Happy Thanksgiving Week

I have decided that my heart is HUGE for celebrations. I love birthdays, holidays, the 2nd of every month, and the 22nd of every month. I will start wishing people happy Thanksgiving in September out of excitement, wish someone Happy birthday months, and just leap for joy at the thought of birthdays. So, appropriately so, Happy Thanksgiving week.

I am at my favorite coffee shop right now, with a lot to do-but no apparent agenda. I am listening to Death Cab for Cutie again, the song entitled "Marching Bands of Manhattan" It's probably one of my favorite songs to drive to-and I don't really know why. I think it's the part about 35 seconds in when the the bass and the drums start making this awesome rhythm, I love to hit my steering wheel to it. haha. So anyway...check it out-drive to it, it'll be awesome.

Two dear friends come to visit me on Thursday for the weekend, and I couldn't be more thrilled. It will be great to have such incredibly fun/warm company to spend a great holiday with. My finals are approaching rather quickly, and I ask for your prayers as I embark into the beginning of December. On paper-looking at my schedule, December looks like it will destroy me academically. However, God is gracious and a helper-He is amazing at easing minds and providing focus when we ask. So I just ask your prayers for those very things, so I can glorify him with my work.

Something I want to talk about is what I've been reading in a book lately, and it's also been on my heart pretty heavily. There is a this book called "A Severe Mercy," by Sheldon Vanauken. I find this book profoundly beautiful. A man and a woman fall in love when they are "paegans" refusing to believe in an infinite power of an Almighty God. However, as they marry and embark in life together-they attend Oxford University in England and begin to write to C.S. Lewis who is teaching there at the same time as the book was written. God through C.S. Lewis-Sheldon and his wife Davy accept Jesus Christ as the Son of God and as their Messiah. It is beautiful. I love their story...but I love the underlying beauty and grace of their love. Sheldon writes of a "creeping seperateness" that occurs unfortunately in relationships of all kind-especially that of romantic ones. Before you know it, "we and us" becomes "I and my" and he discusses that this idea of "creeping separateness" is the the killer of love.
In its pages, Vanauken shared one of the key elements of his and Davy’s profound love.
“Look,” we said, “what is it that draws two people into closeness and love? Of course, there’s the mystery of physical attraction; but beyond that, it’s the things they share. We both love strawberries and ships and collies and poems and all beauty, and all those things bind us together. Those sharings just happened to be; but what we must do now is share everything. If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it – and the other one must find it – every single thing that either of us likes. That way, we shall create a thousand strands, great and small, that will link us together. Then we shall be so close that it would be impossible - unthinkable – for either of us to suppose that we could ever recreate such closeness with anyone else. And our trust in each other will not only be based on love and loyalty, but on the fact of a thousand sharings – a thousand strands twisted into something unbreakable.” (Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (New York: Bantam Books, 1977), 27)

And further into the chapter...

There is such a thing as creeping separateness. What do young people who are freshly married do? They can’t rest when they’re apart. They want to be together all the time. But they develop separate interests, especially if they have separate jobs and some separate friends. So, they drift apart. Soon, they have little in common except, maybe, the children. The stage is then set for one of them to fall in love with someone else. Later they’ll say the reason for the divorce was that he/she fell in love with someone else, but it wasn’t that at all. It was because they let themselves grow apart. ( Sheldon Vanauken).

Anyway, I wanted to share this because it's on my heart because it can happen not only in romance with men and women, but unfortunately with our relationships with God. I want my relationship with God and people to be full of one thousand strands of strength,love and grace because in those strands, they are unbreakable. We as sinners, are prone to unravel and fall in love with "things, or false ideas of the One True God" and I want to encourage anyone who reads this blog, to notice the warning signs of what is causing creeping separateness between you and God. I know lately, I've noticed some signs in my own personal spiritual life... like the one lately has been...

"Oh, you're busy-so just "do first" and "then pray about it."
WARNING SIGN #1....Doing first...is a human idea. God calls us to a life of communication with Him first, then after we talk and hear from Him...then we DO or Don't do accordingly. My will for some reason lately has unfortunately seemed like the only voice I am willing to wait on hearing or act on. God calls us, in scripture to ..."Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened ... If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!" (Matthew 7:7-11)

I hope you can learn from some of the issues I have been wrestling with in my life lately:) God is good and wants our nearness to Him. He absolutely yearns for that.Be reminded of that-find out what causes that creeping separateness and ask God to uproot it.

Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus, The Lord, so WALK IN HIM...
Colossians 2:10