orphan.

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*Note: This post was written on Saturday night, but I was totally exhausted and fell asleep without updating! So here it is. :) *

I held a baby for the first time today.

Let me explain. I’ve held a baby before, but only for two seconds before frantically thrusting the little, writhing (usually screaming) body back to his/her parents. I am not good with kids at all; they usually smell something foul in me that prompts them to howl and sob with such passion whenever I go near them that my defense mechanism has developed to where I am extremely uncomfortable in the presence of a child. I may face my fears and say words to them or even poke at them sometimes, but trust me when I say that deep inside, I am petrified that I am going to mess them up or make them miserable in some way.

But today, I really held a baby, and I never wanted to let her go. I fell in love with the beautiful baby girl named Raquel, shown above. It was actually by accident, because while our group was taking a tour of Casa Hogar, which is an orphanage that lies ten minutes south of the border and houses around 100 children, a friend just dropped her into my arms because she had to take care of something. I remember blinking fearfully into those clear brown eyes and seeing her assess, then simply trust me. I was absolutely blown away by this miracle. It came to a point where she became so comfortable with me that she tilted her neck to perfectly fit the crook of my neck, and I wanted to burst into tears at this gorgeous experience. Praise God, I am capable of caring for a child.

I don’t know what Raquel’s future looks like, and really pray that a wonderful family will take her to be their own, and that she’ll be able to experience just how much God really loves her. As I gently rocked her, I wondered if Raquel felt like an orphan, and if she knew what kind of circumstances have been dealt to her. Honestly, one doesn’t have to be in an orphanage to have felt abandoned, and I know plenty of people who have carried the pain of parents who have forgotten, abused, and neglected them, feeling left behind by these people who had brought them into the world.

We have a world filled with orphans, but we manage to find family in the most unexpected places. I’m thankful to have people who I can call my sisters, my brothers, my parents, all role models who I can grow with and learn from, even have those annoying arguments with. But the best part is when I can come to a place where I can stop fighting and crying, drop my arms willingly and lean my head against the crook of their desire to help me, to listen to me, to love on me.

Even deep within Mexico, God shines a brilliant light upon a humble orphanage with children who are blessed with love, and I am so thankful that for now, Raquel is safe as she awaits people who she can call her own. And I hope she’ll be able to understand in time that God calls her HIS own. That will be a beautiful connection for sure.

Friends, I hope you have your person, or people. I hope you’ll love on them and thank God for the presence of something so significant and real in your life. Even if people messed you up in the past and you feel like you have trust/relationship/commitment issues, just know that that won’t stop love from happening around you, on you, to you. So perhaps when love is plopped into your arms without warning, a good first step would be to abandon that fear and simply hold it close.

Hold it dear and experience miracles.

judas.

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Jesus chose Judas to follow Him.
Jesus knew Judas would betray Him.
Jesus loved on Judas, taught him, lived life with him.

Jesus is so crazy.

But when I think about it, that concept ain’t that crazy. I’ve seen normal people do this. I did this. They may not trust someone, they may have suspicions prickling on their hearts about someone, and they may have even heard rumors about the person, but they still go ahead and choose them. Whether it’s for love, for friendship, for work/ministry, they still choose them.

So these people are either really naïve or they’ve learned to trust Love.

I feel like I’ve experienced several occurrences in my own personal life recently where I still chose to love on certain individuals, even though I knew deep inside that they would probably mess me up.

And mess me up they did. I shed a LOT of tears for friends who totally turned their backs on me and broke my heart. But the amazing part about all of this is that I don’t regret having loved them. I did the best that I could, and I loved the best that I knew how. And if this is where we’ve come where God is splitting our road together and we’re on our own paths now, I’m okay with that. I have to pray now, pray even harder for them, and even for this achy-breaky heart of mine.

God, take this weakened, messed up heart, soak it in glue and help me to get it back to functioning order so that it can get messed up all over again. 

Here’s why I’m saying such nonsensical things:

To love recklessly is to live dangerously. There is no way in hell that God gave us hearts to only love people who are easy to love, or even lives that we on a daily basis are able to understand with absolute clarity. I don’t think a lot of Christians actually realize how supernatural and awe-striking their lives are supposed to be. I absolutely refuse to consider my Father to be ordinary, mundane, or boring. Jesus really was crazy, because our Father is crazy too, and all of His children are supposed to be crazy too. Crazy in a sense that it doesn’t make ANY sense here on earth.

I learned recently that people who are absolutely free of their past, their baggage, and their insecurities are those who are able to love the most fiercely, the most passionately. Fear is of Satan, and there is absolutely no FEAR in loving someone else, despite their shortcomings and potential for betrayal and hurt. So honestly, I am not going to lick my wounds and bitterly proclaim, “I shall never love again!” I thank God that I am able to love, fall down, love again, and continue until I die. I can’t imagine how much more I’ll be able to love with how much more freedom when I am liberated from the baggage that ties me down. That actually sounds even more insane to me, which leads me to believe that through God, it can happen and it will.

I really believe there is more injustice to hold out on love rather than to love shamelessly and risk it all.

failure.

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Most people don’t know this, but I actually applied to graduate school back in 2008 right after completing my undergraduate studies at Biola. Once I swiveled my tassel to the other side of my cap, I was proud of myself and felt so certain about my future as a counselor of lost souls and hopeless delinquents. I didn’t think of any other possibilities and was absolute in my decision to go back to school, and couldn’t wait to start my career. I literally holed myself up at the local Starbucks for days at a time, pouring my life into applications and essays. I got great letters of recommendation, all my transcripts were sent out, and I pretty much spent about $2000(!!!) on fees on top of more fees.

I applied to seven schools.

I got rejected from seven schools.

It was one of the most embarrassing and demoralizing moments of my adult life. I felt like the years of painfully enduring through classes would grant me the reward of going to a school I actually wanted to attend, studying what I actually wanted to study. All that I had hoped for, prayed for, and expected with all of my heart came down on me like fire. I felt like my dreams had crashed and burned.

I have to admit that I was a mess, and I was completely muddled. What was I going to do now? Do I apply again next year? Do I just find a job now? All these questions plagued me and I was even too mortified to tell my mother and my friends what had happened, so I lied to cover up the fact that none of these schools accepted me. They didn’t want me. All that money gone, all those prayers gone, I was disappointed in myself. But more than that, I scowled at God and wondered, “Okay, what the heck do you want me to do??” It was a dark moment for the both of us.

One of my dearest friends recently had a big dream crushed… something that she had talked about and planned around for years came to a screeching halt and it really frustrated her. I felt helpless because I wished I could have done more to ease her disappointment, but all I could really do was stare at the blinking cursor before my eyes and just type out “I’m sorry, it’ll be okay, it’ll get better.” I felt stupid, because when people said that to me as I tearfully gazed at my rejection letters, I wanted to punch them in the face. It’s not consoling at all during the heat of the occurrence.

But something I learned as I recovered from that time of my life was that the beauty of dreaming is that it doesn’t allow room for cynicism or pessimism. If you don’t believe in your own dreams, those shouldn’t be called dreams at all. The reason why people are so dreamy about dreams is because it’s just unrealistic, otherworldly, and unlike the “reality” of our world, which can suck most of the time. Another wonderful thing about being a dreamer is that if one dream ends, another can be born. That’s why the terms “hopes” and “dreams” are seen together so often – you need hope to dream and dreams to hope. When failure smacked me in the face that year, I allowed that temporary lapse to push me down many flights of stairs. I came to the bottom and simply laid there, thinking that my purpose was done for.

Isn’t that such an underestimation of the power of God’s grace? God didn’t save and sacrifice for the sake of one little dream to be accomplished. He opened up realms of infinity for us, and I truly believe that He delights in our creativity and big picture visions for our lives. Through that grace, we’re able to experience different and unique things that God constructed for each and every one of us, and a new balloon of hope swells up in our hearts, readying the next dream He has placed within us.

Dear friend, this dream may be over, or maybe it’s postponed. But you are a beautiful woman who is fearfully and specifically crafted by God to carry out not just one dream at a time, but many throughout a lifetime which will impact others and rock you inside and out. Believe that as you cling to His grace, refill your hope tank, and envision new dreams.

There is no such thing as failure, or the death of a dream. We have the limitless capacity to develop the most amazing blueprints, but it is with the fuel of God that skyscrapers are built. The supernatural component of it all though is that the actual thing will actually look far grander and shinier than what ink and imagination could have proffered.

wiser.

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Image

I recently celebrated my 27th year of being alive, and I must say it was probably one of the best birthdays I ever had. I recall when 10 years ago, I didn’t even have any friends to celebrate with, and I was actually at home by myself suffering from a suspension from school. It was quite pathetic, and an unfortunate way to “celebrate” anything.

As the years progressed, I started having more and more people involved with my life, and while I was thankful for that, the depth was beginning to decrease as well. I remember there was one birthday party where I had invited over 180 people (what the freak was I thinking?) and although it was a wonderfully crazy time of people just having fun together and I felt thankful that these people even took the time to visit me on my birthday, I had a moment when I looked around the room and realized that only a handful of these people were really people who I had a thriving relationship with. It was strange, because even though I was surrounded by so many great people, I still felt lonely and hungry to live with people.

For my most recent birthday, I was on the brink of not having any sort of gathering at all. I would have been okay with just being by myself, just like that girl I was 10 years ago. This past year had been difficult in regards to my closest relationships, and I definitely had some fall-outs that affected me deeply. But I decided to bite the bullet and have a small dinner of girls who had made a significant impact in my life within the past year, and it was the best group of people I could have spent any birthday with.

And then the love started pouring in. When I stopped trying to just get people together for the sake of making myself feel better or making some sort of statement that I was not miserable and in fact was embracing my “popularity,” little by little people started surprising me. I received meaningful emails from friends I hadn’t seen and hung out with in years, new friends in my life made me delicious cakes and cupcakes, I got to spend quality time with amazing souls through birthday lunches/dinners, and I got to witness what it really meant to celebrate someone, and to truly show thanks that they were alive. My mother even wrote me a card in ENGLISH which took her nearly two days to rack her brain over a translation dictionary for. It really taught me how sacred a birthday really is, and how I want to celebrate others’ birthdays from now on too.

Love is seriously SUCH a humbling gift. I can’t believe to this day how many people love on me when I really feel like I don’t deserve it at times. It strikes me in my heart when I converse with people who don’t think they have any friends, who think no one cares enough about them, or even think that God purposely wants them to be alone. But with that, it’s so easy to fall into self-pity while playing the “loner-victim” card. I feel like I was in this stage for the longest time, and then I transitioned into the surrender stage, where I willingly relinquished control over my relationships and threw it up to God, saying within my heart that these relationships are not mine to hold tightly, but I need to allow them to grow, die, or even re-birth in their own organic way. And I started praying specifically for the friendships I struggled with, and became less entitled to them too. As I became more reliant on trusting God that He would bring friends and mentors who would not only edify me, but prosper with me, love came in at opportune times, and it also broke me at unfortunate times.

It’s interesting that when I was younger, it mattered so much to me that many people knew my name. But now as I’m thanking God for another year where I’m older and wiser, I just desire for people to know my story.

value.

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Back in 2006, my mother and my stepfather had decided to commit to a long-term plan of moving their whole lives to South Korea, setting up a headquarters there, and traveling back and forth to Cambodia, Philippines, and China for missions work. They entrusted a dear friend of theirs to be the caretaker of a little garage that was filled with my family’s most valuable possessions, mainly being relics of the past, photo albums, and stuffed animals dating back to when I was born. Mind you, this is a MIRACLE, because my mother and I have moved around repeatedly (think once every two years for 20 years), and to even think that that many boxes followed us faithfully throughout our lives is crazy.

Until my mother’s return in 2011, I had only gone there a couple times to retrieve a few items I needed. But now that my mother wanted her stuff back, we went to that garage and the blood went cold in our veins. All of it, it was gone. Just… gone. Staring into that empty garage, a rush of thoughts and rage went through me, and I started to panic. There were some very personal things in there, and I hated the idea of them being in the wrong hands. That “friend” that my parents trusted so long ago? He’s gone too. We don’t know where he went.

Now, I don’t want to go into the gory, legalistic details of what we had to go through, but the thing I want to focus on is the perception of value, and why certain things matter so much to us. For my mother, she was devastated about losing all the photo albums recording my whole childhood and the little art projects I did in elementary school. I remember being at a wedding and viewing those slideshows of the happy couple in their younger days, and feeling a pang of angst because I knew that I would not have a single picture to contribute to that. At that point, I felt like my whole childhood which I would depend on those pictures to remember, was wiped off the face of the earth, and no one would ever know.

But even more than the pictures and my stuffed rabbit named Bobo that my now-deceased grandmother gave to me when I was born, I mourned even more at the loss of my books. I am a huge book nerd, so my collection was overwhelming. My mother and I used to get into screeching arguments about my books, because I refused to move without them and my mother just wanted to make space for more necessary things in life, like food or clothing. All I wanted and needed were my books. You may find this crazy, but the memories I recall when I think about the books I had are much more vivid than the memories I would get out of a picture.

Ranging from Goosebumps, The Great Gatsby, The Firm, to Tuesdays with Morrie, Joy Luck Club, and my Harry Potters, all of these books had a specific memory attached to them. I remember I was 12 years old when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out, and it kept me company as I had to walk a couple miles to school and back daily. There was one day when I was struggling because I didn’t fit in at school, and I was  gripping onto my book despondently. Then Hagrid reassuringly stated to Harry, “Everyone starts at the beginning…Just be yerself. I know it’s hard…But yeh’ll have a great time.” That honestly helped me out a bit.

Sure, I can go out and re-buy these books again, but they won’t be the same books I held in my hands. The smell, the creases, the intent note-taking and highlighting I contributed… none of that will be there.

We place value in different things, and we find memories in the most random places. But one thing for sure is that I am SO grateful for those books that traveled with me through a long, arduous journey, because they granted me wisdom, comfort, and motivation when I couldn’t find it anywhere else.

May books never go away, and may words continue to paint the worlds we do and don’t live in for all to behold.

Image source: http://vi.sualize.us/view/140ca4d29e708c0537a7c8510f612ef8/