Everything is so important

   Everything feels so important lately. People starving in  Somalia walking 18 hours to just get somewhere for help leaviing children dead on the road cuz they are too weak to carry or bury them. London a blaze with riots with little solid reasons known behind it. In my state deep rip on our communities felt so close, the elections lost and won by just a few vote with corruption and fraud being raised. Even closer dear friends living in grief over loss and illness. My heart breaks and longs for something different in all these things, the overwhelming sense of grief and injustice hangs in the air in daily life tangible just under everything we see. It is so easy to sit in my comfy chair and turn it off or become numb to those suffering make them and other, you know. I am not like that, I am glad I am not there. They are outside my experience so do we tune it out.

                        Since I was a young girl nothing has felt more right to me than to fight for Justice for others. Learning about Apartheid in 8th grade all I wanted to do was to go there and fight for justice for the oppresed people. It has been the only thing I have ever felt I was built for.

                      The need is so great, the wave so overwhelming and the words seem to evaporate into nothingness in the face of so much pain. People say all I can do is Pray. All we can do? I think there is a fundamental image problem with Prayer. All we can do is ask the power that raised Jesus from the Dead into any of these world ending things. Jesus came to bring freedom to the enslaved hope to the lost and healing to a broken hurting world: there is a tension we live in the already and not yet. Jesus brought in the kingdom of God available to us all. But that kingdom is here and now and yet is to come. Not a contradiction but a real. We can not comand God, we can ask Him into a situation not to our will or our bidding but to bring the healing and life to it. When we pray there is always a response, always, never an exception, never. When I pray and I do not get my way I am inclined to say God did not respond, but this is an inacurate view. As we pray we invite change we invite growth we invite justice and light into the dark place in our lives or the lives of our love ones or those we may never know around the world. This may take longer than we are will to see or want that does not mean there was no response. What happens when we pray is we invite God to break through and make a change that would not happen if we do not ask. For His will for our lives or those of others to break into our reality making miracles and the supernatural or natural appearing things happen. I never got when people would say it was a natural ocurrance to explain away something extraodinary that happens that is a bit out of the ordinary. Nature is extraodinary,who would have thought a flower can break up a sidewalk? even if it is just how it works that is extrodinary!

                        People never understand why I am so passionate about Prayer and think it's boring and ineffective: But it is never either of those things It is not head down eyes closed stay quiet kind of Prayer, it is eyes open shouting, crying, doing daily life, and talking to friends while I pray kind of thing. Not to be a shame thing for those that do not, but for me it is how I deal with all the injustice and pain I see in the world otherwise it just is a tidal wave and we stand on the shore waiting to be swallowed or worse we become calloused or tune it out. I just can not see standing in face of so much and just turning my back. To see the pain in a strangers eyes and not ask God to intervene. I may never meet them but I know one thing, God loves them and mourns with them, or celebrates with them no matter their view of Him. Jesus love is not bound by all the rules man tries to put on him. the in and out club of church has nothing to do with how far and how wide the Grace will takes us further than an gymnast can bend. The question for me is Am I willing to let Jesus challenge me? Will I let him break my heart for others will I let him show me myself and how I am like the person that I can not stand at this moment? Will I be willing to stand with the hurting with out trying to fix it or change them but can I stand and love even those that I naturally would not?

The Squeak

So I started this blog because I feel I need a place to have a voice. So much of my life has told me to shut up and not say anything. I do not know if you can relate but it seems a theam in my life.


I used to love to sing. I did it all the time, I woud walk around singing all the time. A few friends and my hubby encuraged me that I sound good but I lost my joy in it long ago when A 'profesional' guy brought in when  to our chorus class said "You were the reason choruses were for volume, not quality". I was crushed and have lost my confidence in singing since. I struggle to sing in worship even in church, afraid someone will hear me. I recently have started singing just at home again trying to gain back a little of my voice, not the sound of it but the right to do it. It may sound small and tright but I feel it is a step to gaining back a small part of me held too long by someone who ment no good for me.


Since I started singing again all this stuff seams to have come back ground.  I thought I gained and been healed from. Growing up I never was enough for my Dad, who I was at my core was wrong and he felt it was His job to save me from myself litterally who I was. My personality how I saw the world even my joy and excitment about the world needed to be changed. Leaving me with a deep lack of identity, I have struggled for years to gain a sense of who I am and gain the ability to have a voice or something of value to say. Not that it's more important than others I loath being put on a pedestal or held up mostly cuz I struggle with legitimacy in being worthy of being in the room at all.


Why do we as people have such a struggle either putting people up on a pedestal or under our feet? Why is equality and just honoring each individual for who they are such a hard goal to reach? Everyone deserves to have a voice, everyone is deserving of love and healing God has to offer. It seems in the church if you admit you struggle and are hurting in need of God's healing and help people can not seem to relate or deal with it. They either want to fix you with more religious behavior or shame you into silence.

I know God can heal, I know God sees me different than  I seee myself or how I see him. That does not change the fact I am where I am. The Holy Spirit can heal and bring new life to areas long dead with in me. It may not be instant or anything like that but as I come before the The Lord I will be changed,  I will heal.

I have a tatoo on my arm that reads learning to live loved, It is not for show or anyone else. It is large and somewhere I see it every day to remind me I am loved by God, I am learning to live that way. I do not have the answers, I do not have a pretext that says I know anything other than I am in desperate need of Jesus,  His love, His healing, His hope.


The only voice I have is mine, My little squeak will continue as I learn to walk this life, maybe one day it will be confident enough to be more than a squeak.