Dear old love

In a field full of roses, you're the one that spoke to me. 

You had this uniqueness about you that others may not have appreciated, but I loved. 

I carried you everywhere I went and you made everyday brighter. 

Whenever you would start to wilt, I would nourish you, and for a while, that's all you needed to pep back up and bloom again. 

But one day something changed, whatever I was feeding you wasn't working. 

It seemed like the harder I tried to keep you alive, the worse you became. 

Now I'm standing here holding onto your stem that's covered in thorns, while your flower has fallen off... 

I'm left with wounds that won't stop bleeding until I let go of your stem that once carried life into your body. 

I want to heal but to do that is to let go , so that's what I had to do. 

It's not easy because your thorns were embedded so deep that taking them out caused me more pain than I cared to experience. 

The wounds will heal and over time the scars will fade, but the pain....the pain is something I don't know if I can ever forget. 

So goodbye old love, always know that in a field full or roses, you were my favorite.

Beauty in Brokenness

Life changes so quickly. It can leave you feeling numb and have you in denial, but when reality sets in, you begin to feel empty and hopeless. When you put so much time and effort into something and it doesn't go the way you planned it, it leaves you feeling like you've failed and has you asking God, "why?"  You think you do everything right and you try your hardest, but it's still not good enough and you don't get what you worked so hard for. How else is there to feel other than defeated and broken?

Over time God will reveal to you why He allows things to happen, but you have to be open to accept it. 

You may find yourself saying, "I don't want to be broken", " I don't want to be damaged", but the truth is, everybody is damaged or broken in one way or another. The important thing is to acknowledge your brokenness and let God heal you. It's hard. Probably one of the hardest things in life because you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel. Days run together, you're just going through the motions, and you can't seem to pull yourself up. Your feel stuck. You pray constantly and it seems like God is silent. You know He's trying to teach you to trust Him, but you're begging for Him to say something or open up a door that will help you see a little glimpse of hope, but He's still silent. All you can seem to think is "it's not fair". But life isn't fair. 

So how do you get through? 

You keep pushing. Everyday, you wake up and you tell yourself everything is okay. You go through the day, take time to cry if you need to, but don't get stuck there. Get yourself together. Listen to music, call everybody you can think of, do anything to get your mind off of the pain and defeat you feel. Don't dwell in the pain because pain is only temporary and you don't want to make it a permanent home. You keep trusting God and you go through the motions until one day there's no more tears to cry. 

One day you wake up and smile, not because you have everything that you want, but because you have everything you need. God would never take away something you needed. No matter how much you thought you needed it, you'll one day realize just how blessed you are, with or without it.So you smile, because you realize that as long as God loves you, nothing else in the world matters. 

No matter what struggle you are going through in life, know that God is always there. He allows things to happen for a reason. We may not always understand why we didn't get the job we wanted, the person we wanted, but God has a plan and we just have to trust in Him and in His timing. 

There's beauty in brokenness. Think of a glow stick, it has to be broken before it can 
shine.

Psalms 34: 18 The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; and saves those who are crushed in spirit. 

The missing piece of the puzzle

She was broken...but she chose this. 

He was broken... he didn't choose this. 

Everybody that didn't know her thought she was crazy for giving up that thing, that from the outside looked golden, but was really tearing her apart inside. She had to get out, even if it hurt. 

His story was a little different, he thought everything was golden, but the internal strife on the other side told a different story. Circumstances put him out. 

Deep down they both wanted to be free in the sense that they wanted to leave what felt like home and experience the world for themselves. They had been sheltered by comfort and had never experienced the world around them and it looked so good. They wanted to be a part of it...freely, without the opinion and feelings of others.....

The world wasn't what they were expecting. It was fun for a little while, but the comfort they once knew was gone. They didn't have what they used to have and it didn't feel as good as they thought it would. Her and him had very different situations but at the root of it all they were going through the same exact thing...

They had been broken and they thought the world could fix the brokenness within....but it couldn't. The world will never be able to fix brokenness because it itself is broken. 

Time went on as they lived their lives. They began to heal to the point that they no longer saw their brokenness. As they say "Time heals all". But how much does time really heal if we don't know what was broken? 

Think of our lives as puzzles. As we go through life we pick up things and we go through things that shape us into who we are. The things that stay are the missing pieces to our puzzle. The things that don't stay help us to learn what doesn't fit so that the next time we see it we'll know that it doesn't belong in our puzzle. 

She met him and instantly she knew that he was some way a part of her puzzle, but she didn't know exactly for what. God told her that he was a part of her puzzle but she was kind of skeptical because she once thought she had found the missing piece to her puzzle but was completely wrong and she didn't want to go through that again. Time went on and life happened and she realized she was more broken than she thought she was but she tried her best to hide it because she thought that if she let it show, she would lose the piece of her puzzle that she knew she needed. 

As her walls came down, he saw how broken she really was and she knew that he saw past the facades she tried to put on because he was the missing piece... he thought he knew what she needed. But through her brokenness he actually saw that he too was still broken. 

He tried to fix her but he couldn't. So he had to let her go. He told her he'd be back, but he had to let her heal. 

She didn't want this. She fought it as hard as she could, but then she heard God. God reminded her that he was the missing piece to her puzzle. He told her how He had brought him into her life because she had lost hope that she would find her missing piece but He needed him back temporarily. Together they showed each other how broken they both still were and they together tried to fix one another when God really wanted them to focus on Him and He would fix them. 

She thought she had lost him, but as time went on God showed her how much he really loved her, enough to let her go so that she could heal. God confirmed in her heart that he really was a part of her puzzle, and that he was there to stay...

So the story goes on and she's finally letting God heal all of her hurt and she prays that he is doing the same because the puzzle they make is the most beautiful puzzle you'll ever see. . . 

Are you accepting your gifts?

God is always giving us things and presenting us with opportunities but due to our lack of faith and our tendency to trust our own intuition rather than trusting Him, we miss out on so many things. We push away things that could potentially be amazing because the package it was delivered in wasn't what we were expecting. 

Now let's say we understand how God operates and have accepted the fact that gifts come in all different forms and we say, "Hey, I trust God and He's giving me a gift, so let me just take it." Well we take the gift but then what do we do with it? They way you handle a gift from God is what is most important. God doesn't just give us gifts because He has nothing better to do. The gifts and opportunities God affords us have a valuable lesson. We must start realizing that every single thing we go through, whether good or bad, is a gift from God and we must use it. We must take something away from it. 

According to 1 Corinthians 13:13, the greatest gift out of faith, hope, and love is love. For the past few days I've had to face something that I have never had before, being alone with my thoughts. I went almost half way across the country to a place I've never been, and for the first time I am physically alone. No, I don't do everything with somebody else, but when I start to feel any type of emotion that I don't like, there is usually somebody around that I can go talk to in order to distract myself from myself. But now I can't do that anymore. I am finally coming face to face with myself and having to deal with everything I've ever pushed aside and ignored. It's not easy. I have finally figured out the root of all of the emotions that I ever have. I, for as long as I can remember, have not been accepting God's greatest gift. The gift of love. I have always wondered why I always feel like I'm missing something and why something is wrong. I've never been good at receiving love, but it wasn't until now that I fully understood that I wasn't. I wasn't opening my mind to accepting that love is more than hearing "I love you"(something my boyfriend would always tell me but I couldn't grasp this concept because I was ignorant to what love really is). I don't like for people to help me, to do things for me, or to worry about me when sometimes that may be their way of loving me. I realize that whenever people try to love me, I shut down. I get upset and get uncomfortable. If people give me an expensive gift, it makes me feel really bad  to accept it. That's me rejecting somebody else's love. Allowing yourself to be loved is allowing yourself to be vulnerable in the biggest possible way. You allow someone to come into your being and make a home there. 1 Corinthians 13 talks about how you can have all the faith and hope in the world, but if you don't have love, you are nothing. This downfall is the root of all my insecurities. The only person I know how to let love me, is myself. I know that I won't hurt or betray me, I know I won't let myself down. This mindset has ultimately held me back. It has made it hard for me to trust. God has given me the gift of love so now it's time for me to fully accept it. It's always been there but now I just have to use it. Thank you God for giving me love.