while thought, I decided that I didn't want to fall into that again this year.

As I began to work on loving people and being kind, I found it to be much harder than I had anticipated. Had camp already changed me back into the person I was three years ago? The girl who fell so easily into these temptations? Surely not.

I began having small breakdowns nearly everyday during which I would cry for a few minutes and then pull myself together and go back out to face the world. I blamed these instances on missing my friends and my boyfriend, but this just didn't seem like the kind of thing that would keep me continually in this state for so long.

When I woke up at 1:00 this morning, I had a very sudden realization of how alone I am, I had felt alone before tonight, but I had made friends and I had people to hang out with, so why did I suddenly feel so very isolated?

I started to put the pieces together and came to the realization that I was alone in my attempt to change my role in the culture I am living in. I have no one to talk to about how I wanted to change the way I've been acting and the things that I would usually do to help with this feeling like corporate worship and fellowship aren't options here.

In the midst of my heartache stood my Savior, He said "you have been using so many things that are meant to reflect Me and show My Glory in place of Me, so I have taken those things away from you for now, and I am leading you to scripture, you are not going to always have a group of people to help you when you struggle, but you should be coming to Me first anyway. I am your Creator and I have made a plan for you, no one else knows this plan, so you're going to need to start looking to Me first."

 I have been so cut off from the world and from other Christians and it has been really difficult so far, but maybe as I realize what I need to do to help with this, things will become easier as I fall on the Lord.

Music II

I wrote a post a while back about how important music is to me, especially music about the Lord.
I talked about how three songs had been my prayers to the Lord and over time they had turned from prayers to praises, because I had seen the Lord work. I've have some new songs that are speaking to me right now and I wanted to share and explain them.
The first is a song by The Collection called To Dust, I first heard about this song while one of the leaders on my trip to Boston was telling me about some of the music she listened to and why she liked it. She pretty much just said the whole last verse of this song to me while we were walking through the streets of Boston, and since then I have listened to it more than anything else. Sometimes I put it on repeat and just leave it for a couple of hours. There are several parts and pieces to this song, it's all really gorgeous and magnates to be beautifully poetic and fantastically candid at the same time.
"well I remember when You danced with me in the mud so ever frequently, and I didn't wash my feet for weeks for fear that the muddy healing would rub off"
I just relate to this line a lot, it makes me think of times when I've gone on mission trips and grow a ton with the Lord over a short period of time and it was never overly religious or strict and legalistic, it was like dancing in the mud with my Father as He explains how much He loves me and wants the bet for me.
"I used to no love You, but I changed my mind and if that happened once, could it happens, how many times can I 'still have faith'?"
This describe basically the way that I have been thinking for about six months now, thinking about my journey with the Lord and how I made a decision to follow Him but then sometimes looking at my life and seeing that I struggle to follow Him, and asking myself, "well i changed my mind to choose to follow Him, could I change it again to not follow Him?" which has kind of become a haunting question in my life this year, but is something that I'm working through.
But it's kind of answered in the next line
"but You are forever, and if we brave this weather, You go and walk across the water to keep me from drowning to the bottom"
This has been the thing that has brought me so much peace since January, it's not up to me, I made a choice, but I didn't save myself, He saved me, and I can't do anything to change that.

Now, the last verse of this song has just kind of been on my heart constantly since I first heard it in Boston in March.

"I was staring, looking back, out the keyhole of my door

You saw that I had seen you, and I fell to the floor


You were dancing with the children and loving all the broken


And I was too scared to come out


And then you busted through my doorway and it seemed so very violent


But peaceful words came out and silenced all my silence


And I realized that the knowledge that I thought that I had known


Was nothing compared to you coming to my home"

The first few lines there are so how I looked at being a Christian before I actually became one, and how I, sinfully, sometimes still view it. I grew up almost bombarded with the gospel and the stories of the Bible, I had Christian parents, I went to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and I went to a Christian school, no part of my live was away from it all. But the way that I saw it was so distorted, and sometimes the way that I see it now is still distorted. I felt like I just wanted Christ around to make sure that I wasn't going to go to hell, and I felt like that whole like relationship thing was just how bad people became good people, how broken people became whole. But I didn't need that of course, I was a good girl, I wasn't broken, but of course I was, I would never have gone outside to be loved with the other broken ones because I didn't see myself as broken, and sometimes I still have trouble reminding myself that I am broken and in need of Christ. I feel sometimes like the pharisees that Jesus rebukes for being like a cup that they was on the outside so that it looks nice but leave the inside dirt covered and disgusting. I am seeing more of the inside of my broken and twisted heart this year as I've been given more freedom to pursue my own wants and desires which are so often incredibly sinful. But then I think to when Christ did burst in through my doorway and how I realized that all that I had thought that I had known about Him and what it meant to follow Him was nothing compared to actually being close to Him. 

"And I could be content to forget everything I've known, and fall asleep right now, for good, before Your throne."

December 10

I thin God is trying to prove a point to me in a way that He often does. Generally when I know He is trying to tell me something, the first time He says it, I think "alright yeah, I've got it" and His response is always, accurately, "no, you clearly don't, so let's go over it again". I'm like a poor student who thinks they can handle the lessons better than they really do. So, after yesterday finding what I wrote last year about coming back to see God's faithfulness, I was looking aimlessly through the files on my computer and I came across something that I wrote over two years ago about a moment of moving back towards the Lord. So, same as yesterday, here is what I wrote two years ago:

"December 10, 2013

Recently, as simply part of my life, I have had a feeling in the back of my head of myself moving away from God. Every time this happens (and I feel it is way too frequently) my first reaction is that God is pulling away from me, when I know that actually God is chasing after with all of His might, and that to get away from the effects of His love, I must be running hard in the opposite direction.

I always miss the beginning of this, I never notice myself starting to move away from God, but instead I find myself mid-stride, halfway through an attempt to runaway like a child who didn’t get the toy she wanted. I’ll find my Bible gathering dust in a bag from the last trip I took it on, and I’ll notice that last date in my journal is one from months ago, or I’ll realize that I cannot find one of the aforementioned necessities, or that I don’t remember where a book or a verse can be found (not to say that you have to know every book of the Bible in order or that if you don’t know the exact reference of every verse, but I have found that when you truly fall in love with God’s word, and you are really reading it, you just tend to know where to find things).

Usually, just noticing that I am drifting isn’t enough to get me back into reading my Bible everyday and really listening to what God has to say to me. Usually (and I really hate that this happens often enough that I can even use the word “usually”), it takes a good hard push from my Creator to remind me that His love for me is not just something that I can remain “just ok” with, that it is something so powerful that I should not be able to help but act upon it.

This time around, my “shove” was a reminder of the journey of a friend of mine, and how much God’s love really, truly, actually changed her life. I have known this girl for almost three years now, and she is a fantastic person, now when I met her, I probably wouldn’t have said that about her, in fact, her closest friend at the time’s mom was actually worried about her daughter hanging out with this girl, and was only allowing it because she was bringing her to church. Then, she wasn’t what you would call a “good person”, and she certainly wasn’t a “church girl”, and according to people who have known her longer that me, that was her getting better. But over the first year that I knew her, I literally watched her life transform into the person I know today.

Two weeks ago, I asked her about a locket she was wearing; inside of it was a single word, “furious”. Two years ago, that word would have meant to live life furiously, to take it by the horns and have as much fun, and be as cool, and be as crazy as possible, but now, that word has a totally different meaning to her. She showed me an entry in her journal about it. It was a brief overview of her journey from her former life to her current one as a child of God. She talked about how God had furiously fought for her in so many situations in her life, how He had given her parents the courage to love her and care for her and to be the parents that’s she needed, how He had kept her from places and people that would have damaged her life irrevocably, and how He had always kept her in a place where there was a way out. There is a song that describes God’s love in a way that is a little different than what we normally think, “His love is deep, His love is wide, and it covers us, His love is FIERCE, His love is STRONG, and it is FURIOUS.” C.S Lewis described it perfectly: as a lion. It’s not something tame and captious, it is a furious fight for us against the one who wants us dead.

With the reminder of this I can’t keep living like I have been, I like the way it is described in the Afters’s song: “I feel alive, and it hurts for a change. I’m looking back, and it’s hard to believe that I was cool with the days that I wasted complacent, and tasteless, and bored. But that was yesterday; I’m never going back to easy. I’m never going back to the way it was. I’m never going back to ok.” I don’t think I can continue in living my life in a state of being “ok”, it just won’t do, because my God has fought and is fighting for me furiously, and that is not something that I can leave unnoticed.

His love is deep, His love is wide

And it covers us

His love is fierce, His love is strong

It is furious

His love is deep, His love is wide

And it’s waking hearts to life

He is jealous for me

Love’s like a hurricane I am a tree

Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy

And all of the sudden, I am unaware

Of these afflictions eclipsed by glory

And I realize just how beautiful You are

And how great Your affections are for me

I DON’T HAVE TIME TO MAINTAIN THESE REGRETS WHEN I THINK ABOUT THE WAY THAT HE LOVES US."