only a song

"There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?"

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:07:31 -0400

“There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?”

- Pam Halpert, The Office (via theofficenbc)

theofficenbc: Are you ready to challenge John Krasinski to a...

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:58:29 -0400

theofficenbc:

Are you ready to challenge John Krasinski to a lip sync-off?

HE IS MY SOULMATE.

Learning humility.

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:20:58 -0400

Learning humility.

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Wed, 01 May 2013 10:55:03 -0400

kayteerain: This is beautiful. ♥

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:48:20 -0400

kayteerain:

This is beautiful. ♥

Love Does Adventures

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:26:00 -0400

So, I don’t know what came over me this past year. Well, to be honest I do… His name is Bob Goff and his book is Love Does. MAN OH MAN, how this book changed my life. I had truly forgotten how to dream. How to live with abandon.

How to love with abandon.

The worst thing about growing up is how quickly you become cynical and practical. Having a “childlike spirit” seems like sacrilege, because you’re supposed to be thinking about down payments, 10-year plans, and the “real job” you’re going to get after the one you just got hired to do.

Well against all odds, as I read this book, I felt something shift in my heart… like I was a new moon and God was getting ready to bring me into the light, little by little. I distinctly remember hearing Him whisper—in a way that only a sweet, protective, all-knowing Dad can, “We’re only just getting started, Melie. I’ve got big plans.”

So off God and I went, on the amazing adventure called 2012. The irony is only hitting me now that the world was supposed to end that year—because in the craziest ways, 2012 was when I shook hands with the world for the first time in my life.

Better luck next time, John Cusack.

Now when I talk about adventures with the Lord, the phrasing alone seems magical and “happily ever after”-ish, as if I got sprinkled with fairy dust and before I knew it, was flying hand in hand with Jesus past the London Eye or the Eiffel Tower.

Umm… Not so much.

Before the book, our year started with my sweet Jasper in the hospital. His anxiety hit an all-time high, so much so that we found ourselves pulled over on the side of I-95 as he shook and convulsed on a patch of grass next to our car. Terrified, I googled the nearest emergency room and off we went.

Being a wife and a woman, two things ran through my head as the love of my life laid in the next room, getting treated by doctors I never met.

One was—He’s so going to die. I CAN’T BELIEVE he’s going to die. This isn’t supposed to happen yet… I’m going to be a widow. My life, as I know it, is totally over.

The second was—Dang it, I’m the worst wife ever! The first thing I think of while my husband is suffering in the hospital is how his funeral arrangements just aren’t jiving with the life plan I laid out for myself. No wonder he has anxiety… I’m the WORST.

(I’d like to throw in a disclaimer here that I got married really young, so these thoughts are also a side effect of being an insecure, super-selfish, still-pretty-new-to-this-whole-marriage-thing little girl sitting at the grown-ups’ table. However, I’m still holding on hope that there is at least one other woman out there who is saying, “Mel, I totally get you! I’d be mentally picking out what outfit to wear to the funeral!!”

Wherever you are, strange, morbid lady… Thank you for existing.)

Jasper turned out to be okay, physically at least. The doctors gave him no definitive answers or medication that day, but simply told him that he had an anxiety attack and should slow down. See a doctor at home. Breathe. Seriously? I’m so glad they charged us $2300 to tell my husband to breathe. We’re still paying off that bill.

The next four or five months were undoubtedly the hardest season in our marriage. Jasper’s struggles with anxiety, fear, depression and shame were greater and more intrusive than I’d ever seen them before. I woke up every day knowing that my husband—my leader, my partner in crime—was hurting in a way that I couldn’t repair. I couldn’t heal his heart or say the perfect words to make the worry dissipate. All I could do was be there. Show up, hold him, pray for him, and be there.

In some ways, it was really beautiful to be that helpless. We both were forced to die to ourselves. To deal with our sin. To desperately cling to the hem of His garment every single day. Looking back, I see why God took us both through that season. Without it, Jasper and I would have gone our whole lives with our struggles, strange predispositions, and numbing insecurities at a nice, easy 30%. But the Lord, in His gracious (and sometimes KILLER) sovereignty, decided to crank up the heat, shining painful, searing light on our weaknesses until we were forced to deal with them. 110%.

Yeah, it hurt. Sometimes it hurt so badly, I thought that we had lost. That our marriage was over. That we were too far gone to be restored. But God saw us. And He proved Himself faithful yet again. I learned how truly, disgustingly selfish I am—how I placed my identity so much in being insecure, that by thinking so little of myself, I was actually thinking only of myself. Jasper learned how pervasively his parents’ divorce affected his heart. He was so scared to open up to the real stuff in life because he was afraid of becoming just like them—of one of us running away. (I could go into the nuances of how these lessons changed and re-shaped our walk together as husband and wife, but maybe I’ll go into all that later.)

Consequently, we had no choice—we had to repent, learn, and love harder than we ever had before. It was painful in every way… but equally glorious.

Shauna Niequist talks about how, as husband and wife, we assume we become family when we say the vows, sign the certificate, or cut the cake. But in all honesty, “family gets made when you decide to hold hands and sit shoulder to shoulder when it seems like the sky is falling. Family gets made when the world becomes strange and disorienting, and the only face you recognize is his. Family gets made when the future obscures itself like a solar eclipse, and in the intervening darkness, you decide that no matter what happens in the night, you’ll face it as one.”

In this crippling, beautiful season, Jasper became my family. And he will continue to become my family for as long as we both shall live.

It’s no fairy dust, but it’s pretty dang adventurous.

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:47:11 -0400

Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 14:45:00 -0400

Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

"Go and find a girl for whom your love is selfless, someone who makes you helpless, to change the way..."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:23:29 -0400

““Go and find a girl for whom your love is selfless, someone who makes you helpless, to change the way you feel. But stay away from girls who always look so pretty, who’s hearts just aren’t fitting for the man in you I see. Would you remember that for me?””

- “Hank” - Ben Rector (via jimjacobson)

"Life is not the mountain tops, it’s the walkin’ in between… and I like you walkin’ next to..."

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:19:00 -0400

“

Life is not the mountain tops,
it’s the walkin’ in between…

and I like you walkin’ next to me.

”

- Ben Rector, “I Like You”

Thanking God for the joy that heals, that clarifies, that breaks...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:39:39 -0400

Thanking God for the joy that heals, that clarifies, that breaks through the darkness with triumphant light. Why would I dwell anywhere but Your presence?

misscinemafanatic: I love Jim and Pam…. I’m gonna miss...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:54:40 -0400

misscinemafanatic:

I love Jim and Pam….

I’m gonna miss these guys.

"The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:32:35 -0400

“

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity—it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound’s worth of Pride towards their fellow-men. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap.

Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all, that we are better than someone else—I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very center of our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy’s Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by learning to think that they are beneath his dignity—that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride—just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains (similar to frostbite) cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

”

- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

From the ark to the empty grave, You keep Your promises. He is...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:02:35 -0400

From the ark to the empty grave, You keep Your promises. He is risen! (at I-26W)

where feet may fail.

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 22:06:37 -0400

where feet may fail.

I really wanted a picture reminder of this truth when I got...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 17:44:20 -0400

I really wanted a picture reminder of this truth when I got home. But every time I tried to write in the sand, the water would completely wash that joker away. EVERY. TIME. I thought, “Bahhh, forget it. Not worth it.” And I felt God so clearly whisper: “Melie, the enemy will keep trying to wipe away this thought. You’ll be tempted to believe that you’re alone in this life— that I stopped fighting for you. But daughter, remember My love… I will never forsake you.

Keep writing. Keep fighting.” #LoDoSoFlo (at Boynton Beach, FL)

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Sun, 24 Mar 2013 08:31:44 -0400

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Sun, 24 Mar 2013 08:27:58 -0400

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Sun, 24 Mar 2013 08:27:33 -0400

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Sun, 24 Mar 2013 08:27:18 -0400