Cosmic Love

"What does LOVE look like?"

Last night I found this song on my friend Grace's blog and it rocked my world. So I am going to share it with you. It's called Arms Wide Open by Misty Edwards.

I'm gonna post the lyrics and write LARGELY the ones that really stuck out to me. 

(“What does love look like?” is the question I’ve been pondering
“What does love look like?”
“What does love look like?” is the question I’ve been asking of You

I once believed that love was romance, just a chance
I even thought that love was for the lucky and the beautiful
I once believed that love was a momentary bliss
But love is more than this
All You ever wanted was my attention
All You ever wanted was love from me
All You ever wanted was my affections, to sit here at Your feet
Then tell me

“What does love look like?” is the question I’ve been pondering
“What does love look like?”

Then I sat down, a little frustrated and confused
If all of life comes down to love
Then love has to be more than sentiment
More than selfishness and selfish gain

And then I saw Him there, hanging on a tree, looking at me
I saw Him there, hanging on a tree, looking at me
He was looking at me, looking at Him, staring through me
I could not escape those beautiful eyes
And I began to weep and weep
 

He had arms wide open, a heart exposed
Arms wide open; He was bleeding, bleeding

Love’s definition, love’s definition was looking at me
Looking at Him, hanging on a tree
I began to weep and weep and weep and weep

This is how I know what love is, this is how I know what love is

And as I sat there weeping, crying
Those beautiful eyes, full of desire and love
He said to me:

“You shall love Me, You shall love Me
You shall love Me, You shall love Me”

With arms wide open, a heart exposed
With arms wide open, bleeding, sometimes bleeding

If anybody’s looking for love in all the wrong places
If you’ve been searching for love, come to Me, come to Me
Take up your cross, deny yourself
Forget your father’s house and run, run with Me
You were made for abandonment, wholeheartedness
You were made for someone greater, someone bigger, so follow Me
And You’ll come alive when you learn to die)

Everytime I hear this song it breaks me! Man, this really forced me to re-evaluate the way I live and  "love". 

I have grown up thinking i'm so fragile and so afraid to be vulnerable to anyone for fear they might destroy me. For this reason I tend to keep people at a distance, even people I really like. I can't love anyone like that. How could I be so scared all the time? 

This shows me that:

1. that I don't trust to God to take care of my heart

2. that I don't fully understand what love is. REAL, SELFLESS, wholehearted love of God. 

We talk about the love of God a lot, we say, God loves us! And even, man, God REALLY loves us beyond measure. We say how MUCH he loves us. But for me, do I realize HOW he loves???

Jesus was made completely VULNERABLE, the song says EXPOSED, ARMS WIDE OPEN, BLEEDING. 

He was humble, broken, KNOWING even as he broke and bled and died that some would never believe and love Him back. WOW. That's unconditional.
Love doesn't protect itself, it doesn't think of it's own gain at all. It just GIVES FREELY, even to the point of bleeding. 
Can I love people with THAT love?? Because that IS love, "that he lay down HIS LIFE for his friends." 
And can I trust that a God who is faithful to love me this way, and who I claim to be my HEALER will take care of any hurt? Like I think I'm so fragile, and if I break, it's a big disaster and it's all over, but why don't I just trust Him with my heart? He is so much bigger than my brokenness. I think someone who loves me this way is perfectly worthy of my trust. I feel like the reasons why I haven't stayed consistent with God in the past, was I get to a certain point where I don't really trust Him. I say I do, but then don't. So here's to trusting Him with ALL of my heart. 


I would think that being a Christian for 2 years, (more like 4 but I'll only count 2 lol) I would have the "love" thing down...but I totally don't. I needed to really GET this. We all do.


I wrote this quote in the back of my planner and I love it: 
"To LOVE at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless-- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable." --C.S. Lewis 

Just listen to this song, it will break you I swear.


"This is how I know what love is."

Eyes Betray

Heyyyyyy. I'm back. It's been a good 3 and a half weeks. So i have a lot to write. :) I'll start with this one thing for now.
Okay, for starters, I have been involved with I guess you could call it an "activist" group, i don't really know what that title entails. But a group in Denton, for about a month or so. I'll tell you the story. Let me start from the beginning though. Okay, since the very beginning of my first year in Masters, as soon as I started seeking the Lord with all of my heart and really learning who He is and what it is to have a relationship with Him, He called my attention to the issue of human trafficking. Before, I had never even heard of it, didn't know what it was, and I dont even remember the exact moment or how I got exposed to it, but as soon as I was informed, my heart just BROKE and even more, I was FURIOUS. Seriously, get me started on this topic or the topic of women or sexuality in general and I will give you a fit of all my opinions, probably in a heated manner lol. Anyway, so since then I have had a heart for it and known that I have to do something about it. Well, I was recently informed that this doesnt just happen overseas, but here in America, and even RIGHT HERE in Dallas/Ft Worth, right under our noses! Well about a month and a half ago, I came to Denton to meet up with my friend Kyle and his friends who play ultimate frisbee at UNT every Wednesday, well afterward I was all like, let's go to Jupiter House! They don't close till eleven! And Kyle was like, their coffee's gross! So I was like, but they're open! And then he told me...that there is actually a coffee shop, on campus, that's really cool and has good coffee...that IS OPEN 24 HOURS!! Umm, heck yes!!! I've never heard of something so perfect!!!! Lol..I'm a night owl so I kind of have to suffer for the fact that most establishments close around 9 and past that time frame, I'm out of luck. And an all night coffee shop is absolutely a dream come true for me! So I was way excited :)
Anywho, so we get there and my friend Kyle's friend said hi to this guy Brandon there that he knew,  and it was something along the lines of : "hey man, what are you doing here"
and then: "oh ya know, human trafficking meeting every wednesday at 915" and my head like did a 90 degree turn in their direction immediately lol but then I was at the counter and the guy was like, "what do you want" so I had to order and my attention was diverted. Well he disappeared so I hung out there and when they dismissed from the back of the coffee shop, I got to meet the group (it was just three of them that night) and hear about what they were doing and since then I've been joined up. Anyway long story even longer (I always make my stories unneccessarily long and detailed lol) I met this group and have been involved with them ever since.
So here's an update, the group now has like 20 people on the email list (probably like 10 come to the meetings) but it has seriously grown! And we've teamed up with a lady from an organization called traffickfree who was actually trafficked in Ohio, and got out of it and now runs a campaign called SOAP, which distributes soap to different hotels (where prostitutes (willingly or not) would be and the soap has a sticker on it for the national human trafficking hotline for tips and it's like if people have seen anything shady they can call tips in and stuff. Also, we have kind of linked with an organization called Rahab's Rope, who are in India and they teach women, prostitutes or women who have come out of that sort of thing vocational skills to live off of, and they make jewelry, which they sell and you can actually order a shipment from them, which they will send for free, according to Brandon (he's kind of the leader) and have a jewelry party to raise money for them. AND this past week, YOGURT FUSION which is a fro yo place right off the square, agreed to donate 15 percent of proceeds if people mentioned human trafficking at the register all through finals week, so a few of us took shifts throughout the week holding signs and promoting that, (yes we were the dorks with the signs on the corner lol) and we actually got a bunch of peeps to go, or at least ask us about the cause, which is awesome cause we got a chance to let them know what's going on. And the owners of Yogurt Fusion I believe are Christian, and they were totally behind our cause which was awesome. The last night of the fundraiser we all got to go eat yogurt for FREE which was super sweet and talk to the lady working there, she is so cute and nice and she's from Russia i believe, her name was Svetlana. Anyway, so that MIGHT become a monthly thing, like one week a month, we don't really know yet though. But that was cool.
And so Brandon and I went to this orientation for a volunteer program on Sunday afternoon, the program is called Traffick911 and they are really big on raising awareness and what they do is try to train up front line defenders, which would be like, teachers, cops, etc. Anyone who is with kids a lot, or is a cop lol, because they have the most authority. But they want to train people to know the signs and what to look for so they can help stop it, or better yet prevent children becoming trafficked. Well, we went to this orientation and man, if we were not passionate about this before, we sure as heck were after we left. It was just another eye-opener about what is going on in our watch, and it realllly just drove us to be like, dude. WHAT THE HECK. This is absolutely five thousand percent NOT OKAY. And, how on earth can this be happening, to CHILDREN no less, and how are there possibly that many SICK horrible people in the world, to either be running this kind of thing or contributing to it. I mean, HOW do you do that, to ANYONE much less a 13 or younger year old girl. I don't even want to think that that's actually possible in humanity. And then Brandon got to thinking like, man..it all starts with a demand. LUST. and GREED. These men are making BILLIONS off of these WOMEN and CHILDREN, and that's all that matters to them! EWWWWWWWW DUDE! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?


 So yeah, well me and brandon and some of the guys got to talking about how there are people in the church and even pastors, who have struggled with at least porn. And how that's like, indirectly linked to the demand for things like that.. And that's not to condemn anybody, because I'm no saint, and  i think everyone has had to face some sort of lust in their life, but it just goes to show how it all starts with "little" sins, and we don't even realize how serious the implications of giving in to our flesh are. Like, it started with lust. And greed. And that set me off on a whole nother tangent about how society is poisoned by the concept of sex, and how its all wrong that something that was made to be so perfect and pure and sacred and meaningful, has been so UTTERLY twisted and DISTORTED and exploited to the point that, no one in the WORLD (there is rape in like, every nation) can live their life without seeing or hearing something or having some sort of sex sold to them or thrown at them, I mean, it's EVERYWHERE!!!! and teenage girls think the answer to being beautiful and wanted, and feeling like they have some sort of worth and power, is to wear a ton of makeup and dress sleazy and use the power of their sexuality just to feel like a woman. REALLY?  Lisa Bevere put it this way: How did the mystery of our sexuality become so cheap? Do you guys realize that we have it SO WRONG?????!!!!! And I can't even go on in written word. I dont even know how to put it in words on a screen. It just disgusts me. That this is what the world has come to, and women and children are paying the price for it. Seriously?? I seriously, was SO absolutely disgusted that it just gave me a greater conviction of purity, and how much I want it, and I will NEVER compromise. I mean, I'm re-evaluating the way that I dress, because I don't want to play ANY role in feeding the MONSTER. I want absolutely NOTHING to do with it. Even though I don't dress particularly slutty, it doesnt take much for guys. So what if I always wore long flowy dresses and baggy flowy tops, ya know? Or lots of layers, just things that wouldn't even show the shape of my figure. I mean. Guys are visual. Period. And yeah, we live in the 21st century, but still. Humanity hasn't changed. No offense, guys. And I'm just thinking like, what can I do? What thing, anything that I can do personally in my life to stand against this. That all may sound weird or extreme and I'm probably being dramatic but that's how strongly I feel. It just shows you ya know, how the commandments of God are NOT for nothing. He freaking KNOWS what he's doing! They are there because He knows so much better than we do, (and we are stubborn because we think we know everything) because He knows that the implications of all sin are sooo much bigger, deeper and more powerful than we know, it starts with something "little" and we think we can compromise and tip-toe the line and it'll be harmless, but it's not! And that's with everything. I mean, I've seen in my life personally where I have been disobedient to God when he warned me not to go down a path, and MAN did I learn my lesson the hard way! Brutal. But I can't afford to learn lessons the hard way anymore, and I don't think God's people really can either. If we are living by the flesh instead of by the spirit, our lives are wasted, when have the POWER to be out there changing this world! Once you start to see the path that sin leads down, man it's serious and you see it for what it is and what it does, and it's no longer remotely appealing. It's disgusting. ABSOLUTELY REPULSIVE. Funny when you start to see through God's eyes and understand why things are not okay. In the bible, when it says "the wages of sin is DEATH".... Seriously! That means more than just, hell. Or that because Eve ate the apple that they couldn't live forever. It means hell on earth, death of the SPIRIT. Death of hope, and life, and purity and our souls, when we are in it. Sin brings death, in our everyday life, not just literally. That's just the way it is. There is a Kesha song that says "i'm dancing with tears in my eyes, i'm losing it, with every move I die. " And she's talking about a boy that she screwed over and now has to live without him, but I feel like that's ME when I'm living in sin, without the spirit of God in my life, without obedience. We are a DEAD monster machine without the grace of God. Because sin is of our deathly nature and not of God. And it affects others even when we don't think it does. Brandon was saying, it's a cycle of suffering and more suffering, which causes more suffering. Idk he made sense when he said it, I probably said it wrong lol. But does that make sense? Cause it's making more sense than ever to me.
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." -Eph 6:12

First Timer!

Hey! Ok so i am starting this blog because there are a lot of thoughts I have spent time working out and analyzing in my head, especially with situations in my life or random concepts of life that may or may not affect my life and all that jazz. So I thought I should start a blog. Get it all out here, my thoughts and views on life and what not. That way it will be out of my head! Lol. Idk exactly what all stuff I will write, but we'll see! Probably a lot of random stuff. Probably also a lot of daily life and memorable experiences. I guess it will be like a journal of my young adult life and mind. With pictures and stuff! This should be fun :)

Now I am not narcissistic and I do not expect to have a ton of followers, since this is not a themed blog I don't expect my life to be fascinating to strangers, it's mostly for me, but feel free to be a part of it!

P.s. I'll probably do that thing Mark Schwann does by titling every episode of one tree hill with a song title, for me each entry could be a song title. Because that makes life more fun.