תוהו ובוהו

I have spent my whole life in selfishness...too overwhelmed to help someone or hear someone or see someone...and now I am in a position where I am in a new place jumping from home to home...all I want is for someone to ask me how I am doing and hear me...but I know that I cannot share my words with people right now...so instead I ask others how they are doing and hear them. I am financially unstable but I get to share with others...I feel that I came to Nashville feeling that this was a time for God to love on me like I am a baby...completely helpless...I thought this would be a time of lavishing as I selfishly take from God and others...and somehow what happened is that I find myself in a place where I feel I am being called to stop throwing a tantrum and open my eyes to see the world around me. I have been just living with others and hearing there life while my words remain stored away from most people here in Nashville. I came to talk...and yet I am here to listen...I came to heal...and the healing is so ridiculous that it makes no sense. I have been forced to let go...and I have been handed the adventures and the new eyes I have been asking for forever...but to be honest...I am so overwhelmed...I still have to live with my life...my choices...I miss my friend. I don't know what will happen...I can't change anything nor can I do anything...but I hate sin...I want relationship. I miss her. And I am realizing the weight of my move to Nashville in my expectations...I am here...but my heart is somewhere...and reality is here. I can't say what I want...but what I can say is this: my heart in my current life circumstances feels the way I feel when I listen to Bon Iver...enchantingly joyful and crushingly brokenhearted. Oh friends...please pray for my heart...these new freedoms are heavy...my adventures are heavy...nothing right now fits...my greatest adventures are matched with hardest struggles...too much all at once...but I am going to view it like the hardest rock climbing problem...I am going to grit my teeth, chalk my bloody hands, and beast it!!! I am determined to love my current life in all the good and all the bad...I am determined to conquer it...but my mind and my heart waver between being strong enough...lol 

I told my friend Ginger this...it feels like Rocks and Moss...I am so broken and yet so healed. My journey over the last few years...and I mean heck the last few months...days...have been so painful...like walking on rocks...God is bringing me to a place of rest...like He is bringing me to a place of walking on moss...what I am realizing in this is that God is beautiful and rest is wonderful and yet my feet (heart) still hurt...there are sores and blisters and blood still left to heal...I am feeling the sore sting of the rocks upon the beautiful moss...

But what the heck...despite the brokenness of my heart with friends, pain of uncertainty, weariness from houselessness, sting of sin...I am on one of the coolest and most humbling adventures...but I am tired so I am going to sleep...gotta get up early to rock climb!!! :) 

Cliff Diving

The day you realize that freedom and change is working in you. To feel healed...to be fully known by so many around you but knowing only Gods opinion and actions matter...I can breathe lighter for the first time in a long long time.

Picnics with God

I will sing because you are good
I will dance because you are good
I will shout because you are good
You are good to me


I had such a hard time singing those words today...I feel overwhelmed and burdened...but God I want nothing circumstantial to blur the lines of the truth of your everlasting goodness...open my eyes and change me limited feelings/understanding...

Help me.

Money, health, living situations, relationships, my sin...these keep me from seeing Your everlasting goodness...I confess my sin without shame asking for Your help...

I want to be healthy more than you...help me???

Where am I? Learning about what trusting God looks like in a way I haven't known before.

So I've never been in a situation of not having a home. I am now in a place of having to possibly find a place to stay for the next month and a half to possibly two and a half months...I'd be lying if I did admit that I am actually truly stressed and frustrated. I have never planned to be 25 and without my own family let alone my own home...but ironically I guess just now I'm realizing that I have always planned to not have a normal life...so I guess the truth is God is giving me the chance to enjoy an adventure...lol

But really guys if you'd be in prayer that I can find a super cheap or free living situation for the next few months...

Also sometimes church leaves you with these thoughts: so today's sermon was on seeing how God sees and being willing to suffer with Him...I realized I was angry to hear this sermon. Angry because I was there...desiring to give up everything to go across the country to live desolately to love the broken. I wanted to travel the country helping churches learn how to minister to the homosexual population and to hike the AT and preach the gospel...or be a counselor to reach broken families and kids...I feel that my heart in my eyes for brokenness and my heart for the hurting...I feel God allowed it to be stomped out and destroyed...I feel that financially these things get farther and farther from ever being possible and I am super pissed and feeling like I'm being kicked when I'm already down...

But God doesn't destroy what He desires...He's not a mean or a contradictory God.

Maybe I'm just not seeing the truth of my own personal decisions that have destroyed or made it impossible to get to where I desperately wanted to go for God or maybe I never really wanted it for God...

Today has been a weird day. Ending in tears because I miss my family... But God will finish the good work He has started...I know this is all right...just hard today.

Sunny Saturdays

So sometimes you sit outside on a tree root and write: what has life been like lately? It's been like going to watch a counseling session between yourself and God. It's like I'm watching this happen from the outside. To step so close to God and so far from yourself it is a weird but good experience. I've been able to see my flaws and darkness without being crushed by it. I've met myself as perhaps Gods sees me. It's weird and I cannot explain it. I'm broken by my failures and seeing why I'm broken. I love those around me and I'm seeing how my sin effects them. It's great to be free from the crushing weight off shame...to be functionally able to address sin in your life. God is gentle...it is Satan and ourselves who crush us.

God is so lovingly bringing life. I'm not where I want to be...but God is not angry. He is not demanding me to be someone or something but He is demanding me. Just me. Demanding what has kept me locked up and bound so as to keep me from joy and life and light. My mind. The darkest prison. So God breaks chains by these words: "THE AFFIRMATION ACCEPTANCE ADMIRATION YOU ARE LONGING FOR HAS ALREADY BEEN GIVEN TO YOU   AND IS CONTINUALLY AND UNCONDITIONALLY AND ENDLESSLY BEING LAVISHED ON YOU...FROM ME. AS CHRIST LOVES THE CHURCH. YOU ARE MY BRIDE."

My life has not turned out the way I hAd been planning it to be...I still have big dreams that mean everything to me...but I suppose that I'm in a place where I'm having to learn that sanctification is what matters most. To become more like God should be my heart and should be better than my dreams of being married and being a counselor and hiking the AT. Perhaps until you're more like God you cannot really enjoy those things...but I'd be lying to say that I have truly embraced that.

I have met someone...myself for who I truly am...and God is trying to teach me why I need Him...I'm beginning to see...

On a completely irrelevant side note: i wish Middle Earth wAs real...hahaha (must be the fact I'm sitting on a free root smelling the dirt)

I love that God made dirt!!!!

How can I heal if I don't know time?

You know what's wonderful?

 God is always trying to get to you...I went for a walk the other day that had the potential of self pity...when all of a sudden God showed up very loudly and clearly bringing up an issue that I had not been aware of. Setting yourself up for failure. We do it all the time...I don't think we wake up one day and say I am going to screw up my life...no I think we invite sin with such subtly that we don't even realize it. That is what Satan wants...just enough to keep us completely clueless...but God loves us so much that He won't stand for that. He desires to make us wise...and sometimes He knows we need to hear what He has to say so even when we aren't trying to listen He is loud and clear!!!

I would suggest trying to listen though...I am working on it!

And I need it...we need to hear our King...He has a lot of life to bring! And a lot of light to bring to our darkness!

Umbrellas and Bushes

I am eating Tofu at the moment and contemplating whether the eggs I ate this morning were stopping the process of a baby chicken coming into life or if the egg was just never fertilized...so forgive me if my post turns out a bit strange. Speaking of strange...to feel that no where is home is strange...I just went and visited Lynchburg where I have lived for the last 5 years but it no longer felt like home...in just a month it became a strange place to visit with beautiful friends there that I have missed. And then I journed back home to Nashville...but that doesn't feel like home either...it was strange to be caught up in the in between...but isn't that where we, sons and daughters of God, are? This is not our home...until we are fully restored into our rightful relationship with God nothing will ever feel like home. I want to embrace this truth. I do not want to feel perfectly at home until I am fully restored in Christ. Nashville feels more like home then anywhere else now because I feel I am getting closer to God and living amongst people who are the body of Christ to me...and yet I am not home. So what am I learning while I am away? Well, this past month has been pretty ridiculously overwhelming...in good and bad ways.

Things I am learning in no particular order:

1) God is very loving. He really does care and does demand life for us. He desires to get His hands messy in sanctification with us. He makes us worthy...beautiful...He makes us able to love.

2) I have a choice: I can choose to be in God/life or I can choose to be in Sin/Death. The things I hate...I have the choice to say no to. Simple...hard...but much easier then I originally ever believed.

3) Communication is good and beautiful. I am realizing I bought into a lie that my thoughts/feelings/opinions were not right nor were they safe to share...I forgive myself and others who helped teach this to me and prepare to embark on a new journey. To be known by someone is not to just let them in on your past but to let them in on your present. If something is eating at my mind or I feel a certain way I will no longer hide who I am or how I feel for fear that it will be shut down or rejected or that I will be rejected...I am who I am and I feel how I feel and with the help of God I hope to become more and more like Christ in those aspects...but I want to share who I am with those around me...not keep myself looking good on the outside but something else on the inside.

4) God gives us warning signs for a reason, and it is never okay to ignore them for the sake of your plans. If my car check engine light comes on I will not embark on a trip across the country...so why do I do the same in living terms?

5) I must learn to live for myself...not get ready for life with someone...but just get ready for life for me...for God in my life. I want a family...but as I reminded myself by reminding a friend. God sometimes has bigger plans then our momentary satisfaction of our requests.

6) God is always close...always waiting for me to turn to Him. It is never Him that keeps us apart...its is me...I want to change that and get closer and closer.

7) I need to learn how to interact with the guys around me...not needing affirmation...that was a poor lie that I have allowed myself to remain victimized under...but I do not have to be the victim anymore...and my past should not way lay to my present/future.

8) I am human. I have feelings. I am not perfect...I need to be okay with how I feel sometimes...work them out and give them to God...but it is time to stop being so hard on myself.

9) Seriously, stop being so hard on yourself.

10) I have opened so many doors into my life for Satan to swoop in and destroy...now is the time to start shutting those doors...I like Aslan lions...not devouring Satan lions.

11) I love babies...I want babies.

12) I want to hike the Appalachian Trail so badly and for some reason my heart is longing for it way more. I do not trust that God will open the door for this desire.

13) Never miss an opportunity for God to work in your life. He is always there...and always working in  crazy ways.

14) I love God.

15) I do not have to compare myself with others and consider myself a failure or a winner...I am a Meme. And not meant to be anything but a Meme...well a Natalie I suppose I am meant to be as well.

Renew your mind. Bodies as living sacrifices.
This is real...this is necessary...this is life abundant.

No, life here in Nashville is not all peachy keen. Somedays it sucks...my heart hurts a lot...I struggle with being who I want to be...or even wanting to be who I want to be. But...it is the closest thing to being out in the woods...I can breathe a little better here. And now that I am realizing that I need to be living my life and preparing for my life...with just me in in...just me and God...I feel I am going to be breathing a lot more now.

Things to do:

1) Find a place to live for free/relatively cheap for a month or two...in 18 days...(God, please help provide...really)

2) Find families/mentors.

3) Make 1 or 2 new friends apart from Grace Center/or people connected to everyone I know.

4) Work out more.

5) SPEND TIME WITH GOD WHERE I ALLOW HIM TO SPEAK AND WASH ME.

6) Find new places to explore no one has shown me.

7) Join rock climbing gym.

Well,
     I am very sleepy. And this post was not nearly what I wanted or meant it to sound like...but hi, I am Meme...and these are my thoughts as they pour out of my head. Tomorrow: I need to realize the importance of intimacy with my King. I need Him to be my love.


Good night dear friends.