Love

Do Your Worst. (Part 3.)

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Continued from part 2…

So, I’ve covered a problem with our attitude towards the real and the imagined, and the problem with not showing mercy. There is one last piece of this I want to put into place, and this is where the title comes in.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Shirira Hall struggled with feeling guilty long after the whole thing was over. It’s not like anyone let her forget it either, even if she had tried.

It’s because of this that I really started to feel sorry for her. Real or not, it breaks my heart when people cannot forgive themselves. I have seen it enough in real life to know how destructive it is, and to feel it myself.

I actually have a difficult time forgiving myself if I feel I’ve really done something that was intentionally wrong.

The things is, I have been tempted to wallow in guilt. To let it make me miserable, because then I won’t want to do the bad thing again, and I know people who embrace that way of thinking.

And then there are those who shrug off guilt way too easily and ought to dwell on it a little longer.

But guilt has never set me or anyone else free of their fault. It actually weakens me, I have less resistance to sin when I feel guilty, because if you feel like crud, you act like crud. But if you feel like a million bucks, you act like a million bucks.

The worst of it is, when you live in constant guilt, you lose you ability to tell when someone is guilt tripping you unfairly, and you don’t know whether you’ve truly done wrong, or whether they have misconstrued it so that they think you have.

The way I see it, that is what happened to Shirira, she did do a lot of bad things, but she made unbelievably hard choices in order to do t e right things, and she was criticized for doing it, until she didn’t know herself. She, quite sadly, started to wonder  if she was destined to betray her friends.

As far fetched as her example might seem, is it really any different form us? How may of us have started to feel like we are doomed to fail, to bring unhappiness, to let people down? I know I have felt that way in the past.

But I am no longer laboring under that kind of guilt. I broke free. So it is possible.

I have often wished that there was a way to change the show so Hawk Girl found peace with herself, because it might have helped people.

But this is the best I can do at using her story for good. And it still works, because we know what should have been.

She should have been forgiven. She should have been shown kindness by more people. She should not have been constantly reminded of her mistakes.

And if you find yourself in a similar situation, rest assured, it is not right. You do not “deserve it.”

The truth is, we all deserve such treatment from God. But not from each other. None of us are sinless, or anywhere near good enough to have the right to judge each other to that extent. If God can show mercy, (He delights in it, according to the Bible,) then we sure as heck have no right to complain that it’s not fair. Like Jonah did,

I always feel sorry for Jonah when I read his last words, how could he have missed what God was doing so much as to wish to die? Yet it is possible to be so full of hate that you’d rather die than see your hated people live. You’d rather drag them down than be lifted up. It’s very sad.

I trust no one reading this has that problem, but if they do, God can fix it. I recommend reading what He tells Jonah, it is little quoted, but it tells something of how God views mercy.

Mercy triumphs over judgment, every time. Mercy has a miraculous effect on people, it has made hardened killers sob, it has made people on the brink of suicide find a new reason to live, it has broken the pride of the proud who judge people unfairly.

Mercy has made the fearful find the courage to be brave.

Mercy can take the red out of your ledger. (Avengers reference.)

Mercy is the first attribute of Love that we recognize as such.

And, it’s not actually that hard to get, if you just ask. But ask the right Person.

One more thing, those who know they need mercy have a lot easier time receiving it. They won’t make such a complicated mess out of believing. They respond the quickest.

And while there are other ways of finding the truth, the path of mercy may be the simplest.

But, like Shirira, if you get too deep in the mire, it can be difficult to believe there is any way out. And that’s the whole point of this post. There is a way out.

You can do your worst, and still be forgiven. And I want everyone to keep in mind that we all have done our worst, and most of us have been forgiven even by people, so we have no call not to extend that forgiveness. Though it is not easy; it has often been a long fight for me to be able to do it. But it’s really about making it a priority. The rest follows.

Okay, I think that wraps up this series. Thanks for reading, and until next time–Natasha.

 

…turn to color all around…
all is new….this is lving now!

Click on pictures for captioning.

Do Your Worst (Part 2.)

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Okay, continuing from part 1…

So, as I have already covered, there is an attitude toward both real and imaginary people that is very harsh, and it is very prevalent.

But I recognize that I may be the only one who thinks it is a problem. So I am now going to dive into this question: Is it deserved?

Specifically, do these both real and unreal people deserve to be spoken of, cursed, and held a grudge against, in this manner?

What makes this question important even for the made up characters is that many of them do things that real people have done, so we have something to compare them to.

I’m going to go back to Hawk Girl, a. k. a. Shirira, what exactly did she do?

Well, she lied. But that is hardly enough, we all have lied. What makes hers worse, so we think, is that she lied to her friends, multiple times. About who she was, why she was there, and what her own people planned to do.

To be fair, the last one she didn’t know herself and lied more than she thought.

We might jump on that and say, she should have found out what her own people were really planning. Ignorance is no excuse.

It may be no excuse, but all of us have been ignorant and I daresay we acted upon what we thought, instead of what we knew.

So far, I see nothing that overwhelmingly wrong in what she did.

But it turned more serious, she helped her own people defeat her friends, telling them what their weaknesses were, so they could be exploited. She did nothing to stop them from hunting them down. She sucker punched the guy who she’d claimed to be in love with. After asking him to trust her. Not to mention that she’d never told him she was already engaged.  Not that she could be absolutely certain that was going to be a problem since it had been five years with no word from her own people.

All this is pretty bad. On top of it all, she was betraying the whole planet of Earth, almost leading to its destruction. This was heavy stuff.

But as bad as it was, Hawk Girl was never the callous kind of betrayer. She felt guilty for everything.

And I never blamed her for wanting to believe in her own people, who wouldn’t?

It was a tough call, because if they didn’t destroy earth, their enemies would destroy them.

At one memorable moment in the film, Hawk Girl is angrily arguing with her old fiancé, Ro, and cries “So we just trade their lives for our own? That’s not right.” Or something like that.

In a word, Shirira is talking about Honor. Earth is full of life, and its people have no quarrel with the Gordanians, they are not in the war. They were duped. There is no excuse at all for, as she says, for committing this kind of holocaust. Even thought Thanagarians do face extinction by letting Earth survive, it was their fight, their risk, and their choice. We never find out how the war started or who was at fault, but it is certain that the technologically advanced Thanagarians could have had other options, had they not been such a barbaric society. They waited too long, but that was their own fault.

There is no country on earth that could substitute another into its war to be killed in its stead, thank goodness, and I think because of that it is difficult to realize how horrible the idea is. But Shirira did, the reason she was conflicted was because these were her people, how could she turn on them?

She does the same thing to them that she did to the Justice League, but she tells Green Lantern “I did what I thought was right then, which is what I’m doing now.”

I wish I could say that Shirira at least never regretted her choice, but she did. Not enough to unmake it, but she felt horribly guilty and to make matters worse, many people, even in the Justice League, kept ribbing her on it. Eventually she got to the point where she didn’t even want to hear about forgiveness because it was too painful. She got flack for not being able to be loyal to anyone.

I just shake my head, these people entirely missed the point.

Honestly, I think the people writing the series missed the point.

Shirira messed up, but she was listening to her conscience the entire time, and ultimately she did the right thing. She lost her people, you’d think a smidgen of sympathy would be possible. Just a little bit, but it never occurred to anyone to put themselves in her place. Except Superman, I liked him better for that.

And outside the DC universe, what about in real life? Does it ever occur to anyone that these are real people we’re talking about? Who have real feelings, who go through the same things we do, and maybe they made the wrong choice, or maybe they didn’t, but could we just put ourselves in their shoes for one second?

I don’t mean to rant.

Look, I have my beliefs about Mercy, and I know many people do not, but two things Jesus said about it sum up the reason it is important to me. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy,” and “Judge not lest you be judged.”

I want to be shown mercy for my many faults, and I do not want to be judged, so I need to be merciful and not judge other people. Christians are famously accused of being judgmental, but from what I’ve seen, non Christians are every bit as judgmental, if not more.

Who is leaving those hate comments or hate mail; who is blasting those political people; or the opposing side? Yes, Christians do that, but it would be delusional to say all or even most of the culprits are Christian.

And it is not my intent to point fingers, I just mean we all do this. Few people are born merciful. But we all need it, and we all need to learn it.

There is one more thing I want to talk about concerning this, so watch out for part three,

Until next time–Natasha

Do your worst. (Part 1.)

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

Today I want to address something very important, and I’m going to do it with the help of yet another animated TV show example.

This one is really fitting, actually.

I’m going back to that show I used to watch every day, Justice League/Justice League Unlimited. (JLU.)

Until I started watching that show I had never heard of at least two of the members of the original league, that would be the Martian Man hunter, and Hawk Girl.

I like both of them, but I am focusing om Hawk Girl, also known as Shirira Hall.

To make a very long story short, Hawk Girl appeared on Earth, claiming it was a mistake, but in reality she was on a secret military mission, to learn about the planet and the people. This was unknown to all her friends and fans until out of the blue, an alien warship showed up with her fellow Thanagarians in it. It pretty much went downhill from there. Her friends felt hurt that she had never trusted them enough to tell them and suspicious of the new comers, but they agreed to help them set up a defense on earth against their mutual threat, the Gordanians. However it soon turned out that the Thanagarians really wished to use Earth to build a sort of shield against their enemy, and in the process earth would be turned into an hourglass shaped hunk of itself, destroying all life on the planet.

Needless to say, Hawk Girl was horrified when she learned this, and more so because she had helped her people to capture and neutralize the Justice League when they got too antsy. They had already escaped, so she found them and gave them the information hat she’d learned, none of them really wanted to trust her, but they took it.

Hawk Girl then returned to her people, only to be found guilty of treason, and locked away. There ensued a final battle between the League and the Thanagarians. Hawk Girl was reluctantly set free by Wonder Woman, and then helped Green Lantern to defeat her former fiancé, and shut down the bypass before it could activate.

The Thanagarians recognized their defeat and left, of course leaving hawk Girl behind, she was then voted on to stay or be kicked out of the League, but she left before hearing their decision. She told GL she was going to find a place where there were no more secrets, no more lies. And she left.

Hawk Girl later was readmitted to the league, they had voted in her favor, but it took a long time for the rest of the world to forgive her, if they ever did. And things got no easier for her in other areas.

So, why am I telling you all this? Well, I want you to understand the scope of the story. It involved a lot of deception, a lot of betrayal, and  a lot of bitterness, which is perhaps the worst, in my book at least.

My major complaint about the whole movie they made about this was that despite the outcome, Hawk Girl’s own friends did not let go of their anger for a long time. Well, I should say, not all of them did. (Flash is awesome.)

Also, when I watched a commentary on the movie, I learned that many of the real life fans of the show though Hawk Girl should have been left to her fate by Wonder Woman.

Since then I’ve run across other situations where the fans were the same, they had absolutely no mercy for the characters. And the characters aren’t even real. Nothing they did actually hurt these fans, or endangered our world.

What does endanger us, is their attitude.

Because I have to wonder, if you cannot forgive someone who is not even real, how can you forgive someone who is?

You may think, “Well, if the characters aren’t real, it can’t hurt to hold a grudge against them.” And I would have to politely disagree.

For two reasons: One being, many fans of superheroes consider the heroes to be quite real, to the point where they are irrational about it, and if they can think that way about them, they can think that way about anyone.

The other reason is that I have not missed the things people say about those in politics, or those who are just famous, or even those who are not but who have a small public voice. Horrible, terrible things are said of them.

It is a sad fact that humans beings can be very cruel to each other.

(I’m going to get more into Hawk Girl herself in part two, but for now I’m focusing on this problem.)

And I am sorry, but what a person will say about a fictional character, they will nine out of ten times say about a real human being. I have heard it many times.

The fact is, we are not aware of real or unreal when we pass judgement on people or their actions. That is a simple truth. Our brains will make no distinction, and neither will our feelings. All that changes is how personal it is.

Someone who cannot be merciful when it is not personal will have a hard time being merciful when it is; unless they are working from the inside out, but that is rare. Our attitudes do not switch on and off with our televisions or phones. (That is so a quote I want to remember.)

This goes for other things besides anger by the way, it goes for hate, sadness, exhilaration, envy, and host of other emotions.

I’ll be getting more into the first one in part two, until next time–Natasha.

Home Sweet Home

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

You guys know I went to a foreign country last year and it changed my life. I suspect in way I won’t fully realize for years yet.

Well, today I was reading something by one of the other girls who went on that trip with me, and I marveled at how similar we were feeling in some ways, and how different in others.

It is for privacy’s sake I don’t post pictures of myself or any really personal information here, so I can’t show you what the trip was like, but I have talked about it.

You learn a lot from another culture, and in my case, you learn that different as it is, in many ways it is more comfortable for you than your own.

I really feel out of place in the Western World. I value my rights as an American, and I thank God I was born here, and had the freedom to learn about Him without being arrested, or fined, or laughed at. But that aside, I’ve never really felt I belonged in this country.

You ever get the feeling you were born for somewhere else?

I think everyone gets that feeling at one time or another, before we get old enough and cynical enough to be convinced we deserve what we’ve got and there’s nothing better available. Am I the only girl my age who still believes she’s going to live in a palace one day? Probably not, but in another ten years, who knows? I may very well be the only one who thinks so.

Is it normal to be seven years old and think you just don’t fit into the world around you?

Well, maybe the better question is, is it normal not to feel that way?

We all do, sooner or later, but we usually dismiss it. Or we blame it on the wrong thing. The truth is, we are not meant to be perfectly happy on this earth.

It would kind of be wrong if we were, given all the horrible things that happen daily, I’m not one to focus on them, but it’s like Reason tells Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth. “When you are sad, no one else in the world can be truly happy.” I wouldn’t go quite that far, but no one else can be totally happy while there is suffering in the world. And that is as it should be, we are meant to bear with one another, and if you will not do it willingly, your life will still be affected by the world enough for you to do it subconsciously.

But this begs the question, if we are not meant to be perfectly happy here, where are we meant to be happy?

See, wise people know that a perfect thing on earth will not last, and they do not hold onto to it too tightly, but the wisest of all know that though earth is not the place for perfection, there must be a place.

We all yearn for the perfect, the complete, the finished. There has to be a time when we will or are meant to have it.

Imagine what it would be like to feel in your bones that it was time for perfect joy. I don’t know how, personally, I could stand it; like the sweet water from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, it might kill me, but it would be the death I would have chosen. (FYI, the water doesn’t kill, it actually heals, but that’s all in the book, you should read it if you haven’t.)

I believe that we are meant to have increasing joy in this life, because I believe that God gets better the more you know Him. I believe God may even give happiness to people who do not believe in Him, because He never leaves anyone without something of Himself, whether they choose to acknowledge it or not.

I believe that one of C. S. Lewis’s greatest achievements was how, in books Five and Seven, of the Narnia ones, and in “Till We Have Faces” and “The Great Divorce,” and also “Perelandra” in some ways, he managed to make the reader see a tiny glimpse of what heaven must be like. Only the tiniest glimpse, but even in that, it’s like Alice looking through the keyhole of the tiny door, into the garden, and already wanting to go there. (Alice’ Adventures in Wonderland.)

You want to go there, so badly, it scares you.

Whenever we want something with all our being, it is scary.

“My heart and Flesh cry out for the living God.” Psalm 84:2

Wow, this got deep.

What’s interesting is that you don’t have to be a Christian to get what I’m saying, you just have to know yourself.

Actually, plenty of Christians wouldn’t get this, because it is so easy to forget that first love and joy of being one.

If I may say so, one of the biggest problems we believer shave is forgetting what it was like to first be one. For me, it was as if I’d never seen anything before, or heard, or felt, it was all so much more vivid and vibrant. I mean even material things, not just the internal kind of sight.

That’s why I can’t be convinced it wasn’t for real. Nothing before it was as real as what came after it.

I’d like to end by going back to what I said about feeling out of place. I think once we accept that sorrow, it no longer is a sorrow. It is just a reminder of what we are to hope, it keeps us form getting too bogged down by stuff that is just not important. It brings to mind this other song I know, I’ll just quote the chorus here:

I’m going home, to the place where I belong, where Your love has always been enough or me.

I’m not running from, don’t think you got me all wrong, I don’t regret this life I chose for me.

But these places and these faces are getting old, so I’m going home.

Until next time–Natasha. 100_3137

Experiences.

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

I am re-uploading this post because it’s been several months and I think I can say it better now.

I want to get more into why we have experiences in this reboot.

Brushing your teeth is an experience, but it is not really memorable; versus going to another country, which you will probably remember as long as you have a sharp mind.

Though experiences themselves are easily defined by the facts, what they do to us inside, that is not so easy.

It’s funny how a seemingly terrible experience can later in life prove to be a good thing. one you are even grateful for. Like having a bad tooth pulled. Or getting disciplined by your parents. Or it can be a far worse experience, traumatic even, yet later, it makes you stronger.

I want to share with you guys something I got into this week, it’s an old comic book story, by Jack Kirby, about Scott Free and Big Barda.

AS yo may know, I don’t read a lot of comic books, but here and there I have one I like. This actually was all a tory I read online and saw pieces of on Justice League Unlimited, I only rada little of it in an actual comic book. I am not endorsing the show, but id o recommend reading the comic book saga if you get the chance, it’s an amazing story.

Not just because it may be the most romantic one in the DC universe, and it has a functioning couple to boot, but because even individually the stories of these two characters are poignant and surprisingly real.

Raised on the hellish planted of Apocalips, Scott and Barda are very different. Scott is the adopted son of the ruler of the planet, Darkseid, while Barda is a selected child who is being groomed to be the head of the furies, horrible female warriors who have no mercy, no pity, no remorse. It’s not really their fault, they are all brainwashed, hypnotized, and severely punished for doing anything remotely good or beautiful that Darkseid doesn’t like.

To make a longs tory short, Scott and Barda both witness one injustice too many, and Scott decides to flee to Earth, Barda, for reasons she does not fully understand, decides to help him, but does not follow till later. When she does they are happily reunited, and after a lot of adventures together come to realize they have fallen in love, they get married, and continue to have adventures. Though the most memorable may be the one where they go back to their “home” and face their nightmares (almost literally.)

Now I bring this up because the amount of experiences both these characters have is huge, and most of the experiences, at least early on, were bad.

So, it’s just a comic book, right?

Never!

Something about this story rung true with me. I have not had such a horrible life thank goodness, but I recognized something about it.

see, though we don’t live on a world that has no hope, many of us live in a kind of personal misery where we feel no hope. And we are brainwashed by many sources, hypnotized by entertainment, and severely punished by circumstances or possibly other people if we dare go against the norm.

I’ll bet most of us would look at Scott and Barda and say “that would never happen in real life, two people raised like they were would never be able to live a healthy lifestyle.”

Come on, is our modern phycology so very different from the kind of messages I’m sure Scott and Barda both heard? “You are meant for this, you can never be anything else, hope is pointless.” And I do not mean the lack of self esteem, but the lack of awareness just of what life is really about.

You might say, and honestly I would have agreed with you, that Scott and Barda would both be really messed up. Haunted by their past. and for awhile, they were. It literally cam after them. But they protected each other.

Until the fateful moment when Scott decided he was through running. He would go back and face it. And Barda, though she believed they would die, went with him. And they didn’t die, though they came close.

And this is how I feel like I relate to this story. Facing your past, and the fears that go with it, can be terrifying. You can feel like you’re going to die. Pain hurts. That’s what pain does.

But here’s why I don’t find their story unbelievable and I do find it real: I have been on the same journey. I continue on it. I do not feel as fearless as Barda, or as clever and optimistic as Scott; but I have had to learn to be brave, wise, and hopeful. I love Barda because she tells Scott right before they go into a dangerous situation, which she compares to a shark. “We’re jumping down that shark’s mouth together–and then I’ll beat it to death from the inside.” Who doesn’t want to marry someone with that kind of devotion?

Having a rough life may suck while it is rough, but one thing is certain, you cannot become so tenacious as to beat a shark to death, unless you’ve had a rough time of it.

And it takes tenacity to love, take it from someone who once had the backbone of a jellyfish, at least when it came to facing my own demons.

Scott understands, as he tells Barda, that they are proof Apokalips can fall. Not because they have defeated Darkseid himself, but because they defeated the darkness that he tried to instill in them. They overcame it with love and justice.

Usually we think of love, but you need justice too. Justice is what tells you when it is time to face your fears, justice tell s you when it is not fair to other people to act the way you do. Justice tells you that you should have a better fate than what you’ve been assigned by your enemies. (Whatever form they take.)

I think we are apt to get tired of hearing about the inner battle, but it is the one we have the most active part in, and it affects more than you know. More than I know.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to fight, ladies and gentlemen, and if you find a person who will jump down that shark with you, keep them around.

Note to self: Marry somebody who has no problem beating a shark to death if  it should ever be necessary.

Well, I hope you enjoyed this unabridged post from DryBonesTruth. Until next time

–Natasha

I really Lived.

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

I have heard many times that we need to live life to the full. We just need to live. Period. I may actually be sick of hearing this message. The reason is , no matter how often I hear it, I never know quite how to apply it.

I want to live well, to use my time wisely, but how? How do I know what’s worthwhile?

And even if I know, what if I don’t want to do it?

And even if I want to do it, what if I can’t?

Why does this have to be so hard?

Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it just seems hard because we make it so. That’s probably not news to you.

There’s this song that I happen to really like, and it’s not a Disney sequel one. This one is by One Republic is I am not confusing my band names. Perhaps you’ve heard it, it’s called “I lived.” I read on Wikipedia that one of the band member wrote this song for his son, and such songs are typically the best, because though we don’t know what we want, we have much clearer vision for what we want our children to have. (Even if they aren’t our children, but just children we care about.)

But I love this song because of what it exhorts the listener to do.

Hope when you take that jump, you won’t feel the fall.

Hope when the water rises, you built a wall.

Hope when that crowd screams out, they’re screaming your name.

Hope if everybody runs, you’ll choose to stay.

Hope that you fall in love, and it hurts so bad, the only way you can know is give it all you have.

And I hope that you don’t suffer, but take the pain.

Hope when your moment comes you’ll say: “I, I did it all. I, I did it all. I owned every second that this world could give. I saw so many places, the things that I did. And with every broken bone, I swear I lived.”

I literally get chills just typing these words out, they are so good.

There’s a verse in the Bible that has been made into a song, (as many of them have) but also expanded upon. It goes like this “Teach us  to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

The song tweaks it to “Teach me to number my days, and count every moment, before it slips away. To take in all the color, before they fade to gray. I don’t want to miss, even just a second more of this.”

What these two songs are telling us is very true. And the reason they use the analogies they do is because we understand better that way.

The first song is talking about how we need to live. We need to take jumps of faith, and if our faith is in the right thing, we won’t feel the fall. We need to face the storms of life and build walls to protect ourselves and those close to us. Now, the crowd screaming your name thing can be see many ways, but the best light to put it in, is that we will do so much good that we will be cheered on.

It is so important to me that the writer of the song used the word hope. No parents can make their child do any of these things, they all involve wisdom on the child’s part, and courage, and faith. But it is what a parent should want and prepare their child for. But it get even better.

To hope that falling in love will hurt sounds strange, but it is wisdom. Love, when it is purest, strongest, and most unfailing, hurts the lover. It won’t hurt all the time, but the ability to love so much that it hurts is the ability to have perhaps the highest human connection. I speak of true love, not the pain of unmet desire, that is something else entirely. That kind of love requires you giving it all you have, and that is a great thing.

To stay when everyone else runs, to not suffer, but to view it as taking the pain. Why, that is encouraging bravery, and not being the victim but the hero.

Seriously, I love this father’s prayer. It is like a prayer.

In the chorus of the song we get to the end goal, that the child will one day look back on their life and say “I lived.”

There’s a movie “Secondhand Lions,” which I recommend. It tells the story of two men who had an  amazing life, and passed on what they learned form it to their nephew, Walter. At the end of the movie, the grandchildren of one of the two uncles old foes, a wealthy sheik, show up at their house, and one of them says to Walter. “So those two men form Grandpa’s stories, they really lived?” And Walter says the most powerful line of the movie “Yeah, they really lived.”

I hope that will be said of me when I am gone. Or that I will be able to say it of myself.

It’s not what you do so much as how you do it. If you put your whole heart into it, that is living.

But there is the possibility of living for the wrong thing, and that is where the second song comes in. We only live for a short time. And even if we have good motives, we can easily direct them into the wrong pursuit.

That’s why it’s so important for the Christian to live for God. To do what is right, and what is helpful, not just what we enjoy. I maybe just lost you there. “Another message about how I can’t do what I want, yada, yada, yada.” Well, sorry. I don’t pretend never to struggle with this myself.

But I think that is because I forget the message of these two songs, (and every other form I’ve been told it in.) You don’t give your life meaning, but you can make it meaningful.

See, God gives life. He gives it meaning. But what you do with it, that may be left up to you.

“I lived” get to this as well.

Hope that you spend your days, so they all add up.

And when that sun goes down, I hope you raise your cup.

I wish that I could witness, all of your joy, and all of your pain. But until my moment comes I’ll say…

When all your days add up it should amount to something. Read that again.

Let me repeat, God gives your life meaning, you make it meaningful. That is not saying you have to make an effort to be important. You already are important, and many of us actually wish we weren’t because we see how we negatively affect other people without intending to do so.

No, what I’m saying is, you can pursue worthwhile things, like making other people’s lives better, and even more crucially, worshipping God; or, you can live your life like it was a credit card given to you with no max. You may use it all up on conveniences, but in the end the credit means nothing because there is no such thing as infinite provision without you working for it somehow. You’ll only run up a debt of time.

If you owe something your time, and don’t pay up, you lose your soul. That’s because time is the medium through which we even come to know and grow our soul, it is what God has given us to use for this purpose.

We, as the songs say, need to allot time for many things. For love; for adventure; for serving others; for Faith, foremost of all; and for enjoyment; and for taking in the colors, the rich beauty around us, if we only have eyes to see it.

“That we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Yes, if we realize how our time is precious to us, we gain wisdom. I don’t know about you, gut that’s a kind of wisdom I’m still acquiring, I don’t think I have it yet. But I hope I will continue to learn it.

Maybe there will be some broken bones along the way, I am positive there will be broken hearts, but those can heal. So, when the moment comes when you’ll look back on your life, I  hope you’ll say “I really lived.”

–Natasha.

Poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.
There are no small roles
Reach higher.