twelve

your presence, quiet
your absence, deafening
in joy i pause
to cast my gaze and find that
in your wake i've made me

can i outrun
the grief in my limbs?
it is my bones

every year
i write to give life
to the turmoil death left
a blinking dash
morse for words i know not


every year i try to write something and i end up with unpublished drafts. today i rode my bike and remembered that he ran while we biked. i looked for flowers to press but didn't find any that reminded me of him. i read a book in the bookstore and remembered that he took us to b&n on weekends and it was one of my favorite things to do. he drove us after some rounds of chemo, too. i made mac & cheese with broccoli because i remember that he liked it. i drew a portrait of him and watched coco because i like that dia de los muertos celebrates life and memory.

this time every year, i am contradiction. i want to be alone but i also don't. i want people to know but i also don't. i don't know if i want to grieve in public or in private; is it worse to feel sad and alone where no one can see you or where people who don't know you can see you? especially this year, i laugh because i chose a person who makes me laugh; but shortly after i cry because we cannot laugh with you. or you with us. is there a difference between me missing you and you missing me? do the years make it easier or harder? am i closer to you or further?

ten years, now eleven

10.31.2017
it is strange to me that dad passed away ten years ago. i don't really keep count of the years so it could be five years for all i know. ten years usually sounds so celebratory but in this instance it twists my throat and gut into unsure knots. when i was in san francisco, janet, whom everyone on the streets called grandma, shared about how she lost her father when she was a child and started to cry. i looked at her white hair like a foretelling of my future, staying grief. this week in class, roxana shared about the altares created during dia de los muertos - about how they signify celebration of life and how they invite re-memory of loved ones so that they do not disappear. i appreciate this; i don't know how the taiwanese culture remembers the dead. i don't know if they do, but i do know they fear the emotional pain as much as some cultures fear the dead.

it is not yet the 31st, but today i borrow from c.s. lewis' words in preparation for tuesday:

"no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. i am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. the same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. i keep on swallowing. at other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. there is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. i find it hard to take in what anyone says. or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. it is so uninteresting. yet i want the others to be about me. i dread the moments when the house is empty. if only they would talk to one another and not to me. there are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that i don't really mind so much...then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this 'commonsense' vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace."

some things i dread all of october: the unbearable secret which no one in the room knows, the screaming desire to tell everyone and no one; feeling like i am living two timelines at once as the present becomes irrelevant and bothersome. the compounded grief as the years move me further from the epicenter of my memory of him; like i am being moved further from shore with no mind to my protesting legs and lungs. it's cruel because the waves don't give a shit. thinking/hoping i am ready to be sad that day and never being ready.

10.31.2018

i had forgotten that i wrote this last year and never published it. it is october once more and i am reflecting (obsessing) about the impossible challenge that is teaching. october is obscenely difficult for first year teachers, but something that is giving me pause is the ethnographic work that we are doing with our adviser. i think undoubtedly my parents were my first teachers in life. because my mom and i have such a contentious relationship, i remember my dad fondly as someone who i knew i could ask for math help. i often did not want to because he would inevitably teach me ten steps ahead of what i had to know in class. even so, i could tell that he loved math. "a function is just a black box," he would try to explain to me for the fourth time. "if you put this number in the black box, something happens to it and it comes out like this." i never understood that analogy as hard as i tried.

i grieve the fact that he will never see me accomplish my dreams. i grieve that there are things i will never be able to ask him or know about him; that i have to imagine and fill in the blanks with conjectures. this year, after the first half of the month passed and my terrible anxiety and anticipation of the day passed, i found that the actual day was manageable even though i cried in every period telling my students. i'm not sure if it's because i cried it all out earlier in the month or because it's been 11 years. in some ways i hope the pain will never disappear entirely, because it would feel like a disservice to him.

meander

source

since moving back, i've started around four or five different blog posts only to abandon it after a few meandering sentences. i have felt very un-myself lately, which means that i am likely changing and don't know how to process through it all. here are some things lately in my post grad life that i've noticed:

1) i never wished harder in my life than now for financial independence and autonomy. what is it about freedom that has made it become so valuable to me to the point that i effectively pine away for it?
2) there is a lot of anger in my heart. i see it when i cuss randomly during traffic or in my own reflection when disgust splashes across my face when i see certain peoples' posts on social media.
3) trust, hope, and joy have for most part become vague aftertastes of memories that both belong to me because they were mine and don't belong to me because they are so far away. i'm generally okay though, because i don't let myself sit in the emptiness for too long.
4) my heart seems to have atrophied, i don't suffer gracefully at all.

let it be

source

"The path of the righteous is level; you make level the way of the righteous. In the path of your judgments, O Lord, we wait for you; your name and remembrance are the desire of our soul. My soul yeanrs for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you. for when your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness." Isaiah 26:7-9

The way of the just is evenness, a steady course of obedience and holy conversation. And it is their happiness that God makes their way plain and easy. It is our duty, and will be our comfort, to wait for God, to keep up holy desires toward him in the darkest and most discouraging times. Our troubles must never turn us from God; and in the darkest, longest night of affliction, with our souls must we desire him; and this we must wait and pray to him for...The intention of afflictions is to teach righteousness: blessed is the man whom the Lord thus teaches. -Matthew Henry

recently i visited a friend who has a two year old toddler; as we talked i asked my friend if her child was showing any personality traits and she shared about how her child would make noises of discovery and point out new things to her parents. these discoveries ranged anywhere from a spider on the wall to the sound of the ac being turned on to an unfamiliar water bottle.

i remember not so long ago that i felt a different kind of energy about life; my inner thoughts were intense, curious, always churning and so hungry for more and i was eager to unabashedly share about these things. i leaned forward in seats when i was in conversation, greedy for opportunities to pick at others' brains and to bear my soul to others. my desire for intimacy in relationships was un-bound: i was raw and vulnerable and i think i thrived in it. but now the thought of returning to that intensity like sandpaper, or like the thought of a messy room that i have no desire to clean. i find that i have somehow begun to erect parameters in my heart for these conversations. i no longer look for them with nearly the same amount of intensity and in fact, somehow along the way i have begun to value privacy so much so that conversation has become increasingly taxing. i wonder if it's because i feel both burned and weary from relationships that i err on the side of caution, it seems like as i have implicitly experienced what feels safe and unsafe, my heart began to unconsciously build boundaries. it now feels relieving to detach myself from expectant desires and take a back seat to let things be, to let people be.

despair

source

if this is what despair feels like then it's bitter and sharp and brutally indifferent. i want to punch things and in the morning i want see purple and yellow shapes on my knuckles as an outward manifestation of what's inside. i don't care to pray, i've never felt so lucid and cold and dead inside. and i feel alone because no one can step in and feel these things and know with certainty that i'm not crazy. i hate explaining. i can barely validate myself, let alone legitimate myself before the many hands outstretched in a helpless gesture. i can only give you stale morsels because i myself am starving

i'm only fucking twenty one

sidenotes;

in a really not good place

reflections

source

this quarter/year is off to a really interesting start.

1) i feel as if the most prominent responsibility characteristic of adulthood for me is to understand my emotions -- to reign them in, to live with them, to give them necessary space, to own them, to befriend them. i am reminded of a quotation by joshua harris that says, "if we want to feel deeply, we must think deeply... true emotion- emotion that is reliable and does not lead us astray- is always a response to reality, to truth."

2) something about foreign words/concepts is very attractive lol, two of my favorite words right now are conscientização (friere) & cariño (duncan-andrade).

3) today self care involves feeding myself pesto pasta with sauteed asparagus & sweet peas + roasted tomatoes & mushrooms, drinking citrus sparkling water, going rock climbing, going running, blogging, and updating my ipod.

4) pain is an interesting thing... it "becomes a strange friend...but even in hours spent examining it and learning from it and even befriending it, it is ultimately from an external source and until that source relinquishes its power, the pain remains." -dr. charlene jin from isaac's 6th symposium

5) commonsensical practices/habits that i learn in a romantic relationship are for some reason not so commonsensical in my platonic friendships and i wonder why that is. i want to develop a more substantive understanding of platonic relationships and how they in fact may be the greatest of all loves... but even as i do so, how do i reconcile this heart-changing information with the isolating potential of implementing it in friendships where we are no longer on the same page? this is a rhetorical question. i realize that the goal is not to be right but to understand and submit and meet in the middle to move on.

6) everything that i assumed i knew about committing to a fellowship is being shaken as i find myself in a reality in which i desire to withdraw for my well-being. and even in saying this i feel myself subject to the condemnatory judgment of my brothers and sisters...

7) i need to be conscious of my expectations of others and keep them in check. unfortunately i don't generally become aware of my expectations until they are violated/unmet.

8) i really freaking need to say no to things. because i'm hecka dumb and say yes to commitments and then regret it.

sidenotes;
nrk

31st

source

today is the 31st. i give myself permission to cry randomly over stupid things like opening the fridge and not wanting to cook, or buying a cold pressed juice that turns out tasting gross, or when people miss my calls. today i give myself permission to post depressing melodramatic vague things on social media as a reckless and desperate vie for attention. i will avoid contact with people just because i feel like it and i will ignore the nagging need to explain myself. today i will indulge in angry unreasonable thoughts and let myself be irritated at all the halloween festivities. today i will also practice self care and exercise and cook even if i don’t feel like it. i will also try to tell at least two people about my dad. and cry about stupid dad jokes. i also hope it rains today because then it’ll be a rainy friday. and i will eat ice cream and watch tv or something. i might splurge on some new shoes. and i won’t sleep until midnight because this is the one day i’ll let myself do these things

sidenotes;
lol herp

rage

source

rage feels like expletives tearing out of my gut and up my throat and past my biting teeth. it feels like thick hot fast blood shooting through my veins and it feels like recklessness trembling in my limbs and my clenched fists. rage feels like the cold amusement of remembering that my knuckles are made of soft skin and bones instead of steel. soft, ripped skin. rage is a violent and powerful substance that fills me from my gut to my throat, destroying my stomach, puncturing my lungs, freezing my heart, twisting my esophagus.

this week i have felt these things. today i did push ups until i couldn't and said fuck a lot and punched the mattress because i didn't want to destroy my knuckles.

sidenotes;

why do we react in anger to hurt? why do i scratch my eczema when i'm distressed? why do i have random thin scratches on the left side of the bridge of my nose?

life is moving at a very uncomfortable pace right now
emotional left fielders hecka messing with my sleep schedule and my study life

amnesia

source

"i am certain that the dimensions and content of my heart's landscape and layered architecture is undergoing some kind of pivotal activity. what will it look like? who will it hold? how much will it be able to hold? what beauty has been unearthed and what frightful things must still be uprooted and destroyed? what things have been built, are being built, are being torn down, reconstructed?" may 22, "effusive"

"i am certain," i said.

lately i have largely collapsed inside myself and withdrawn all of my processing into places where only choice few are capable of entering. the landscape and layered architecture of my heart is indeed mutating, but in ways that i am unfamiliar with. with wounds this severe my capacity for vulnerability exponentially withers away. processing this particular wound looks like repeatedly and knowingly traveling a well worn road where a traumatic event happened, reexperiencing the pain, and resurfacing with amnesia. and when i share with people it just sounds dumb coming out of my mouth and i feel more defeated with every word i speak. explaining hurt is really difficult when what i really need is for people to step into my pain without me having to walk you into it! exclamation mark!

sidenotes;

also i have this huge amount of affection in my heart for this one person and also a huge amount of hurt in my heart from this other person and idk how such diametrically opposed emotions can coexist, i feel so bipolar and contradictory. jk capacity to love and capacity to hurt may very well be more related than i give credit for. herp

apparently "intrusion" is a theme in how i understand interpersonal relationships. hecka introvert status

blessed are those who mourn

source

"nothing wounds like elusive love."

my bouts with loneliness feel like awful echoing emptiness inside my hollow frame. this space exerts gravitational pull on all things untrue and condemnatory, and as the voices which accentuate my unloved state get louder i find myself withdrawing like a wounded animal, unable to reach out for help. in these moments my deepest fears of being unloved by certain people surface. who do i reach for in these moments? why?

i am conscious of the way triggers layer and snowball, and of the richness which arises from the soil of my woundedness when i welcome jesus' healing presence into my tender mess. i am seeing that people in this world are so, so lonely. tonight i recoiled into jesus' arms and saw that i am blessed because i mourn, and that he turns weeping into dancing.

this summer has not been a bad summer. but it has been a lonely, fast, unrestful, and unfed summer. i have been like a delusional and disoriented sheep wandering the fringes of the pasture: ears ringing, eyes swollen, stomach growling. i need him to be gentle with me because i cannot see the tenderness in his eyes as he reaches for me.

sidenotes;
i have hecka bug bites

mundane

source

"Throughout these forty days Jesus fasted from food so that he could all the more fully enter the divine feast. Then...God allowed the evil One to come to him with three great temptations...they were temptations for Jesus to access for his own use the three most prominent social institutions of the day -- economic, religious, political [turn stones into bread, leap from the temple and be caught by angels, and lord over all the kingdoms].

...but Jesus knew that domination and force were not God's ways. He rejected coercive structures because he intended to demonstrate a new kind of power, a new way of ruling. Serving, suffering, dying -- these were Jesus' messianic forms of power.

In those forty days in the wilderness Jesus rejected the popular Jewish hope for a Messiah who would feed the poor, bask in miraculous heavenly approval, and shuck off oppressive nations. And he undercut the leverage of the three great social institutions of his day (and of ours) - exploitative economics, manipulative religion, and coercive politics." Streams of Living Water, Richard J. Foster p.6-7

"wisdom as a charism of the Holy Spirit is far more than knowledge or information, more even than truth; it is truth applied to the heart and the mind in such a living way that the person is transformed" p.9

"we must recognize that the majority of Jesus' life - and of ours - is found in our families and homes, in our work and play, among our neighbors and in our everyday surroundings. This tangible world is the place we most fully experience the outflow of love, joy, peace, and all the fruit of the Spirit. Here and nowhere else. It was true for Jesus; it is true for us." p.21

i include the first two excerpts just for record keeping sake but want to address the last quotation. this summer i have been feeling, as i usually do during the summers, dry, purposeless, empty, dead. when i write, i write impulsively upon emotional waves and find that the act of writing feeds my soul as well. life circumstances will trigger my thought processes and my heart quickly follows as it connects long thematic arches and attributes it to God's work. but when life slows down, my heart, ill-adjusted to this speed, atrophies as its vision of life's grand meanings becomes frustratingly veiled.

so in light of the tone of my past two posts, i find that this summer is not a bad summer at all. god has placed me squarely in the midst of the social justice community in sd; i have found a new friend in jesús m.; i get to see my favorite people every weekend; i get paid; jackie is with me so that i'm not alone in the evenings.

things that give me life this summer: caring for people, thinking about the asian american church, meeting with trish and being rejuvenated by the kindred dreams i have in her, reading from nouwen and foster and lewis, sleeping, eating well, my new makana candle

swept, dazed

source

i don't really know what i'm doing. after my quarter ended, and after three weeks of sleeping at home and hanging out with someone every day of the week, i came back to san diego to start my internship with CPI's SEJ program in mid-city. i had one week of training, a three day independence day weekend (highlights include playing with cats, munchkins, lbp, hiking in killer heat, going to la), and this week i started at my assigned site, ICWJ in north park. the past two weeks i have missed freeway exits at least once a day because freeways in sd are convoluted and patchily built. i hate sd freeways. today i helped load boxes into the truck for the refugees and none of the staff stopped to ask my name.

after getting home i eat dinner, feel lonely, chat online, go to bed. i spend a lot of energy listening with my heart and asking god to show me the hearts of my coworkers; he gives me insight with which i know not what to do but pray throughout the day in the cage (haven?) of my mind. i want to make heart connections but it feels out of reach because from what i gather from the spiritual climate, they don't seem to be very aware of the depths of their heart to be able to share. and to the extent that they are aware, they stash it away from the workplace. is it okay that the work i want to always do is heart work? i miss the women in tenderloin. i feel far removed from anything that gives me life.

e said that god has given this internship to me because he loves me and knows what i need - and i suppose that is to be in san diego, to be in the midst of social justice work, to be in the midst of people who have yet to know jesus, to have physical separation and emotional room to think and be silent. but in the midst of it i am more aware of my heart's longing for substantial human connection; i miss the company of those who nourish me, even if i see them on the weekends.

will you ask me what i've been learning? will you hold the things on my heart with me, because sometimes they're too heavy by myself? do you see me? are these not near fundamental human cries that we as humans have sometimes? do you hear these cries in the everyday interactions of those around you?

i feel like that moment of disorienting unfocus as i frantically try to focus my camera lens and fumble with inexperienced hands. give me the eyes to see that which i cannot by nature.

sidenotes;

sometimes i feel like an insane person

snapshots

source

life has no glorified destinations on this side of eternity. we are nomads in no man's land and i am only twenty. here are multiple threads lying in my quivering palms, i'm not sure how god will hold them together:

i feel as if i live from obstacle to obstacle. i often feel the need to cohesively understand all that is occurring in my life so that i may articulate it to my loved ones, but when i am incapable of doing so it's as if i look inside and see emptiness and lies and fakery.

i enjoy walking around barefoot until my feet are raw and my mind is quiet and my heart is full with the richness of conversation with my favorite person. being known, being loved, knowing, and loving are gifts to me in this moment.

i don't know how i can experience such polarized worlds of emotions, but the god who authors romance also is revealing some hefty things. there is this one area of my life that i wish i could claim even a mustard seed sized faith. it is ugly and dead and i am seeing by the grace of god that this is one area that i do not allow the light of gospel truths to penetrate and take root. here i am only a sinner engulfed in anger; here i am a lost cause, i am the target of god's wrath. here the cross of jesus is small but in the darkness of his tomb i will await his resurrection. he brings life from death does he not. let praise arise from my mangled voice

in every moment i am where i am supposed to be. nothing can fall outside of god's sovereignty; to sit in the entirety of god's sovereignty is to consciously avoid diminishing his sovereignty in "bad" times and avoid augmenting his sovereignty in "good" times. he is fearfully and wonderfully sovereign in all things.

limbo

source

it's been brought to my attention that as God moves people into different seasons of life (through different struggles, life stages, milestones) -- that my knee-jerk reaction is to resist change and dig my feet into the ground that bows to God and moves regardless of my petty whines of protest. i am just about as equipped to hold onto certain relationships in certain seasons as i am to hold water in my shaking hands. this sentiment might just be particularly apparent because at this moment i feel like i'm in limbo - i have been groomed in this education system to be prepared for nothing. i am a twenty year old, unmarketable nobody with a lot of hopes and dreams and with little experience. i don't know how anybody gets from place a to place b in their lives; i have a feeling our parents knew little more than we currently do when they were in their twenties. i have a feeling nobody ever feels like they have their lives together in neat packages of achievements and structured predictability. i have no idea (this is probably a lie) why i feel so little peace recently; i have allowed the noisiness of life to shake me from my center of peace and joy and idk! i am sorely in need of some type of healing of some type of sickness because something feels really off

what do i know to be true?
what are my anchors?
jesus is always worthy of praise and rejoicing is he not?

sidenotes;

hohum one day this will no longer be an issue foregrounded in my mind 24/7

needy

source

this quarter i think i knew i was heartsick but i was blithely unaware of the extent. it was obvious when i laid my head to sleep but only met layers of fears and worries masked in outrageous and nightmarish fantasies of hypotheticals. it was most obvious when i woke up in the morning and lay paralyzed for half an hour to forty five minutes, weighed down by heavy limbs and a weak heart. somehow rest became an ordeal. in my heartsickness i also twisted my care for certain people as my desire to comfort leaked out as strained and silent begging. my hands, outstretched, reached to give what i thought i had but the silhouette it outlined on the ground was of profoundly empty and wretched and shaking hands reaching to grab and possess what i didn't have. i want to say i should have paid attention to the symptoms sooner - but that would suggest that i could have done something different, that i have the power to change this heartsickness. the wonderfully liberating implication of my helplessness is precisely that i have become cognizant of my sickness and my neediness, and now i can begin to receive healing. today god's grace has shed light upon the architecture of my heart/mind to reveal that it is currently characterized by lonely and chaotic streets running between buildings of quasi-processed materials. my atrophied lungs are hungrily filling with the realization that i was feeling lonely and it hurts like stabs of cold air. so simple, so painful, so freeing, so healing!

yesterday i spent time with e and today after sleeping 11 hours i ran some errands and then did devos near the lake and read henri nouwen's turn thy mourning into dancing for three hours at the bookstore. in kind of a clunky, awkward, rusty way, i am re-acclimating to resting while maintaining a vivid orientation of purposefulness independent of my task-driven schedule. also, today i was attacked by a canadian goose hahaha herp

sidenotes;

my awful migraine has somehow magically abated after i finished writing this
wau thanks brain
edit// 3.20; last night i had a dream that she was complaining about me as a "problem" on the phone to her sister and i was pounding the table with all my strength and screaming my protest and she completely ignored me.

20

source

i'm 20 and i'm a mess.

i am a mess of fears and desires, some experience and no experience, and plenty of imaginaries. but i also remember being 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. i remember always feeling like a mess of fears and desires.  it's strange how the visual closeness of those numbers in text form seem to violently and flippantly gloss over all that has happened between each of those numbers; but even as they cannot embody my memories, my memory does a similar thing. my memories are abridged and i'm left with a vaguely helpless sense of loss.

but i'm none of those ages, i am 20 and i'm a mess but i'm still here. i can also be melodramatic sometimes

"My hour in Carmelite chapel is more important than I can fully know myself. It is not an hour of deep prayer, nor a time in which I experience a special closeness to God; it is not a period of serious attentiveness to the divine mysteries. I wish it were! On the contrary, it is full of distractions, inner restlessness, sleepiness, confusion, and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases my senses. But the simple fact of being for one hour in the presence of the Lord and of showing him all that I think, feel, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him. Somehow, somewhere, I know that he loves me, even though I do not feel that love as I can feel a human embrace, even though I do not hear a voice as I hear human words of consolation, even though I do not see a smile as I can see a human face. Still the Lord speaks to me, looks at me, and embraces me there, where I am still unable to notice it. The only way I become aware of his presence is in that remarkable desire to return to that quiet chapel and be there without any real satisfaction. Yes, I notice, maybe only retrospectively, that my days and weeks are different days and weeks when they are held together by these regular "useless" times. God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart.  I do believe that he touches me in places that are unknown even to myself. I seldom can point directly to these places; but when I feel this inner pull to return again to that hidden hour of prayer, I realize that something is happening that is so deep that it becomes like the riverbed through which the waters can safely flow and find their way to the open sea." -Henri J. Nouwen

this just happened

yea

sidenotes;

five more days
1!!!

peace like a river

source

there is sometimes a claustrophobic bubble of tense smallness in my chest; i am particularly aware of its presence when the pace of the last few years of my life leaves me little room to sit back and pause to catch my breath. in that awful smallness i am aware of how fragile and fleeting the present is. i am also aware of how fixed the past is and how intenable and inscrutable the future is as it stalwartly frustrates all my feverish attempts to pry security to cling onto. my small hands cannot reach back and fiddle with the past; my small hands are too small to carry the weight of the present; my small hands cannot reach into the dark of the future to get any answers.

it is in this visceral "fear of smallness" and lack of control and direction that i find that i must direct my thoughts to the only Person worthy of my attention, energy, and hope. in this buzzing fear i am also aware of a God who holds my whole life in his hands: his presence was threaded through the fabric of my past, is a working force in my present regardless of the level of my awareness, and is promised reassurance for all of my future. i don't have to change the past because he has written it that way; i don't have to carry the present because he holds it for me, and i don't have to foresee the future because he will orchestrate it. as i meditate upon his worthiness of my trust, my emotions will align with the steadying nature of this truth. this, i suppose, is what it means to have peace like a river. give me battered and bruised and ugly knees as i use the transformative power of conversation with my Father to turn that claustrophobic bubble into a house of refuge and sanctuary. it is his presence in this bubble that transforms it. with him as the object of my faith i may content myself with being small in this moving river because he is my peace. whom shall i fear?

sidenotes;

this weekend was a place of reassurance and refuge and rest. praise bubbles up from the depths of my heart when i think about the way i am able to encounter God through the people who share the same King in their hearts.

also i am very loved :) hehe

adulthood

source

nobody warned me exactly what would make transitioning into adulthood so difficult. so many growing pains. thanks life. tell me what's redemptive in this, because i can see very little and i'm at a loss. my palms are empty, they have nothing immediately concrete to grasp onto. all i've got is an empty and hungry, desperation-fueled hope in the pit of my stomach as i double over to catch my breath. run this race, he says - don't be afraid, he says - i have overcome, he says. i am feeling increasingly bewildered that stories of similar struggle braved by people older than me have yet to come to my attention. indignant even, maybe. why is everyone silent?

the gospel's meaning needs to be ever increasing in my life

sidenotes;
three rainy fridays in a row. i am loved by the king.
also daaaangit, the coming two weeks are gonna freaking suck

in, on, through

source

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. James 1:2-5

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:4-7

He loves me. He hears me. He works good for me.
this i will drill into my brain as i press in. press on. press through.
this i will tattoo onto my heart as He holds it together, as it bleeds into His hands.
this i will sing over my limbs like a soothing ointment, as they tremble and cry for relief.
this i will shout to my feet, as they bear the pounding weight of my body in this race, as they brave the unpaved and uncharted and hostile territories.

sidenotes;
today was really hard. but it started with sweet and ended with sweet. and so i am grateful for so many things! thank you, God, for loving me, through so many ways.

edit// this weekend was so hard. feeling vulnerable, tired, fragile, needy, leary, like a cornered animal
to love, to suffer
and in all things to glorify Him

not an option

source

i'm not sure what to think, feel, or do about this new development. is there ever any clear direction when those you most desire approval from cannot give it? when people who have played a formative role in my life are unwilling or unable to enter into the joy of that which is close to your heart? not only unwilling, but straight up resistant? what if they are ignorant to the ways that they cannot meet you where you are? what if they are aware that they cannot meet you where you are? what if running away is not an option and i am left with the mess that is life in my shaking palms and unsure fingers

god would you go before me, like i know you do
god would you help me welcome the bitter with the sweet

p.s. the concept of generational sin kind of terrifies the pewp out of me

sidenotes;
since when did new developments ever come with new obstacles
never, that's when