Filled.

God, I KNOW you are good. I know I'm not walking down this road by myself. I know, also, that I have SO much to look forward to! One gloriously beautiful day I will be with you, singing and dancing in your presence, to the beautiful melody of your heaven song! I'll be with you, right where I belong. But Jesus, I pray that while I'm here, you would give me grace enough to see the people around me through your eyes, even when I feel hurt and empty, I pray that you would fill me. Lord, give me patience to show them a taste of your great love and unending mercy. Thank you, Jesus, that I can kneel before you knowing I'm completely forgiven. Thank you that I can delight in your grace and dance in your joy. Thank you that I can swim in the depths of your love, and that I can't even comprehend how beautiful the day will be when I can run free with you in Heaven. God....YOU are SO!!! VERY!!!GOOD!

In ALL Things...

If you've ever experienced that moment where you have never felt so alone in your entire life, only to come to the realization a short time later that never once was that the truth, then maybe you have gained the beautiful understanding (in a way that is, perhaps, not so beautiful) that Christ is present in ALL things...

"You were all called to travel on the same road an in the same direction, so stay together, both outwardly and inwardly. You have one master, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of All, who rules over all, works through all, and is present in all. Everything you are and think and do is permeated with Oneness."

-Ephesians 4:4-6

The theme of unity in this verse is so obvious. And so is the presence of Christ. He is Master of every single circumstance, situation, and thing; without exception. Nothing is left as an outlier. He is OVER, THROUGH, IN absolutely everything. Whether we experience the darkness or the brightness of joy, Christ is totally present in our lives. He orchestrates everything into a beautiful harmony for His glory. And whether it is the messiness or the sweet melody that sticks out to us more in that particular moment, it is all permeated with Christ. It serves the purpose of drawing us deeper and deeper into His heart, into His love. God's desire for us to unite with fellow believers is so real. We can't do it alone, and He knows that! He desires for us to experience the authentic community that comes when we open our hearts to others who know Him and pursue Him with a whole heart.

Though I have never seen the ugliness of my wayward heart as clearly as I did a week ago (a long story better left for another time...), I have also never experienced the depth of Grace Christ offers, nor have I felt the reality of undeserved, unconditional love present in the authentic relationships He has given to me. After a night of darkness came several nights of heart-wrenching, tear-jerking honesty all of which were followed by "me too" moments sweeter than any metaphor or words I can even come up with right now. As I shared the less appealing parts of my life with the people who matter the most to me, I experienced the sweetness and sincerity of encouragement Christ's way. And I am overwhelmed with thankfulness, that spills over into tears of joy; that He has given me friends and family to be His hands and feet as they hold my hand through the reality of life. Ugly or beautiful, we're traveling on the "same road in the same direction", and Christ, in His wonderful goodness, is simultaneously leading every step and bringing up the rear.

Praise God that He never wastes a moment of our lives, no matter how much it hurts! Praise Him for His grace that NEVER runs out! Praise Him that He is truly present IN ALL THINGS!

Praise Him that no matter what we do, we will not be separated from the reality of His love!

"I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how WIDE and LONG and HIGH and DEEP is the love of Christ, and to know that this love SURPASSES knowledge-that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God."

-Ephesians 3:16-19

Delighting with you in the awesome grace and stunning love of Our Wonderful Savior,

Allison :)

A Fire Ablaze!

Fire is bold, hot, captivating.

Fire ignites curiosity and is attractively dangerous.

Fire is strangely irresistible, and its heat is illuminating.

In 2 Timothy chapter 1, Paul tells Timothy to keep the fire of his faith ABLAZE! What an amazingly descriptive word! It made me think about all the characteristics of a fire that is set ablaze, and what I came up with is listed at the beginning of this post. It's a short list...but when I replace "My faith" with "Fire", it becomes incredibly challenging!

The dictionary defines ABLAZE as "burning fiercely". Fiercely, another wonderful word, describes the bold and dangerous character of Jesus and the standard of faith that He desires us to have in Him. I want this faith. Only then will Jesus be able to transform me into one of those fires that once looked at, can't be looked away from: one that is irresistible, captivating, attractive and ablaze with the love of Christ!

Wondering about the Wonderful...

This morning I sat down with some coffee and opened my Bible to 1 Timothy 6. I knew that I had read this passage before, as I saw highlighted verses and a few notes in the margins... But the freshness of this fall morning reminded me that there is always something fresh and new I can find in the Word of God. It seems that no matter how many times we read the same sections of God's Word, He always has something new to teach. I like to think that it gives Him great joy to reveal something we have never understood and to watch us approach His love letter with a desire to dig deeper. I don't always enter my quiet times with an attitude this thirsty, but when I do, I always come away asking how I could ever settle for anything less! God's Word is just SO satisfying!

And that leads me to what struck me the most about what I read today. As a whole, the passage reminded me that as someone touched and changed by the incredible grace of Jesus, my life should be drastically different from the "norms" of the world. If my life makes total sense to someone who doesn't know Jesus, then something needs to change. It was a great reminder of what I should be pursuing with my whole heart...

More specifically, verses 11 and 12 grabbed my heart...

"Pursue a righteous life--a life of wonder, faith, love, steadiness, courtesy. Run hard and fast in the faith. Seize the eternal life, the life you were called to, the life you so fervently embraced..."

The fact that the life of someone who claims Christ should be marked by WONDER jumped out of the page. I was struck with the realization of something I have always known: my heart is prone to severe dissatisfaction! I am so easily distracted by everything I don't have, can't get, don't understand, can't do, shouldn't want, etc... The point is just that WONDER in this context seems to imply an insatiable thirst for Jesus. It implies that God created our hearts with threads of awe and appreciation for WHO HE IS, and nothing else. It shows that our hearts will never be satisfied until we stop and wonder at the deep and beautiful complexity of what He has made. And it shows that unless we have the desire to notice the millions of traces of His goodness that He leaves, we will miss out on something incredibly good. Our hearts were made to worship-- to wonder with authenticity about the unique complexity of what God created. And they were made to enjoy the wonderfully simplistic ways He uses to reveal this quality of Himself to us.

What I mean is that everyday happenings like the sunrise or sunset are so very simple, but when you stop and truly take a look at what is before you, there is no way that your heart doesn't WONDER at who could create such an incredible piece of art solely out of air... My heart jumps every time I see the strikingly vivid colors of the sunrise in the morning. Something in me stirs at the sound of thunder and the smell of fall. I can't help but feel without a doubt that there must be something more to life when I stand on the summit of a mountain and am able to see for what feels like thousands of miles!

We were not meant to suppress the desire our hearts feel to worship! It is exactly what we were created for! It is the life we were meant to pursue!

Wondering with you,

Allison :)

It's the little things :)

This morning, the sunrise was beautiful! The sky was dark, the stars were bright, and at the edge of the horizon, there was an intense line of burning orange! It was amazing! I can't express it, I only wish I'd had a camera! God is good...

I suppose the other thing I wanted to write about today is just a silly little story that made me really appreciate the little things God gives me each day: one of these being laughter. :)

Ellie, my lovely roommate, and I both received the wonderful gift of 8 am classes this semester... Out of this rather inconveniently early time for class to start, we get to share a wonderful bike ride together each morning. Today, we were running a little later than usual because we had both forgotten something and had to run, one after the other, back into the house to grab what we left. I ran out of the garage like characters from a Mission Impossible movie, barely sneaking under the descending garage door, and we were off! It was a thrilling scene and I'm sure it would have been quite comical had anyone outside the situation been watching. Our bike ride commenced as normal, with mindless chatting, complaining about endless papers and assignments, and encouraging each other just by being in each other's company. As we turned the corner onto Elizabeth street, we were blinded by the blinding brightness of the morning sun. But out of the blindness came the wonderful sight of a GREEN light at Elizabeth and Shields, the gateway from the rest of Fort Collins to campus...and a light that is rarely found green. We were far away. Too far to catch the green? Not us. Not today.

Simultaneously, we yelled, "It's green!" And at the same instant we pedaled faster than ever before. Fort Collins has never seen two girls more anxious to get to campus at ten til 8 on a Tuesday morning! We counted down the seconds as the walk sign did the same. The orange hand flashed, attempting to tell us we couldn't make it. But side by side we strained and pedaled, cheering each other on...and, in victorious procession, we entered the intersection, passing through the middle as the light turned yellow, reaching the Moby parking lot before it was red, fist pumping, smiling, and glorying in our sweet victory! We had persevered down the stretch from City Park Ave. to Shields St. and conquered that traffic light! Laughing hard, exchanging smiles, and congratulating each other, I found myself incredibly thankful for little moments like that one. Nobody else could have found the joy that we did in those 10 minutes on this early fall morning, but I know-at least for me-it is a story, a memory, that I will probably remember with a smile and a little chuckle for a very long time.

I'm thankful for laughter and friendship, and the millions of other little things that remind me that life is meant to be enjoyed, that you can forget about the trillions of other things piled up on your plate, and find laughter in absolutely nothing at all... :)

Song words...WOW!

I love the David Crowder Band for lots of reasons. They are weird, funny, and completely random. :)

But perhaps what I love most about them is the down-to-earth, rock-solid truth they put into their songs. Their lyrics are genius, and they write with hearts that are passionate about following Jesus. God has had a lot to say to me through the words of songs by this band, but the most recent one influenced what I named my blog. It is simply called "Shadows" and the words go like this...

"Life is full of light and shadow

All the joy, All the sorrow

All the sorrow

And yet will he bring

dark to light,

And yet will he bring

day from night

When shadows fall on us

We will not fear

We will remember

When darkness falls on us

We will remember

When all seems lost

When we're thrown and we're tossed

We remember the cost

We rest in Him,

Shadow of the cross."

These words are so powerful. And the incredible thing is God's timing in showing them to me. I had just heard a message on having faith that is completely independent of my circumstances. No matter what is going on around me, no matter what is crashing in on me, no matter how discouraged I feel at the end of every day, God is always there. He has already given His all for me. He has already shown me how much He loves me. He loves me in a strange and unreal way...a way that I can't see displayed in any other example in my life. It is so great. Maybe one of the best descriptions of His love comes from words in another song..."He loves like a hurricane, and I am a tree, bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy..." He gave everything He had for me, and so He will not hold anything back. He gives grace and mercy that is always sufficient.

Just like this song says...when I feel shadows fall on me, I don't need to fear. When I'm feeling tossed and thrown, I can rest in the memory of what Jesus did for me on the cross, knowing that He saves me like that in every moment of every day. In this truth, I can have joy. I can lean on a God who is full of mercy, who gives me strength to get up every morning and take in the beauty of His promises in the sunrise, feeling His refreshing grace in the cool breeze that hits my face. No matter what is going on, all of these characteristics of God remain.

I am fully aware that the discouragement and frustrations I am facing right now are nothing compared to the reality of fear that others deal with every day. But I also know that I understand the true joy that comes from knowing Jesus in a much more real way. Constant pain and the questions and doubt that accompany that pain made themselves at home in the last year of my life. But I can say without a doubt that I am thankful to have a God that fights for me, that stands guard at the door of my heart to let in only what He knows I can handle. He is always faithful, and never once have I been crushed. I may have felt like I would be, but every morning, I wake up. And every morning He gives me the choice to see His beauty.

God is real. And He doesn't really give me the choice to believe otherwise. He is everywhere around me. Even in the shadows. Because it is in the shadows of pain where I can remember HIS shadow of pain: the cross. And it is through the cross that He has painted me the most beautiful picture of the strongest demonstration of love, grace, mercy, power, and strength...

I will keep trusting. And waiting. And knowing that God is bigger than my discouragement and stronger than my fear.

Paul had it together quite a bit more than I do...but his response to difficulty (in a way that I cannot even begin to define) is a constant challenge to me. In weakness, we can't be prideful. In weakness, we realize our disparity; our depravity is obvious when we are stuck on our knees. In weakness, we realize that our deepest need can only be satisfied by Jesus, and through Him, strength takes the shape leaning as hard as we can into the God.

"My grace is enough; it's all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness. Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ's strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become." -2 Corinthians 12:9-10

The beginnings!

Well, I decided just recently that I wanted to make a blog. Who knows why... :) I do love to write, and recently I have so much to write about. I wouldn't mind if no one ever read any of this; but if they do happen to stumble upon this page, (which may turnout to be somewhat of a Twister game of my thoughts) I hope they find Jesus woven through each seam. I hope His love seems more tangible in the words on this page; and I hope it is obvious that His heart beats for every single soul He created to be completely whole in Him. God is Good, and His love for us illustrates the life He has for us. His love is outrageous, extravagant, risk-taking, whole, perfect, and refreshing so that our lives can be complete, adventurous, abundant, and real in absolutely every way.

I am far from having everything figured out, but I am learning that the wonderful melody of joy is infinitely richer when accompanied by its complex harmony: one that is often so quiet we don't hear it until our lives enter into the silence of the shadows...