some thoughts for Jesus...

Commonplace fermented to heal wounds I denied existed
Find me indelibly scripted on walls laid bare in heaven's secret halls
Collecting all the fragments, gather scraps of prayers I forgot I scrawled
Who am I that my reckless words have worth to You?
Who am I that You decode in me the riddles You authored, puzzles You placed,
melodies transplanted in my heart?
Your one syllable quiets all my my infinite rambling
My heavenward graffiti paused
Until fermented silence makes me drunk
Your resonance repeated
The visceral echoes of waiting
You wait on my lips for every word You already know I'll speak
Can't apprehend this fascination...
That You died so we could have this conversation

Throwing My Life Away

Today I threw my life away... quite literally. My passive avoidance finally caught up with me and this afternoon I faced 20 years of meaningful junk. I went to my mom's house for the first time in a long while. I walked into my old bedroom to rediscover childhood habits and adolescent battle scars buried beneath the bed and jam-packed in the closet. Two hours of sorting and trashing barely made a dent. There will be many more days like this in the near future. The only way I came to grips with getting rid of certain things was jotting down my findings before dumping them out. Here are a few for your reading enjoyment... some will make absolutely no sense to you, but feel free to ask:

TRASHED TODAY

1. Calendar/ Planner (2001-2004)- note in my October "to do" to visit scott
2. Sad birthday invitation
3. High School Econ paper about my "Career Dreams"- I wrote that my 3 passions were writing, justice and God, so I wanted to be a screenplay writer, supreme court justice or pastor.
4. Calligraphy set
5. 6th & 7th grade poetry portfolios- laughable musings of an 11 year old (now gone forever!) hah
6. Donna's Phone Number- it was scrawled on a piece of paper & must've been the first time I got her # 5 years ago
7. Letter petitioning to change Mt. Carmel's mascot- actually led to my mom getting saved
8. 2003 Halloween Drama Scripts- these 5 plays never got performed because of the huge fires in October 03... the only good thing that I recall about those fires were that my shockingly trite and melodramatic scripts never got performed!
9. First love song I ever wrote- embarrassingly, it compared first love to candy, chocolate and stars. I guess those things are really important to 10 year olds!
10. Film negatives I always meant to develop... never did and never will
11. HUNDREDS (yes, hundreds... no exaggeration) of pages of poetry and writing
12. ALL of my past schoolwork... except I kept my Lewis & Clark journal from 8th grade
13. THE bright pink purse... Nicole is the only one who will get this =)
14. Cherry stem in a knot (except I kept this)
15. THE BEST ONE... All of my old Halloween and Easter candy from ages 10-14. What preteen kid doesn't eat their halloween candy, especially after sprinting from house to house to earn it?! Me. I loved candy, but had a dream to win a Guiness World Record for most Halloween candy saved for the longest amount of time. Crazy record huh? I'm pretty positive it does not exist, but I did it anyway. I literally ran from house to house to collect it... brought it home... sorted it... counted how many of my favorite types of candy there were... and THEN put it in a box in my closet and NEVER ate it. Now, 12 years later I rediscovered it like buried treasure. Surprisingly, it spoke to me a lot about myself and what God's doing in my life right now.
    

It was pretty sad to look into colorful bags and boxes of my favorite candies that were never opened or enjoyed, all for the sake of achievement. I've bypassed years of pleasure in the present for the sake of an empty future. Now I'm here, living my whole life in retrospect.

feelings

[FEAR] an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.

thank you apple dictionary widget.

the intersection

My feet float above my head, ad every blink fades in and out in slow motion. My stomach finds comfort in the base of my throat and my words are trapped in the nausea. Normalcy is surreal and the waves of people swallow each other up at the shoreline . . . Ebbing and flowing, breaking and receding as another’s ambition consumes their withdrawal. I don’t remember the last four intersections, when the light turned green and when I went. For all I know they don’t exist. But now, here I am stopped at red. I wonder if they see me screaming, or see the furious tears racing toward my heart.

Is it rude to look?

I look. There’s a black man in the car to my left. He looks affluent. His eyes stay fixed forward. I scream from my stomach in the base of my throat. The gurgling and guttering plea of my lips makes me forget whether the tears come from my eyes or gush from my mouth. All of a sudden I know nothing.

I turn to my right and an Indian woman hushes the child next to her. There’s cluttered emptiness in her eyes. The gasps become shorter and sharper; I expect them to draw blood. My scream doesn’t shatter the glass and they can’t hear the captive words of my heart. The man, the woman, the child, direction decided they’ll soon pass. They may never know.

Ninety degrees away the green turns to yellow, and I know we’ll be next. I breathe a long breath through staccato reception, and let the final tears curl underneath my chin. I look ahead. I stop screaming. My stomach descends to its rightful place. Dead calm suffocates me and somehow I feel that it’s wrong to stop crying, even for a moment. Pin pricks of guilt and sadness tickle the surface of my mind as feeling returns and the novacane fades. So there they go, the waves breaking and receding and swallowing each other up on the shore. I wonder which wave I am. The light turns green and I smoothly pass.

a song.

Don't try to reach me,
I'm already dead
The pain when it grips me,
for things that I've done
Well I try to make you proud,
but for crying out loud
Just give me a chance to hide away
Exhaustion takes over,
will this someday be over?

Fearful tears are running down
The pain you've laid don't speak a sound
Don't take my heart away from me
And they think I fell down
AGAIN

A teardrop falls from up in the heavens
Drowning the sorrow of angels on high
For the least of the helpless, the hopeless, the loveless
My Jesus, His children, He holds in His eyes

He loves you. He needs you. He holds you. He sees you.

&me

confused

So... I think California is very confused. I can hardly believe that there is a bill in our state legislature trying to MANDATE the teaching of homosexuality. Today's kids are already confused. Tonight my cousin asked me if it's okay to say "I love you" to her friends that are girls. OF COURSE. Why would that seem wrong?

it's summer?

seasons come and seasons go, and I think I miss them all. i can't believe it's summer already. it doensn't feel like it. I think I'll be working for the rest of my life... when i take breaks i get bored. I've forgotten how to go on "adventures"....though i so desperately want to be reminded... or I guess you could say I "go on adventures" but there is no adventure in them. i miss that feeling. I wonder what God will do this summer...

fun

it's spring break. i want to act like a kid.... or more acurately, a kid with a car and a bank account. I want to go to the beach and I want to drive far away and discover a new place. I want to do a new thing. I don't just want to be free, I want to BE free. I want to read a book with no primary intention of learning... I want to learn new things with no forced intention of fun. I want to love what I'm doing and rediscover the meaning of F U N.

(by the way that's a really weird word... it sounds Chinese)

what to do

What do you do?
I'm holding someone more than me.
A broken embrace would not be a clean cut sever but a shatter.
Dependency by one more than me.
And the less of that more is screaming.
Not a fake scream.
Not a small scream.
A real scream I hear from locked door to locked door.
And the less of that more is crying.
Tears that won't stop,
the sun can't evaporate their bitter taste before it reaches lips
And the less of the more is looking.
Not at what's real.
Not at what's right in front.
But looking at twiddling thumbs and fingernails, because through weep blurred eyes it's all that can be seen.
And the less of the more is grabbing.
Not holding.
Not feeling.
Yes grabbing.
Not items & things & ideals
Yes me. Grabbing me...
And as the less of the more grabs me, screams for me, cries to me, looks to me...
What do you do?
When one that's more than you is only living for you,
When one that's more than you can't move
When one with more answers than you can't get up
What do you do?
and generation cries to generation, what do we do?
Father, what do we do?
Mother what do we do?
And these are the questions that can't be asked.
And these are the questions that can't be answered.
When the one more than you
When the father, when the mother
screams, cries & grabs for you
YOU better have the answer...
the less of the one that's so much more than me now asks
me
what do I do?

God came.

Today I felt the presence of God. This is why I live... and never want to stop living.

Today I scribbled in my journal... I got out two sentences before all feeling and all train of thought halted and went numb.

It's a process. Life's a process.