i'm alive

I turned 20 on Tuesday.
20 years and what do I have to show for it?
Maybe I'm being cocky, but I think that I have lived a great life so far.

But why is it that we are always waiting for our lives to begin?

We always put things off saying that we will do the things we want to do when we have the rest of our lives sorted out. Here's a reality check: life will never sort itself out.
Life is meant to be this grand adventure, except for many of us it has become a waiting room. We spend our lives waiting to live, and then we wonder where all our time has gone.

Life has become an endless game of what's next. We are always looking forward to the future, always looking forward to something else, rarely enjoying the time we have today. Why are we hoping for that day when we will come alive? Why can we not wake up out of our comatose state and live?

"It's like you wake up just to find that you're alive..."

I want to go to Africa, and I knew that I would wait until I had things in my life sorted out.
After I'm done school I will have time and money.
Buzzer anyone?
I realized last year that I would never do the things I wanted to do because I was constantly waiting for the 'right moment.' But what if there is no right moment? What if the right moment is now? Why do we always wait for things to fall into place instead of grabbing hold of them ourselves?
I made a pact with a friend last year. I asked him to make sure that I went to Africa in the summer of 2009. I knew that if I didn't have someone holding me accountable, I would always find an excuse not to go. This year I talked about it, to everyone so that when next summer came around, I would have to go.

Waiting has it's benefits, but not if it become the force that controls your life.
Waiting is like fear, sometimes it can keep you safe, but sometimes, it just stops you from living the life that you were meant to live.

"One day you will awake, unafraid..."

Live now; laugh now; love now. Do what you like and do it now; life won't wait for you to slow down...

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 :)

Someone said to me that a lot of people say "God provides" and then use that as an excuse to not do anything for themselves. Well now I am one of them. The bank was running low, and though I knew that I should have been looking for a job, I decided to be lazy and trust that "God will provide."
Maybe God only provides when you're doing what he wants you to do. Maybe God provides when you make the first step yourself.

It's much like prayer. You can pray and expect God to answer your prayer, but many times we pray and then do nothing ourselves. Sometimes we have to realize that God acts through us. Maybe we pray for our friend to become a Christian, but then don't show them what Jesus' love really means. Maybe we pray for our friend to feel encouraged, but then don't send them an encouraging note or phone call. Maybe we pray that God will provide for us, but then don't seek out opportunities for him to bless us.

I cannot even contain my smiles this week.

My words won't even do justice to the peace and fulfillment that God has placed in my life over this past month.

That is all. Just peace. Take it from someone who knows: when hope is lost, it can only be found again.

May you live this week in the grace of God, and may He bless you in all you do.

"For the Lord is God, and he created the heavens and earth and put everything in place. He made the world to be lived in, not to be a place of empty chaos." -Isaiah 45:18

where's the love?

This is an exerpt from a private letter to Brian Flemming, an atheist movie producer: "You've definately got some nerve! I'd love to take a knife, gut you fools, and scream with joy as your insides spill out in front of you. You are attempting to ignite a Holy War in which someday i, and others like me, may have the pleasure of taking the action like the above mentioned. However, God teaches us not to seek vengance but to pray for those like you all. Therefore, I'll get comfort knowing that the punishment God will bring to you will be a thousand times worse than anything I can inflict. The best part will be that you will suffer for eternity for these sins that you're completely ignorant about. The wrath of God will show no mercy for your sake. I hope the truth is revealed to you before the knife conects with your flesh.
P.S. Merry Christmas."

That letter was sent my a Christian in a North aMerican country.
Funny how though the crusades are over, we still find ways to impose religious violence on those who do not agree with our beliefs, even if those methods are not directly violent themselves.
I've started listening to a series of sermons by Bruxey Cavey titled "The God Debate." I listened to the first sermon today (yes I took up listening to sermons. no Bjorn did not influence me. I gave up TV for Lent and took up more audio...)
Whether you believe in God or not, I encourage you to listen to these sermons. They aren't what you expect, and I think that's why I like them so much. I always catch myself saying, "Christianity isn't a religion, it's a relationship." Those words are true, but how many Christians actually act that out these days? Bruxey's talks are an attempt to bring understanding between Christians and Atheists. He attempts to bridge the gap, explore common ground and show where Christians, who think they are always right and everything an atheist or believer in evolution says is wrong, are actually wrong themselves.
His point is education, no ignorance. Understanding, not bigotry. Love, not hatred.
Really interesting. And eye opening, considering that I myself, growing up in a Christian home, would never have thought that a Christian would write a letter like the one quoted above to an atheist, someone they should be extending love and compassion to.
We want change and then we don't realize that we are the ones stopping it from happening.
Christianity is supposed to be the "Religion of Love." Where the heck has that idea gone?
Anyways... some more random thoughts.

what do we know? (part 2)

I’ve heard people say that Christianity is a crutch for people who can’t deal with life. Maybe that’s true for some, but for me, being a Christian is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t think a day goes by when people don’t scoff at me for believing in God. “Look at you,” they say. “You just believe everything that people tell you about God.” The thing is, I don’t. Christians get labelled as hopefuls who take everything the pastor in their church or a random book says as absolute truth. But I’m not like that. Trust me, I’ve tried to prove that God doesn’t exist, or that what the Bible says about him is a lie, but in the end it only made me believe in God more.
I don’t use “religion” as a crutch. In reality, Jesus wrecked my life. It’s like some people have this notion that when a problem in my life comes along I just “give it to God” and don’t worry about it. But giving things to God is easier said than done. I don’t think trust is an easy thing for anyone; it sure isn’t for me. Especially when it comes to God, someone I can’t see and interact with the way I can a fellow human being.
Christianity has not made my life easier. Because of God I have a huge conscience – a good thing, but a heavy one too.
I can’t lie; knowing that God loves me does make things in my life more bearable. But getting to that point where you really understand that God’s love is endless and unconditional, that’s hard. I’ve been a Christian since I knew what the word meant, and I’m still not at that point. Hearing something is one thing, but believing it, that’s a something else altogether.
Some people think that my belief is naïve. But I don’t just believe in God, I know Him. Some things in life have proved to me that He’s there, and that He is who He says He is. So you may look at me and think that I’m naïve, ignorant, even weak. But the reality - I believe what I believe because I choose to, not because someone else told me to. I don’t just take in information and declare it truth. I explore, I get curious and attempt to discover the truth. I test “faith” hypotheses like a mad scientist. The weak part - yea, maybe you’re right. The fact that I acknowledge that I need someone other than myself alone makes me weak in the world’s eyes. But I don’t care.
What do I know? Not much. But what I do know, I know for sure.
Why do I know? Now that’s the question we should be asking…