truth

People do not drift toward holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.

D.A. Carson

to build a home

from http://tylerknott.com/

i love this song.

listen here

watch

its a little long, but achingly beautiful and totally worth it.

APRICOT — A Short Film by Ben Briand from Moonwalk Films on Vimeo.

just like that

i am in wisconsin
and time keeps speeding up.

oh, the little things

http://www.mediafire.com/?rmy0jzdwzyc

these girls sing songs

that i will never know,
how love can last if you only let it grow.

http://www.mediafire.com/?1td2xky5nxg

happy God

i asked Will what he was thinking about on the way home from church today and he told me he was thinking about God and how happy He was while we were singing today.
i love the God that Will knows. He is gentle, unassuming, and untethered, capable of anything and everything.
i feel like i am drowning in religion here at home, and not healthy religion- not devotion that comes out of love, but obligation that comes out of fear. i don't want that. i want Will's God. the God that is happy because His children are happy and singing.

We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls.
-Bill Bryson

Travel

"We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost."
Ray Bradbury

i love the deep blue, the deep taste, the deep longing of life, but sometimes, i am startled by the depth.

listen here.

i miss europe.
i miss the smells and the food and the art and the history and the jokes and the street musicians.

yesterday, today, and forever.

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever."
Hebrews 13:8

the reward for seeking Christ is Christ. more and more of Him. and that has become not only enough, but everything.
He is in the beautiful, the truthful, and in the eternal. and what else is worth seeking?

postsecret

growing

beloved

"I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against the want of you; of squeezing it into little ink drops, and posting it."
Amy Lowell The Letter

enough

we are told constantly that we are not enough and i have been bought into that my whole life. i have spent way too much time making sure i was enough for my friends, family, peers, teachers, and for a world that saw me with at best, critical eyes.
God has hit me with a bus recently and that is the simple truth that i am enough. that i am enough for Him, in every capacity. that when i am stepping over my bible like a dead pet, or when i am seeking Him with everything i am, that i am enough for Him. He is helping me understand that His love for me does not change, that it is as wild and overwhelming now as it will be tomorrow, and that there is nothing i can do to change it or earn it. but just by being, just by existing, i am enough for that wonderful, frightful, and incomprehensible love. our father is the father in the story of the prodigal son, we return stumbling home, unworthy of even a passing glance, but God runs out to meet us, crying out with joy.
i stumble home so often, but just by being there, just by being in the presence of the living God, i am enough for that love and i can accept my father's cry of welcome and joyful proclamations of love.

so if no one has ever told you that you are enough, here you go:
you are enough. you are enough for God, as for the world- forget about it, you are not even on the same scale of enough as the world, and now you are free to see others as enough for your love, and you can run and greet them with the father when they too come stumbling home.

the God of love

"The confessing church of American ragamuffins needs to join Magdalene and Peter in witnessing that Christianity is not primarily a moral code but a grace-laden mystery; it is not essentially a philosophy of love but a love affair; it is not keeping rules with clenched fists but receiving a gift with open hands."
Brennan Manning The Ragamuffin Gospel

The love of God is so big. it is nonsensical, non-conditional, and never ending. we will never understand it, but even just the small part we can grasp,
changes everything.

trees

http://www.mediafire.com/?54xmmzmmgjj

even if you're surrounded by people in whale suits

always

"It’s always been you
singing to me in my dreams.
You and you alone."
Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson

let your heaven invade this earth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWCdQn4s6uA&feature=player_embedded

light

Honestly

I have spent the last few days disappointed in my humanity.
Because we don’t know how to love right.
Because we are lonely.
Because we are seeking everything else.
Because we are so far from our daddy and our home.
Because we are caught in an in-between.
Because we are stuck waiting for the bridegroom to return for the wedding feast.

But oddly enough, God has taken my sadness and has turned it into reassurance of the reality of His kingdom and the final fulfillment of His promises, and has shown me my overwhelming need for Him.
And what better place to be, than in the arms of the savior?