All About the Love

The summer before I started my first year at the University of Michigan, my mom told me (warned me?) “Please don’t become a liberal.”  At the time, I suppose I considered myself a moderate-conservative Christian.  Of course, I was eighteen, and who knows who they are at that age?  I knew I was open-minded and wanted to be in a diverse environment, and I wasn’t opposed to the fact I had been accepted to what many considered a school which getting into was difficult.

 

Off I went from West Michigan to Ann Arbor, and, lo and behold, five years later (yes, five years – don’t judge), I left the University of Michigan proclaiming myself a liberal.  I don’t think I More

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Remembering

God has a good sense of humor, doesn’t she?  (See what I did there?  Gonna get everyone all fired up).  Last week, I shared that my biggest wish for this school year was to sleep.

And sleep I did.  For about 3 days straight.  Pneumonia, folks.  I don’t recommend it.  God is hilarious.

Okay, enough about me.

Do you remember where you were on 9/11?  I was working at a condo reservation company called Vacation Values, sitting at my desk, when one of my coworkers came in and told us what was happening.  She heard it on the radio on her way in to work.  I didn’t believe her.  I went to my dad’s office, which was one floor below ours.  He had a TV in his conference room.  I hoped I would see that it wasn’t true.  I wish I didn’t turn it on and watch, but I did.  Didn’t we all?  It was horrifying seeing people, on live TV, jumping from the towers to their deaths.  I will never forget that.

The days and weeks following were sad and confusing, but it was the only time I felt like everyone in our country was together.  No one was fighting about this.  Everyone was helping, praying, caring.

Let’s remember that.  We all had our differences, but somehow we managed to come together.

I don’t have much else to say about that, but I thought this video was a fantastic way to remember the people who came together, in the midst of the confusion, when no one even knew what was happening yet, and helped.  Because that’s what they had to do.

 

 

Going to get some more shut-eye now.  Take care everyone, and remember to remember.

The New Normal

(If you’re new to The Lorix Chronicles, you may want to read this first.)

It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  In fact, it’s been over three years since I’ve written a blog post.  Life got busy, and I stopped writing.  And by “life got busy,” I mean life is always busy, always a bit crazy.  I realized (again!) that even though life is busy and crazy, I need to write.  The internet even told me that’s the career I’m meant for.  How do I argue with that?

So I will write.  I might even finish the novel (and I use that term loosely) I’m working on.  I took a 3-year hiatus from that too.

I felt the need to write again because it’s cathartic for me, and I need something cathartic in my life right now.  See, I’m still depressed.  Not everyday for the last three years kind of depressed, but I have my moments.  They last a week, or a month, or a couple months.  I have been diagnosed with chronic depression.  I told some friends from my old PPD group that I feel like I was lied to.  It didn’t get better!  Of course, in reality, it has gotten better, but when I spiral down More

Love, God, and…Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

Have you read the book Love Wins? It’s written by Rob Bell, the pastor of Mars Hill, which happens to be the church I attend. The book confronts the notion that God condemns people to spend an eternity in hell if they do not believe in him. The book does not say there is no hell, but it leaves room for anyone, anywhere, dead or alive, to come to God and live the full life he offers us. Bell implies that God never gives up on us, not now, not ever. He loves us always, every single one of us, no matter what we do or what paths we’ve followed. Because of this love, we can always return to him.

I know that many do not agree with the ideas in Love Wins. For me, however, it is a book that tells me what I already knew. God, through Jesus, came here to save us from hell. This is not the hell we usually picture – some shadowy fire-filled place under the ground. This hell is the one where we’re separated from the love of God. When someone says “it feels like hell,” we may think it’s just a euphemism, but they may be struggling in their own personal, very real hell.

I am a big fan of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (stay with me here, I swear there’s a point to this). Have you seen the show? Think it’s all just a bunch of cheesy vampire-fighting fluff, right? Okay, well, it is. There are moments, however, when I watch and cry because of how poignant it can be. More

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