Announcement! (Goodbye, but hello!)

Keeping up with this blog has been fun, and world expanding. I have “met” people I never would have met otherwise, which is so thrilling to me. However, I’m in a different place now than I was when I began this over a year ago, a happier place.  I started this as a frightened, lonely, questioning young woman who’s life had recently been upended into turmoil. Writing was a comfort, an outlet.

My life now, praise God, is full and busy and rich and full of meaning. I have seen that God has answered and continues to answer my prayers,  and thus I am preparing to move on from this blog.  It’s not that I no longer have any questions or comments or musings, or that you can’t have a blog AND a full busy life, it’s just that any religious musings I’m going to have will be privately written in my {handwritten} journal, or talked over with my fiance. The season this blog was founded for has (praise God again) passed.

However….

Please come visit me over at my new online home, The Cozy Book  Nook, at http://thecozybooknook.wordpress.com, where I will be posting book reviews and related book information. It just feels right to transition into a book-focused blog, as I am a bibliophile both professionally (librarian!) and personally.  I would love if you would continue reading, maybe finding some new book recommendations or suggesting some of your own!

Thank you for adding to the rich experience of blogging. Hopefully I’ll see you over at The Cozy Book Nook!

 

~Hope

moving on

…so, this isn’t the update I had in mind (I’m considering a few ideas for the direction of this blog). But I wanted to write anyway. Yesterday, I said goodbye to my therapist of over a year. I have complained about the man, I have been difficult and stubborn with him, I have viewed counseling with trepidation and as an annoyance but knowing this was our last session…it was brutal, to be honest.  I cried there, tears falling down my face and unlike many other times, I made no move to wipe them away. I sobbed later, in my fiance’s arms, and I thought about how the nagging fear that had been in the back of my mind since I met this doctor–

why get attached, if my therapist’s place in my life isn’t permanent?

And I did get attached. I was belligerent and difficult but I grew to enjoy knowing that I had someone to talk things over with, someone who was totally separated from everything else in my life. Someone unbiased. I grew used to our conversations. It hurts to see that go. It’s frightening to face life on what feels like my own two wobbly legs–I grew dependent on him, I guess. But I’m coming to a new understanding, I think, of our time together.

Some things aren’t permanent. Some people and relationships aren’t permanent. Some people enter your life and your lives become inextricably linked, and you see many seasons through together, lots of joy and lots of happiness and maybe tears too. Some people aren’t forever, and that’s okay. Some people are just for a time and you can still learn from them, still appreciate their existence, and it’s okay to be sad when they move on, or you do. It’s okay.

Not to sound all “Christian-y”–cause I’ve always hated when people fed me what sounded suspiciously like regurgitated sound-bites from a Sunday School class–this recent season in my life of moving on from a therapist, a relationship I’ve had for over a year, reminds me to consider that only God is always stable, always present, always dependable. Not that other people don’t desire to be, or want to be, but that only God is capable of doing so. I will never have to fear getting attached to God and then moving on and saying goodbye cause I ran out of money and can’t afford our sessions. He will always be there. It’s something to consider.

Ps: yes, I did say fiance….I’m ENGAGED! He proposed last week, and obvs, I am over the moon ecstatic about it!

changes are coming….

 

…..please stay tuned!

shaking my head

*face palm*

This is what makes me question whether I should even try to stick around and fight for grace and truth and equal rights in this place called the church, or run away as fast as I can from an organization that has the nerve to say it follows Jesus but disavows itself so completely from seeing women as more than just sex with legs.

I am continually horrified by people who profess to be such Christians, and then prove themselves so incapable of seeing women as anything but adultresses and temptresses.

@Michael Hyatt, chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers; Jon Acuff of Stuff Christians Like, and every man who thinks as they do:

GROW UP. Stop being so full of yourself that you think every woman you come across is just DYING for the opportunity to sleep with you.

(for more on my problem with Jon Acuff, and this issue, see my post: My Name Is Not Hester Prynne)

The article refers to the fact that Jerry Falwell (who I have my own separate issues with, so this is just icing on the cake), “used to say that if he were driving alone in his car on a rainy day and passed a woman from his church walking down a road, he wouldn’t stop to pick her up. “

Right, right…I remember reading about that Bible story, how Jesus was alone at the well with a woman of ill repute, and He said, “Away from me, ye temptress, and someone fetch me a male, so I may drink my cool beverage in pea…”

Oh wait, that’s NOT in the Bible? Funny. The way “Christian” men treat the women around them, you’d think there was an addition to the two greatest commandments: love God, and love others, UNLESS THOSE OTHERS ARE WOMEN. IN WHICH CASE, feel free to treat like the dirt underneath your sandals.

semper fi

So…the new boy–we’ll call him A. for the purpose of this blog–is amazing. He’s also a Marine, and currently training overseas for a month. And I miss him so, so incredibly much. This might sound like a complaint, but it’s not, it’s just how I feel right now: I feel like overnight my world has shrunk to just me, my cell phone, and how much I miss him. I don’t know if he has access to a phone–he called from the airport right before he left, which I was overjoyed about–but just in case, it’s always on me. Today I started panicking because I thought it wasn’t with me…and there it was in my hand. I was very relieved, I have to say!

This is a new world for me, this military world, but it’s quickly becoming familiar. I feel like I’ve always been doing this: converting the time to his time zone, wearing his dogtags, holding a sweatshirt that smells like him instead of holding him, randomly crying because it feels like way too much. Replaying our memories in my head, willing the time to rush forward so he’s home with me again.

Hopefully, by the end of this month, I’ll be tougher. Not so fragile, not so tearful, better able to handle things. That’s my goal, at least. To be a strong woman. I want my Marine man to come home to a woman who can handle military life with grace. And I want to be able to lean on God. I don’t know when I can talk to A., I don’t know if I’ll even be able to talk to him before he comes home. But I do know God can help me through it. I don’t know how He can do that, I don’t understand how He can help me, but I believe He can–and I’d like to give Him the chance to.

I’ll close with a favorite new quote I found: “God created the strong to love the strongest.”

Hopefully I’ll live up to that statement.

to blog or not to blog…

So, I wasn’t kidding when I said so many good things have happened in my life lately.  But I feel like I should either rework the point of this blog, or delete it altogether. I started blogging during a pretty dark time in my life. I needed an outlet, desperately, and I got one–and I had the opportunity to feel connected to so many others I wouldn’t have otherwise “met”.  I started this blog to remind myself of what was true in my life, what was good and hopeful.

Now, more than a year later, I mercifully, thankfully, happily don’t need to remind myself all the time anymore of why things are okay. Because I’m too busy living a wonderful, crazy, amazing, adventurous life.  I’m finished grad school. Loving my job. Blissfully NOT single .

I’m working out a viewpoint for myself, a way of looking at the world, at God, at life, that isn’t based on what other people have told me to do-think-believe but what I feel is right and true for me.

So, currently, that’s where I am.

I’m back! and cheers to the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

It’s been a while, I know, I know….and so much has happened in my life since I last wrote! And by “so much” I mean GOOD THINGS! Happy things, uplifting things, things that make me smile. But first….

Entertainment Weekly’s blog asks, “Kate Middleton’s dress: Most perfect wedding gown ever?” Why yes. Yes it is.

Many thanks to the new Princess for single-handedly putting sleeved gowns back on the map. Here’s to the knock-offs that will soon dominate stores (a welcome relief after the same boring strapless gowns which look pretty on some people but are just not my style) and yet another (admittedly shallow) reason why I’m glad I didn’t get married last summer…I’ll have much prettier wedding gown options available someday!

More to come soon…but in the meantime, from one Anglophile to another….God save the Queen!