This generation...

"This generation is sooo much more corrupt then when I was a kid"

"This generation is so lazy"

"This generation is so ignorant"

"This generation just has so much temptation, so it's cool if they mess up...over and over and not learn from their mistakes"

I can't even count how many times I have heard stuff like this said about my generation. Is it just me or does it sound like a bunch of crap pathetic justification excuses? Yes, we do have a lot of temptations and we do have an oh-so-difficult life (my mom won't buy me a new phone because I broke the last 5 I had, geez) but so does everyone else. Despite what the world is today, it is no more acceptable to sin than it was 50 years ago.

We still need to try to do the right thing and not make up excuses like "oh well its just too hard to try to be godly in this fallen world"

drama or peace?

when asked if you'd rather have drama or peace, you're go-to answer is obviously peace. (who *wants* drama??) but there is also a part of you that wants the drama. you kind of want someone to insult you so that you can feel oh so misunderstood and complain to anyone who will listen. you kind of want kyle to cheat on jenna so that you can say "i-knew-it-all-along-hes-such-a-bad-person..." part of everyone wants to be able to justify their complaining or bad mouthing. ew. why do we do that?
i think it's because everyone (myself included in all of this) wants to be

right.

it feels really good to be able to say "i told you so". it's nice to be the one with all the answers. but then on the other hand, who doesn't want peace? it would be amazing to live in a world where no one argued. people knew the facts before picking fights. a world where the ego inside of every one of us would sit down and shut up so that we could easily admit to being wrong.

sooooo, if given the choice, would you honestly pick being right all the time or having peace?



(i'm sorry if this seems kind of scatterbrained...these thoughts have just been bouncing around my head and i just needed to get them down. i'm still not sure if this makes any sense :P )

love

there have been a lot of things (weddings, first dates, etc) that have been making me think about love. as in, its been on my mind constantly for the past month or so. so here are some of my thoughts

i'll be the first to say that i'm not a romantic person. at all. i mean, the whole romance, prince charming, fairy tale thing is sweet but i don't spend my days watching Pride and Prejudice and waiting for my Mr. Darcy to come.

but love is a different story. love and romance are very, very, extremely different subjects. romance is butterflies in your tummy, heart skipping a beat, watching Channing Tatum movies every night.

love is a commitment. it's promising that you'll stick with someone even on those days when they're being a jerk. even if they betray you. it's not giving up on someone because of their mistakes that have hurt both of you. love is forgiveness. it's is celebrating the good but accepting the bad. it's giving everything a expecting nothing. that's why it's so hard to genuinely love someone.

it hurts when someone throws away a relationship or friendship. you want to shun them or say awful things to them. you really want to yell at them so they know how much they hurt you and then beg them to be your friend again. but if you truly love them, the only thing you can do is be there for them. and it sucks. but thats all you can do. and it helps.





a passage of the Bible that i go to whenever i feel like love is far away is in Genesis. the part when God had created Adam and made him supreme ruler of the world only under God Himself which is a pretty sweet deal, right? but God knew Adam's life wasn't complete. not yet. so He made another person from Adam and for Adam. Eve. here's my favorite part, when Adam saw Eve for the first time the first words to come out of his mouth were "At last!"
even Adam had to wait (who knows how long) for love to come to him, but God was faithful and provided him with the perfect person. even though Adam had to wait, he knew as soon as he saw her that she was worth the wait. and i'm personally excited to meet the extraordinary person that will make all of my waiting worth it :)

How to Get Over it.

This is from the Owl City blog by Adam Young and I just liked it and wanted to share :)

Of the hundreds of relationships you participate in throughout the course of your roller coaster life — associations of all kind: good/bad, joyful/sad, casual/serious, friendly/hostile, short/long, romantic/heartbreaking and everything in between, there’s always ONE relationship that harrows you like an old wound that refuses to heal. It haunts your mind, frequents your thoughts — maybe because you let it, maybe because you’re reluctant to fight a losing battle when your emotions are swinging like saloon doors on rusty hinges. You live, you breathe, you dream, you repeat — but such austere malady won’t go away and your heart and resolve commit to a constant tug of war, each pulling on one end of your instincts. So you might as well diagnose yourself a royal schizophrenic! Wrestling with your emotions over the dream of someone who still claims so much of your sentiment but is no longer there… well isn’t that lovely.

And so you sit and think.
But you CAN’T think about things like this so you distract yourself!

And it actually works.

Wow, I feel better already.

Goodbye now to the breakdown between thought, emotion and behavior. Farewell to faulty perception and inapt actions and feelings. Goodbye to withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion. Good riddance to an overwhelming sense of mental fragmentation!

Life is way too short to worry about the past, and I for one, don’t have time for anxiety.

First Post!

okay so as you can see, i've joined all the other bajillion people who have decided to write a blog...yay me! so this'll be new and fun and stuff, right? buuuuut, i'm really bad at follow through of any kind so we'll just have to see how long this blog lasts. okay lets start:

the way it was
there are so many times i wish my life could go back to "the way it was". i wish i still had dance class 6 hours a week, i wish i still went to a normal school, i wish i had a church and a youth group that i actually liked, i wish for a bunch of things. then i try to figure out the exact moment that i want to go back to and its impossible.

if i went back to living in the states there are so many amazing people that i wouldn't know. i wouldn't know any more spanish than i learned in first grade. i would never have been to costa rica. i most likely wouldn't have the same relationship i have with God now. and, let's face it, i'd probably be a materialistic brat (no offense to people who live in the states, thats just what *i* would have turned into)

ok so back in georgia wouldn't work so lets say if my dad accepted the job offer he got when we were in costa rica and we stayed there. i never would have met ANYONE who has ever come on any mission trip to peru in the past 3 years. not gonna lie, that would pretty much suck. i may or may not have discovered my love for photography. my spanish would probably be pretty awful (in the year of language school i literally learned about 10 spanish words, just sayin..) and my house would be constantly filled with cockroaches. ew. worst part of costa rica.

everytime i try to wish or pray myself back in time i come to this conclusion: my life's good. reeeaaaally good. (if you don't know what movie that's from, i'm embarrassed for you) even if i don't particularly like where i am at the moment, i wouldn't trade it for anything.