Starting Over

Remember how I said I was gonna keep up with this blog?  Way to go there Meghan......To be honest I'm not entirely sure what propelled me to get back on here and actually punch this here blog out but here I am..trying to string together some of my thoughts in the hopes that someone will read it and maybe get something useful out of it.  I think there is an art about words and how people use them.  While I'm remembering why I started this blog I wanna say that the original purpose still remains: to help people.  I've been through countless valleys that have lead me to this beautiful mountain top and I want to help as many people as possible.  If anyone actually kept up with the 2 posts I actually made....my deepest apologies for keeping you waiting on this one.  I truly do want to keep up with this, and by that I mean make more than 1 post a year haha.

One reason I wanted to fire up this blog again is because I came across some pretty blog worthy material that got me thinking.  It's Friday night and I'm sitting here in my bed watching a 20/20 episode about Heaven.  I'm just gonna throw this out there...some people are crazy.  I don't know how this will come across to some people, but why do we try so hard to figure Heaven out?  Why do we have to know its location? Why do we have to know what it looks like? Why do we have to know every detail of it?  I'm not saying it's wrong to wander those things, certainly not.  But some people drive themselves insane and spend their whole lives searching for answers they won't get.  One thing keeps going through my head as I watch this;  I keep getting the feeling that there won't be that many people in Heaven.  A lot of the people that call themselves christian's are sadly wrong.  After having said that I feel like I'm judging a lot of people unfairly, so maybe I'm wrong.  But I wanna share a story today that made me think that.....I have a good friend in a band that was trying to get a gig at a certain venue.  The people running the venue wouldn't let them play there because they didn't call themselves a "christian" band and only "christian" bands were allowed to play there.  After telling me the story one of the other band members said, "Aren't christians supposed to be the most accepting kind of people?"  I wanted to defend the venue and ask why it was wrong to have a place solely for christian bands but I didn't say anything.  Because he was right.  Maybe the whole venue issue isn't a big deal but the problem is deeper than that.  Christians do have a bad name and we've given it to ourselves.  I wanna stop right here and say that this blog isn't coming out like I hoped.  Basically I'm saying that many christians today have no clue what Jesus was about.  He loved the crappy, dirty, poor people that are looked down on today.  That statement might be obvious to some but others are still totally oblivious.  I've been reading 1 Corinthians and the other day I read one of the greatest verses I've ever come across: "Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life.  I don't see many of the 'brightest and the best' among you, not many influential, not many from high society families.  Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose the 'nobodies' to expose the hollow pretensions of the 'somebodies'?"  That was 1 Corinthians 26-31 in the Message translation.  (I love the Message translation with all my heart.  It's a paraphrase translation, not a direct translation, but it makes a lot of things clearer and puts things in simple terms.)  Reading that verse was like getting the wind knocked out of me.  I knew that God's favorites were the scum of the earth but I had never applied that to my own story.  I was far from a God follower.  I was just like them, but God still picked me to represent Him.  I think that's another thing many people don't realize; we are the image of God.  Since God is not physically present on earth himself, we are what His actions and ways would look like.  At least they're supposed to be what God's doings are actually like.
Ya....this blog still didn't turn out how I wanted it to...but hopefully I will redeem myself in future posts.  I wanna leave yall with a nice little quote.  It's my favorite one...
"In the midst of summer, I found there was within me an invincible summer."

Don't Be a Frodo.

Good evening chums,

This isn't the second part to my journey, it's just some random thoughts.  I will finish the second part however.  It just seems to be taking a while.  I've been extremely sick the last two days and have done nothing but lay around and watch Lord of the Rings.  Oh and I went to the doctor....which is just my favorite thing to do >:(  and of course they just said it's probably a cold.  I guess that it's my mom's fault then for taking me with such common symptoms because it's not like the doctor made me come in.  OH WELL. The deed is done.

I wanna talk about the Lord of the Rings today......if you haven't seen it then you won't understand this lol, and you're also crazy because they are some of the best movies ever.  But I was thinking about it tonight..........did Frodo truly accomplish what he set out to do? I mean ultimately the ring was destroyed but that's because Smeagol had it on and fell over the cliff.  Frodo did not make the choice to throw the ring in the fire and end all evil.....he made the choice to put the ring on.  After he had come that far, he caved in.    Doesn't that kinda equal an epic fail?
And then there is the end when Frodo gets on the boat with Gandolf to go to some place where there is pure bliss and where he would be at peace.  Sometimes I wish I could get on a mystical boat and sail away to some random utopia lol.  Then I realized, Frodo basically gave up.  He left because he couldn't find peace in the shire.  It's like he just became extremely jaded after trying to destroy the ring and since he had been through so much, he could never go back to the way things were.  You can't blame him.  But at the same time, haven't we all been in that position before?  Maybe not to that extreme, but I know there has come a time in everyone's life where they can't find peace and they just can't take it anymore.  As a christian the only answer is to seek out God.  Don't be a frodo.  No matter how much you've been through, don't give up.  Maybe I'm crazy for making LOTR analogies, or maybe this will help someone lol.
Speaking of being jaded, I think that's what describes me best lately.  I think I'm a lot like Frodo.  I need to take my own advice and not be that way but it's easier said than done.  After going through such a deep, dark depression one would think that you could only get happier.  Wrong.  You just expect for bad things to happen, and when bad things do happen it's......well they just happen it is what it is.  You just feel numb. And being numb scares me.
As I read over this I realize that there's a lot of work still to be done, not that I thought the work needed to stop but I'm not as ahead as I thought I was.  But no matter how depressed or jaded I get, I know God is there.  Even if I can't feel him or see him or hear him, he's there.  Even if I don't feel him for years, he's there.  He just wants me to walk on my own for now.

And so the story begins.

Hello Chums.
Well, Wednesday marked a year since my grandma died.  Surprisingly I had a peaceful feeling about it, and I think it's because it was time to let go.  I think that sounds a little harsh, but she had been fighting cancer for 3 years and it was beyond painful to see her that way.  She had nothing left to live for, and I mean that in the best way possible.  Of course her family misses her more than words could explain, but she lived an epic life.  It was time.  I'm not sharing this to have a pity party, but to celebrate her.  We all love you and miss you grandma and we know you're up there watching us.

I think grandma dying represented a lot more than her physical death.  It represented a lot of things that died inside myself, whether they were good or whether they were bad and needed to go.  Now hang on, this isn't gonna be a morbid post like I've already made it sound so don't leave lol.  And I wanna explain this, this being my depression, to help other people who are going through the same thing, because they shouldn't have to go through this and if they are going through it they shouldn't have to go through it alone.  I also wanna share because it's just a huge part of who I am, and it's a lot of what this blog will be about.  Moving on--So a week or so after grandma died is when I started going to counseling for my depression, or rather when I found out I had it.  I wasn't depressed because my grandma died, it just happened to be shortly after her death when we found out.  At first I was way excited to go to counseling because at that point the depression wasn't bad and I had a tremendous amount of hope that we would be able to get rid of it.  The first couple months of counseling were awesome and I made a lot of progress.  I started seeing my counselor less and less because we thought it was gone forever.  LOL wow were we wrong.  About mid October I started feeling kind of depressed again and I had no idea why.  I didn't think much of it because I thought 'oh well I'll just go back to counseling and it will be fixed.'  Wrong again.  It only got worse.  It turned into the deepest, darkest, and most twisted way of life I had ever known.  It physically hurt, it made me physically sick, and I didn't know if I was gonna make it through.  There were a lot of things about this time around that just utterly confused me.  Before, the depressive episodes would only last a couple of weeks and when I started to feel better it seemed to happen overnight.  I didn't feel like I actually did any work.  I would just wake up and be ecstatic.  And at the beginning there was no fear of it coming back and no fear that it would last forever.  But the second time around, all I could ask was why.  Why did it come back?  Why is it so much worse now?  Why won't it go away?  If it came back after such a long period of being happy, what's stopping it from ever being gone?  What if I'm never happy again?  That was all I could think about.  My mind just went in circles and circles with those questions.   This had gone on a month now, and the anxiety got worse and worse each day.  Then the pain turned into numbness.  I had never felt numbness to that extent before.  Some people say felling nothing is better so at least your not sad.  And I have to strongly disagree.  When you're numb you can't be happy, you can't be mad that your not happy, and you can't be sad that your numb.  Sometimes you try and cry just to feel anything at all.  I can't describe how horrible it is to look out at everything you're blessed with, and not be able to feel a single thing.  I thought I would feel better that I at least wasn't depressed anymore, even if I wasn't happy.  Still wrong.  Feeling all the pain in this world is better than feeling nothing at all.  So at this point it had been two solid months of confusion, pain, numbness, sickness, anxiety, cluelessness, and fear.  One thing I began to wonder about, and something that began to eat at me was why hadn't I felt God's presence?  Why didn't I get even a little relief out of prayer or digging through scripture?  Why do I continuously pray just to have no results?  But I kept reading and praying and tried to keep the faith alive.  And my goodness, am I glad I did.
I'm gonna stop there though, that's only half the journey.  Night kiddies.

Just another day.

Well chums,
I absolutely hate choosing a college.  This is the most important decision I've had to make in life thus far.  And like I do with so many other things, I think I'm making this a much bigger deal than it needs to be.  It's constantly on my mind.  But the more I write the more I think that this would be a much easier decision if my top two choices were both in Indiana.  One choice is Anderson University which is just an hour away, and the other choice is Johnson Bible College.....which is in Tennessee.  Don't ask me what it is about Johnson that makes me wanna go there.  It's gonna come down to whether or not I can handle being away from my family and friends for weeks at a time.  I would be moving there.  If I went to Anderson I could still come home every weekend and during the week if I really wanted to.  One large factor is that I don't want to regret NOT going to Johnson.  I want to see the world, and yes I know Tennessee is not the entire world, but I wanna be go somewhere other than Indiana.  I'm not saying I'd move to Tennessee permanently but I would be down there a nice chunk of time.  I could come home once a month, maybe twice, and I would still have fall freak, thanksgiving break, christmas break, spring break, and of course summer.  And if I went for a semester and don't like it I can always move back.  Feel free to tell me what you think of this....because I would love someone else's view on this....
Another extremely large factor about choosing a college is my depression.  That's a whole other story lol, but I don't want to go down there and feel completely alone and isolated and I don't wanna be at Anderson constantly regretting not going to Johnson.  Not to mention Anderson is waaaayyyyyy expensive.  I've become really close to a lot of my family over the past year and I don't wanna leave and have those relationships fade.  Wow, I seem to be doing a lot of complaining but this is what has consumed all my thoughts since probably summer.

Life is just too crazy.  I want you all to know that I went to McDonald's today and ordered a big mac with a diet coke.......YES I am that person.

I had a lot more I wanted to say but I can't remember one bit of it. Dangit.

I'll be on here again late tonight because I don't have to be at school until 10 for the rest of the year :D That's a beautiful thing.  Hooray for college classes!

The pain that you've been feelin can't compare to the joy that's comin.

I really feel like I need to post the lyrics to this song. It's such a beautiful song, and it describes my situation so dead on it's scary.  The song is Before the Morning by Josh Wilson.  It's a christian song, and while I'm not the biggest fan of christian music....this song speaks to you....if you let it.

Do you wonder why you have to,
feel the things that hurt you,
if there's a God who loves you,
where is He now?

Maybe, there are things you can't see
and all those things are happening
to bring a better ending
some day, some how, you'll see, you'll see

Chorus:
Would dare you, would you dare, to believe,
that you still have a reason to sing,
'cause the pain you've been feeling,
can't compare to the joy that's coming

so hold on, you got to wait for the light
press on, just fight the good fight
because the pain you've been feeling,
it's just the dark before the morning

My friend, you know how this all ends
and you know where you're going,
you just don't know how you get there
so just say a prayer.
and hold on, cause there's good who love God,
life is not a snapshot, it might take a little time,
but you'll see the bigger picture

Would dare you, would you dare, to believe,
that you still have a reason to sing,
'cause the pain you've been feeling,
can't compare to the joy that's coming

so hold on, you got to wait for the light
press on, just fight the good fight
because the pain you've been feeling,
it's just the dark before the morning
yeah, yeah,
before the morning,
yeah, yeah

Once you feel the way of glory,
all your pain will fade to memory
once you feel the way of glory,
all your pain will fade to memory
memory, memory, yeah

Would dare you, would you dare, to believe,
that you still have a reason to sing,
'cause the pain you've been feeling,
can't compare to the joy that's coming

Would dare you, would you dare, to believe,
that you still have a reason to sing,
'cause the pain you've been feeling,
can't compare to the joy that's coming

com'n, you got to wait for the light
press on, just fight the good fight
because the pain you've been feeling,
it's just the hurt before the healing
the pain you've been feeling,
just the dark before the morning
before the morning, yeah, yeah
before the morning


I wanna thank God for the opportunity I was just given.  It was a opportunity to witness and actually put my faith into practice.  So thank you God for that epic opportunity.  I think one key factor about being a follower of Christ is that you be prepared to help others who come to you for help, whether they are believers or not.  I'm not saying you must be a biblical scholar lol, but if we can't come to eachother with problems and struggles throughout our walk then who else can we really go to? Well, other than God himself.  There will always be someone out there who has been where you've been and can provide input.  I know for myself at least, sometimes the pain eases up when I can just go talk to someone even if they have absolutely no advice to give.  Sometimes people don't want advice; they just want you to listen, and I mean not just hear them but really listen.  And sometimes it makes me feel better just to know that there's someone out there like myself who is going through or has gone through the same crap I have.  I think it's always helpful to see someones else's views and opinions on a topic.  
Today was a good day all around....I'm gonna try and enjoy what's left of senior year.  I really need to learn how to enjoy a moment and not constantly worry about the future.  

Bleh.

I check back into the real world tomorow.  So it's gonna get harder and harder to update this, which is what has happened every time I've started a blog; I have to leave my fantasy land and go back to my routine.

2011?

A lot of things have gone down this weekend......the new year started......met a new friend......got to catch up with very old ones....and as always my mind has created a myriad of insane new ideas and thoughts. 

I don't really now how to feel about the new year, and when I think about it I think it's better that I don't feel anything towards it.  Another year has come and passed.  And it will happen again and again and again and again.  Time goes on.  This year has BY FAR been the craziest year of my entire life.  It feels like I've been living in 12 straight months of twilight zone.  I've learned more than I ever thought I would, I've cried more than I ever thought I would, I've realized more than I ever thought I would, and I've grown closer to God than I ever thought possible.  The more I think about it......maybe I feel relieved that this year is over.  I'm glad it happened, but I'm ready to be done with it.  I've been through the darkness...hopefully 2011 holds the light that I've been looking for.  

This is a bit of a random thought but I mentioned being hopeful and whenever I talk about hope I start thinking.  Hope can either be the worst of things or the best of things.  One of my favorite quotes, possibly my most favorite, is from the Shawshank Redemption when Andy Dufresne says "Hope is a good thing; maybe the best of things, and a good thing never dies."  Id really like to agree with that.  Sometimes I think I over think things way too much, and that life shouldn't be nearly as hard as it is.  But then sometimes I think it should be that much of a challenge.  What would life be if you went through it not feeling anything, like you were in a coma or something.  

Let me move to a positive note.  The Robinson's are in town and they're staying with us!!!!  I am beyond excited.  They are more than friends to me.  I feel like I've gotten closer to them since they've moved which is ironic because normally you just get lazy and lose contact with someone whose moved away.  But I feel like theres more motivation to keep the relationship strong, because I don't wanna lose people are special as they are.  Last night we partied hardcore with them, and by partied hardcore I mean drank sparkling grape juice and watched Dick Clark's new years show and stayed up til 5 in the morning.  Today we just reminisced and visited all the old places we used to go.  I think one of the most painful things in this life is looking back on something you truly and genuinely enjoyed, and knowing that you'll never have it back.  It physically hurts sometimes.  

The goal of this blog is not to be a debby downer, but it seems that that's what I've been best at lately LOL. 

But speaking of letting things go.......how do you do it? is it ever really gone? Can you have a part of whatever is was you loved and be okay?  I have a hard time with letting the past go.  Because it was so much better than the present.  But I've gotta stop being like that.  That's not the point of life.  Why would we be put here to dread waking up everyday.  I believe we were put here to number 1) lead people to Christ and number 2) make the best life possible for ourselves.  Life is made to be enjoyed.  God has given us the tools to make it awesome and amazing and it's up to us to do with it what we want.  

So many random thoughts, but it's all good.

Well friends, I'm gonna go stay up really late again with Jason, Eric, and Haley.  Good night kiddies.