Love vs. Lies

  It will never cease to amaze me how God can take this thing called love and make it an endless lesson.  He has made it my life long pursuit and I can honestly say that I don't understand how vast of a subject it really is, but I guess when love is a Man it is a subject that I cannot afford to not chase after every single day of my life.

   A couple years ago I was sitting in my pastors office. I was in a point of my life where I was unsure of what I was doing with it and was struggling with the direction God was taking me. As I sat there trying to explain what I was doing, though not really knowing myself he pointed something out to me that I am so glad he had the guts to say. He told me that I was living a very selfish life. I was pursuing my "ministry" and my "goals" but completely missing relationships in my life. I was focused so much on becoming something that everyone could be proud of instead of caring about the thing that God cares most about. People. My pastor went on to ask me where a husband and kids fit into my picture and what about getting plugged in to a church family. He pointed out that I cannot do what I was trying to do without letting people in and establishing solid deep relationships.

   So here I am, further down the road in life and God has placed a wonderful man of God right in front of me. He is my very best friend and I couldn't imagine doing life with anyone else. God has been so faithful to work all things for good in our relationship but I was so hesitant to be in this relationship. My biggest setbacks about dating Corey were two lies I fell for.....

1. A boy will distract me from my relationship with God
     Now this has the potential to be true if I were to pick a man that is not pursuing God but in this situation that is the biggest lie in the world. I am so grateful for how Corey loves God and pushes me to love God. He is a man of the Word and is always wanting to talk about what God is showing us in our personal quiet times. He has chosen to be consumed by who God is and therefore by being with him, I am forced to be pursuing God as well. But the most amazing thing I have been learning lately is how God uses how Corey loves me to show me how HE wants to love me! As Corey learns to love God, he learns how to love me and it shows me a completely different aspect of God's love for me that I could never learn on my own because the way Corey learns about God's love is different from the way I learn about His love. I also was afraid that I didn't have the capability to love God with everything in me AND a man without it taking away from my love for God. But what I have seen is that I cannot love Corey without loving God first. When we both are passionately pursuing God and continuously learning how to love Him, we have no choice but to learn how to love each other, and let me just say I have had some awesome revelations about God's love from how Corey shows me love and it blows me away! God created marriage and it is not meant to be a distraction from Him but rather a runway TO Him.

2. I have to have MY life completely figured out and put together BEFORE I can date
    Ok, so I totally understand how relationships can be a distraction from pursuing your life goals and what God has for you but I am sick of hearing that you have to wait until you are done high school, college, have your dream job and everything perfectly in place before you can even think about dating. Everyone is different. You cannot put a to do list on life because God's plan is different for everyone. Corey's and my relationship is a total God thing and he's not finished college yet. I still live at home with my mom. By the worlds standards we should technically wait until he's finished college and I need to be living on my own and have my own career before we should even pursue this. But here's the thing, God has strategically moved Corey and I closer and closer together and even gone out of His way to redeem our relationship when it looked completely hopeless. Where we are now is a straight up miracle!!! So why should we ignore what God is doing with us just because we don't have everything checked off the worlds to do list. I know finances are a big deal and wisdom should be used in preparing for marriage but it should NEVER be the reason not to. I have seen God provide money for me and I still cannot explain how I got it so to not be obedient to what God is doing with us would be doubting the faithfulness of God to provide. He is a provider! We have been prayerfully moving forward in this and believe that God is telling us to stop procrastinating. We wasted a year apart, it's time to be serious about His plan for us.
   Then there is the fact that Corey is not finished school. I have been told that it's gonna be hard. I have been told marriage is hard but hey guess what else is hard.....LIFE!!!!! But you don't see people telling me to give up on life because it's hard. There will always be trials in life, they will either shape you or break you but the outcome is always up to you. Relationships are hard, yes, but they are a part of life and they are something God values. God uses relationships to refine us and teach us to love like He does. YWAM was hard, and going to Finland by myself to help lead a school was hard, so was leading an outreach by myself but you never heard people tell me NOT to do any of these things because they were gonna be hard. I came out of these experiences with a deeper relationship with God and a maturity in life. I learned so much from these experiences but I learned BECAUSE they were hard. If things were always easy, we would never grow. If I choose to stay single for the rest of my life (and let me just say there is nothing wrong with this if it's what God has called you to) I would choose to limit what God wants to do in my life.

   Relationships are a good thing. They are a God idea. As long as you pursue God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength He will bring along a person to continue to pursue God with you. God in a person is attractive. You cannot love God and NOT be attractive to someone. Learning to love is a lifelong pursuit. It starts with God and overflows to others, especially that one person that you chose to love God with. The results are a beautiful thing.

Love is a choice, and choosing to love Corey is one of best choices I will ever make.

Clear Mind = Clean Room

       So recently I found myself feeling pretty overwhelmed. My tendency when I feel this way is to shut down so I can function without losing it! Haha, it only works for so long. My problem came when I was so stressed that I just had a meltdown and had no idea why. I had no idea what my emotions were because I was shut down to feeling anything. So I decided to pick up my journal. Someone had prayed over me once and told me to never stop journaling because it was going to be a means for me to help others but honestly, it is more for my own sake then anyone else's. So I sat down and just began to write. It had been almost a month since I had last written and this is coming from the girl that has a suitcase full of 13 completed journals from the time I was 14 to 24. I really didn't know what to write but as I began writing, somehow I began to just fill the pages. It was as if someone pulled the stopper on my mind and everything just started to pour out. Before I started writing I had no idea how I had gotten to where I was at but after I was done and read back over it, I was able to see the complete process and even find the root of where it all began. You know what I found???? It all started from NOT JOURNALING! Go figure.

    I am an outward processor. If I don't find a way to think outside of my head, everything starts to pile up! I forget to do things because I have too many mental lists and I get stressed out and one thing leads to the next and before you know it I am completely shut down because my mind has become so cluttered that I don't even know where to start. So that's what journaling is for me. It's literally a way for me to de-clutter my mind so I can think straight. The crazy part is, if you know me well you can tell when my mind starts to get cluttered. My room becomes cluttered, I'm less productive, I'm more tired, I eat less, and I'm way less creative....it's all a downward spiral that leads to ultimately depression. Thank God I didn't get there. The most important thing I realized though was my conversations with God had died down massively! On a normal day talking to God is like breathing. We just talk throughout the day. He and I have always had that kind of relationship, but when my mind gets cluttered, He goes silent. It's not because He's no longer talking, it's just my mind is talking so much louder then His voice! The best feeling in the world is for my conversations with God to be effortless but in order to keep that I have to maintain my life in such a way that I am open to hearing Him without anything getting in the way.

   As soon as I cleared my thoughts I was able to make a list of priorities that needed to be put in place. I cleaned my room and got rid of the clutter in there, I went grocery shopping and started being more aware of my water intake, and I have had so much more motivation to do creative projects! I also now see a strategy of the enemy. It doesn't seem like not journaling would be that big of a deal (and maybe it's not your way of clearing your head) but for me, it is a trigger that if he can convince me to not journal today, and then tomorrow and then the next day.....all those thoughts that I'm not writing down start to build up inside of me and there goes the process all over again.

     So that being said, I'm taking my journaling more seriously. Clearly it's a big deal! I'm also going to be starting to blog weekly. I find that I only really blog when something big happens, but I'm gonna take this a step further and blog what God is teaching me. God created me to be a writer, so that's what I'm going to do! I also know that people read this ;) So if you're reading this I want feedback! What's your way of keeping your mind clear and de-cluttered so that you can function in who God has created you to be?