alone

i won't let anyone in
this i promise you
i've made one last mistake
now i'm going in alone

i won't wait now
i've had my practice
i finally know how to walk away
now i'm going in alone

had enough of the heartache
of all the broken promises
no last chance will i take
now i'm going in alone

i used to lean so hard
on everyone that i loved
but what happnes when they break
i'll have to go in alone

now if i fail
i'll know just who to blame
but at least it won't be fake
now that i'm in this alone

leave you all behind
friends, yes even family
it's not that i hate
but i have to do this alone

then maybe i can come back in
sit back down, after i've had time to think
but for now
i need to be alone

i'll build up every wall
high and so strong
only one day to watch them shake
when i'm ready not to be alone

but for now please leave
get out, hurry
don't wait for me to break
i have to do this alone

i have to make it on my own

--anonymous

eek!

So I finally put my music on Myspace...
EEK!
It was scary. And took a long time for me to rack up the courage to actually do it.
My music is a part of me and so if people don't like it, I feel rejected. Because when people reject my music it feels like they are also regecting me.
But one morning I woke up and decided that I didn't care anymore.
God knows where this music comes from. Maybe it's not all about Him and my love for Him, but it is from my heart, which he created.
I have never been a very confident person. And I can hear the person reading this now thinking "what!? you are soo confident." But seriously, I'm not.
Putting my music on Myspace was a huge step because lately, everytime I have put myself out there, I have come back broken hearted.
But this is something I just had to do. A step I had to take in life. A step towards caring only what God thinks. He created my voice, my ability to play instruments. He gave me the gift of words, the love for writing and the need to express myself. So God, this is all for you. Even if it's not all about you, it's all for you.

www.myspace.com/kaitjongsma
leave comments please =)

Real Love

This is real love.
The love Dick Hoyt has for his son is a love that is beautiful and rare in our world.
A love the believes, that is self-sacrificing. A love that will do anything to see others happy, a love that dreams and then does everything it can to reach those dreams.
The father-son relationship between Dick Hoyt and his son Rick is one that is unseen and unexperienced by most. Why? Why is real love so rare to us? Shouldn't we all be living like this?

Lately I have struggled with the thought that God is love. Not that God himself is love, because that concept is not very hard to grasp, but the concept that God is the only one who can show us what real love is. God is the only one who can show us how to love eachother spiritually. Without God, there is always a part of love that is missing, a part that cannot be recognized, understood, or shown until we first know the love of God.

I am not putting Dick Hoyt on a pedestal here and saying that he is an amazing man for loving his son the way God intended for us to love oneanother, but I am saying that he should be an example to us all, an inspiration. But not only that, he can also show us the love of our Father, love which we may have previously been misisng out on.

We are all born spiritually handicapped. Like Rick we struggle to make it through life. When we come to know Christ, that handicap is overcome and we are made into a new person with a new identity in Christ. However, God must still carry us. There are many things we wish we could do on our own, but we can't. We are not God, we do not have his power, his strength, his capabilities. So he carries us. He runs with us. He lifts us up and helps us to acheive our dreams. Like Dick runs marathons for his son Rick, God does this for us. He sacrifices the things he loves most to help us become, and to overcome.
Satan see's us as useless, he thinks that we should be put away and he leads us to believe that we have nothing to offer. Then God comes in and gives us the tools we need to accomplish things. He shows us that with his help, we can do anything. For nothing is impossible with God.

I can't answer for anyone else, but I know why my love is sometimes not the real love that God has given me. It is not because I am human, or because I live in a fallen world, or becasue I am actually unable to love the way I was meant to. Though those could be other factors. The real reason is that I am selfish. until we overcome our need to put ourselves first we will never be able to love the way we were meant to. God put our hearts before the life of his one and only Son. What will you do to experience the love of God? What will you do to help others do the same?
I can only imagine.

falling off bicycles while reading good books...

today i fell off a bicycle while reading a good book.
well... almost.
the books were actually in my bag, which was actually in my brothers possesions. and i didn't actually fall off my bicycle. in fact, it was more of a 'get off becasue i'm home now'. but i was riding the bicycle.
the rest was just a dream...
that phrase, "falling off bicycles while reading good books" was produced during a conversation with my best friend.
she foud it funny that i went on a bike ride because apparently i am the type of person she can just picture getting distracted and running into random objects, then getting up looking around to make sure no one noticed and quickly riding away. funny thing is, i'd probably do it too.
but i'm not the only one. in fact i think everyone has fallen off a bicycle while reading a good book at some point in time, if not, then you will.
see, you get on the bike. you start riding. you have a purpose for riding. you want to get in shape, you have a destination, you want to have fun, whatever. you ride.
then along the way something distracts you. nothing big really. maybe a sunset, or a interesting person, or a random road sign (i do that all the time, for some reason i feel the need to read road signs), anything really. one moment you are on your bike riding down the road and the next you are face-planted in the asphalt, pebbles sticking to your face and your helmet twisted so weird the strap is now digging into your neck.
we try to go somewhere in life and things along the way distract us, they make us stumble or even temporarily forget what we were doing in the first place. those things can be good things or they can be bad. maybe their taking you off a bad path or maybe they're preventing you from moving forward on a good one. distractions aren't always a bad thing but there seems to be a negative connotation that goes along with the word 'distraction'.
i think we should be careful on the path but i also think that every once in a while we should let some distractions in, often they are what bring us back to reality. if you work too hard towards one thing, other things that used to be important can start to fade away.
read good books while riding bicycles and hope that if you do happen to fall off, you'll land in the grass.

live.love.laugh.

I was reading Tara Cleaver's blog, as i often do, and her post, as usual, made me think really hard. This is some of what she wrote:

I've realized that in our heart of hearts, we all know what we want to do with our lives. But we don't want to admit it to anyone... in some cases, we don't even want to admit it to ourselves, because what if it doesn't happen? I think it's at the point where our dreams are so precious to us that, to speak them aloud makes them vulnerable, makes us vulnerable....I think that, as human beings, we need hope. We need dreams. We need to hope and to dream. We need to do so wisely, but to not hope or dream at all is to kill part of the essence of who we are. God gives us the ability to dream and to hope for a reason. Dare to dream.

After reading Tara's post over again today I realized that I had stopped dreaming. I felt that having expectations led to being hurt and so i decided not to expect things anymore. But because i stopped expecting things from other people i also stopped expecting things from myself. I got tired of one-way friendships, of me trying and having no one (except a few people, one of whom is one of my best friends, the most loyal and honest girl I know, and is not even a Christian) give back; i got tired of the lack of a second job so i stopped looking for one; i kept messing up as a Christian and so decided it was pointless to try anymore; i was afraid of not being able to go to school so i pretty much decided in my mind that i wasn't going and if i did, i wouldn't make it.
Living like that is like living in hell: living with absolutely no hope. What do you have to live for when you have no hope? Don't ever live like that. Don't ever give up hope, because when you do you give up on life. If you don't have hope then you pretty much don't have motivation and so you stop doing things. Instead put your hope in God because he is the only one who will ever see you through, forever.
I hate that we try to defend ourselves. We try and stop ourselves from getting hurt and then wind up hurting ourselves more in the process. We take some risks, we'll do stupid things like jump off 60 foot bridges or skydive. If we get hurt we often just want to do it again. But when it comes to the heart we become more guarded and, eventually, some of us just shut down and shut everyone out. But life is about taking risks, it's about dreaming and hoping and seeing how far you can go. Live your life. Laugh. Love. Take chances.

"'But they did end, all of them,' I said. 'They failed.'
'Maybe some would say so,' she said... 'But I think, personally, that it would be worse to have been alone all that time. Sure, maybe I would have protected my heart from those things, but would that really have been better? To hold myself apart becasue I was too scared...'
'..then at least you're safe. The fate of your heart is your choice, and no one else gets a vote.'
She considered this.. 'Well, it's true that I have been hurt in my life. Quite a lot. But it's also true that I have loved, and been loved. And that carries a weight of it's own. A greater weight, in my opinion... The problems, the sadness... those will be there too, but just smaller slivers, tiny peices.'
'I just think that you have to protect yourself,' I said. 'You can't just give yourself away.'
'No,' she said. 'You can't. But holding people away from you, and denying yourself love, that doesn;t make you strong. If anything, it makes you weaker. Because you're doing it out of fear... Fear of taking a chance. Of letting go and giving into it, and that's what makes us what we are. Risks. That's living. Being too scared to even try it- that's just a waste. I can say I made a lot of mistakes, but I don't regret things. Because at least I didn't spend a life standing outside, wondering what living would be like.' " (From: This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen)

Hold on to hope. I always hear the saying "if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your future plans, "and it's true. But that doesn't mean you can't dream about the person you want to become. Planning out our lives in detail will lead to heartbreak but hoping for a life full of love and laughter, that's something that can happen. Don't hold onto anything that offers a line, but don't deny living because you're afraid it will hurt too much. "I'd rather feel pain then nothing at all..." Trust and put your hope in God tell him your dreams and then lay them down so that he can create the dream he has for your life. It's the hardest thing you will ever do at times, but when it comes down to it, it's all that matters.

"Trust in the Lord and do good. Then you will live safely in the land and prosper. Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart's desires." -Psalm 37:3,4