Nudging

God's answering my longings. But not how I thought he would. Of course. Why would he limit himself to my imagination?
He's answering my longing to become a wife with Proverbs 31. Classic. Recently I've become more committed to praying for my future husband to breed healthy habits. But in this I've been praying for the future wife in me. Asking him to mould me into her. He's nudged me to Proverbs 31. Like he's saying 'ok you want to know the qualities you'll need to be a good wife? You want to practically know what that looks like? Here's a checklist.' And I know it's not a literal checklist. I don' need to be at the market early tomorrow morning. But I know he's teaching me to just do things without the feeling of 'well if I won't do it no-one else will' or 'I'll do it because I have to'. I know marriage won't be easy but I want to be able to walk into it with an attitude that doesn't complain. Because if I have a heart of complaining I've already set myself up for it to be hard and I'll start to resent things I'm supposed to rejoice.
So God's sitting next to me poking my arm like a five-year-old who wants to play. Begging me to spend time with him as I so often neglect to. Nudging me to his word and answering my heart cries.

Hope

Today I have hope.
I feel a little better.
My heart feels a little lighter.
Life isn't rosy yet.
I will tumble down from this place yet again.
But today, I have hope.

Can we skip to the good bit?

I always thought that by 18 I'd know who I was. I thought I'd know who I was going to be. I thought I'd have it all together.
I have almost nothing together. I almost cried 4 times today at college and I have no idea why. I'm afraid that either people don't see the good in me or that they see too much of the bad. I don't really know what love is, I see it all around me and I feel it now and then but I don't think I know what love is. I guess in terms of loving someone for the rest of your life, love is being able to change with someone and not in spite of them.
I'm tired of dealing with all of the hard bits of life. My life isn't hard either. I'm a moaner. But it's true, I'm so tired of feeling like I deserve a Gold star for getting out of bed, and another one for showering. I'm tired of being so confused about the thoughts radiating through my own head, constantly trying to decipher truth from a lie.
I want to skip to the part in my life where nothing's hard anymore.
The part where I don't have to lose sleep over if the guy I'm dating is worth my time, and therefore their own. The part where I'm not afraid of breaking someone else's heart due to indecision because I'll have made the choice. The part where I'm not worried about the ability of my womb because it has already housed life. The part where my career is sealed. The part where I don't struggle to live my life because I'm excited by every aspect of it.
But am I waiting for a lie? Will I just be disappointed? Maybe. Maybe not. I think I'm realising more and more that happiness is fragile but joy is permanent. I need to find my joy. I need to find out how I find my breathing space in a life where I feel suffocated and bullied into growing.

Quietness

So I really do envy people who can simply enjoy quietness and being alone with their own thoughts. For my quietness and being alone with my thoughts brings a steady downward spiral down the rabbit hole. The simplest of conversations can cause me to second guess a lot of what I believe in and make me so uncomfortable in my own skin. Simple comments can cut deep with no original meaning. I wish I was more comfortable in my own skin and my decisions, I’m trying to learn to be but it is the most painful process it feels like 2 steps forward and 1.75 back, looking like I’m making progress which is so infuriating as all I want to do is let go of my anxiety and live in freedom. It should be so simple. But it isn’t because I don’t really know how to do it or what it feels like. I’ve felt this way for such a long time that I don’t know what ok feel likes, what does it feel like to be comfortable in your own skin? As I’ve grown I’ve not grown into my big personality and I feel like it drowns me sometimes, I can’t keep up with who I am. I can’t keep up with who I want to be. Life is a contradiction as it moves so quickly and so slowly as everything as I don’t want comes at me at full speed and everything I do want seems so far away and almost untouchable.

This isn't ok

Life is a funny thing today. I guess it always has been, there have always been problems that people have been trying to fight and ideas have always been evolving. The pursuit of knowledge plagues us, our hunger to know who we are, where we came from and where we’re going starves us of living happily with today. The fact is that now FOMO rules us, there is a new fad, a new craze every day. If you put down your phone for one weekend you miss out on staying relevant because the world has already changed and moved on. Fame is no longer real. Everyone has a moment in the spotlight, but it is fleeting. We concern ourselves more with the latest celebrity ship than we do with those real and tangible ones. I’m growing up in a generation that finds it hard to produce some original, something physical as all we’ve known is a digital age. As consumers the internet is our life blood, we have grown up thinking that a binge is good and normal, because when it’s been a bad day there’s Netflix to comfort us. We’ve been taught that casual sex is good and healthy and that porn is a normal part of sex. This is not ok. We are tearing up relationships because we feel pressure to conform, we’re not being taught the real values in which to live by, that you can disagree with someone without calling them an ignorant twat, we can love someone and let them in on our lives without giving them all we have, we can get over a broken relationship without getting under someone else’s body. Our culture has been polluted by being politically correct and promote letting everyone live their lives without fear of consequence. The rise of STI’s (both transmission and the resilience) sexual abuse, domestic abuse, mental health issues, homelessness, substance abuse, broken-heartedness, PTSD and countless other plagues show that something is wrong.

I believe we’ve gone too far to bring it back on human strength alone, it’s too easy for corrupt people to gain power as all we care about in money, and the truth is even if the right person was elected they wouldn’t get it right as no one knows the answers of how to run a perfect society. The only way for it to change is a powerful move of God. Maybe even the second coming. There is nothing else that can possibly change the mindset of a diseased culture. We need the words ‘safe’, ‘beautiful’, ‘precious’ and ‘treasured’ to have meaning behind them again. We value what strangers think of us far and beyond what people who are close to us think. We need to be less self-obsessed. We need to fight fear.

Fear is one of the biggest challenges right now as it sets us against ourselves and others. We fear what we might say in order to kill our status. We fear others in what they may do to us. We fear vulnerability as we fear admitting to ourselves and to someone else that we are not who we put up for the world to see. We fear failure. Fear grips every single person and it is only a curse that the cross can break. The cross has broken it but we don’t let go of it. It makes us like anyone else. We fear fearlessness as once we are fearless that scared little voice in our heads can’t control us and we might do or say what we want to. That voice is there so we aren’t excluded from society. But do we really want to be part of a society that crushes differences that are within set parameters? You can be an atheist and share your views publically that God could never exist because of science etc but to be a Christian and share your views that God is the only possible explanation and that you love him with all you are? Unforgivable. There’s different and then there’s, well, different.

I wish that I could override fear. I wish I could override the need to fit. I wish I felt strong enough to fulfill my calling. I wish I didn’t fear my calling was a lie. But wishing doesn’t work.

Prayer does. Prayer and a relationship with the one true and faithful God loosen the need to be human. Loosens the desire for fear as it’s normal. God loosens despair and brokenness. God brings safety. God brings true and real and whole love. God shows us who we can be. God carries our burdens with us, not for us. God brings light in a dark world. God is constant, as time is human and not divine. God is infuriatingly mysterious but beautifully so. Our hunger is always met. Our thirst is always quenched. God is hope.