awake my soul

thoughts and truth from the band mumford and sons. if you haven't heard of them, give them a listen.
awake my soul: mumford and sons

How fickle my heart and how woozy my eyes
I struggle to find any truth in your lies
And now my heart stumbles on things I don't know
This weakness I feel I must finally show

Lend me your hand and we'll conquer them all
But lend me your heart and I'll just let you fall
Lend me your eyes I can change what you see
But your soul you must keep, totally free

In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your life
In these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die
Where you invest your love, you invest your life

Awake my soul, awake my soul
Awake my soul
You were made to meet your maker
Awake my soul, awake my soul
Awake my soul
You were made to meet your maker
You were made to meet your maker

Silence is Deadly

teach me to love. enemies, or those that i just don't want to love

thankful

home. it feels good to be here. having family around me again puts me at ease. being away from school causes me to breathe easier and somehow slow down.

thanksgiving is a time for that very thing. slowing down to take notice of the good things around me. to see the things in my life that i enjoy and to be grateful for those.

i enjoy the warmth of the sun on my face. i enjoy the way leaves take on warm colors as fall begins to get colder. i enjoy the grass right after its been cut; both the way it looks and how it smells. i enjoy those ten minutes before sundown, when the setting sun throws pink, purple and orange across the clouds. i enjoy the mountains after it rains. they are capped in white and seem close enough to touch.

i enjoy warmth and genuineness from others, those ones who just put a smile on my face. i enjoy the times of deep conversation that happen without effort. i enjoy hearing wisdom and affirmation from those i look up to. i enjoy doing things with others that we share a common love for.

i enjoy seeing the way God moves in other people. i enjoy a love that is unconditional, one that i know hardly a piece of and yet it still fills me. i enjoy the fact that God designed me unique from all other human beings, that i have a purpose just as unique and that He wants a relationship with me. i enjoy the fact that i can always look to Him in uncertainty, to talk to, knowing He knows what's really going on inside of me.

"God, the LORD, created the heavens ands stretched them out. He created the earth and everything in it. He gives breath to everyone, life to everyone who walks the earth. And it is he who says 'I the Lord have called you to demonstrate my righteousness...' " Isaiah 42.5

Lewis' Screwtape

This book, in case you haven't read it, is a hypothetical conversation between two demons, Screwtape and his nephew Wormwood. It is a conversation about the temptation and projected demise of a fictional man. This excerpt is Screwtape talking to his nephew about what humans are in their eyes.

"To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands [ the Enemy=God in this context] of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not, (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself..We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.?

i second that.

this is something that someone i look up to wrote. it resonates with me; i admire this dream and i think that this is what men ought to be more like.


I want to be a strong man. I want a wife and a family and I want to love them well. I want a life marked by sacrifice and simplicity. I want to be a man who returns calls and leaves his door unlocked. I want to take my family for breakfast after church.

I want a house that smells like coffee and food and warmth and I want it always full of people. I want to live in community with my friends and their families; we’ll raise each other’s kids, paying special attention to our own. I want to keep tradition; nutcrackers at Christmas. I want to drink champagne with my wife on New Year’s Eve and play football the morning after. I want an old car that I drive on Sundays and I want kids who know who they are.

I want to work hard and do well. I want to communicate and build relationships and I want to buy the first round. I want to laugh honestly and breathe easy and I want to be an agent of hope. I want to live in love and let the world know why.

And I want God’s feet to mark the center, his proud arms holding the weight of all that life.

I guess that’s what I want when I grow up.

sight

give me your eyes. let me see deep. teach me to look further. longer. slower. to see them.

quoted

"Idolatry is a mistake about reality..It arises from the crying need of human beings to gain control over their lives. That need is understandable, of course, and it must be met in some way. But idolatry tries to meet the need by assigning powers to an object of human imagination and artifice, powers that object does not actually posess..."

Dallas Willard: Knowing Christ Today: Why we can trust Spiritual Knowledge

Love Came Down

truth in the words of this song.

so when do we become adults?

i'm studying for my developmental psych class tonight and one of the sections of the material is on emerging adulthood. they define this as the period between late teens and mid-to-late twenties when individuals are not adolescents but not fully adults. the authors look to different things in our culture that have been used as a marker for the start of adulthood. here's what they came up with; these things have are what some people think kickstarts adulthood.

college degree.
ability to drink.
ability to vote.
romantic involvement.
child and spouse.
independence from parent.
formation of identity and independence.

i don't think that these exactly hit the mark. i have my own opinions but let me know what you think. what qualifies a person as no longer a young adult? why the period of adolescence?

truth

"Therefore, brothers, we have an obligation-but it is not to the sinful nature, to live according to it. For if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die; but if by the spirit, you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live because those who live by the spirit of God are sons of God." Romans 8.12-13

divorce statistics explained

interesting explanation as to why the divorce rate in America is NOT actually fifty percent. check it out.
Divorce Rate: It's not as high as you think

this.

peace

i remind myself of all that you've done.

and the life i have because of Your son.

[love came down and rescued me. love came down and set me free. i am yours, i am forever yours]

romans 8.38 "And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God's love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today or our worries about tomorrow-not even the powers of hell can separate us from God's love."

mob mentality and self inventory

tonight i went to the men's soccer game as they played a post season match against vanguard. it brought out a long of different emotions to say the least. it was quite a game but one of the things that struck me the most was how easily it is to get into things. i wanted to yell insults back. i wanted to tell the crowd they needed to grow up. i wanted to tell the players to play fair and stop acting like babies. i wanted to nag the players right along with the rest of em. and thats just a bit of it.

what does it look like to love your enemy? i couldn't find an answer in the game tonight. one thing i did find was an instance where i had to admit that there was no way to be humble on my own. there was no way to be loving on my own. there was no way to avoid judgement on my own. i remarked that i could not make a habit of going to games like this because of what it was bringing out in me. what gives me the right to feel so much bitterness and anger to people i don't know? what gives me the right to find fault in them and write them off as not worth my time?

God. teach me true humility and love for others. even enemies.

give it a listen

if any of you are fans of alexi murdoch, city and colour, or joshua radin, then check this guy out.

Greg Laswell: Take a Bow. great album