Make You As Lonely As Me

There's no way of dancing or prancing or hopping around the bush with this subject.
Fact is: I went to church last night and I liked it. No, correction - I loved it.

People get too touchy on this subject. The subject of religion, belief in God and the love of fellowship.
I mean, if you were to dye your hair purple and someone laughed at you and asked why you did it, you'd shrug it off and defensively say 'Because I like it.' Why can't it be like that with Jesus? Why is there a stigmata upon those who choose to have a belief and follow their moral compass? Take a trip across the water from any modern western culture to somewhere like Italy where everybody is a religious fruit-loop. They'd consider you an outsider if you didn't believe in God and go to church.

Proverbs 13:20 says:
'He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.'

Basically comes back to the idea that you become like the people you associate with. If you constantly associate with non-Christians then naturally, your walk with God will become more like a delayed picnic in the park that you have no intention of organising. However, if you surround yourself with like-minded people who live out their beliefs and worship God with what they said and how they act then you're more likely to draw closer to God because you're surrounded by good influences. The same goes for partners,

2 Corinthians 6:14 says:
'Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?'

This teaches us not to have the most important person in our life a non-believer. At the end of the day, who are you most likely to follow and become like? God, or the man/woman that you love? He should be the biggest part of our life, we should be able to share Him with the person we love the most. If you were to surround yourself by the general populace, 9 times out of 10 the chances are you won't get a convicted Christian as a spouse but a sceptical atheist.

It's not until I lived a lonely life and had contact with only people of the world that I realised just how far from Jesus I'd gotten. My solution had been to turn to alcohol to temporarily blur the issues I had instead of opening a bible and handing them over to God. To find peace, the comfort of my Saviour beats any crude jokes my colleagues could spit at me to take my mind off issues. I need to realise that I cannot solve my problems, only God can.

I have to find my way back. I know in my heart, my being, that I'm not right with God and I know that it's not a change I can make overnight. I'm fully aware that I might stumble every day and choose the world over Him, but he deserves that I try.

It can only be described as a miracle that I met some people last night who took me under their wing in an excessively large social situation and showed me what it was like to have a normal conversation and be happy, smart, everyday people that still had the undying faith in our Lord. I hope I don't isolate myself again in a tiny room in my head with the devil nitpicking at every good thought that comes to me.


Excuse the confusing analogy's, excessive rambling and cliche epiphany's. I like it that way.

Lost In Translation

The votes have been cast, counted and called out. Sometimes decisions are ours to make, sometimes they’re not. Other times you get to make a partial choice as part of a group, voicing your opinion anonymously. In the matter of family decisions, the large life-changing ones for more than one person, the decision made is most often than not based on the members you most care about and not necessarily yourself. Later on in life we may regret these decisions because it was the beginning of the end for ourselves, or we may be proud of the choices that we made, seeing the benefits that have come from them.
Personally, for most of my life I haven’t stood up for what I want, but rather stayed quiet, letting the leader or majority take the role of decision maker. Whether it was because I was too young or lacked the confidence, I don’t regret staying quiet and keeping out of the situation or agreeing with whomever because I see clearly now the outcomes of those situations and the life-changing lessons my whole family has learned from them (whether good or bad). Everything in life happens for a reason. Whether it be our reasoning or God’s, it happens. All we can do is learn from the past, accept the present and look forward to the future with as much childish enthusiasm as possible, praying that God will bring good things our way.
I face a dilemma now, less than 2 weeks away from my birthday, to make a choice. I have ample time to make this decision but it doesn’t make it any easier. As we all know, time flies. I look into the big black unknown abyss in front of me, wondering what every person feels at one stage or other in their life – uncertainty. I have no clue at all what is the right decision and what is the wrong one. Being an over-thinker I take every scenario possible and run it through a million possible outcomes. The problem is that thinking over it doesn’t bring me to the right conclusion like a mathematical equation would, but rather more turmoil and uncertainty than before.
All that I can reassure myself with is that there is no wrong or right choice, merely different ones. Whatever I believe to be right is what I must run with.
The first step now is to identify the choices I can make, then discover which one sounds best.

My brain is empty, yet so full. Somewhere along the line my heart and my head got lost in translation. I wish our lives had a Rosetta Stone.

How Am I Gonna Be An Optimist About This?

Things in life happen for a reason. Supposedly.

We're faced with choices everyday. Usually they're basic choices - eg. to do the dishes or not to do the dishes. However small or large they may be, some of us (or in fact a majority of us) prefer not to have to make those decisions. The small choices we make can impact not just the here and now but also the future. If you don't do the dishes now and you have unexpected guests turn up, they won't have a clean coffee cup to drink out of so now they're drinking espresso coffee out of a teapot. Classy. The upside of not having made that decision is you have an excuse or someone to blame. When you make the choice consciously there's no one to fall back on but yourself. Why aren't there any mugs? Because you were too lazy to turn off Desperate Housewives and give them a scrub. Let's face it, daytime television? Ridiculously dramatic and unfortunately enthralling.
Children love to make decisions. It gives them power. What to wear today? The bright pink leotard! They feel happy knowing they chose the red cordial over water. Little do they care that it's actually PE at school today and they will tear their tutu or that they have a maths test in an hour and the red cordial drained their brain cells something shocking in the playground, assisting them in failing the 2+2 quiz.
We all want the power, but none of us want the responsibility. How many times have you heard a self absorbed teenager saying 'But I'm willing to live with the consequences of my actions dad! Just let me go to the party!'
I made a decision not too long ago. It was the most difficult decision I've ever had to make and even harder to live with. I realised at the time that I might well regret it in the future, but I couldn't bear it at the time and so I did what I thought was right even though it greatly hurt me and the man involved. I look back now and think to myself what a stupid girl I was and how I should have just sucked it up and stopped being so afraid, but it's easy to think that when the memory of the emotions felt is somewhat dampened.
I believe I made the right decision for me at that point in time and I think it might have been good for him in the long run too... but it hurts regardless. I lost my best friend that day, the one I wanted to spend forever with. In my head, he is my forever.
He may have had his faults, but I have mine too. If he accepted me, why couldn't I accept him? I don't believe that two people have ever been so perfect for each other and yet so poisonous.
I'm on a new path now - a path of living with the consequences of my actions. Every year, every day, growing older and hopefully wiser comes with it's equal share of pain and guilt. I'll never know what could have been, but I grieve for what I've missed, because it was the only time I've felt so happy and I know it was his happiest time too.
No matter how much we tell our children not to grow up too quick, we can't make them listen, just like I never listened. When times like these hit, there's no going back and the long road of life kicks you in the guts.
The pain may last a long time, it may last forever, but there's no point dwelling on it. Feel it, and let it go. It's easier said than done, but I'm gonna try.

Horror

‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’

Or so they say.

If you’re using words to describe an image, there is simply no amount you can string together to give someone the entirety of the scene in 3D visual colour (unless perhaps you and the other person are colour blind, but even then it falls short of the mark).

I find the best way of accurately describing anything is not through words or through images, but through experiences.  People, expressions, colours, the breeze even… is never the same in photographs as it is to see it, feel it, taste it, hear it or smell it. The tangible cannot be substituted and that which we miss out on experiencing with our five senses we categorise as ‘unreal’ or a ‘fantasy’.

I believe there is a sixth sense. Not the sci-fi version of ‘I see dead people’ but rather a sense of faith. Considering a majority of the population on earth believe in a god or some higher power, it’s not exactly easy to deny that when we believe in something, we can’t sense it. Otherwise, why would you believe it if you can’t feel it? There’s that little nagging cricket down in the pit of your stomach telling you that it’s real. It’s something you can’t explain, there’s no way of knowing how or why, but fact of the matter is it’s there and it’s real. THAT is the sixth sense.

Now I’m freaked out Freddie Krueger is going to rip his nails into me tonight.

Moods

Starting something can more often than not be the hardest part of any venture. When I try to envision myself fulfilling a lifelong dream of writing and actually publishing a book, it’s not the beginning of the story that I find myself drawn to – it’s the middle. The part where things start to complicate and the main character has so many issues going on that their head is about to burst. It’s quite difficult to write the lead-up to any climax as the emotions felt by the characters are so complex and varied that it stresses me out trying to help them not to be stressed out. I’m getting stressed right now just remembering the pent up aggravation I felt trying to make it through the final chapters of a story when everyone in the damn book just wanted to go haywire and completely veer from any sense of normality in a fictional story.Phew!

I think this is why I don’t write so much anymore. When things get toodifficult with other peoples lives, as much as I’m a shoulder to cry on, I endup going ‘Stuff this, these are NOT my problems!’ and walk away. When anauthor, you simply can’t do that… and I struggle with that side of things! Why can’t it be easy?

Blanked

A Sunday consisting of movies in bed, chats with the neighbours and a general lack of doing any form of housework was how I spent yesterday. The sun rose and I reluctantly rose a couple of hours after it, cursing my body for not being able to go back to sleep and stay asleep for a rather long period of time. After attending a wedding the previous day as bridesmaid and driving two hours home after the reception that evening, the last thing I felt like doing was, well, anything. The knowledge that no work was waiting for me today (Garfield's most loathed day of the week - Monday) didn't seem to help my body relax, all I could do was feel guilty that I wasn't doing anything. This rings to me as laziness. The general lack of want to do anything and yet the ongoing nagging in my brain telling me to finish the washing and mop the floors... maybe even wash the dog.

It turned out today hasn't been so bad. Being officially 'unemployed' leaves me open to interviews at any time of the day - bingo! Let's hope that in approximately 40 minutes I will find out whether or not I shall be once again employed and not have to drag out the anticipation of ongoing interviews days, maybe even weeks apart. As we all know, money is something we all need. Not necessarily want (I, for one, despise the concept of paper notes and gold coins) but is however the most common posession for a person to have. Without money, where would we be? Considering time travel to the stone age is out of the equation and bartering for chickens in a temple isn't how we purchase our food, I'm gonna say the homeless child in the gutter in Calcutta.

All of a sudden I feel very fortunate and grateful for my life and un-paid phone bill that I currently have the money to pay... as soon as I get around to it.

All By Myself

It's said that showers let the water wash away all thoughts, problems and provocations. Perhaps the people claiming these 'facts' are in fact, braindead. Since when have you gone into a shower and not thought, worried or cried? I sit here, on my bed, wrapped in the fluffiest towel I own, which has coincidentally been in my posession since I first moved to a beach side town at 5 and pour out my heart or maybe my brain and it's overcrowded thoughts into a keyboard and onto a screen.

As of late I've stopped playing music when having a shower or a bath just to see if the solidarity of it might be a tad bit more soothing... alas, I come out feeling stunted like a newt, at odds with the problems racing each other back and forth in my head. If it wasn't for the fact that you also feel clean after lathering yourself up with a chosen brand of scented soap, there'd almost be no point.

To be fair, the music goes on as soon as I enter my crowded bedroom, prolonging the sense of loneliness instilled by quiet showers and an empty dining room at meal times. It's almost as though every problem I have I don't take action to sort out until I've lived with the misery for a little while, clutching to it as though it were a fluffy teddy when sleeping. I like to take the problem, close my hand around it softly and blow it out again through the gaps between my fingers, feeling as though part of it I am in control of and denying it the right to mentally affect me. Meanwhile, a majority of it floats around me, engulfing me in hysterical laughter, saying 'Ha-ha, you are as little as a peanut.'

This is all in my head isn't it?