Letting my eyes

So...just when I was starting to think I had this whole where-should-I-go-to-college-in-the-fall thing figured out, WHAMO! God threw all this new information in to the mix and confused the daylights out of me.

An acceptance letter I wasn't expecting came, which, to any normal student, would be awesome. And it is! But I had just been getting ready to cross that school off my list and narrow down the options. I thought maybe this was God's way of letting me know that particular school wasn't where he wanted me. Now I'm not so sure anymore.

Similarly, a second school that I was getting ready to cross off of the list recently notified me that I *might* qualify for a full-tuition scholarship. Obviously, I would take a full-tuition scholarship as a pretty clear-cut sign from God that THAT is the school I should be at. Not what I expected at all -- suddenly this school is an option again. My list isn't getting narrowed down at all!

Shall we add another loop? My first choice school; the place I really, truly want to go? I was so close to getting a full-tuition scholarship THERE, and I just found out I didn't quite make it. Which disappointed me more than I thought I would.

So, in typical omniscient-Creator fashion, God has taken every plan I thought I had made and every factor I thought I count on, and turned them all upside down. He's giving me this huge chance to just throw up my hands and let him take control of this crazy journey....oh, but I'm having trouble relinquishing that control!

I'm feeling very confused right now, and wondering just what kind of path is God leading me on, anyhow?

And I found this email in my inbox:

"Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before
you. Make level paths for your feet and take only ways that are
firm."

Proverbs 4:25-26, New International Version

Where are my eyes focused right now? Behind me. I've spent so much time lately worrying about what I did and didn't do in high school; was it enough, was it right, was it this or that. I've spent so much of this week worrying about scholarships and acceptances letters and all this other stuff. My eyes SHOULD be looking straight ahead; focused on God and watching where He's going.

Only I keep getting distracted. The things behind me and around me are all vying for my attention, and it's so hard for me to fix my gaze straight ahead!

I need to remember to "take only ways that are firm." In other words, to look for and follow the path that GOD is drawing me to; not the path that I want. Sure; I really want this first-choice school. I want it so badly that I can't even explain it. And until this week, I thought God wanted me there, too. But maybe all this topsy-turvyness in the land of college is God's way of showing me that my path isn't the strong one, the firm one, the one that will hold up against all the pitfalls and temptations around this world. My path isn't that path.

His is.

All I need to do is fix my gaze on Him and follow where he leads.

But oh, these distractions!!!!

Blinded by the light...

My brother has been walking around the house for the past two days, randomly bursting into choruses of the song, "Blinded by the Light". I'm really not sure why, quite frankly. I didn't even know he liked that song. In fact, I didn't even know he knew that song existed, let alone knew the words to it.

Actually, I don't think he does honestly know the words to it. Because he just keeps singing the same line, over and over and over and over again, getting progressively louder at each repetition. "Blinded by the light...Blinded by the light! BLINDED BY THE LIGHT!! BLIIIIINDED BY THE LIIIIIIGHT!!!!!"

(Have I mentioned that the singing gene just doesn't seem to exist in our family? Apparently it wasn't just me it skipped. My dear brother didn't have any luck in that category, either. *sigh*)

And when this chorus met my ears for about the 7,402nd time, I realized that maybe, just maybe, this was something bloggable ( < new word. How much fun is that to say? Bloggable bloggable bloggable!)...that maybe there was a way to tie it in to today's post. It's worth a try, right?

While listening to the radio the other day, I heard a story...hopefully I can remember it:

A hurricane ripped across the coastline, pouring intense amounts of rain down on the inhabitants. Cities were flooding, the water was rising and people were crying out for help. One man climbed on to his rooftop to avoid the rapidly rising water in his house. He looked up to heaven and called out, "God, save me!"

The man had loved God all his life, and truly believed that God would reach down and save him from this disasterous situation. He watched for God's hand to come down from heaven; he listened carefully so he wouldn't miss God's voice when it told him what to do.

As he was listening so intently, a rowboat floated by with a neighbor in.
"Do you need some help?" shouted the neighbor. "Climb in my boat!"
The man on the rooftop shook his head. "No, thanks!" he yelled back. "God's going to save me!"
Rowboat man shrugged and rowed away.

Well, the flood waters continued to rise and rooftop man was growing impatient. He thought maybe God hadn't heard him the first time, so he called out again, even louder, "God! Save me!!"
He stared up at the heavens, watching and waiting for the moment when God would come and save him from the floodwaters.

While he waited, another boat came by; this one even bigger then the last. Half a dozen people sat in this boat, but there was still plenty of room inside. One passenger held out a life vest.
"Hey there!" called out the passenger. "You need some help? Here! Take this!"

But rooftop man shook his head and held out his hand. "No, thanks!" he shouted back. "God's going to save me, you'll see!" The people in the boat shrugged and headed off to another rooftop.

Now, the rain had started up again and the situation wasn't exactly getting any better. Rooftop man realized that God better hurry up and do something here. He was getting pretty nervous. "God!" he called out again. "Please, God, please save me!!"

The waters had almost reached the top of his roof. The man danced around anxiously, on his tiptoes, knowing that his miraculous rescue would come any second and not wanting to miss it.
Unfortunately, he was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter.

The helicopter came closer and the man heard a voice coming through a bull horn say, "You there! Hang on! We're sending you a ladder!"
"No!" the man shouted back as loudly as he could. He shook his head again to prove his point. "No, that's OK! God's going to save me!"

Looking rather surprised, the helicopter folks nodded and shrugged and moved off to go find another person in need of rescue.
Well, a few moments later the flood waters had risen so high that they swept the man off his roof. He tried his best to swim away, but in the end, the current was too deep and he drowned.

When the man got to heaven, he said to God, "God!! I've loved you and served you all my life. I've been a faithful follower of your Word. I trusted you to save me! I cried out to you and you didn't do anything! You ignored my prayer, God! Why didn't you save me??"

God raised his eyebrows and looked at the man. "Are you kidding me?!" he said, surprised. "I tried! I sent you two boats and a helicopter! What more did you want?!"

In this story, the man was so sure that God was going to save him. He had this expectation that God would do something totally, incredibly, earth-shatteringly amazing in order to complete the rescue mission. The man was expecting a huge-scale miracle! He was waiting for the hand of God Himself to reach down and save him; he was waiting for God's voice to command the waters to recede. The man cried out, "God, save me!" and trusted God to do so. The only problem was that he was so focused on the powerfulness and miraculousness of God, that he missed the smaller miracle right in front of him.

He was blinded by the light, so to speak. This man believed so strongly that God could and would make unbelievable, inconceivable miracles happen (the "light") that he was unable to see that sometimes, God delights in using the ordinary to do extraordinary things.

The point is that sometimes, we get blinded by the light, too. We get so caught up in reading Bible stories about manna falling from heaven or angels saving people from fiery furnances or the mouths of lions being closed that we forget about the everyday miracles, too.
The thing is, God provides for our every need. If we need it, he's already got it taken care of. He hears every single one of our prayers. And he answers them -- often in ways that we wouldn't expect.

We need to make sure that our expectations don't interfere with our vision. It's great to believe that God does amazing things -- He certainly does! But don't let yourself get so caught up in the extraordinary that you miss all the incredible things he does on a smaller scale.

The most amazing thing God's done in my life? Bringing my best friend into it. There were no lions, fiery furnances, voices from Heaven or manna falling from the sky. In fact, the very first time I met my best friend, I hardly even talked to her. It wasn't an extraordinary day by any means; it was a picnic. But it was the start of the most amazing and important and incredible and yes, miraculous friendship I've ever experienced.

Is there something in your life right now that you are praying for? Are you waiting for God to answer a prayer? Be careful that your expectations of HOW he is going to answer don't interfere with your realization that he HAS answered it.

Don't be so busy waiting to hear God's voice that you miss the rowboat and the helicopter right in front of you. Sometimes God might give you an incredibly obvious answer to an incredibly complicated situation. It's easy to overlook the everyday answers to prayers -- the best friend who called to say Hi when you were feeling low, the brother who started singing obnoxiously when all you wanted to do was focus on writing a blog post, the dog who barked continously for you to take him for a walk so you could enjoy a gorgeous day...

Be ready and waiting for the ordinary AND the extraordinary. If you EXPECT God to do great things, He will. But beyond that, you've also got to be looking for these BIG things -- sometimes in the smallest of places. Don't be blinded by the light of God's greatness -- let his light illuminate things you might have otherwise missed.

The Flies of Life

Well.

I've learned a very important lesson. Do not, under ANY circumstance, assume that your kitten can ignore a fly. I'm sure you're all going, "huh??". It's a valuable lesson, though, mark my words.

Take last night, for instance. My dear probably-about-4-months-old kitten was "sleeping" (theoretically) in my room. It was dark, I was tired, we were both curled up in bed and I was positively thrilled at the fact that it was finally time for sleep. Sleep is good :)

But, lo and behold, a fly made its entrance. How? Couldn't tell ya. Seeing as we've had a three inch layer of ice on the ground and every other imaginable surface for the last few weeks, I had naively assumed that meant most living creatures were either hibernating or..well...not so living. Apparently I was wrong. How did the fly get in to MY room? Also no clue. In the summer, they're everywhere, but that's because I have my window open all the time...but I assure you, my window hasn't been open for months now.

The point, though, is that somehow, this tiny little fly got in. Keep in mind the size of a fly, OK? Tiny little beasts, really. In the grand scheme of things, they really don't take up that much room or space or thoughts.And yet, I found out that this one, tiny fly had unimaginable power. It's all because of this insect that I didn't get any sleep last night. My kitten, Littlest, apparently decided it was her new life's goal (aside from killing all the house plants and eating all the candles, that is) to catch this fly. Kitty on a mission, I'm tellin' ya. So, she spent THE ENTIRE NIGHT (no exaggeration. Really.) leaping, clawing, meowing, pouncing, jumping, hissing, and desperatly trying to catch this thing.

Not sleeping, which is, believe it or not, what you're supposed to do at night. No -- she was too distracted by this fly to do anything important like, say, sleep.

Needless to say, NONE of us got ANY sleep. The fly was busy buzzing around, finding new hiding places, and taunting the cat (I'm sure I heard it giggling at one point, saying, "Nah nah nah nah naaaah! I'm way up here and you're stuck down the-ere!"). The cat, of course, was consumed by her obsessive desire to catch this pest, and I was stuck listening to them both and praying that all the crashing sounds were nothing breakable. (As it is, I don't think anything major broke, but my room is rather messy at present, and it's kind of hard to tell what was knocked on the floor and what was already there...)

My point? From all of this, we can learn a lesson:

Sometimes the tiniest, most trivial things can distract us from what's really important. Just like Littlest, who allowed this tiny, inconsequential bug to so completely distract her that she missed out on something vital to her health -- sleep -- we, too, are guilty of this.

Ever allowed yourself to worry about something to the point where you tune out what a friend is saying? How about procrastinating? (THAT'S ME!!! But that's really a topic for another post)
Ever forget to pray because you were too busy?Ever skip church because something else felt more important?

See what I mean? It's a dangerous thing -- physically, emotionally, and spiritually -- to let things distract you so much. You will miss out on SO MUCH in life!

Especially around Christmas, there are SO MANY distractions that can get in the way of celebrating our Savior's birth. In the mad rush to buy presents, host parties, pack suitcases, send Christmas cards and hang lights, it's so easy to forget WHY we are celebrating.

So...why do we have distractions, then?Well, here's some food for thought -- what if God gives us distractions so we can learn to be more focused? Think about it -- every time you're faced with a distraction, you're also blessed with the opportunity to become a more focused, determined person. That's pretty cool! We humans have the amazing ability to learn and define our skils. It's pretty exciting! And when we are blessed with opportunities to do so, well, the possibilties are endless! (Cats are apparently the exception to this rule -- they don't seem particularly interested in becoming more focused. Phooey.)

Ok..well...how do we become more focused?

First, figure out what is most distracting you right now...allow your mind to wander for a moment. What does it settle on? A worry? Something you're excited about? An upcoming event? Something you're afraid of? That funny joke your best friend told you? That mean insult you accidentally overheard? Recognizing your distraction is the first step!

Next -- let it go. Scary thought, I know, but let go of all your distractions. Give it all up to God -- whether it is praise or frustration, worry or joy, pain or excitement -- He can handle it. Better yet, He can help you through it.

Then -- once you've cleared your mind and heart, focus on what IS really important. Maybe that's reading the Bible. Maybe it's spending more time in prayer. Maybe it's volunteering somewhere. Maybe it's telling your friends and family how much you care about them.

Whatever it is, make a conscious effort to focus on that.It's not easy to stay focused, and from time to time, everyone loses sight of the important things in life. It's essential, though, to step back every so often and think -- am I distracted? What's distracting me? How can I be more focused?

Hopefully you will be able to let go of all your little "flies" and focus more on the important stuff :)