let your love be strong

"If we spend our time obsessing with the future or regretting the past, then we will never live. Tomorrow will always be tomorrow and yesterday cannot be changed." - Jon Foreman (from Switchfoot)

Just this Christmas break, I found this quote written on a journal I handmade from bits and pieces of other used books about 4 years ago (another obsession among many. picked up this habit from alane. have kept one since I was 9 years old). I had ripped out the pages from a book called "Iced" about a debauched drug addict (mainly because cardstock folded in half fit just perfectly) and had sewn in my own pages in the spine with clear fishing line. After decorating the cover to my liking from supplies from the craft store, I wrote this quote, written boldly and pasted to the cover, as a sort of reminder, serving as a guidance of perspective, on how I was to view life every time I started to write in this book.

I noted my own life as an emotional roller coaster, a slave to my heart muscle, and found it as providence to be reminded of this quote at this given moment. I'm always ruled by my worries, my heart heavy with the pain of broken relationships, homework that will always be there, friends, the boss, family depending on me. And what do you do when you feel your arms so far outstretched they are breaking, when you are being pulled mercilessly in every direction? You know, during dead week (week before finals) I would wake up every morning at 2 am with horrible toothaches, and was highly medicated for the majority of it. I scheduled a dentist appointment for when I arrived home, and found out than an abscess had formed (or something weird like that) in my gum and I had to have a root canal! yuck! My dentist (who is a good friend of the family) said the cavity was very small and didn't know why it had reacted in such a dramatic way, and when further questioning revealed circumstances, he decided that academic stress had lowered my body's resistance (?) and resulted in 3 shots of anesthetic that made even the left lid of my eye feel numb! Anyways, the point of all this is, I clearly fret too much (and have medical bills to prove it). But how to deal with all this pressure? Apathy? Complacency? Surely the opposite end of the spectrum is not the answer (balance! balance! but how?) But I'm slowly learning to embrace my humanity, and stop trying to be a hero. I am not sufficient. But I am NOT called to be. But how does one choose their battles? How does one find balance? (and I think this quote was more about living one day at a time, but my mind goes off into every direction) I would like to end my angst and perplexities with another quote from Jon:

"I got alone with God and I was reminded of how we're NOT called to be sufficient. We're called to be completely dependent upon our Creator. The relationship that He establishes with us, I think we often tend to think of ourselves as growing and maturing in Christ -- meaning that we lean less and less on our maker. But in fact, it's the other way around."