In depth

I’m in Control.

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I hope I won’t lose points if I admit that I do, on occasion, like to watch Barbie movies. Barbie annoys the heck out of me 90% of the time, but now and then the company comes out with a good movie. (Is there a hashtag for that?) In case anyone reading likes her, here are my top three: Barbie and  The Fairy Secret, Barbie Princess Charm school, And Barbie Starlight Adventure. The titles are the worst, I admit, but the content isn’t. Okay, now to why I am bringing this up. In yet another movie (The Princess and the Pop star,)045 there’s  a song that’s pretty good, and one line in it has always grabbed my attention. “I’m in control, I broke the mold, the girl you see is up to me.” (Here I am.) It’s a standard theme, being yourself.

But I always think of the implications. It’s one thing to be yourself, it’s another to think that means no rules, no boundaries. “No right, no wrong, no rules for me, I’m free!” I love Elsa, but I’ve never like that part of the song. But  the words “I’m in control” from the above song, those warrant a little reflection.

What does it mean to be in control? Especially of your career, your life, your self.

Well we all know one can’t be in control of one’s career, disaster can strike, at any time. We hope it will not, or we ignore the possibility, but it is there. You can make career choices, but you can’t control accidents, economy, or public zeal.

Being in control of our life is something a lot of us really want. If only we could meet all its demands, and still do something meaningful. If we could know we were making a difference. Well, we are, whether we know it or not. No one is inconsequential. On our own strength, I really don’t think we can balance all aspects of life. And that is because of thing number three.

If we can’t control ourselves, then we can’t control anything else. I heard the term Self-Control for years before I knew what it was. I’m still figuring it out actually, but this is what I’ve got so far: Self Control is the ability to keep your feelings and impulses from ruling your behavior. It is not banishing all feeling of pain or sadness, it is simply not letting those feelings ruin your life. Self Control means if you get angry, you can keep from blowing up at someone, even if they deserve it. Self Control means you’ll do what you intend to, and not get side tracked or succumb to temptation.

In that movie of movies, Frozen, Elsa thinks for a while that the key to freedom is having no rules to break. But no one has to tell her that’s not true, she realizes it pretty quickly after her sister informs her that she’s plunged her entire kingdom into deep winter; eternal winter they think. (I suppose there’s no proof it was eternal.) Elsa finds out that whether she’s around man-made rules or not, there are rules of nature. Fear does affect things. And she’d not gotten rid of hers yet. Fear is very hard to control, I’ll admit. Sometimes you can’t, the only time you can is when something else is more important than fear. I make this point because so many things in ourselves that we don’t control are fear-based. Anger is, panic is, stress is, binging is. The answer is, of course, Love.

Love is my favorite thing to talk about, because it’s all we need. Every need finds its root in love. God’s love is the cure for every fear, and human love can do wonders as well.

Before Self Control, comes love. So at best, the message that you can be yourself when you learn self-control is half cocked. You can be yourself when you know you’re loved. Bottom line. And I mean really loved, unconditionally.

All right, that’s all I’ve got for now. Next time–Natasha.

For freedom we are free.

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I read an interesting idea from Abraham Lincoln, (I’ve been studying historical figures,) he said that God did not give Adam the tree of knowledge of good and evil so he could choose between the two, but so he could choose to not to eat of it. (I’m paraphrasing.) I’ve never heard this idea before. I’ve thought for a long time that Free Will means the ability to choose between right and wrong. Of course we know that it’s not right to choose wrong, but God won’t stop us.

But Lincoln gave me a paradigm shift. I believe whole heartedly the Good and Evil are real things. But what if freedom is not choosing between them, but simply choosing. It sounds like the same thing, I know. But let’s dive in deeper.

The thing about evil is, it depends upon the fact that the longer you allow it, the less you can resist it. The Bible says Sin makes us its slave. But I haven’t been the only one to think that it’s kind of unfair that Adam makes one choice, and screws up the rest of humanity. Yet that’s how it is. It’s called the Ripple Effect. Plus, every person re-enacts the scenario found in Genesis, we all have Good and Evil before us, we all at some point decide what we want to know.

Knowing Good and Evil is not the same as knowing it exists. Adam and Eve knew that tree was there, but they didn’t know what it was to be evil, to do evil, or to understand it. They were innocent. God made them good, but perhaps they didn’t know what that meant either. The choice they really had was God, or getting knowledge their own way. God didn’t set them up, the tree was not a bad thing, it was how it was used that was.

That’s another theory in of itself, but what I’m trying to get at is that Freedom to  Choose remains freedom only as long as you choose rightly. That’s the nature of choice, to be able to make the right decision, not just any decision.

It used to be that people would tell you what a bad decision was, none of this nonsense about it being up to you to decide what was right. People, there is a difference between choosing right, and choosing what Right is. I don’t mean that we can’t  decide what is the right course of action,  but we don’t set the standard.

If God really wants what’s best for us, then he want us to be free. Evil doesn’t make you free, it makes you evil. Stealing makes you a thief, drugs make you an addict, lying makes you a liar, etc. Once you are that, how can you ever not be that again? Your deeds stand. We do have a choice, we can choose God. That is the only choice we have, because he allows us to keep our choice. Evil doesn’t. You get in, it won’t let you get out.

But I don’t despair. Evil may trap us, but evil is not the most powerful thing in the world and we all know if you can’t free yourself, the only option is to be rescued by someone stronger than your captor. This is why the Word says Christ freed us, and “It is for freedom that Christ set us free.” You might say Christ freed us for our own benefit, or you might say he freed us so we could be reconciled to God, but the Christian knows those two things are the same. It’s true, we are described as slaves for Christ, but slavery to one thing is freedom from another.

Freedom is choosing God, that is just the fact. I know from my own experience that this is true. There are tons of reasons to back it up, but I suggest Mere Christianity as a resource if you’re curious.

(This post got preachy, but I want everyone to know that was unintentional, I was thinking as I typed. I don’t just say this stuff, I really think this way. So it’s no more preachy than anyone else sharing their thought. I’m only saying this to clarify that I wasn’t proselytizing.)

Whether you like my conclusion or not, this subject is certainly intriguing. Feel free to  comment with your thoughts. Until next post–Natasha.

We all need it

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Hey viewers, I was planning another more positive post, but today I heard someone say something that shook me up. I heard someone say they should just kill themselves.

I don’t have much to say about it. But I have felt that way too.

Reach higher.

People like me, we get our hopes up, set ourselves these high reaching goals; and imagine what a fulfilling existence would be like…and then we find ourselves stuck in the day to day living.

“Any idiot can survive a crisis, it’s the day to day living that wears you out.” Unknown source

I was never more depressed in my life than in the two years I spent prior to finding God. I don’t mean I never enjoyed myself in that time, or that I didn’t eat, or anything like that; but I lived everyday with the underlying question why I was so miserable.

I am so different now it’s hard to believe it, that part of my life seems so small and shell-like. But I still get reminded of it from time to time. I used to feel sick to my stomach nearly everyday, because I felt that way whenever I was scared or nervous or just plain worrying. I used to be a hypochondriac and feel sick whenever I heard or read about illness. I used to have irrational fears of monsters and other stuff I won’t go into. And those were the small problems. My overall problem was fear. Like Charlie Brown, I was afraid of everything.

Fear has torment. That’s why it makes you depressed. Fear makes you hopeless if it stays too long.

The second time in my life I was depressed was when I’d been a Christian for a year or two, and God just went into hiding. Every believer deals with this sooner or later. And knowing that helped, but for awhile I felt like my faith was pointless.

That experience taught me so much. I learned that faith is not a feeling. Because when you feel bad, even if you believe your religion is based on facts and knowledge, then it looks false. I learned that praising God when you don’t feel like it is sometimes the only thing that brings Him closer, and that’s not for Him, it’s for us, to remember what kind of God we serve. But I also learned that God doesn’t leave, He simply becomes less visible so you have to search deeper and deeper to find him. And that can either make you angry, if you let it; or it can make you stronger.

Maybe I’m alone in this, but I think when God says His ways are higher than our ways, He means that the way he chooses to do things is what it best, even though it makes no sense to us at all. But until we can admit that our ways are the lesser because we are the lesser, we can’t be raised up to see His point of view. That’s why Christians are always talking about going higher than before, and being lifted up. But non-Christians get this concept too when they realize that maturity is a thing, and what it looks like. (And no one is born knowing that.) Maturity is the simplest example of what I’m talking about. It’s the difference between pretending to bake a cake a s a kid, and actually baking one as a young cook (and messing it up probably) and then finally learning how to do it right. At first there is no real difficulty, and no real reward either; then there’s a lot of difficulty and still no reward; then you get to be good at it and the reward is two-fold, the cake and the accomplishment.

But first of all you have to want to. And to want to you have to be hungry. I’ve heard this over and over again. Hunger never gets any easier does it? In fact, it gets harder. But if you learn to understand it, then you can do something about it. Maybe we all wish there were easier ways to achieve the Great things in life. But that is because we are down here, and we need to be higher. (I guess I had plenty to say after all. It’s gotten easier to talk about the rough patches of my life.)

As you all can see, I have no picture perfect existence. I’ve talked a lot about my faith in this post, because I had to, there is just no other way to understand things like this. I got shaken up, and it’s happened before, and it hurts every time. But nothing has taken me out yet, and nothing has to take you out either. My advice if you’re feeling bad is to hold on; play good music; read a good book; chat with a good friend about it; and keep holding on.

Until next time–Natasha

Life as Riley Matthews

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It’s no secret that I, Natasha, like the show Girl Meets World. For various reasons. But today I wanted to write about something I thought of after watching the episode “Girl Meets Pluto.”

One of the main characters, Riley, is often described as a goofball who only sees the good in everything. And she wants to believe Pluto is still a planet. Whatever your thoughts might be on that, I can relate to her; I never wanted Pluto to stop being a planet. When I originally learned the Solar System,( via the Magic School bus,) I taught it to my younger sister. It was one of my first teaching experiences; I loved it. And Pluto was still a planet.

Do you see why I still want to think of it as such? Perhaps the fact of the matter is, as I’ve heard pointed out, that it’s ridiculous for us human beings to think we can decide what anything as huge as a planet is. But really, its not about how much we know, or how we can measure stuff, we names thing so we can learn about them and so they mean something to us.

If Pluto is a planet it has more dignity than what it’s called now, an “Ice dwarf.” Ugh. It’s one thing to decide something is grander than you knew at first, like the sun being more central than the earth; but it’s another to decide something is lesser than you thought. The earth is actually more central than we used to think. And I can understand why Riley still wants to believe Pluto is a planet.

I have a lot of Riley in me. I want to see things in a good light. Even if/when I hear hard facts, I wonder if there’s a brighter side that no one knows about. Is there a hidden good? Perhaps that sounds like nonsense to other people. Sometimes I think it is and that I just look for what’s not there. But here’s the thing: I like being this way. From all I’ve observed, in my short life, being pessimistic only makes you miserable, and it means you are always living in fear of bad things happening. I know too many people who tend to think the worst. They aren’t happy. Though “There’s more to life than that–Don’t ask me what.” (Fiddler on the Roof.)

I have to say I’ve been disappointed a lot, and I have my moments of wanting to give up on hoping for the best. But in the end, I can’t, because the day I lose hope, I lose everything. If you have no hope, you won’t see the good that is there, and you won’t expect the good that might happen. (Ever wonder why people who are pessimists are also the most critical?)

I have to have hope even to think anyone might read this post, and more hope to think it might help them out.

One final thought: Hope is not always a feeling. It is a choice. It is choosing not to say that the worst will happen; hope is waking up in the morning and being glad to start the day; hope is doing your work because you know it’ll benefit you in the long run; hope is risking standing up for something because you think it can get better; hope is seeing the political mess around us and believing good things can still happen; hope is turning off the electronics and doing something in the real world; hope is encouraging someone else because it could brighten their day. What fuels all this is love. Hope is the action of love. One of them anyway. Or perhaps it’d be better to say hope is the action of faith. Whatever works for you.

100_4836Okay, that’s all I’m going to say for this post, hope you enjoyed it–Natasha.

A me-centered universe

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I’m sure you’ve heard the term me–centered. it means self-centered/selfish. Looking out only for the needs of yourself. And Sometimes we aren’t even aware of this attitude in our selves, I’ve been accused of being self-absorbed simply for taking something too personally or being preoccupied with my own feelings.

I’m just laying this out for context, I don’t actually want to discuss being selfish. I’m more interested in the question: What is the center of everything?

It could be us in that we observe the world from inside ourselves. Everything you take in from around you is regulated by what’s inside you. Air is regulated by your lungs, food by your digestive stem, sound by your ears, and light by you eyes. (Darkness is the absence of light and you don’t need sight to see it.) And I think the good and bad things around you are all processed by your mind, heart, and soul. One could say “Me is the lens I see and feel everything through, therefore me is the center of everything.”

It reminds me of how scientists used to think the earth was the center of the solar system. We saw everything going around the earth after all, the sun and moon both moved across the sky. The planets moved more slowly. It was just logic. Right? Wrong.

Oddly enough, a man named Copernicus came up with a different theory. And years and years later we actually have pictures that prove the earth is not the center of the solar system. Turns out the sun is.

Great for the sun right? But what does it have to do with the subject? Well, in thinking about what to write, I remembered what C. S. Lewis says in the end of his book Perelandra. (The sequel to Out of the Silent Planet.) Lewis basically introduces the idea that the universe is set up for each thing, each creation is made for every other creation, and every other creation is made for every individual thing. Like a puzzle, each piece is part of a bigger picture, but the bigger picture is not complete without that pieces and all the other pieces need it to do their job.

What is so brilliant about this idea is that I can see it all through creation. The ecosystem for one example, animals need plants, plants need animals, our air needs both  oxygen and carbon dioxide which come from plants and animals (and people.) And all that is connected to the water cycle, but I could go on for pages about that. I think I’ve made my point.

You may not be the center of everything, but in a way, everything is set up for your existence. It can be hard to see at first, but think how many things other people do for you on a daily basis that you never thing about. Someone made the car you drive in, the phone you use, the screen you’re reading this off of, someone built the roads you travel on, wrote the books you love, designed the work or school system you’re a part of, grew the food you eat, routed and purified the water you’re drinking, and made the clothes you’re wearing. Maybe you don’t like everything other people have caused in your life, but have you ever realized how much you rely on them to live at all?

Our lives are woven together like a tapestry. You affect way more people than you think. Often in ways that the best detective  couldn’t trace back but if we could look at time from the outside we’d see we had a hand in the most obscure details.

The sun is the center of the solar system, but it’s rays reach out through  the whole space. And I’ve heard that the whole universe as we know is balanced perfectly for life on earth, only on earth, without the rest of the universe the sun would not be able to exist. (Don’t quote me on this I’m not a scientist, I just love it.)

I don’t actually believe anything is the center of the universe, because then you’d have to fir everything else around that thing, I believe instead that everything is overlapping into everything else. I believe God should be not just the center of  my life, but in every part of it.

The fact about centers is that they narrow things down, I prefer things broadened out.

That’s all for this longish post. Until next time–Natasha.

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Starlight

What I saw on the highway

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APATHY…HOPELESS… A few weeks ago I was in the car on the way to church and I noticed some graffiti along the highway. These are two of the words I caught. But there were more, all about the same. And I’m sure if you’ve seen any graffiti you know it’s usually depressing, or downright vulgar, occasionally you get the artistic words that don’t make any sense but whoever painted them seems to think they’re better than cuss words and negativity. What’s interesting is that only a short time after noting those words, I read somewhere (I believe it was another blog) that graffiti can tell us what young people are thinking nowadays.

I’m not sure how true that is, but certainly some angry teens are trying to tell us something. I have known moments where I felt life proclaiming to the world what I was feeling, not because the world could help me, but because I wanted someone to know and to notice.

In retrospect, I know that I had a lack of communication skills as a younger teen. And that it was because I had trust issues. ( We call it cynicism when it’s adults.) Plenty of lonely teens and kids are asking “Who hears? Who cares?” And I still ask those questions sometimes, but now when I ask I have the answer. Doubt is not the question, doubt  is having the answer and then questioning that.

We exist to be loved, and all of us know it deep down. When we feel unloved and don’t know why, we may think we’ve missed it somehow. That at some point in time either we made the wrong move, or someone just decided we  weren’t worth their time, or we were left behind by mistake; and eventually we conclude it is too late, better find something else to live for.

But what else is there? People do everything they do out of love, or need. And they are happy accordingly. It is terribly sad that there are young people out there who feel so unloved that they tell us all that apathy is the way to live, and life is hopeless. I’m not saying it is right or wrong to spray paint on the highway, I’m asking why.

I’ve wondered a lot why no one ever asked me why I was the way I was as an early teen. I think they probably just didn’t know what to ask, And my past is in the past, I’ve moved on. But I didn’t do it on my own. It took a lot of prayer, and I don’t mean the repetitive, religious prayer, but the kind where the tears are streaming and you feel like you’re being crushed under the weight of your pain. (Ever been there?) It sounds bad, and it certainly felt bad, but when you come to grips with your pain, it’s a huge relief.

I’m going to close this with a word of encouragement to anyone who can relate to what I’ve shared. There is hope. Apathy is never the answer because apathy is it’s own kind of hurt. it is better to face the real hurt and get healed. God can do that for you, or other people can help you. But it’s all a matter of opening up. And if there’s no one at all to turn to that’s when I’ve always found God to be my help.

I think that’s enough for all of us for one post–until next time, Natasha