back to the basics

I think it's so amazing when people go back to the basics.
Simplicity is a lost art in the chaotic universe we submerge ourselves in, so when people choose to just go back to basics it makes things so much more interesting.
A painting with too much detail overwhelms the viewer anyways...

I have decided to go back to the basics (hence the reason for the picture of the Hague in my profile, cuz I'm basically Dutch).
What this means going "back to the basics" for me, I'm not entirely sure.

At the end of the school year I said that this summer would be one of discovery, one of change. Now the summer is 3/4 gone, and things aren't going quite the way I planned. But as I look back on all the reasons I wanted change and all the things I thought I should learn, I saw that I had lost something along the way.

Life isn't always about discovering something new, sometimes it's about discovering something that was there all along, it's about remembering.

Change is good, without change there can be no life. But sometimes, the old ways just work better. Why fix something that's not broken?

Back to the basics.
Back to my roots.
Back to my family.
Back to hope.
Back to faith.
Back to love.

Back to God.

this is the longest post I have ever written...

My Journey to Find You (Exile from Lala Land)

Someone once told me that I was a good person. Funny, I havn't felt that way lately at all.
A couple of weeks ago there was a coffee house held at my church to raise money for disaster relief in Myanmar and China. People tell me that I am a good person for organizing the event, but organizing an event doesn't make me good. The thought was good, the action was good, the event was even good... but me?

Not many people know this, but my heart has been at a crossroads these past six months. I have been fighting battles with myself, and with God. Asking for answers for why things are the way they are, and getting mad when it seems that all I recieve back is silence. I want to love God because I desire to. Not becasue my parents want me to, or my pastor, or my friends, or because I was brought up in the Church and just accepted the Church's teachings for what they were.

I want something real. I am tired of all this fakeness. Why can't anyone be real anymore?

We put on our smiles or our frowns, acting the way we think people will expect us to act. We don't like surpirses anymore, all we like is normalicy.
I am sick of being normal, of trying to meet everyone's expectations and feeling bad when I can't be the person that everyone else wants me to be.
Maybe this is selfish... but what ever happened to what I want? Who I want to be? Who I am supposed to be?

I don't think that you could say that I am a believer in fate or destiny or anything like that. But I do believe that we all have a specific and defined purpose in this life and that each person's purpose is equaly important. I lost that vision. I lost the purpose I had in life and got swallowed up into a whirlwind of anger and doubt.

This past year has been a huge struggle for me.
I think I'm a late bloomer and I'm just going through all those "teen indentity issues" now, when I am barely even a teenager anymore. It has been an amazing yet scary experience.

I have always liked questions. I question everything: the existence of love, of truth, of hope, of faith. I question the state of the world, why things are the way they are and ask questions as to how things can be changed. I just never thought that I would question my own existence, my own purpose, my faith or my hope.

Over Christmas I ran away (figuratively). I have never been one to run away when things get hard. I'm the friend that sticks it out and fights and fights until things get worked out. But not this time...
Anger got in the way. An emotion that I used to struggle with a lot came back to bite me in the behind. I bottled it up. I didn't talk about it, I just let the feelings of injustice and hurt build up inside me until (at no particular moment in time) I exploded.
I forgot all about love and hope and faith, all I could think about was anger.

I still believed in God, but I just couldn't love him.

Funny how when we screw things up badly we try and put the blame on other people.
The things that happened in my life, well most of them, were almost 100% my own fault. My high school Writer's Craft teacher once told me that "anger is almost always a deep dissatisfaction with oneself." And boy is it ever true. I took all the anger that I felt towards myself (along with the select few people that had hurt me along the way) and turned it into outright madness at God.

People I know, great people, people who are caring and compassionate and just downright amazing, bad things keep happening to them. And what about aparthied and genocide and AIDS and poverty? What the heck is God doing about anything?

I was mad, but more than that, I was fustrated. I felt like a pawn in some sick game God was playing. Like this piece that he would move whenever he wished. And then, when things got tricky, he'd leave me there hanging to fend for myself.

My biggest frustration was this: humans have free will, and yet God is omnipotent. My actions don't always cause things that happen to me (for example: I didn't choose to be born in Canada, just like people don't to be born into poverty in third-world countries) so then didn't God choose these things? Didn't He make them happen? Why would a God that supposedly "loves" us choose to have children born into poverty, or orphaned by AIDS, or have abusive parents, or bullied in school?

I didn't understand why things that I had not chosen continually kept happening to me. Bad things, things that I would have been more than happy to live without. So I stopped "being" a Christian. Sure I believed in God but I no longer loved God the way I used to. If you ask me, God was one huge fat liar when it came to the love that he had for people. And for me, love was the characteristic of God that I depended on the most.

What a cop out. Seriously.
I look back on the past year and I think, what the heck was a doing?
Through everything I have been through in my life God has been the only thing that has remained stable. God hadn't changed but my perspective of him, along with my perspective of life, did. I let my selfishness, hurt and anger get in the way of the only thing that ever really mattered.

As stupid as I feel for letting life get the best of me, I'm also proud, because I am about to get the best out of life.

Going through all this has taught me that I can't be a doormat anymore. I can't try and please everyone and hate myself when one person gets let down. Not even God can meet everyone's "perfect" standards - i am definately an example of that. So if humans are unhappy with a perfect God, then what does that say about them being unhappy with an unperfect me? If you live in Lala Land, maybe everyone will love you. But if you live in reality, there are going to be moments (and many of them) when people are disapointed.

But I can be happy with me. As long as I love who I am and do what I think is right and follow my heart, who cares what other people think?

So this is it.

Here goes the begginning of a new life.
Maybe you won't notice a change, maybe you will.
But I will, and hopefully God will look at my heart and see a change too.

Even the smallest change can make a big difference.

ps. if you're interested in my perspectives on injustice and the relationship between a loving God and a hurting world, I'd love to talk about it. Just let me know :)