Xanga was the way to connect with friends before FB came along... at least in my own life... I wrote about all kinds of crazy things. I surprised myself reading through old entries of things God put on my heart back then... some deep stuff. Other stuff was really silly and cheesy with great stories and memories relived. :)
My friend said that she thought my writing style had changed since then... has it? I can't really tell. I don't think it had other than I actually capitalize my "i" when writing but the "..." still remains. :) I started my xanga site back in 2002 and kept it all the way to 2008... I was pretty honest and open on my site... much more than I consider myself to be now. We started talking about where we were in what year and the things that have or have not happened. It's crazy that time has gone by so quickly and yet it doesn't seem like it either. I was surprised looking back and recounting all the stories how much I have changed in the last decade or so.... A lot of things I thought would have happened by now have yet to come to pass.. but the crazy thing is things I didn't even really consider in my plans have happened and I am so amazed.
Isn't it crazy that we have a plan for everything? A plan of when we want to graduate, when we want to get married by, how long to wait before kids, how long we want to work before we retire... we plan for all these things but the one thing we don't plan for (well at least I didn't) was for my own spiritual growth. I mean that might sound kind of ridiculous because who can plan out their own spiritual walk? But then who has planned out their life and it has always gone according to plan? We think we have control over all these things but we don't....not ultimately at least. Yet the most important part of ourselves we leave up to... chance? God? We're not ambitious spiritually (at least not by nature) and the world doesn't care to feed that to us. It feeds us the bigger houses, newer cars, fancy rings and weddings (nothing wrong with those physical things). We are ambitious with our careers and other aspects of our lives but somehow our relationship with God is sort of left up in the air. I think it's easy for us to say well I mean it's up to God really what he wants to show or reveal to me (this is true) so that means I'll just sit around until I get zapped with some sort of revelation... but until then I'm just going to do my own thing. I actually used to think that's how this whole God thing worked. You're told you are saved by grace and it has nothing to do with you... it's all God. But somehow for me it translated into I don't really have to do anything...if God wants it to happen, He'll do it without anything from me...
Now this is a delicate balance as we know since both faith and fruits are needed... Faith alone proves nothing and works alone gets us nowhere either.
and to be continued... :)
You know what...as I was reading your post I remembered something my pastor told me when he was initially trying to get me to consider seminary. And he said that when a person TRIES, like intentionally tries...it takes them 10 years to change and become a better person, a more God-pleasing person. That really hit home for me and I decided that day to be really intentional in looking for parts of my life I wanted to see change in....crazy how I kinda forgot about that....
ReplyDeleteWow....this post is amazing! Thanks for challenging me as well. I never thought about that in my spiritual journey. More and more I want to be a believer who does the deed instead of talking about faith.
ReplyDeleteKeep up the posts! Love reading them~ =)
That last part of your blog reminds me of James 2 from my SG! I took all my Xanga posts and cut and paste them onto a Word file a few months back. It is definitely interesting and nostalgic to look back on all of those posts to see how you've changed from then to now. Keep blogging sister!
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