A little perspective.......

This blog post was published on To Write Love on her arms blog this morning.....I must say this is honest look at St. Valentines Day as it should be viewed. Hope you enjoy it as I did.

DEAR VALENTINE'S DAY,

FEB. 14, 2011 AT 4:19PM

My friend Don wrote a blog about you today and his blog suggests that you used to look a lot different than you do today. He says that you are the product of a poet and that before this poet's pen, you were not a romantic holiday. 

i think i would have liked you more back then, whenever that was. The truth is that you really bother me now. i think you bother a lot of people, honestly. You show up every year right after Christmas. You turn the windows pink and you sell your diamonds on the radio and i think i've gotten five emails from 1-800-FLOWERS in the last three days. i'm not sure how you got so much power.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that i don't like love. i love love - i think it's the best thing that happens on the planet. It's the biggest dream inside me. But i bought a lie somewhere along the way. i bought the lie that says i'm not alive if i'm not in love. i bought the lie that says if i love someone but then they stop loving me or they start loving someone else, then i must have no value or power or worth. i bought the lie that says if i'm not in love, then i'm as good as dead.

And if you believe that lie long enough, it makes a giant hole. It makes a hole so big that no one person could ever begin to fill it. Not even a princess. Believe me, i've tried. To fill it with a person, to fill it with beauty, to fill it with all the things you sell. 

But i don't think it works that way. Bono says his songs come from a God-shaped hole inside of him. He's my favorite singer and he has a lot of things. He has great stories and a wife and kids and plenty of money. But in spite of all of those things, he says he still has this hole and he says that it's the reason that he sings.

i've been thinking lately that maybe i've confused a girl for God, a different one every year or two, since the first day of junior high. And man, that is a lot of pressure to put on someone, to make them God. That is a ton of power to hand someone. Especially when they're just a person. A person with questions and flaws and pain of their own.

So maybe there's a war, inside of me and for me and maybe my heart is the opposite of small. Maybe it's the opposite of cheap and empty and alone. Maybe it's sacred and enormous and wild.

To make a long story short, i think i've given you way too much power. i let you scare me and i let you name me and i let you tell me what i'm worth.

i don't want to do that anymore.

There are dreams inside of me and those are mine and my guess is that they're there for a reason. But for all the days like now where the dreams are asked to be only dreams, i'm gonna keep getting out of bed. i'm gonna keep living my story. i'm gonna believe that there is reason and purpose, and power in my life. i'm gonna believe that i'm alive inside a story bigger than my pain, bigger than everything missing.

It crossed my mind to try to ignore you, to try to go to bed early and wake up when you're gone. But i changed my mind. i am part of a gang in Florida and we're gonna get together tonight. We're going to open our computers and we're going to choose to believe that words are powerful. We're gonna do our best to tell someone something true. We're gonna ask people not to give up on their stories.

Valentine's Day, i don't hate you. i don't even blame you. Perhaps you did not name yourself. Perhaps you are the product of hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of broken people and a million God-shaped holes.

The truth is that we're all living love stories.

Peace to you tonight.
jamie

Good God we need you this time of year......

lets say I'm convinced he arrived just in time.

So I've been out for a little while. It's been weird and I really can't even begin to explain it. The point is things always look up after a while. Christmastime is here and this year it almost feels fake. Like its not a real Christmas even at all. I'm trying to focus back in on the importance of the holiday that is Christ and his beautiful and radical birth into the world.

I have so many distractions in the world. I need God to come and show me why I have no reason to worry about such silly things.

Be well this holiday everyone!!!

Art within music.......

If you believe in art being a part of music. Then you owe it to yourself to spend some time with Paper Route. Spent a wonderful evening with these gentlemen tonight and I must say it was very much worth it. Really enjoyed the music and equally enjoyed the conversation afterwards. Listen to paper route.

Be Blessed.

Open your eyes, you're still here.......

Maybe sometimes we all forget how blessed we are. Maybe we all forget that we're still alive.....empty handed but alive. I don't know if I've ever felt peace in my life completely. But I know now in the midst of every storm that I am alive and I have purpose buried beneath this current state of life.

God is and forever will be my reason to keep going. He is my wise shepherd guiding me to my destination. Life will go on and I will be well.

Bless you all. Much love and peace.

Coming up for air......

Well its been a while. I've been on an extended break out of the blog world and been collecting myself through keeping busy with work, finding a real job and friends. Its been good and I've been trying to collect myself in this current season of my life.

I must say the older you get the tougher it gets to walk through life. The more you need faith in something. I've tried putting faith in several things in my life. Almost all of them have left me feeling incredibly underwhelmed and unsatisfied. It seems every time I drift off that I find myself once again at the feet of Jesus begging to be taken back. I hate this cycle. I hate that I'm so incredibly intrigued by so many other things outside of His kingdom.  I hate that I struggle and claw my way through a world that cares nothing of purity or love.

And yet.

I am still here. I am still a child of Christ. What is around me is more often than not something that I cannot change. I believe contentment is a word that has no place in human nature outside of the grace of God. I've been paid for and I have a name in Christ alone. He is my Father and even though I'm a prodigal son so very often. I am still his son.

My sweet Jesus thank you for being so wonderfully gracious with me. Thanks for loving me in a way that no one has ever even come close to doing. I'm learning through baby steps how to love you in return the way you have so consistently chose to love me. Jesus you are forgiveness and to know that I am forgiven is to be set free.

Amen.

I think we're on to something good here........

Just thinking that I'm going to come out of the post college blues. I'm finding lots of good things to dwell on lately. I've sort of been battling with God about a lot of different things recently as I've tried to explain why these times have been just weird for me. I think that it was bound to happen at some point in my life but it just happened to be the breaking point at this particular time in my early twenties. That all said the plans are being formed and cemented on what the next step is. Prayers are being prayed for the first time in a bit because I was angry at God for a bit.

Yes I do that. I don't know why. Anyway, I'm on the up and up. Pressing on......

Love you all. More to come soon.

and here we are.......

Growing up was something foreign once. It was a decade away. Then it was 5 years away. Then a few years off. Then I stumbled into the realization that life is here and no one is waiting for me. I remember in my younger years having expectations for my life at this point and now having achieved very little of them I find myself searching for the reality of now.

Love is a fickle thing. It moves in  motions we understand only in tiny intervals and just when we grasp things marginally, we gamble away good love for momentary comforts. I've gambaled for most of my life with the things that are good to me. Things such as grace, God, friendships. It seems like only a little while ago that I had the path clearly planned out for what was ahead of me. college, job, wife, kids.........and now that seems to be less and less of a reality and more of a fantasy. I gambled, I lost.

I'm not saying that none of this will happen. I'm sure in time that it will. For now I piece together what is to come for the time being. I can only kid myself with plans these days. We know nothing of the future. We only know where we are today. I only know that what was and is not what will be.

I'm a shell of my former self. Wrestling with my roots attempting to find calm in a raging sea. Anchors are deployed but we are far too deep to find the ocean floor.

Yet I feel constantly on the verge of finding ground to stand on. I feel like I'm constantly on the brink of finding God like I've never found him before. I feel like everything will be explained to me soon. When I see the fruits of my passions change for good. In all this though I've known the truth that its time to stop gambling away good things in my life. In fact its time to start to shift focus to those things that are in fact good to begin with. Playing with fire is no longer my desire.

And so we grow up. And so we hold on for dear life. But it is the turbulence that gives us life. I really believe that love must detain us, engulf us, and dominate our being before we can embrace the things God has for us. That life has in store for us.

I wrote this after a wedding the other night. It was a great weekend with my wonderful friend Erin whom is always a blast to spend time with but we had a conversation about those we care about and how we must love even when things they are doing are seemingly idiotic (sounds similar to what our creator must do). This is what came from the convo:

Sometimes in life we all trip up a little and fall with anything but a graceful nature. I think that maybe loving people is a bit like this. We stumble through relationships at times and only once we start to fall with such a violent nature do we start to learn how to love patience, grace and hopefulness that manifest itself in the truest of love forms known to many as authenticity. This is something that we all must continue to foster with great passion until the very end.