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.