just Peachy thoughts

Today seems like a really odd time to re-visit this ghost of a blog, but whatever. Today just felt like the heights of a pace that I can’t maintain and that I was literally stopped in my tracks. Oh well. I think all would agree that life truly is a roller-coaster ride (and sometimes it’s a bit too much like the Incredible Hulk).

Anyway, I could use another freshly baked batch of highlights, served wonderfully warm and with fresh cold milk. Mmmm, comforting, chocolate-y blog.

- Today’s weather. Wow!!! I absolutely needed bright, warm sunshine to wake me up a bit.

- The Thorn! I got to see it again last night, and man oh man, I love every minute of it. Whether it’s the acrobatics, fire twirling, the heel-kick of a 95-year-old man, or conceptualizing Jesus in a way that is up close and personal–I can’t get enough.

- Ephesians. My small group has been studying this book for a few weeks now, and no matter how trying my week was, I walk away from our group discussion feeling super encouraged.

- Seeing or hanging out with my hubby. These moments are rare over the past few weeks (that will change after Easter!), but I love, love, LOVE how he makes me feel more like myself than anyone else in the world.

- Bella. She’s crazy, she’s cute, she’s so stinkin adorable, and I love our newest (and furriest) member of the Russo family.

- The pictures that Nathaniel and Ella drew of themselves (which are now hanging on our fridge). They are such sweet little self-portraits, and I love seeing Nathaniel’s 4-year-old writing that says “I -heart- you”.

- Also, I love the homemade tortilla chips I make. They’re pretty wonderful.

Hello old friends, if you are still out there hopefully not holding your breath since my last post. Life has once again carried me off on its back for weeks at a time, and I have managed to escape its grasp for about ten minutes. Between weddings, a vacation, a puppy, a conference, a birthday, constantly ongoing car issues, more weddings, another birthday, work, and cleaning up after me, my husband, and the puppy, I’ve been unable to write something delectable for you to munch on. Such is life, I suppose.

Anyway. It’s nice to have a moment to breathe. I’m realizing I guess that life just doesn’t slow down. You think it will. I think it will. But it doesn’t. Something always happens to distract me from what I really want in life, which is peace and real priorities.

So I’ve decided that I’m regularly going to not care about dirty clothes, dirty dishes, and floors that need vacuuming for enough time that I can breathe again. While my life keeps trying to take control and make up priorities of its own, I will refuse to surrender to its bullying.

Oh wait. I have to go. Life is calling…

I’m sad to say that my blog has been a bit of a desert for months now. I’m not really sure if it this is because I’ve been too busy (definitely), nothing interesting has been happening to me (depends on how you look at it i guess), I’ve had writer’s block (maybe so), or I’ve run out of things to say (this couldn’t possibly be it).

Regardless of the reasons, I’m trying to defibrillate this sad little green page back to life. With that end in mind, the best thing that I can share today is a lesson God has disrupted my life with lately:

Sometimes it takes going to a really dark place to remember how amazing the light is.

In my everyday Charleston life, there is an ample amount of sunshine. I know this is true, yet I allow my mind to forget the contrast of light with dark, and the light begins to loses its luster. The contrast fades to white on white, and my mind loses sight of any definition. Visiting a deep pit, oozing with soupy blackness, managed to re-awaken my senses, and I remembered what darkness is.

Let me not get lost in metaphors: I have forgotten the blessings in my life because my life is so full of them. I began feeling that God was far from me. And a weekend around some of my family, whose lives seem like bitter wastelands as a result of the enemy’s destruction, helped me see that God is not far, but close. Close as in, pressed against my face. God has blessed my life immensely. Ridiculously. With things and people and situations that I couldn’t even have dreamed up. And I don’t want to forget that.

Long time, no blog. I’ve been so crazy busy, but I’ve missed this. I figured I’d do a third installment of positivity to get the juices flowing again.

- My mom and I had a spend the night party last Wednesday: yummy dinner, lots of laughs, and a funny movie.

- Two words: Wii Fit!!!

- Another two words: Evo Pizza. That place is awesome, and Liz and I had a blast eating there.

- Hanging out with Abbey all week. It was so much fun hanging with her while the boys were away.

- Getting the gallery successfully moved. I was beat after last week, but man did I feel like I accomplished a lot. I think God’s grace made everything so smooth. I’m so grateful! And I have a real desk now!

- Last, but not by any means the least: Chris coming home! It’s crazy that you can miss someone so much, and I’m so happy he’s back.

There, my monday’s a little better, and I finally updated my blog! Yippee!! Hopefully I’ll write again soon!

‘Have we been slandering God by daring to worry when He has said: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you”?’ –Oswald Chambers, “My Utmost for His Highest”

I was feeling a little bit captivated by my worries today, and so I decided to seek out some counsel first from the Lord, then from my husband, and then from the internet: ha ha, not really the internet, but an electronic version of Oswald Chambers’ devotional. Perusing the list of titles there was one that caught my eye from curiosity rather than from relevance to my situation. “Can a Saint Slander God?,” it read. I was casually reading through it, and I stopped to re-read the quote above.

It struck me that God is not so much concerned with our condition as sinners, ball-droppers, and mistake-makers as He is with the condition of our faith in Him. In His Word. In His trustworthiness. The former condition is the mundane, ordinary, boring to Him. He is not half as surprised as we are when we forget to call someone back or say something nasty or spend too much money at Target; He expects our imperfections. He is asking, “Yes, you messed up, but where is your faith?” This is the question Jesus poses after the disciples wake Him in fear of drowning, and He calms the storm that seemed to be overtaking the boat. Where is your faith? He is redirecting their focus from their situation to Jesus’ condition: faithful, loving, trustworthy. I am suspecting this question also applies to us. Where is my faith? In myself, in my husband, in my church? In my attempts at being perfect? In Jesus as Lord of my life?

I believe that worry might be a check engine light, saying that we are putting too much stress on ourselves, stress this engine can’t hold up under. Stress to perform, to be perfect, to be in control. Where is my faith?

I needed God’s interruption today.  

I hope God interrupts your life at just at the right moment like He does in mine.

Lately I’ve been feeling a little hit over the head with life. As if life has just swung a good old-fashioned baseball bat, and left me with a cartoon welt on the forehead and the word “whammy!” written in yellow stretching out from it. It’s kind of like my life has been living me instead of the other way around. Things have been a little hectic, I suppose. <– Understatement of the decade, btw. Consider this list of events:

- my mom got married last friday.

- my whole family spent approximately one week here, without my mom here to keep them entertained.

- my apartment is in a shambles as we try to get packed for the move into our house on friday (we still aren’t finished packing).

- my brother and his family are getting ready to move to Charlotte, NC.

- I am helping multiple friends with their wedding plans.

And oh yeah, I still have a job and a marriage to maintain. I keep trying to dig the life lesson out of this heap of to-do lists, numbers, and packing tape, but I’m feeling a little tangled at the moment.

Chris managed to bribe me into taking the night off from packing last night with the promise that we would make up for it with extra hard work tonight. The truth is I really, really needed it. I was beginning to forget that there are faces behind all these lists and errands and bubblewrap. Hopefully, my work tonight will be more inspired due to this realization. I am also secretly hoping that I might fall asleep tonight and wake up 2 months from now, when our house is all unpacked and everything is already done. Hey- a girl has to have dreams.

The Fuel conference this weekend was amazing. There were so many great messages and movings of the Holy Spirit that I could share, but I feel like God placed three core ideas on my heart as the theme of the weekend, at least for me.

Forgiveness

Letting go of the past is crucial to moving on, and I’m usually reasonably quick to move on from some sort of hurt, but I don’t always forgive before doing so. This isn’t really all that effective. Giving forgiveness so deep that it extends beyond yourself is transcendental; it comes from an entirely other place–from the great reservoir of God’s grace. Grace for you and for me. It almost never really has anything to do with the person my unforgiveness is directed at, and it almost always has everything to do with me and my heart and my issues and my wrongdoings, and God wants me to live a life that is not entangled with strings of emotions and hurt feelings that are still around simply because I am being too stubborn to cut them.

Compassion

There are a handful of people in life that really have the ability to get to me. Really get to me. And I sometimes let this knot of bitterness, selfishness, and hardness of heart form deep inside me. It makes me hard when I ought to be soft. Venomous instead of encouraging. Resentful and not thoughtful. I start to let that person embody all the things that I am angry or upset about, things are unfair because of this person. It’s not that they are doing more wrong than any other person in my life, or more than me for that matter, but this person is the problem. The Lord reminded me this weekend that I am the one with the knot in my stomach. My lack of compassion is rooted in my lack of trust that God alone is my provider, and he alone is my satisfaction. And I take my lack of faith out on others, blaming them for the way that I feel. Compassion is crucial to interacting with the human race. Without compassion, moving through life would be like a waterpark with no water. We’d all be hitting the bottom of the pool with a thud and screeching down hot plastic slides, burning our feet on the pavement and stuck on floats that aren’t moving.

Surrender

I am stubborn. If you know me at all, you know that I am stubborn. Sometimes relentlessly so. And God is calling my life to the sacrifice. That means I am constantly looking the other way, because honestly, I hate sacrifice. I love sleep and sugar. I love my own way and I hate cleaning. Sure, I also love a clean house and I always feel better when I eat right, work out, get up early, and have a regularly-scheduled quiet time. But I hate sacrifice. Time and time again this weekend, I felt like my heart was a rope and God was on one end and I was on the other. I’d start to give in to worship or His Word a little and feel my end of the rope slip. And so I pull back. Surrendering myself, my heart, my desires, my thoughts and feelings is not easy for me. I don’t know exactly why, but I think it has something to do with the two-year-old temper tantrum happening inside me that says, “No!!!! That’s MINE! I want to do things MY way, not yours! It’s my turn if I say so!” And this might be why I ate a couple packs of candy for breakfast this morning. My head said, “Start the day fresh-eat well today.” The two-year-old said, “I like candy! And I want it!” And so the Lord told me this weekend, We’re gonna deal with this. I’m gonna deal with your heart. Surrender it to me, because I love you.

So my prayer in leaving Camp St. Christopher behind is not letting my daily life get in the way of living for eternity.

I just want to take the time to share with you a book I’ve been reading. It is an absolutely awesome collection of very short and very true stories about life. Cold Tangerines by Shauna Niequist (daughter of Bill Hybels, founder of Willow Creek) is quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite books!

Everytime I crack it open, I am overcome with these savory slices of Shauna’s life, a life filled with real-ness. It almost always brings a tear to my eye, not of sadness or sentimentality, but of refreshment. Every story is filled with real, breathing, honest life. And that is hard to come by.

She is very much a woman, very much a mom, and very much an inspiring individual. I know many of you (ladies, in particular) would thoroughly enjoy this book, and I just wanted to take the time to highly recommend an excellent read.

This is a book that reminds me why I like to read. Have an awesomely inspiring day.

So the young adult mid-week service at Seacoast has come to an end. Last night was not just an every tuesday service, it was the last tuesday service.

In many ways I am left speechless. I can say that the service was awesome, it rocked (literally, twice as hard- we basically had double the band), and that I was surprisingly sad. So much change has happened in my life at that service, and I know that God was the one changing me, not the ministry, but I find myself being attached to the service itself. And I know that God is still here, with me, just as he always has been, but I can’t help but feel like a whole, packed chapter in my life is closing. My mind keeps running over all these events and services and moments in small groups, with friends, with family. My life has been changed dramatically, literally from darkness to light, and the Lord chose to use that service as a vehicle of change.

I know that life moves on, and I guess last night was the perfect picture of that. But I guess the thing that struck me the most about last night’s service was the worship. Actually, the way we worshipped. Unreservedly. Everyone. Even the unlikely. Even the tired. We worshipped like we knew that there was no promise of tomorrow, like the moment that counts is the one that’s happening right now. That this worship was our sacrifice, devoured by Holy fire, and acceptable for the Lord. Maybe if I’d been worshipping that way for the past 5 years my heart would look very differently today. What if I worship that way today…and forever?

The cross before me,

the world behind.

No turning back,

raise the banner high.

It’s not for us,

it’s all for You.

wince. I’m craving caffeine and a few more hours of sleep. I’m watching the clock wind down and finally let me leave. Tuesday through Friday I can swallow, but Sunday ends and them WHAM!, here it comes again. There’s a little girl inside of me that just wants a blanky and a pillow and a pair of flannel jammies. Ahh, sweet bliss…

I think I need to seriously work on improving the quality of mondays. There’s got to be better monday out there, one worth capitalizing and italicizing, and I want to take hold of it. I’m going to make another list of highlights just to get this one turned around (I’m cheering myself up already):

- the Masters on Sunday. I love watching golf, especially with my hubby. Especially with my hubby and my niece, Ella, who was pretending to bake us cookies and bring us milk the whole time.

- Our house. Every weekend we go visit our house as it is being built… we take pictures and get more excited to move in. This week: it’s primed (inside), there trim and molding, inside doors!, a garage door, and house numbers. House numbers!

- Family. Getting my in-laws together with my family seemed a little nerve-wrecking, but it was awesome. God is good.

- Birthdays. Shouts to Carrie, now 29, and Ashleigh E., now 21!   Next up: Nate- 29

- Our clean, clean, clean apartment. It’s such a joy…(hopefully it will still be clean enough for me to list as a highlight next week).

- Fresh strawberries, handpicked by a 4-year-old. Perfect and yummy.

- The Office. It simply brightens my day with idiotic and outrageous humor.

- My husband, who will almost make himself late for work because he can’t stop cuddling with me. I wish he were here right now.

- The Reflect small group/personal study that we’re going through at Seacoast. It’s really, really awesome.

There, I think I feel a capital ‘M’ coming on… here’s wishing you a brighter, better Monday.