Breaking the Habit

I was in the sorry cycle, going down the slippery slope, it had taken me to places I never thought I would go, I had hit "rock bottom!" I didn't even notice myself falling at first, but before I knew it I was trapt. It's a scary place to be. I wouldn't wish this habit on anyone, not even my worst enemy (I don't think I have one).

Somehow I got caught up in it and it was taking hold of my life. Not in a good way either. We all have said it, "it's just this one time", "if I do this good thing then it will balance out", "no one needs to know", or "I just have to because I'm stressed." Those are all just excuses, not real reasons. Who asked for a reason anyway? I knew it was wrong!

This weekend though, I broke the habit. Although it was kind of a process. Rather about a month of talking myself through my problem and the solutions. Working on healthy ways to replace it. I finally did it!

I went shopping and did not buy a thing for myself!

This may sound minor in the grand scheme of bad habits we can get into, but for me this was a HUGE problem! I had become an obsessive shopper for myself. Granted it was usually when things were on sale, but I had become consumed with wants and my bank account was taking an undeserved beating! So I had to do something about it.

I am just at the very beginning of my recovery, but progress looks good. I only bought the things on my list (Christmas presents for my family). I did look at other things and even tried a few things on, but those things never made it to the register. For the serious selfish shopaholic, that is amazing progress. I am hoping to keep it up, which will not be easy during the upcoming after Christmas sales. However, I am strong and I will survive! I just might have to avoid the ten or more malls in St Louis, for about a month.

What color is the sky?

So I’ve been asked the same question a lot lately. I’m not sure if it is because of the extra tan I have gotten from this past summer or because I just look exotic. But as of, well since about a year ago, all kinds of people have been asking me, “What ethnicity are you?” or my personal favorite “Are you mixed?”

I mentioned this in a conversation with friends the other day. See because I began noticing that only certain people would ask this question of me. Not that I am trying to group people into boxes or be any type of prejudice. But none of the people asking me this question were: white, Caucasian, of Anglo-Saxon decent, or had a small spread out dosage of melanin.

Instead, those that were inquiring were what some people might call minorities, people of color, or culturally diverse. Interesting huh?

Not that I ever mind people asking me my heritage (Which is pretty much the same as if you were to call a dog a mutt, because I have about every type of European background and then add native American on top of that. Although the traits that appear are those of French and Cherokee.) I wouldn’t even mind if I did have some sort of Latino, African American, or Asian decent.

What I wonder about though is, why is it that only those people we sometimes call minorities doing the asking? Just a “hmm” question that I am putting out there and asking for a few ideas back.

*This is my clause however, because you never know who might read your blog or where it might end up. So I want to make myself as understood as possible. I do my best to be culturally minded myself. I make extra effort not to be prejudice and to see all people as equal (yes even celebrities are people and have the same organs working in them as everyone else). To me all of our fundamentals of life are the same so why should I treat someone different just because they appear different by some cultural standard.

Knowing that, I also am curious why the cultural assumptions and standards exist and recognize that they are there. So I am just doing some honest questioning of our own personal views of why we act and react in certain ways to racial visual stimuli.

I have been humbled

God does interesting things with the lives of His children. When we become Christians we lay down our lives to follow Him. Sometimes, though, we forget that our lives are not our own. We forget that He loves us and because we don’t love Him the way we should we don’t trust Him like we should. Manytimes, that love relationship seems so distant that we don’t realize it was because of our own decisions that we don’t hear God beckoning us the way He used to.

I got to experience this and like I’ve always known, God needs to speak loudly to me. That He did, or allowed things in my life to happen that brought me back to Him. He humbled me by taking away the things I thought I needed to be happy: money, jobs, a camera, part of my self perception, and even a close friendship. I could have very easily kept turning away from God, but instead He chose to put me on a path that led me right back to Him. He showed me how I had kept Him at arms reach, and that I did not love Him like I should. I was humbled by my mistakes and asked my Lord for forgiveness. For a lot of things and mostly for not being a very good child to Him and forgetting all that He had done for me. I am still amazed for that way that God forgives His children and lets us walk with Him once again.

This time though, I don’t want to change just myself and my outward actions. I don’t want to do anything, except trust and love Him. I have learned and am reminded that God is the only one who can change us and He changes us from the inside out. The things I do in life I want to be because of Him and not of myself. I don’t want to refrain from something just because it appears “wordly.” Rather, I would not want to do “wordly” things because my love for my Savior, has my life focused on Him. Which, is not exactly easy unless Christ is a part of my daily walk.

So I have been humbled and things will continue to be different in my life, but not because of me. Instead it is because of Him. How amazing is it that God cares so much!

Why Can’t Christians Stay up til 5 a.m.?

When was the last time you saw the sun rise? It seems that being a Christian means to some people that staying up to “ungodly” hours is a sin. That if you see the sun come up in the morning you have been out doing something inappropriate. I would like to disagree. I am in my twenties and I love to stay up late! I can’t really remember the last time I went to bed before 10pm.

I find it difficult, though, to find other Christians willing to stay up the same hours and therefore a lack of activities to participate in. I mean just because I am a Christian shouldn’t mean that I can’t have fun somewhere after midnight. When was the last time you heard of a Bible study that lasted until 3am or a singles ministry event that didn’t end until sunrise? Why not? Are Christians the type of people who never stay up that late?

It doesn’t make sense to me to make the assumption that once Jesus is your savior that trait disappears. After all, consider the amount of cash flow nightlife brings in all the time. Obviously there are people who are just wired to go, go, go. Can we not use that feature and apply it to a ministry? I am sure we can. I know, I know…my grandma too said, “Nothing good happens after midnight.” But something in me also remembers the life changing decisions made at youth lock-ins that lasted until, heaven forbid, the next morning.

So I am wondering now, are there any Christians out there that are wired like me and not ready to hit the sack after the last newscast of the night? Anyone out there that would like to discuss the book of Daniel until the sun rises? I’m hoping that there are and that maybe, one day, we can hang out and enjoy the fact that sleep can still be seriously overrated, even if we are Christians.

Synchronicity

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally inexplicable to the person or persons experiencing them. The events would also have to suggest some underlying pattern in order to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

Carl Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "'acausal connecting principle'" (i.e. a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by direct causality), "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept in his 1952 paper "Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle", though he had been considering the concept for almost thirty years.

It differs from mere coincidence in that synchronicity implies not just a happenstance, but an underlying pattern or dynamic expressed through meaningful relationships or events.

It was a principle that Jung felt encompassed his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual.

Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were not merely due to chance but, instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic.

***I have been experiencing this a lot in my life, synchronicity that is. Although Jung might have believed the more humanistic realities were involved, I believe it shows us once again that God has an order and pattern for everything in our lives.***

You suck, now quit

We do lots of things in life repeatedly: shower, eat, communicate, and learn. Then there are those things that we do that we consider talents or learned activities. Those can be many different things. The activities that we consider talents, usually have a great deal of time and/or effort invested in them.

So what if something we thought we were actually really good at doing, turned out to be something we had no skill at all doing.

Or what if we found out we aren’t good at doing something we really enjoy.

Would we still do it?

For example: Cooking ( I promise, this is not a real life story, just an example for explanation purposes. I have been known to be a pretty decent cook.) What if someone thought they were a great cook and they did it all the time? Then they found out one day that they kinda sucked.

What would you do?

My newest struggle

Sometimes I wonder about the person I am. I know myself well, almost too well. That is why I wonder if I can truly settle on anything or anyone. I love variety and I love change. I can find that in my workplace no problem. But when it comes to atmosphere and people, well, I know why I travel so much. I need a change of scenery and I love meeting new people.

This can be good and bad. I mean I never settle but I’m also never set. I can’t have one really amazing friend and keep it at that. I love all of my amazing friends and they each fill their specific spots in my life and I don’t know what I would do without each of them. But see you can’t have more than one man. I’m not talking about guy friends I’m talking about one boyfriend at a time, one true love, and eventually ONE guy to marry and spend the rest of my life with. Is it possible?

That is what I question. Can I really be committed to the one, kiss only that one, share my most intimate relationship with only him. I mean to this point I have even settled down enough to only be “talking to” or “dating” one guy at a time. (I’m really not a player, I just have issues). How do I cross that line of commitment to only one and not feel like I am losing out on all the variety that is out there?

Currently I have no man and am dating no one. That is probably a good thing because I really need to get this sorted out.

Any advice?

The Dangers of Sleep Typing

So most us have done some weird stuff in our sleep and of course those around us have had to share. I myself have held half-asleep phone conversations and sent half jumbled text messages. (This of course because I love to get calls and texts early in the a.m. and encourage it, most of time I am coherent, the other times we get a good laugh). I mean I have even found it necessary to check my phone the next morning and make sure that yep I did have a conversation with so and so at 3 a.m.

However, what I am about to tell you about I have never heard of anyone doing before. So I was typing up one of my last assignments to be emailed into my professor. Note: this was occurring at 2:30 in the morning. It was a reflection of what I had learned from the class. I suppose I did not realized exactly how exhausted I was, but I had been dozing off for the past half hour trying to get this thing completed. In desperation I stretched the document to a half page and called it that. I was already too far gone to proofread or even spell check so I just emailed it to him. Today I kinda wondered what I had sent because I didn’t truly remember.

Then I check my email where he had replied to my reflection and given me a grade on it. The first part started out well and the whole first paragraph was relevant. Then I read on to the next paragraph. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I mean I could have written about a lot worst things, but apparently in my sleep writing I was concerned with my new church and the opportunities God is giving me to work with it. Then I go on to say that now that God has put me in this place I hope he gives me a relevant job here in St Louis.

Bless my professor, I bet he was so confused. Then he probably checked the time I sent the email and it all made sense. By the mercy or may it was the humor of the situation, I did get a 100% on the assignment. I know now though the dangers of sleep typing.

Talking with the sports news anchor

So my roommate from college, Kristina Perez, works at a news station. (I know...its freakin awesome isnt it!) I came down to visit her this weekend and she had to work, so I was hangin out at the station with her. Which is also freakin awesome! We had just got back from her lunch break when we walked in and the Cardinals vs Astros game was on. Mind you I am in SW Louisiana, AKA Astros territory. The Cards were up 4 to 1 so I responded automatically with joyous glee then I realized what I had done. I had just announced my enthusiasm for my team to the sports news anchor of the station, who is an avid Houston fan. What else could I do but rub it in his face a little, after all I had already "stepped in it." So there I was talkin baseball babble with Garrett the sports guy (who would have ever thought?). We finished our conversation and watch the rest of the game while everyone prepared for the 10 o'clock news, where of course he had to announce that the Astros lost to the Cardinals. I wonder if he was thinkin about this crazy Cardinals fan while making his report? Regardless I guess its just another one of those random opportunities that you never know about until they happen. Life is good like that. PS Thanks Cardinals for winning so I didn't have to look like a fool.