Sarah Anne I Am

  I am a remarkable human being in my ability to forget.   Remembering is something that is important to me. It’s something I value. "Thank You…for a life and a mind and a heart and a will to live, and to not forget, and a will to write it all down," I have sung to myself, yet I am so quick to forget the goodness of my God and so quick instead to remember only the things that surround me and threaten to tear me down.   We must be eternity-minded. Focusing only on temporal things will always depress me, it will always cause me to be terrified and make me want to run away or drive until I find the end of all the highways. When I try again and again to be who I am called to be using only my own feeble willpower, it always results in me curling up on the floor of a closet or a bathroom or a copy room to cry and hope I fall asleep and don’t wake up for days.   My boyfriend read me the second and third chapters of Colossians today, and in verse 2 of chapter 3 Paul says, "Set...

  Someday you will meet someone who will love you despite- maybe even in part BECAUSE OF- the strange, ridiculous, and generally weird things about you.   They will love how you arrange all of the dirty dishes into neat stacks before you wash them.   They will love the fact that in order to efficiently clean a room you need to put your hair up, have a beverage on hand, and be listening to Adam Lambert.   They will love the way you dance when there’s no music.   They will love that are mess you are when you first wake up in the morning.   They will love your habit of hearing an indistinct word and replacing it with something ridiculous, causing you to ask people things like, “Did you just say you’re craving Benadryl?”   They will love your total lack of ability to remember street names.   They will love your obscure knowledge about your favorite band.   They will love your feet, even when they’re calloused from going barefoot all summer…and part of the...

Step 1: Give them a little taste of something familiar. Perhaps use a scene so reminiscent of the year 1999 that it is practically the cover of the Backstreet Boys “Millenium” album come to life. Be sure to appear out of thin air and have some box fans built into the wall behind you for unneccesary effect. Step 2: Start slow. Begin the song by talking. It really doesn’t matter what you say, as long as your hair is a foot tall while you’re saying it, and it builds into actual singing while you use flashy hand motions at the exact same moment. Step 3: Wear lots of outfits. Make sure you give your audience an opportunity to see you wearing a white space suit, black leather with enough chains and grommets to build a chainsaw out of, and something you think the typical high school student would wear- just to be relatable. Step 4: Feature a nice car. It’s ok if the car has no bearing on the video whatsoever, just step out of it or sit in front of it for a few seconds here an...

  Too often when I check Facebook or YouTube I see something that makes you think, “You do remember you just put this on the INTERNET, right?”   Just because you practice your sexy face in front of the bathroom mirror doesn’t mean you should take half a dozen photos and then put them on your Facebook in hopes that some cute boy will comment saying that you look good in that t-shirt.    Just because you want to have good dance moves doesn’t mean you should record yourself doing a little pelvis thrusting and little butt shaking and then put it on YouTube so that everyone can see how gangsta you wish you were.   You do remember you just put this on the INTERNET, right?   You do realize it’s not just the hot girl you met over the summer or the cute boy that lives three blocks away that can see this, right?   Your classmates can see it. Your friends, your enemies, your uncle in Colorado- they can all see it. Your potential employers can see it. Your parents can ...

  I wish everyone had a Levi in their life.   I wish you and everyone else had a seven-year-old little brother like him. I wish I could share this with you.    Levi is one of the greatest and most remarkable blessings in my life, and he is a constant reminder of limitless joy and limitless love. I wish everyone had such a reminder in their day-to-day lives.   I hope I never take this child for granted. I hope I never forget how much of an impact one person loving others with all of their heart can make- if a little boy can impact so many people in only seven years, surely I can impact others as well.   And surely so can you.

 ”It is a good thing that God doesn’t show us glimpses of our future, otherwise we might not want to move towards them.   At least this is the case with me- I know that if I had seen visions of my future self when I was a child, I would have been both incredulous and incredibly unhappy. I thought this as I walked across camp this morning, looking down at my skinny jeans and my moccasins. The only thing I that I am wearing at the moment that I would have approved of when I was seven is my moccasins and my red nail polish. I would’ve been horrified to know that I would someday wear straight leg pants like my mother does, because as a child I vowed never to wear anything that wasn’t cargo pants or flares, regardless of what may be in fashion.   And if, as a seven-year-old girl, I could’ve seen any other piece of my life right now as well, I think I would have been equally unhappy about that.   I didn’t want a car like this, or a job that doesn’t pay lots and lots of money and require...

I know you’ve been hurt. You’ve been let down. I know you see other people finding love- or even just things that look like a semblance of love- and you want that for yourself as well. I get that. I understand. I spent years standing in that place. But taking matters into your own hands time after time and getting into a relationship simply because you CAN has proven to do nothing for you. Remember how you’ve been hurt? Remember how you’ve been let down? Remember how it never seems to work out quite how you’d hoped it would, and you end up either pretending it never mattered or angry that it did? Don’t do that again. Don’t keep doing that over and over again. You won’t find any real joy in a relationship until you stop trying to force God’s hand by jumping into things and hoping He’ll work it out. Yes, God can do incredible make-overs on a persons soul. But wait until after He does to date them, please. See, I say all of th...