Luggage

I've been carrying too many bags around for a long time, some new, some old. I have kept these bags locked up and even though they are by my side, all the time, I never look inside of them. I just keep on bringing them along with me, keeping them too myself. Many of these bags contents are just so trivial and over collecting dust on them for they are so old.

I often think of myself as a forgiving person, but when I look at all these bags I question myself.
Maybe I am a forgiving person, but only to the people I still talk to, after I picked up their bag.
I looked over many of the bags I'm carrying today and I see a pile of lost causes, a collection of crushed hopes. I can count the bags, do you know what I find? Over 90% of these bags are with people who I no longer talk to, most of the time they were the ones to cut off contact. Sometimes I try and say hi to one of them and I get a hi back, then it stops. I get nothing after that. The fire sizzles out.

I don't even know why I have some of these bags still, maybe I'm a physiological hoarder. I already know I am scared of letting go, yet why would I be scared of some of these bags. Maybe it's just me getting my hopes up, my optimist personality coming through the cracks.

Even though I'm pretty sure that most of these won't apply to anyone who actually reads my blog, fuck it though, I don't forgive you for that (I don't hold that against you), but I will forgive any of you of my luggage.

I forgive you that you couldn't handle the truth about me.
I forgive you for seeing me as someone who still had a crush on you, 10 months later, even after asking me.
I forgive you for never talking to me again, and getting super angry when I told you what happened.
I forgive you for continually judging me and ruining a short, but fantastic friendship.
I forgive you for tempting me with lust even though you knew I was already with another.
I forgive you for pushing me away for all that time.
I forgive you for not talking to me because you wanted to shoulder it all yourself.
I forgive you for these scars.
I forgive you for trusting me.
I forgive you for talking behind my back.
I forgive you for not asking me first.

It was the best of Times

This song just kinda hits home, I feel like it hits home on every person in a different way

My thoughts during Good Friday service

The ground I am standing on is Holy, I recognize that and have taken my shoes off.
I see his mercy flowing around me, as if I were in the center of a raging whirlpool.
His love out numbers the uncountable bubbles that have surronded me.
The water of eternal life, it surrounds me in a warm embrace.
It fills my soul with Hope.

Hope.

A reminder of the unconditional love that we are not worthy of receiving.
Love that I am not worth of receiving.

Moses had to walk up to his neck in the Red Sea before God parted the waters.
Are you going up, past your shoulders in the waters of this world. A public display of you love for him.

My ears have been too full of wax that I've been ignoring your voice recently.
I have been addicted to being busy.
To always have the sound of this world running through my ears.
Emotionally running away.

What is your bread and wine?
What garden am you taking care of?
Is your breathe becoming healing words?
Are you getting covered in the dirt of your Rabi?

Tragic Turn of Events / Move Pen Move

I discovered this song last night, I've been listening to it all day, on and off. I've just kept on coming back to it, the words pull my soul in. There is so much meaning behind these words I just can't even begin to describe. It's just so raw, it's beautiful.

It's 9 minutes, but just listen to the lyrics.

Road Regrets

I prayed for my first stranger today

A girl came on the bus in tears. I couldn't do anything to help her, another girl came to see if she was alright.
I was powerless, so I prayed for this stranger.

Remember this:
Your heart will recover, it will never be the same again, but it will recover.
May you see that whatever you are feeling, it's ok.
God is sitting shiva with you, always.

Thanks Rob Bell
(I bought Love Wins today, super stoked to read it)

Love Wins

Give me the wisdom I do not have.

Job; joeb

This weekend I have started and almost finished (am just finishing in the next hour) to read the book of Job. It's a short book, only 42 chapters. I encourage you to take a day or two and read it, then lets talk about it. Alright?

Drops Like Stars

Quotes and Thoughts from Rob Bell's new book, Drops Like Stars

"In 1941, in a village in nazi-controlled polard, a young man came home to discover that his father had died while he was at work. what made his father's death exceedingly more unbearable was that several years earlier, both this young man's sister and mother had died. As he held his father's dead body in his arms, he lamented, "I'm all alone. At twenty, I've lost all the people I've loved"
One writer described it like this: "ripped out of the soil of his background, his life could no longer be what it used to be. He now began a journey to deeper communion with God. But it didn't come without tears, and it didn't come without what seems to have been a certain existential horror." Suffering can do that to us. We've jolted kicked, prodded, and shoved into new realities we never would have brought about on our own. We're forced to imagine a new future because the one we were planning on is gone. The key word here is, of course, "imagine." That young polish man sitting on the floor with his dead father in his arms was having all his boxes smashed to pieces. "His life could no longer be what it used to be."
That young polish man? His name was Karol Jozel Wojtyla, but later in life he was known as Pope John Paul II."

The first Christians insisted that Jesus died on the cross,

this wasn't just another execution by the Roman Empire.

They believed this was the divine, in flesh and blood, hanging there on the cross, bloody, thirsty, suffering.

A god who is not somewhere else - remote, detached, distant - but among us, feeling what we feel, aching how we ache, suffering like us.

"God came into the world and screamed alongside us. Interesting idea, that"

Perhaps that's why people across the religious spectrum, for thousands of years, continue to identify with the cross. It speaks to our longing to know that we're not alone, that there's someone else "screaming along side us"

Is the cross God's way of saying, "I know how you feel?"

Basically, this book is a Nooma film turned into a book. It's awesome.

I cried yesterday

I just couldn't fall asleep, but I felt a real urge to turn off my music and watch a nooma video. The one I felt appropriate was #5, titled Noise.

While watching it I just started to cry, I know why now too. It's funny how things become quite obvious to us once they are pointed out.