Lights Will Guide You Home

When you try your best but you don't succeed

When you get what you want but not what you need

When you feel so tired but you can't sleep

Stuck in reverse

When the tears come streaming down your face

When you lose something you can't replace

When you love someone but it goes to waste

Could it be worse?

These famous Coldplay lyrics seem to say it all. It seems that this song is able to speak to anyone who is going through something hard, no matter what it is. This is the ultimate 'cry-your-eyes-out' song. The lyrics speak so strongly of times when you go wrong. Times when your life is in the dark. Times when you don't know what to do with yourself because you feel so alone. But while this song emphasizes the bad times we all go through, it also shows that there is a way out. A way out of whatever is going on in our lives. 

Lights will guide you home

And ignite your bones

And I will try and fix you

When I'm in this slump in my life, I like to think of this 'light' as my Father calling me back into His arms-back into my home where I belong. It happens to all of us. We all go through the hard times and tend to wander down the wrong road. We all wonder if we are beautiful enough, smart enough, important enough... Unfortunately, we always see beauty and importance through our culture's standards. This isn't the way we are intended to be seen. God wants us to be seen through His eyes and His standard of beauty and importance. His standard is a lot more generous than that of our culture. He loves us all and thinks we are all meant to do something in this world. I know this all sounds cliché and it's what we've been told since we were in Sunday School, but it's absolutely true and sometimes, all we need to do is get back to the basics of our faith. This is what I'm trying to do. It's hard when you aren't a part of a youth group or a Bible study to get into the Word everyday and still be active in your faith but I'm going to try to get back into all of this. I haven't been blogging recently because I haven't wanted to face the fact that I'm not in the place where I should be right now. This is my attempt to get back into it all. I'm running, full force, back into my Daddy's arms. 

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Ruth

So, a few months ago, as we rang in the new year, I decided that I'd dedicate the next 12 months to changing. There were and still are a lot of things that I would like to change about me. The biggest being my faith and my spirituality. I get unmotivated very often and when that happens, I start to feel depressed and start to hate how my life is going. It was around one of these points when I was feeling completely lousy about myself, when my sister told me to go and download this 6-part series that Mark Driscoll did on Redeeming Ruth. That got me really excited because all of a sudden, here's something that I can do in my free time that will get me back on track. On my days of feeling lousy, my mom always seems to ask, 'Have you had a quiet time lately?' Of course my answer is no because I haven't actually had one in forever. ha. Problem one. So then I realized that this could be like my daily quiet time or devotion. I'm not really too involved in a small group or youth group so I'm having to resort to what I can. Turns out that the first podcast was amazing. I loved listening to him dissect the Bible in the way he did. Ruth really is an incredible woman and an amazing role model. I realized that she is the perfect example of living by faith. She followed her mother-in-law to a city that was unknown to her and not only unknown, but that hated the kind of person she was, a Moabite. She had to put her trust into a God she didn't even know. This was incredible to me. She had so much faith that she uprooted her entire life and religion to trust a God she didn't know or believe in. I know and love and trust my God. I know He is there and loves me too. But for some reason, I can't have faith in Him that things will be alright. I can't seem to hand it all over to Him and let Him take the wheel. How can I know so much about God, but not have faith that He will do what's right and never lead me astray? I want to be like Ruth. God said that with the faith of a mustard seed, one can move mountains. Ruth had the faith of a watermelon. (sorry for the bad analogy) Imagine what my life could look like if I just had faith that He could handle it all on His own.  

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