God

You know that dream you’ve buried? Drag it out and dust it off.

/ witheringthyme / 2 Comments

Stop living for yourself. You are nothing. Stop living for everyone else. They are nothing when you are unsatisfied.
When you abandon God you have nothing to live for. Except yourself. And I’ve learned the hard way that, without God, I’m a worthless, unsatisfied nobody.
I became a master artist of lies, weaving intricate plots to avoid consequences. I was ashamed and yet continued to lie until everyone I loved despised me. When they tried to help me, they hurt themselves.
I began to suffer from severe depression. I lived hour by hour, fretting over every little thing. It was misery. My former passions were now ghosts that constantly reminded me of my failure. To seek motivation was to enter a barren wasteland. I hated each second of my existence. The objects, actions, relationships that had once made me “happy” were sources of disappointment.
God was literally standing in front of me saying, “Let me help you. I will help you bear your burdens.” And I shoved him aside. Attending church was too much effort. Socializing was tedious.
I still had hopes and dreams, but they grew to seem like distant, lofty aspirations meant for some other individual.
To live without God is to live a life that makes a finite impact. You are a particle of dust.
Eventually, I reached the edge after crawling around on my scraped up knees, blind and pathetic. God didn’t push me off the cliff; I pushed myself. Don’t blame God for your issues, look in the mirror: There is a gaping hole in your shriveled heart and you ignore it while you bleed to death. No more excuses.
I fell so far I thought I’d never get out. I had already given up long beforehand. God doesn’t give up, though. Instead, he slapped me in the face and told me, “Look around you. People are suffering everywhere. You are whiny and you are nothing without me. Stop staring at the ground, look to me and reach out your hand because I’ve been here for you this entire time. So, you’re covered in bruises, so what? I’ve used people in worse shape than you to change the world. Your passions cannot be achieved without falls.”
Stop living for yourself. How can you change the world if you cannot change yourself?

Why I Give Up on Giving Up.

/ witheringthyme / 4 Comments

Wow. I see the images on the news and I feel absolutely helpless. War, disease, fear– they all ravage the world.
My whole being aches to change the world and make a difference in just ONE PERSON’s LIFE. I am one of those people that knows my purpose in life, but achieving it as akin to realizing there is a fierce mountain looming above you, taunting you.
Well, I am also an advocate of Faith. Not blind faith or plain stupidity, mind you, but the “if you have faith and do not doubt…you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea’, and it will be done” faith.
For years now I have been struggling within a storm of depression and I can honestly say that I have made horrible mistakes that I cannot take back. My imperfection pains me, disgusts me. There is a constant feeling of inadequacy that shadows me.
I live on the East Coast and I have a dream to attend a university in Vancouver. Yes, living in Canada sounds exciting to me, but that’s not the true draw; this school has a unique Linguistics program. They teach you to learn indigenous languages that lack writing systems. Then, you learn to create writing systems for these languages. According to Wycliffe Bible Translators (the organization I yearn to work for), there remain nearly 2,000 languages that do not have written word. These indigenous people are persecuted by others that speak majority languages, leaving them to believe their cultures are somehow less valuable. I want to reach out to these people so they know their cultures are beautiful. Furthermore, I wish to create alphabets for them so their communities can become educated and their children can become doctors and teachers for their own people.

Three years ago, I discovered a college in Canada that looked like a dream. My parents told me to think realistically and I had to withdraw my acceptance to the university. Now, community college has left me longing to delve into the study of Linguistics. Yet, there is a financial issue. There seems to always be one. I understand that my parents wish to view this from a realistic point of view, but God does not fit into their perspective. Once, I gave up on achieving my dream, but now I must give up on giving up. I will attend Trinity Western University next year because money is nothing to a God that can move mountains.

Image of Slovakian church courtesy of Wycliffe Bible Translators

SurReality

/ witheringthyme / Leave a comment

It is incredibly surreal to feel the ping of the keyboard beneath my fingers as I sit here in a well-furnished room…
since,
There have been crowds rioting in Missouri over the death of a man named Michael Brown…
Yet in a village in the Congo a young boy attempts to hold back his tears at the sound of mothers keening as he holds his father’s hand and knows that Ebola will take him next.
Yet a figure draped in black stares down at another body of a child he decapitated, but he is no longer a man–he is a monster.
Yet there is a woman raped and tortured awaiting the same fate as the journalists before her.
Yet in Ukraine a mother watches helplessly as a Russian soldier threatens her family.
Yet a pile of rubble in Gaza used to be a home where two parents and their children resided.
Yet a Christian in the Middle East flees to the mountains because it is the only safe place…
But I want to lose weight because I have enough food to eat.
But I wish my job were not so stressful because I overwork myself to buy nice things.
But I need to attend my dream college.
But we complain, “Why can’t the news station talk more about the Emmy awards so I can avoid macabre reality?”
If you want to make a difference in the world then you need to look around you and realize that you are alive. Your life is not threatened.
Rioting and violence brings more pain, hurts small businesses, makes you look like an arrogant fool.
WATCH that boy give in to the tears he tried to hold back for so long as his father no longer recognizes him!
SEEK JUSTICE at the sight of an innocent child’s headless body.
FIGHT for the woman that wants to live a day without terror.
FEEL for the mother as she sees the world raging about her.
LOVE the family that lost everything in one fatal blow.
PRAY for the Christians that have had the strength to recognize their God.
What if you had been born in their place? Imagine waking up one day…
…knowing your father is dead and his body will never be buried because the Disease killed him.

How will you change the world?

/ witheringthyme / 3 Comments

There are over 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, but did you know that there are still groups of people that are unable to read simply because they do not have alphabets? Forvo.com, a language site that has collected pronunciations of words in languages from around the world, only had 318 languages on its site. There are hundreds of indigenous cultures in places such as Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and Mexico that do not have written language. Imagine feeling undervalued by speakers of majority languages (like Spanish) because your native tongue is somehow ‘unworthy’.
Wycliffe Bible Translators is an organization that brings alphabets, biblical knowledge, and education to indigenous communities across the globe. They train willing individuals to learn languages with very few speakers and then write them down, creating stories, books, and pamphlets as reading material. Furthermore, they translate Bibles because many of these people need hope and have been suffering.
God has given me a love for indigenous cultures and within the next year I will be attending university in order to study Linguistics. I have a passion to reach out to these people and let them know that their cultures are beautiful! 🙂
Do you want to change the world? How?