Thought for the day: Ecclesiastes 3:1 " For everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heavens.
A subject that has been coming up repeatedly for me and for the people in my inner circle is transition. Change. Renewal. However you want to phrase it, when its put in laymans terms, life is moving, and like Sam Cooke said...a change is gonna come.
But how can transition come about when all of the players in the saga seem stuck? I must admit that I have been feeling stuck lately...I didn't make the best choices academically in the past, and because of that instead of graduating in May with a bachelor's degree like I should be, I will be starting back to school in August with at least another year and a half left on my degree...and more than that if I choose to add a minor. I will be going from making my own money (like I have for the past 3 years) back to being a broke college student with my hand out...unless I take classes at odd hours so my work schedule doesn't suffer...and I don't know if I am up to that...all of this because I didn't ask for help when I needed it. All of this because I let the whims of a few vapid college girls affect me deep down. All of this because I veered off track. So yes, I am feeling stuck...while the friends I grew up with are applying to jobs and grad school and trainee positions and talking about what they will wear to their senior formals...I am here. Stuck.
And then there is home life...we are in the process of looking for a house...and I feel like my mother is stuck where this is concerned. She doesn't want the responsibility that comes with owning a home, whereas I feel like taking 10 years of living in a home and cramming that into an apt is just a gigantic step back. So the date is looming for us to move into our next season and we have no clue as to what we are going to do...all we know is that we have to go.
So I have school and work, and mom has this house thing, and I have friends stuck in relationship and economy issues, and we all have this common lament that things just aren't moving as fast as we would like. It csan be frustrating and discouraging as all get out, but then I look at the scripture at the top and things start to make sense...nothing is solved, but I gotta believe that neither me nor my mom, fam, and friends would be in our present situation unless there was a reason. For everything there is a purpose...and I for one cannot wait to see how my purpose presents itself.
Until next time.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Reaching Out To My Nineveh
Thought for the day: "The will of God will not take you anywhere that the grace of God cannot protect you"
Amen.
Today in church (shout out to Mother Anjel and St. Luke's in Baltimore!!), the homily had to do with Jonah and Nineveh...how Jonah was being sent into this unfamiliar place, this hotbed of dissent and destruction, and far from being the kind of eager saint who jumps up and says "SURE!!"...he did not want to go...
I mean, he did not want to go AT ALL. And Mother Anjel went on to say that each of us as Christians has a Nineveh. We all have a place that we are being called to do God's work, a place that for one reason or another is giving us reason to be like "oh HELL no...I can't do it"
But how many of ya'll know that not only CAN we do it, we WILL do it if God has anything to do with it?
I started thinking about my own Nineveh...and its not somewhere that I don't want to go necessarily...its just somewhere that has taught me to augment my thinking...I am an assistant teacher at The Jewish Community Center in Baltimore, and while I love all 12 of my children to pieces, working with my head teacher who has a completely different belief system when it comes to disciplining children, causes me to chafe sometimes.
I enjoy teaching. I enjoy learning, but Lord knows there are days where I have literally been praying for inner strength up until the point where I walked in the door. I have had to learn to be humble, moreso than I have ever had to be before. I have had to learn to be gracious, and slow to anger, and patient. I think the biggest thing that I have learned inthis is that I am called to be a teacher...I am being trained and all the anger and resentment in the world at the stripes I have to endure on the way to having my own classroom can change the fact that God designed me to work with his smallest angels.
So I understand Nineveh...I understand reaching out to something when every fiber of common sense wants to say screw you and move on, and I definitely understand being covered by Jehovah Shalom as He prepares me to do bigger and better things.
Amen.
Amen.
Today in church (shout out to Mother Anjel and St. Luke's in Baltimore!!), the homily had to do with Jonah and Nineveh...how Jonah was being sent into this unfamiliar place, this hotbed of dissent and destruction, and far from being the kind of eager saint who jumps up and says "SURE!!"...he did not want to go...
I mean, he did not want to go AT ALL. And Mother Anjel went on to say that each of us as Christians has a Nineveh. We all have a place that we are being called to do God's work, a place that for one reason or another is giving us reason to be like "oh HELL no...I can't do it"
But how many of ya'll know that not only CAN we do it, we WILL do it if God has anything to do with it?
I started thinking about my own Nineveh...and its not somewhere that I don't want to go necessarily...its just somewhere that has taught me to augment my thinking...I am an assistant teacher at The Jewish Community Center in Baltimore, and while I love all 12 of my children to pieces, working with my head teacher who has a completely different belief system when it comes to disciplining children, causes me to chafe sometimes.
I enjoy teaching. I enjoy learning, but Lord knows there are days where I have literally been praying for inner strength up until the point where I walked in the door. I have had to learn to be humble, moreso than I have ever had to be before. I have had to learn to be gracious, and slow to anger, and patient. I think the biggest thing that I have learned inthis is that I am called to be a teacher...I am being trained and all the anger and resentment in the world at the stripes I have to endure on the way to having my own classroom can change the fact that God designed me to work with his smallest angels.
So I understand Nineveh...I understand reaching out to something when every fiber of common sense wants to say screw you and move on, and I definitely understand being covered by Jehovah Shalom as He prepares me to do bigger and better things.
Amen.
I Want A Me Thinking Of You Thinking Of Me Type Love...
Hello blogworld.
This might be a strange, TMI way to start this blogging experience, but I truly do miss being in love.
Now let me explain. I can be quite the hopeless romantic...I am a poet, and I think loving happy endings is quite the stuff of sappy poems, but I truly do miss being part of a twosome. I miss dinner dates and long walks holding hands...i miss having a surefire companion for the theatre and dances and such...I miss going on double and triple dates with friends.
I want to fall in love, and part of that process means differentiating love from sex in a world where they tend to go hand in hand...sex just isn't something I'm interested in at this point in my life (weeelll....LOL). Thats a depth that I can't do, not until I am married, and while a lot of guys in my age bracket TALK a good game and say that they can handle falling in love with a person who practices abstinence, they either cannot, or else they don't take me seriously and believe that with time and a few well placed words, the boy briefs will come flying off. (Excuse my crassness, but if I can't be real on here, then damnit, where can I be?)
What people have to understand is that I grew up around both the best and the worst examples of men...on one hand you have my absentee father, who took it upon himself to declare a do-over and pretend I never exsisted (God Bless him anyway)...and then you have my grandfather and my uncle, both strong, hardworking, upstanding men who worked/work their behinds off to make sure that the people that they love have the best of everything. I am a better woman because of all three of them, and it is because of them that I have such a stringent idea of what I can and cannot deal with when it comes to who I choose to love.
I must have intelligence, spirituality, faithfulness, reliability, honesty, respect, a conscience, a deep and profound love for life and the people who inhabit it, and a sense of worldly wisdom. The rest is just icing.
So, to answer all of the friends and associates who wonder how hard it must be to be a 21 year old virgin...yeah, its hard...but I imagine it must be even harder to be in a relationship in which toes stay curled and sheets stay being clawed at, but thats where the magic ends. It is the nature of an only child to want it all or to not want it, and this is one of the few areas of my life where I choose to be choosy. I would love to be married with a child by 30, but unless I can have that "Me Thinking of You Thinking of Me" type love, that nuturing, secure, all around satisfying, everything I've ever wanted love that my grandparents and some of my friends and some of the adults that I look up to the most have...well I don't want it.
This might be a strange, TMI way to start this blogging experience, but I truly do miss being in love.
Now let me explain. I can be quite the hopeless romantic...I am a poet, and I think loving happy endings is quite the stuff of sappy poems, but I truly do miss being part of a twosome. I miss dinner dates and long walks holding hands...i miss having a surefire companion for the theatre and dances and such...I miss going on double and triple dates with friends.
I want to fall in love, and part of that process means differentiating love from sex in a world where they tend to go hand in hand...sex just isn't something I'm interested in at this point in my life (weeelll....LOL). Thats a depth that I can't do, not until I am married, and while a lot of guys in my age bracket TALK a good game and say that they can handle falling in love with a person who practices abstinence, they either cannot, or else they don't take me seriously and believe that with time and a few well placed words, the boy briefs will come flying off. (Excuse my crassness, but if I can't be real on here, then damnit, where can I be?)
What people have to understand is that I grew up around both the best and the worst examples of men...on one hand you have my absentee father, who took it upon himself to declare a do-over and pretend I never exsisted (God Bless him anyway)...and then you have my grandfather and my uncle, both strong, hardworking, upstanding men who worked/work their behinds off to make sure that the people that they love have the best of everything. I am a better woman because of all three of them, and it is because of them that I have such a stringent idea of what I can and cannot deal with when it comes to who I choose to love.
I must have intelligence, spirituality, faithfulness, reliability, honesty, respect, a conscience, a deep and profound love for life and the people who inhabit it, and a sense of worldly wisdom. The rest is just icing.
So, to answer all of the friends and associates who wonder how hard it must be to be a 21 year old virgin...yeah, its hard...but I imagine it must be even harder to be in a relationship in which toes stay curled and sheets stay being clawed at, but thats where the magic ends. It is the nature of an only child to want it all or to not want it, and this is one of the few areas of my life where I choose to be choosy. I would love to be married with a child by 30, but unless I can have that "Me Thinking of You Thinking of Me" type love, that nuturing, secure, all around satisfying, everything I've ever wanted love that my grandparents and some of my friends and some of the adults that I look up to the most have...well I don't want it.
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