... and this is love

My heart is full and there is so much that I want to write about, and yet the words don't seem to want to come.  I am struggling to find the way to capture what it is that is in my heart and how life is different.  I don't know how to find the words to express how life can change in just a moment.  How does one write about the light becoming brighter, the colours becoming deeper and more vibrant, the joy becoming almost unbearable and the grief that much keener?  How can one capture, in words, the God of the Universe who spoke the world into being and yet *sings* over me?  How can I write about the moment of understanding, when love broke through and I understood that I am loved?  How can I find the way to write about how years of feeling unworthy, never good enough, substandard and flawed came crashing down because of being loved?  The thing is I always was loved.  I just didn't understand it, couldn't accept it, rejected it, wouldn't believe it, couldn't believe it.   How could somebody like me be loved?  I had a whole list of things quite specific as well as vague impressions of why I couldn't be loved and would never be loved.  I gave up on love and by doing so I gave up on myself.  Yet Love never gave up on me.  Gently, kindly, insistently Love courted me, wooed me, waited for me to open my eyes to see what was always there ~ to know beyond a mind understanding to a whole being understanding that God loves me and dare I say it?  He even delights in me and not in the sense of how He loves everybody but in a unique and individual sense that He sees *me* and that His love is not only directed towards me but is specifically for me.  How can I find the words to write about how I finally feel that I am "the beloved" and that even my quirks charm God?

Last night at church it built and built within me that if I didn't speak out this love I would pop.  The words had to be said.  You wonder what is love?  We hear so much in our culture the romantic notion of dying for the person one loves.  Jesus did that.  But He did more.  He took on death, and brought death into submission and came back from the dead because He loves.  This is Love.  This is the love that cannot be diminished, cannot be denied, cannot be explained, and beyond every love.  It is one thing to die for the person one loves, it is another to make death obedient to His will and to deny death and come back for the one loved ... and into a life beyond anything ever experienced before.

I cannot be silent and yet I struggle with the words to even remotely express to a world jaded to itself that there is so much more beyond Socratic thought and what one can see, taste, touch, hear, or smell.  God is real, His love is real, and He loves YOU.  Anyone can die for the one loved, but this is not some ghost story, He took on death and won and came back for YOU, and all because He loves.

Twenty Guinea Pigs

Twenty pounds.  It doesn't sound like much.  It doesn't feel like much when I consider how much I have yet to lose and how long it took me to lose that measly twenty pounds.  I started losing weight in October and here it is the middle of April and all I've lost is twenty pounds.  I am tempted to feel bad about myself because it has taken me that long to lose only twenty pounds.  In the beginning I thought that by this time I'd have lost sixty pounds and be pretty much done with my weight loss.  I thought I'd be looking 'hot' and feeling 'hot' and so good about myself.   This is not be where I wanted to be.  I've been fighting my thyroid through all of this.  It is as if my body is holding onto every pound as if it were some kind of pirate treasure.  I've had the dosage of my thyroid medication increased and it is starting to help.  I'm still struggling with things and I have fought hard for every pound I've lost.  This is certainly not how much I wanted to lose by this time so in order to give myself some perspective I did a bit of "research" on things that weigh twenty pounds. 

A barrel of water weighs twenty pounds.

A car tire weighs twenty pounds.

Apparently the memoir of Reverend Stanley Smith weighs twenty pounds (I'll have to "google" him at a later point in time). 

About four chihuahuas weigh twenty pounds.

Two bags of kitty litter weigh twenty pounds.

Twenty guinea pigs weigh about twenty pounds. 

So, I am down about twenty guinea pigs ....  and I suppose that is good.  It beats being up several guinea pigs.

Although I am disappointed that I haven't lost the weight I wanted to by now, I am sure that in a month I'll have lost nearly two chihuahuas, maybe even a bag of kitty litter.  Now that I'm actually starting to see and feel the weight loss it is giving me a lot more motivation ~ and quite frankly, I need that motivation.