Wasting time.

Ironically, just at a time when I should be buckling down and working hard on something else in particular, I feel the desire to write - to write about wasting time.

I have a terrible habit of finding a million and one other things to do when I should be doing something more pressing and important.

It's not even that I don't want to do it.

I desperately do.

I just don't.

I think it must be fear. Fear that leads to avoidance. Avoidance. I hate it. I want to clean my life out of frustrating, redundant, ignominious avoidance. I see no purpose or substance in the act of avoidance. No benefit issues forth from it. So why do I allow it's grip to distract and detract from my life. From my purpose.

I just read three notes together in my journal. Unrelated to each other, possibly. But all food for thought to my distracted mind.

1) Focus. On your life goals. On your life purpose.

2) Do not be afraid of purity. When did purity become undesirable anyway?!

3) Do not waste one second.

Yes, life flies by, and this I have been learning a lot of late.

So really - we all need focus, to know ourselves, our values, our goals, our reasons - and to understand the value of time and the tragic impact of wasted seconds.

I don't want to realise in ten years time that I wasted my 20's in avoidance and distraction.

I want focus, purpose, passion.

And having said that...

I'm off to get on with it!!!!

When life seems slow and hopeless...

I have discovered a dream. Well, when I say discovered, I don't really mean that. I mean I have finally given something room to breathe. The seed of a dream that has always been inside of me - squashed, ignored, sometimes forgotten, but always present. It is breathing now. Alive. But at what cost? An impossible dream is dangerous. It has the life within it to bring reck and ruin if unfulfilled. And mine is an impossible dream.

To give life to such a thing opens one up.

To the beauty and perfect happiness of attainment.

To the crushing and deadening blow of failure.

So now I allow the dream to become my dream. What will become of me?

Was my dream better left a seed?

I want so desperately to draw from C.S. Lewis' words on love in my circumstance...

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

I need to be vulnerable. To allow my dream to love me or to despise me. For life without the dream is a half life. A life untrue to my human heart, and so lived in longing - for a life which has become distant and out of reach. I don't want to never try. To watch the shadows of a dream which could have been drift away and out of grasp, leaving me drowning in regret...

Let the pain come. Or the joy. I will dream and live and feel and grow.

I would not have it otherwise.

One of those moments...

I just had one of those movie moments.

You know, the ones you wish life could be made up of?

Rooting through some old cards and papers, you come across a card from Someone. And in that card is written a memory, a beautiful memory, and a declaration. And all the while, an overwhelmingly emotive song is swallowing your little room in sound, and you smile to yourself, and are overwhelmed at the beauty of love, and for that moment you are truly thankful for where you have been, for what you have experienced, and for who you have found. And although sometimes it aches so much deep inside, and you wish you could go back to those before times, you are still grateful to have had them. And that those before people have become forever people. And to have found such a moment in your present that gives you hope that more wonderful things are soon coming.

I smiled to myself, stored the treasure in my treasure box, and the song wound to a close. I stood up, went to my computer, and I wrote this. And now, here I am. Finished. But barely begun.

25

1. I love old black and white movies more than any other kind. Timeless classic quality that never fades.

2. 80% of my text messages over the course of a single day come from one individual.

3. I want to ride a camel quite a lot, and own a 16 hands white stallion. In fact if I had to be any animal I would definitely be a wild horse.

4. when it is raining hard, the best thing is being totally drenched, then returning home to become cosy and warm

5. I wish I could play the piano like a dedicated pro. And i would quite like a baby grand.

6. I study French sporadically, but not enough to become good at it :(

7. I have a lot of thoughts which I would like to make into a book one day. Although I don't really know how that would materialize, as my attention span can be lacking.

8. i like to learn about a persons heart.

9. I am scared of being wasteful with life.

10. I think sometimes I dream the future, but non exact things, such as a particular gathering of particular people in a particular place; mysterious inklings of actually having experienced it before

11. On average it takes me under 5 minutes to fall asleep each night. Once every 6 months or so I wont be able to sleep, and it makes me stressed.

12. I love Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and wish I were a dancer. Although sometimes I think I over idealise life.

13. I just finished reading Blue Like Jazz and I love the challenges it brought into my life, especially about selflessness.

14. One of the things I enjoy most is the culture difference between the British and the American. Oh how dearly I love it. I adore living in community. And cultures. And European History. And world History. Really I would like to see the world and learn about it and immerse myself in its lifestyles and people. And this point is really many joined together.

15. I take my tea any way you wish to serve it

16. I have realised that life is actually pretty short and only done once on this earth.

17. To me the ocean is one of the most terrifying and most incredible things on the planet

18. Today I wore my slippers to the corner shop and accidentally stomped in a puddle in the dark.

19. Every time I visit the Theatre I feel it call me home

20. I am very sad that distance is of such a nature that it prevents me from being at some dear ones weddings. If I had 2 wishes I would wish for unlimited free airfare and to speak every language ever spoken and then some.

21. My hot water bottle is called Sebastian

22. I recently started drinking coffee, which has expanded my starbucks order choice significantly, if not somewhat irritatingly.

23. One day perhaps I will get involved more with music and singing, I don't know how though really.

24. I want to live a kind of an adventure. But I scare myself sometimes with my restlessness and fear of being tied down.

24.5 (cheat) I miss San Francisco and its essence with so much of my heart. There are people I wish I could always be close to, and places I long for in the core of my being. Life can be tragic-beautiful.

25. I want to be better than I am. Always.

What are they worth to you?

This is something I read. It made me cry.

Children as young as 6 are cutting themselves. The average self-harmer is aged 11, and 1 in 10 adolescents are thought to have cut themselves deliberately at least once. A typical 16-year-old girl says that most days she cuts into her arms until they bleed, explaining that 'the pain proves you're human...'

Suddenly I find myself in a giant hall. Surrounding me are thousands of young people, battered, bruised and broken. Then a voice says: "What am I bid?"
A Young girl stands out before the crowd of leering, sneering men. "What am I bid for this piece of flesh?"
The men start to cheer and shout figures: "Ten...Twenty...Fifty...One Hundred."
What can I do, God?
I start to bid. I have to save her. The cost becomes huge and I begin to waiver. Can I afford this? What price will I pay?
The dream stops. I'm alone again. But the faces are real enough: Sarah being sold into prostitution; Mike with a revolver in his mouth; Kat covered in cuts and bruises; John falling into crime; Laura alone and desperate; Steve, heroin needle bulging into his vein.
"What am I bid?" The voice shatters the silence. The auction is on again. The bidding has begun. It continues day and night until the end. Most of the bidders desire only use and abuse. Satan drives them on.
And so I find myself in the auction. Will I watch or will I bid? The price of a single life is huge. The currency is prayer. The cost is massive but the prize is glorious. A life for a life.
"What am I bid?"

I have seen it. I have wept for them.

But, surely these people deserve more than just our tears...

City of Crushed Vision

A city with the power to deflate dreams. A terrifying thought. Each day spent dwindles into monotony. Passion lost amid the fatal mundane. Quenching the very hope and life to which we should so frantically cling. Our grip loosens, teased away by alluring forces we cannot recognise. Blind to the face of resignation, we follow him freely. Led into acceptance of a lesser existence. Racing heartbeats slow to the steady doomfilled march. Eyes cast down. Hearts contained. And we do not realise it, but vision has been tamed. Dreams with potential to change the world, reduced to the ordinary. The attainable. The realistic. How did it come to this? How can we have been so unseeing. So fast asleep in our own minds not to have noticed the subtle departure of meaning and purpose from this life.

Let me remind you.

You live for something. For something far greater than yourself. You have been redeemed from death by love. By a love which conquors death and renders the powerful powerless. The love which onced caused your feeble heart to dream and become alive. You have the vision within you to change the world. Radical passion with the strength to endure all the hardships of this life, and conquor.

I know something of struggle. Of the utter devastation life can bring. Insufferable pain. To watch a teenage girl unable to lead a normal life. To feel the effects of a family broken in two. To wonder why you can't remember what it feels like to be really happy. To reach the depths of emotion never even conceived of and catch no glimpse of the end of the tunnel. I am tired of being strong. I am strong. But I am tired of being it always.

But this I know. The hope we have is not in this life. Build your hopes here and watch them crumble into nothingness, dusty remnants of good times turned to bad.
But there is hope in Jesus. In the love more real than anything ever known on this earth, yet more ethereal than the highest thought the human mind can convieve of. His love is saving. His love is strong enough for me. Strong enough for you. And strong enough for all the troubles of this world. The more my heart aches, the more I cling to the joy I find in Jesus. Happiness is temporary. But joy endures. And love and joy together, will save this word. If only you and I step out to bring it.

Wake up. Shake off the dust, heaped high upon your shoulders. Do not let the place you find yourself in limit the scope of your dreams. Look beyond the horizon, to the distant unknown. This time and this place are but moments. You have an eternity to live for. Begin today.

Loose ends

These are a few blogs I had begun and never followed through with. But they want publishing. I don't know why. They just serve no purpose as they were. Stagnant. It's as if they were still inside my head. And in there its getting way too cluttered.
So I apologise. This won't flow well. None of the following will be connected to one another. It will be random. Some of it may not make sense. It has to be done.


Dear Jesus...
Please, let me be a part of your story.
I don't want my own.


"If music be the food of love, play on..."
The food of love? Perhaps in part. But maybe more accurately, music is the food of the heart. It strikes me in the centre of my being. It flows inside of me and becomes a part of who I am and how I feel. Music affects and heightens every hint of emotion within the heart.


I didn't feel like this when I didn't know you.
Why is nothing ever easy?


"We humans have many weaknesses. We feel too much. We die. But we do have the chance of love."
I feel far too much for my own good I think.


You leave an imprint
"Like the color that stays in your eyes after you've caught a glimpse of the sun"
I miss you.

The Dream and Reality. Should we strive for one or realise the other?

I am tired of being strong. I am tired of being strong. I am strong. But I am tired of being it always. I want to be weak. I want to lean. But I can't.
I am impatient. I am reluctant; not ready to make a decision. But I am still impatient.

Isn't it funny how friendships grow from nothing, to everything, in a matter of moments, long or short, many or few.

"All will turn to silver glass. A light on the water. All shall pass."