Why you should be very afraid of the dentist…or who knows, maybe you will love the dentist…

How do you do it?

Ok, yeah, I know the title sounds a little sketchy. Sorry.

I was talking with a dear friend last night. She and I were good friends in college. She lived right down the hall from me my first year (and only year) in a dorm. Now, she is a dental hygienist and lives a couple of hours away from me.

We were talking, as I have already told you, last night about her job. She works one day a week at a dentist office. Then about two days a week she will be called into to another office (kind of like a dental hygiene temp agency). We were talking about a new opportunity that has presented itself to her where she will possibly work more than three days a week. She said that she really didn’t want to because three days out of the week was what she felt was all she could work and still “do life”.

Now, when she first told me this, I wanted to laugh and tell her to join the real world. Everyone works five days a week and does just fine. But when I started thinking about it, I work five days a week and I can’t find time to do all that I want. So maybe working three days a week is a solution to all of our problems. I think Katie may be a genius!

So now I want to know… How do you do it?

Extravagant love…

I want it. I want it to wrap around me and make me whole. I want for every little thing I hate about myself to disappear. Every little thing that has served as a souvenir to any cruelness in my life, whether it may be from another or from my own self, to simply vanish. Every moment of emptiness, insecurity, incompleteness, uncertainty, fear to be gone. Be gone with the darkness.  I want to feel comfort. I want to feel love. I want to feel free. I want to abandon all of those things that are unholy and wrong. I want to leave them in a bad way for once. Only I cannot. Not alone. But HE can. Oh but HE can. HE IS GOOD. HE is holy and pure. PRAISE HIM!! The battle is already won. HE has won.

I feel warmth. I feel security. I feel strength…but not my own. I heard from an acquaintance the other day that “there is no righteousness in me”. You’d think that would leave me in despair. But I cannot tell you how much freedom that has given me. It is not expected of me. I do not have to perform certain tasks in order to pass the test. You see, HE is that righteousness. The ONLY being that can hold righteousness. And HE desires to save me. “What?”, I whisper, reveling in my own despair. HE DESIRES TO SAVE ME!!! I weep at His goodness!

But this GREAT RESCUE (don’t you just love it being phrased that way?) is not to make me greater (which consequently is a wonderful thing, I don’t think I could be any fuller of myself). It is to point to HIM and HIS Greatness. HE IS GREAT!! And it points others (whether I may know it or not) to HIM. Even though most of the time I falter and desire for it ALL to point to me. (Dang it, I have slipped again). But HE is there. He is there to catch me. No doubt there is discipline. Oh the sweet discipline. But, there is love, and not abuse/banishment/sarcasm/scowling, no no, there is love. There is true love from the Creator Himself. How glorious, how sweet. To phrase it as another friend told me this week, the “reality of being truly loved”. To know true love, to be truly loved is the most powerful thing in the whole world. Love covers over a multitude of sins. How…comforting.

And now, as I finish out this post of HIS greatness, HIS holiness, HIS ability to rescue me, how HE is the only one, I find myself hoping you like me. Fighting the voice in the back of my head that is telling me that I do not deserve to write this. This is untrue for me because I am not living my life for HIM. I am a LIAR. Yes, I am. Truth is, I can tell you all of these things, and desperately want them, but I do not hold on to them in my own life/mind/heart.

So my prayer is that I do. My prayer is that you and I remember these things within the next day/hour/moment/breath. Remember His goodness, His righteousness, His love, His glory.

Despite me and my hypocrisy. Despite my rudeness, my lies,  my self seeking and self centered-ness, please look to HIM. Don’t give me the time of day. See HIM. See what HE has for you. It is not about me. It never has been. It is about HIM. HE is what you have been looking for your WHOLE life. Oh HE is good. I love HIM. I really do. But only because HE loves me.

Excess

clothes strewn all over, skirting the borders of the bed, falling out of laundry baskets tossed on the floor…closets packed full and incredibly unorganized…unwanted and unread books stacked on the floor because there is no more room on the book shelf…jackets thrown on spare chairs…the living room is in total disarray…you can barely see the white tile on the surface top of the kitchen table…no one can ride along in the car because the back seat is full of boxes, magazines, dishes, clothes, and who knows what else…you pay the bills when you can because you don’t really know when any of them are due…in the back of your mind you keep thinking it is time to do those taxes, and yet…you now have a big, bottomless pit purse, so who knows what is really in there…the contents of your life right now is just too much, living in excess

This really is me right now. I know. It is scary and ridiculous. The only rooms in our small one bedroom apartment are the kitchen and the bathroom. I suppose that is because we use everything in those rooms every day. Instead of just using the bed in our bedroom. Also, Tim hates a dirty kitchen, and I hate a dirty bathroom.

If you know me well, you know that I absolutely love organizational tools. I LOVE planners. I usually buy at least 3 per year. But then I don’t really use them. I love all of this stuff, but when it comes to be using them, I don’t feel up to it.

Something has got to happen…like, this week. Starting tonight, I am tackling this ludicrous problem.

One thing that I have learned from living like this…we have TOO MUCH STUFF/JUNK. Those clothes that have laid there for weeks now, do we really need them? The items falling out of the hall closet, do we really need them? The books that are laying there that we never read and probably never will, do we need them? The answer is NO.

Spring Cleaning, here we come…

True love needs no work

What a load of crap! Sorry if you feel that the above statement is true, but I do not. I truly and totally love my husband and he loves me, but we HAVE to work at it daily! And from what I understand, this is the general consensus amongst most married couples.

Now you might be in one of those relationships where everything just magically happens and is easy. BUT, you are the exception. And in a lot of cases (not all, but a lot), if you think things are easy, it is because you are not working on those hard issues.

What brought this on? you might ask. I read somewhere that Vanessa Hudgins (you know, High School Musical) said, “If it is true love, you shouldn’t have to work at it”. Great. Then the article went on to say that Zac (her beau) came in the room, she ran up to him and rubbed his belly and he threw his arm around her. “Their actions spoke louder than any statement she could make”. Again with the load of crap.

This makes me so sad that this is what most teenage girls are looking to. Sorry for the rant. I just wanted to….vent.

One more thing: yes, marriage is hard. Yes, there are a lot of arguments that are unnecessary and ridiculous, but I am thankful for necessary and/or ridiculous. Working through all of the hard stuff has brought us so much closer and has made us learn more about each other and work it out.

Ok, stepping down now

I fell off the wagon

Man oh man, I fell of the wagon (where did that saying come from?).

By 1:30pm today, I have had 2 Diet Cokes. Not 1, but 2. I suck.

I will say that there is a good thing from this little set back. I can feel the difference. No really, I can. I could taste the syrup (which, I always could, but this time my mind acknowledged it was there and I didn’t like it), I am on the verge of a headache, and my energy level feels weird.

Call me crazy, but I think falling off the wagon just may have been a good thing. I think I may even take out those Sunday exceptions!

We’ll see though…

No Sodas Update # 1

Eh…I have had to make an exception. No sodas is SO hard. So I have decided that on Sundays I can have one. Yeah, I know, I am weak. But I am feeling much better. I really can tell a difference. I mean, I was a little more tired at first, but not really anymore. And yes, this is the fourth day of the “no sodas” diet. So, there are not a lot of changes, but I can still feel some…

**Update: I have just been noticing how I don’t want to snack as much! Which is great. I still feel full from lunch and have no desire to eat any candy. And I have a whole container of chocolate sitting not even three feet from me! Yay for drinking water!

Thank you!!

Licia is doing much better and will hopefully be discharged from the hospital today! Please continue to pray for a complete recovery so she can get back to her family.

Your Prayers Are Needed!

Real Hope for Haiti is in need of your prayers today! Licia, who helps run the Rescue Clinic, has malaria. This is an update from her sister Lori:

“I wanted to update you on Licia. She’s been sick for the past week or so.  She has a wicked case of malaria that messing up her liver. She still has a bad fever and has turned yellow. She’s in the hospital because the doctor said that the blood levels are at a point that she could go into a coma. She’s on an IV and getting treatment. I’ll try to update if things change. Your prayers are appreciated!”

Please be praying for Licia to get better soon!

self discipline, please come to me…

Ok, I am starting a semi-diet. I know, that sounds like I am going to cheat. Which I may…

Starting today I am not going to drink any sodas. Oh, this will be hard. I drink a Diet Coke just about every day. It is not like I crave them, but they are so good if I haven’t had one in a while.

I heard on the radio the other day that the trainer from The Biggest Loser said the one thing you could do that is good for your health is to stop drinking soda. Especially Diet drinks (yikes!). Apparently the Diet drinks make your taste buds want sugar more. Great. So maybe that explains why I snack all day long.

I know that all of that is probably not new information for you, it isn’t for me either. But for some reason I actually listened to it that time.

I have been gaining a little weight in areas I would rather not. And I have also been dealing with headaches a little too frequently for the past year or so. I have heard a health care professional once say that the majority of the time when people have common headaches, all they need to do is drink more water.

So my solution to all of this: no more sodas, more water.

Lord help me.

Now I will be the first to tell you, I really do not hold much self discipline within myself. There is no excuse for that. I am 25 years old, it’s time to get over myself and push myself towards a goal.

So I will try to give you weekly updates on how I am doing and how I am feeling.

I asked my husband to hold me accountable and he smirked at me and made a face like, “yeah right”. I asked him why he did that and he said that I have asked him to do that before and when he did, I ignored him. Crap. So I told him to still please help me, and I would try to let him this time. Me oh my, self discipline, please come to me..

**No, I do not give myself as much credit as I should with the self discipline. I have completed goals before. But whatever.