Love story

Why is it that everything in our culture seems to revolve around a love story. Every book, every movie, and even many people's lives. But what's sad isn't that love stories dominate society, it's that we root for them. As we watch a movie or read a book we long for the girl and guy to kiss, to get together, and at times even to sleep together. We set our friends up on dates with people we think they'll like, and pat ourselves on the back when it works out. But why do we do this? Well I know why. We're driven by love. Our hearts were made to love, but we have to be careful. If we aren't careful we'll forget about the only one who can fill the void of love in our hearts and lives. I've been in love before, and the love of someone else can make you do some dumb things, but being in love with the one who created you is completely different. It's not the kind of love that blinds you it's the kind of love that makes you see things clearly for the first time. Loving him changes everything about you and your life. And loving him overflows into loving others. While love can often times be associated with hurt, his love is all you'll ever need. It's perfect, unselfish, patient, and constant. Part of its beauty is that you can rest in it and find peace. Earthly love is good and a blessing, but without his unfailing love we can't even hope to love anyone else. I'm so unworthy and yet he still offers me his love. With that thought in mind, how can I not give him everything? How can I not live in a way that brings glory to the name of the one who loves me unconditionally? God is a lot of other things, but today I focus on love because that's what I need him to be. Today I know that if I had nothing else, his love would be enough. That was a difficult place for me to get to, but now that I'm there I can't help but share it with you. 

Feelings are bad?

It's been months since the last time I wrote anything, and my brain is just swimming with thoughts to the point where this might all come out a jumbled mess that no one understands. Or maybe it'll make total sense, who knows.  I could write about a hundred different things right now, but my mind keeps going back to feelings. Now I know that sounds a little weird and to be honest it is, but God seems persistent in teaching me about them so here we go. 

If I'm being honest, I'm not a fan of feelings; I actually dislike them quite a bit. They tend to make me stupid, and I never make good or correct decisions when they are involved. I have always fallen in love too easily, gotten angry too quickly, and cried at the most inconvenient times. So basically, I'm a girl, and I don't like it. These past few months I think I've hated feeling more than ever, and God has used that to his advantage. 

I can think of several times in my life when I've hated the fact that I have emotions and feelings, but none of those times can compare to the last 3 months. Name an emotion and I've probably felt it: love, dislike, disappointment, inadequacy, uncertainty, fear, anger, sadness, and the list goes on and on. And for the longest time it was like I had no control over them, and they seemed to just overtake me. I had been completely drowning in my own feelings, but I couldn't understand why it was happening much less how to stop it. I remember one night about a month ago just asking God why we needed emotions. I was to the point were hurt and anger were too much for me, and I was done. It was at that point that God began slowly teaching me. 

Now I could talk about how feelings are important because they make us who we are or about how without the bad we wouldn't have the good, but that wasn't the lesson I needed. I already knew that. What God has been teaching and showing me is how to overcome and control all those crazy feeling and find peace and rest in him and his plan. How is he doing this? Well, I'm glad you asked! He's doing it by putting me in a lot situations that I really don't want to be in. Now, that might not sound like a good thing, but it definitely is. Like so many others do, I've been camping out in my comfort zone (which means by myself since I'm an introvert), and not telling others about these feelings or facing the people who they're toward. He has thrown me into more uncomfortable situations in the last month than the last 3 years combined, and from those my life has made a drastic turn. Friendships have been mended and new friends made. I've been vulnerable and open with people, which is something I'm not good at. From these seemingly bad emotions, some very good things have happened. 

I don't know that anything I've said has made any sense, but I felt the need to get it out. If you got nothing from all of my ramblings, I hope you get this: even when it seems like there's a lot of bad in your life, God can use if for your benefit.  

Although it can often be hard to see, God really does work for the good of those who love him. All of my unwanted feelings haven't just gone away, but God is using them to mold me into who he wants me to be. And just like any refining process, sometimes it hurts and is really hard and feels totally pointless, but if he is being glorified it becomes totally worth it. 

Looking Back

I was recently advised to look back over the past year of my life. This seems like a pretty simple task, but as I began to go back it became obvious that I was going to need time to really think about it. 365 days doesn't really feel like a lot in comparison to the 19 years I've been alive, but I think more life changing things have happened in the last 12 months than in any other time in my life.

In March of 2012 I was in a completely different place than I am now. I was in very serious relationship that I thought would end in a marriage (I was just a little naive), and I was still a senior in high school. My future plans were to go to the University of Mobile, major in education. and live on campus. My parents were divorced, I went to church in Wilmer, and I always had something to do on the weekend. Now exactly one year later my life has not only changed drastically, but I'm also nowhere near what or who I thought I would be. I'm no longer in a relationship (which is a very good and happy thing), and I'm halfway through my second semester of college at the University of South Alabama. I live at home with both of my parents who are remarried, and I'm a part of the amazing South City Church.

It's obvious through those things that my life has changed, but it goes way beyond that. I have changed. I don't mean jut my address or my relationship status but who I am. I'm not the same person I was a year ago. 2012 was one of the driest times I have ever experienced spiritually. It would be easy to blame that on a boyfriend or starting college or even on my parents getting back together, and for a long time I did blame it on those things. But the truth is, I spent 2012 running from God. I was running from my responsibilities as a believer into the arms of anything I could find: an unhealthy relationship, graduating high school, starting college, getting a job and so on (you get the point). All of these things, aside from the relationship of course, are good things, important things, but I was using them as distractions. I was so far from doing the things the Lord was calling me to that I had all but lost communication with him.

I was told recently that as we mature in our faith, the Holy Spirit gets pickier about what he convicts us of. He no longer is just convicting us of sin but also of our motives behind the good things we do. Now even our attitudes come under scrutiny. Well, I couldn't handle that. I wanted to push the Holy Spirit as far away from me as possible, not even taking the fact that He's a part of me into consideration. I spent from March to the first of August putting all the energy and thoughts and emotions that would normally go into my relationship with God into my relationship with a guy. I put him up on a pedestal so that when we broke up, I was devastated. I no longer had anything or anyone to put my faith in since I wasn't planning on giving it back to the Lord. Next I turned to school. I was going to have the best first semester anyone has ever had, and come out of it with straight A's. That lasted all of 2 months, and I ended up making the first C of my entire life. After that it became about just distracting myself with various activities to stay busy, but I was completely empty.

I hope you can see the pattern here. Without the Lord being an active part of my life I had nothing. I was still a Christian for all those months, but I had blocked out all communication with him. I was totally miserable with every part of my life, but I was sure I had everyone fooled. I'm not sure if I actually had anyone convinced I was okay, but I did have a part of myself convinced I could do it without God. I was forgetting, or just ignoring, that we all have a God-shaped hole in our lives that nothing else can fill. I was finally forced to face the music when the holidays rolled around and I wanted nothing to do with them, and I realized just how much I needed him back at the center of everything. It was at that point that I began the slow and difficult process of getting back where I needed to be. I don't really think I'm quite there yet, but I'm on the right track and happy about what God is doing in my life. When I look back, I'm nowhere near where I thought I would be: I'm in an even better place!

This is my story of the past year, and as I was reminded Sunday, our stories are important. With that being said, I want to hear yours! What is God doing in your life? What has he brought you through? Are you where you thought you would be by March of 2013? I want to hear it all!

Control Yourself

Now this may come as a surprise to some of you reading this, but I haven't always been the charming young lady that I am today. Okay, so maybe charming isn't really the word, but if you knew me 6 or so years ago then you would know that these days I'm much more pleasant to be around. Growing up I was a bad kid. I'm not really even sure how my parents kept their sanity for the first 14 years of my life. You're probably wondering what exactly I did, so let me explain. I was extremely stubborn, had an awful temper, and basically did whatever I wanted to all the time. When I was really young, the problem was refusing to do what my parents told me to do. I've been told the story of the time when I was 3 and told my mom, "you might as well go ahead and spank me because I'm not cleaning my room," about a thousand times over the years along with countless other tales of times when I was just outright defiant. Now that may not sound like such a big deal, but the part that carried over into my teenage years is.

As I got older and smarter, this stubborn defiance came out in my attitude. My parents got divorced the summer before I started eighth grade, and for the next few years after that I was mad. I was mad at my mom for choosing to get a divorce, at my dad for never being happy when I was with him, at my older sister for running away from the problem and making me step up, at my younger sisters for needing me all the time, and at my friends for not understanding what I was going through. In case you didn't notice, that's a lot of anger and most of it wasn't fair. I got in fights with everyone all the time. My mom and I had daily yelling matches, and I argued with my best friend on a weekly basis about nothing. I remember countless nights crying myself to sleep because I was so completely miserable. I don't tell you this story so that you can say "awe poor Hannah." I tell you this because I want you to see how ridiculous my attitude was. Was this a bad situation? Yes, it was. Did I have a reason to be upset? Of course I did, but should I have let it dictate my attitude? NO!

I see statuses and tweets all the time where people say things about how the way others treat them decide what their attitude is going to be, but that thinking couldn't be further from the truth. You are the only one who controls your attitude. Let me say that again. YOU are the only one that controls YOUR attitude! Sure people upset you and make you angry, but they aren't the ones who make you stay that way. It's a choice, and you have two options: you can let other people dictate your attitude and by extension who you are, or you can choose to be joyful and positive no matter what others have to say. For me, it took my older sister telling me how stupid I was being before I took control of my attitude. Granted, I'm still a little stubborn (okay maybe a lot) and will attempt to do anything you tell me I can't, but I no longer let anyone else control the way I act, and neither should you. 

Guard Your Heart

Guard your heart. I think I have heard this warning about a thousand times just since I started high school. It seems to be the big dating advice that Christians give, outside of don't have sex of course, but for me it was really kind of just empty words that didn't mean much. How was I supposed to "guard my heart"? What did that look like, and why should I even bother? Unfortunately instead of heeding the warning of women who had been there, I decided that I was going to learn the hard way: through experience. Now before I go any further with this, I want to make a few things clear about this topic. For one, I do not have the mind set that all boys are bad, and my intention with sharing this story is not so that girls will decide all men are evil and never trust them or give their heart away. Another thing I want to stress is that girls are not the only ones who have to guard their heart in a relationship. Guys can easily get hurt just as bad and need to listen to this wise, old warning as well. With all that being said, I've had some experience with failing to guard my heart.

I've never been too much of a dater. In all 4 years of high school, I had three boyfriends total and only one of those relationships lasted over 2 months. I didn't see the point in the serial dating cycle that most teenagers find themselves in, and now I'm very thankful for that. I was 15 when I had my first "real" date if that tells you anything about me and dating. I just wasn't really into it, and I was perfectly okay with that. After two very short and relatively painless relationships, I was a senior in high school and very content with finishing out the year single. Although I was happy with the way things were, it seemed that some of the people I was really close to felt I needed a guy in my life. The matching making began, and soon they had found their perfect man for Hannah. I had never considered dating this guy, but I thought he was cute and fun to be around, so I didn't mind when all their scheming paid off and he asked me out on a date. After that, I fell hard. I mean head first, swept off my feet, totally crazy about him kind of fell. I hadn't guarded my heart at all. I thought he had hung the moon and could do no wrong, and he was in college while I was still a senior in high school! What could be better? Well looking back now, I see all the problems with the relationship. I stopped enjoying my last semester of high school and started spending all my time with him. I didn't even go to prom or any of my senior activities. I rushed through those last few months and, to my great pleasure, finally graduated. We had planned for the summer to be filled with spending all kinds of time together out in the sun and doing lots of couple-y things. What we didn't plan for was a summer full of arguing. Looking at it now, I see that all that arguing stemmed from the fact that we just weren't right for each other, but at that time I played it off as some sort of rough patch. I loved this guy like I had never loved anyone before, but little did I know, his feelings for me weren't quite the same. In the end we had a pretty nasty break up where he said a lot of ugly thing that he really didn't mean. He was just trying to make me mad enough to want the break up as much as he did, but what he actually did was completely break my heart and ruin my self esteem.

I tell you this whole story not to make this guy out to be a monster, because he certainly isn't, but to illustrate how important guarding your heart is. If I had done that the relationship could have ended several other ways. I may have seen from the beginning that we weren't good together, or maybe the arguing would have caused me to reevaluate, or maybe we would have mutually agreed that the relationship wasn't healthy. I don't know what would have happened, but I do know it would have saved me a lot of hurt, anger, and bitterness and probably made a good friendship. For me a guarded heart means more than just not getting hurt. It means seeing a relationship clearly for what it is and not wasting time trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. I hope that from my mistake you will learn to be very careful with your heart and only give it to someone who also sees the importance in guarding it.

Why blog?

For as long as I can remember, I've always loved reading and writing. I was the weird kid in elementary school who sat by herself with her nose in a book because I was too fascinated with words to socialize with other people. By the fifth grade I had read half the books in the school library and attempted, unsuccessfully, to write several of my own. Books amazed me. I didn't have to be the shy, overlooked Waters girl who lived in the middle of nowhere and had nothing exciting happen in her life. I could become whatever and whoever I wanted to be by simply opening a book and getting lost in page after page of adventure. I solved mysteries, traveled the world, had magical powers, and I didn't have to even leave my bedroom. I was in love with reading.

When you read book after book after book, eventually you dream of writing something that other people will love to read. That's where the blogging comes in. I have a few friends who blog, and that started to spark my interest a little. Sure, it's not a world famous, award-winning book, but if people actually read it, then it's the next best thing. I was very hesitant because I didn't really feel like I would have anything to say that would be the least bit interesting, but after some persuasion from people I admire, I decided that it was worth a try. Although I have lost a lot of my childhood imagination, reading and writing have given me things that nothing else ever could. It is because of that, and because I owe it to poor, strange fifth grade Hannah, that I begin my blogging adventure.