Necklaces for Ukraine!

I'm making crochet necklaces to raise support for my internship in Ukraine this summer. Check them out!

Either copy and paste the link below or click on the title of this post.

http://abicrochets.blogspot.com/

Tension

I'm sitting with classmates and our prof around the oak Round Table, waiting for a prompt. "Sum up your life in one word, the first that comes to your mind." First there's the panic of being put on the spot, then a word comes. "What word did you write?" the prof asks.
"Freedom."
"Love."
"Happiness."
"Improvement."
"Unique."
"Love."
"Adventure."
Then my turn; "tension." What? Why tension? It didn't make much sense at the time, so I dismissed it as a stupid attempt at being different. But now I think I was on to something.

A few days ago, the Witty Rat and I were having one of those random conversations of brilliance that thrill me to no end. (I gotta say, my buddy Jack nailed it: "Those are the golden sessions... when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk.") We talked about the tensions in our lives, and in our relationship with Jesus. As humans, we tend to sway from one extreme to another, but so often the Word calls us to a balance: God's sovereignty AND our responsibility, truth AND love, justice AND mercy, for example. Balance requires incredible energy (trust us, we're dancers); its not simply staying still. You have to fight hard to hold position in the middle ground.

(It's not that these things actually oppose each other; if one truly embraces justice, he or she will also have to embrace mercy. In our limited understandings however, these things often just look like opposing forces.)

But why the tension?(Now I'm not talking about the tension between good and evil or right and wrong, that's a whole different discussion; I'm talking about the balance between two truths.) Why can't we just pick one and be done? Well, I think it's because God has set eternity in our hearts. He created us for eternal relationship with Him, wouldn't it only make sense that we can't ever be done with what is meant to last forever? We can never learn enough about Him. The depth of our relationship with Him is bottomless. We can't become good enough or content with Him enough.

So let's not become lazy. Tension forces us into constant action, and that's how our relationship with Christ should be, active.

I hope this makes sense, I had a hard time trying to express it.

Inlustrat

"On the glorious splendor of Your majesty,
and on Your wonderous works, I will meditate.
They shall speak of the might of Your awesome deeds,
and I will declare Your greatness.
They shall pour forth the fame of your abundant goodness
and shall sing aloud of Your righteousness." ~Psalm 145:5-7

"The steadfast love of The Lord never ceases;
His mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is Your faithfulness.
'The Lord is my portion,' says my soul,
'therefore I will hope in Him.'
The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
to the soul who seeks Him.
It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of The Lord." ~ Lamentations 3:22-26

"If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there Your hand shall lead me,
and Your right hand shall hold me." ~ Psalm 139:9-10

The Starling

I wrote this poem years ago, and my buddy Aaron turned it into a stunning song- check it out! He's sick-nasty talented.

http://www.myspace.com/eloffox/music/songs/the-starling-mp3-80423095

The Starling (Original poem)

A starling, in my heart confined,
Escaped upon a sudden sigh
That I relinquished recklessly.

It battered through my chest, the sky
It sought, it fought, it longed to find.
It turned my inner set awry.

From out my hollow throat coldly
Blew fresh, free air the bird did spy
And burst towards where that bright blue shined.

I swallowed hard, I held my breath
‘Til starling was as still as death
Locked carefully back inside my breast.

"To watch us dance is to hear our hearts speak."

"You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls."
-Merce Cunningham

I miss dance. Today in Jazz my professor, during a turn exercise, tried to explain that moment when a dancer nails it- A quad pirouette, a switch leap, a arabesque en pointe. That moment after practice after practice after practice when the stars align and you execute perfection. "And it's always effortless," the last word as a sigh: EF-fort-leSS. In that last word she nailed it. I know that moment. Now I won't lie to myself, I've never danced better than mediocre; EF-fort-leSS for me was landing a double or grande jete. But I know the feeling. It's literally an AWEsome moment.

That's something I loved about dance. Those moments were rare and so made dancing a risk. You don't know if you're going to nail it. Even after practicing a hundred times, each new time is a new risk.

Risk and defiance. Defiance of gravity, defiance of momentum, defiance of limitations, defiance of the body... but with grace, so naturally performed.

Once a dance instructor told me, "a dancer rages with ferocity within, but with such control so as outwardly she is the queen of serenity." I love that. I miss that. The control and the awareness. Knowing your muscles, the blood flow, the pressure of breath within your lungs.

In a dancer, there is a reverence for such forgotten things as the miracle of the small beautiful bones and their delicate strength. ~Martha Graham

And I miss the rawness. Though I admit to bias, I truly believe dance is the purest art form; there exists no medium between you and your art. You are your art.

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made. ~Ted Shawn

A Clean Heart

“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.”

Must the vision cost so much? Isn’t the heart pure enough that has no more than the usual measure of slyness, conscious covetousness or prurience? Wasn’t it sufficient that I honestly desired to love God and do what He wanted?

I have never forgotten the morning when the dean of students, Dr. Charles Brookes, closed his chapel message with the words of an old gospel song. I can still see his humble demeanor, hear his quiet voice:

One thing I of the Lord desire, for all my life hath miry been—
Be it by water or by fire, Oh, make me clean, Oh, make me clean!
So wash me now, without, within, or purge with fire, if that must be,
No matter how, of only sin die out in me, die out in me.


~Excerpt from Elizabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity

My Life

"Sometimes I wonder about my life. I live a small life, well, valuable, but small, and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave? So much of what I do reminds me of something I read in a book once, when, shouldn't it be the other way around?" -You've Got Mail

God has literally flooded me with revelations this year and I'm not sure how to take hold of them all, or how to express them. I want to know how to apply them.

The loss of Grant and Michael made me pause and look hard at my life. Youth is no excuse to ignore mortality. We don't know the measure of time granted us. Am I living in God's purpose? Am I walking, every moment, after Jesus? Does my life make sense in light of the gospel? C.S. Lewis said "you never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you." In a way, God's bringing me to that place, revealing the authenticity of my faith. "God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down" (another great illustration from Jack). Does my life make sense in light of the gospel? No. Not often. But this is my heart cry- "I want to know Christ- yes, to know the power of his resurrection, to share in his sufferings, and become like him in his death, that I might attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this, or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining towards what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus... Only let us hold true to what we have obtained." ~Phil 3:10-16 This is my mantra.

Aside from this, God has also been speaking something very new to me. My whole life, in one sense, consisted of "saying no," of resisting and refraining and waiting. But now, it's as if God wants me to say yes- and the word is almost foreign to me!

"To be perfectly frank, I'm getting exasperated with your infantile thinking. How long before you grow up and use your head- your adult head? It's all right to have a childlike unfamiliarity with evil; a simple no is all that's needed there. But there's far more to saying yes to something." ~I Cor. 14:20-22.

I know I'm kind of taking this verse out of context, but that "there's far more to saying yes to something" really struck me. Saying yes comes with a whole lot more than saying no.

I have become comfortable, and He's pulling me out of that. He's teaching me to walk.