So, after years of research, heartache, and futile trying, I’ve come to a conclusion: I’ll never be good enough.

Good enough for what?  I don’t know.  I have spent years trying to be good enough for something, and the sadly funny thing is, I don’t know exactly what.  Good enough for someone else?  Good enough to meet my own expectations?  Good enough to do what I believe I am called to do?  Good enough to be a child of God?

Whatever it is, I will never be good enough.

Thank God.

Because now that I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt, maybe I can finally quit trying so hard.  Now I can just BE.....in the grace of God....  I can begin to step out of myself and my fears of not “toeing the line”, and truly live as God has wanted me to - with my hands reaching out and ready to touch others, and my eyes open instead of squeezed tightly shut, trying to block out the constant mistakes I make.  It’s not about my mistakes.  It’s not about me at all.  

It’s about being free to show the Love of God to others.

I have always been so worried about how I present myself, if I’m doing things right or messing up, striving to be good enough and falling into depression because I know I fail miserably.  Love has been a rather elusive thing for me to understand and practice because it’s something, just by its nature, that makes me reach outside of myself and into the lives (and oftentimes space!) of other people.  And sometimes I’m not comfortable with that.  I always feel like my own broken things have to be fixed first so I can have something to offer before I can reach out to anyone else.  What a lie that is!  I will never have anything great to offer anyone.  But God certainly does, and all I have to do is be open to letting Him use me to do it.

I can’t explain why God loves us so much.  But I know He does.  Laying his life down for us is the biggest proof of that.  And I’m so thankful.  Now if I can just learn to accept the love He already surrounds me with instead of futilely trying to earn it, maybe I would remember what joy really is.

You know that place in life where you know exactly what’s going on, you’re comfortable and relaxed, and it’s like burrowing deep in a warm, cozy blanket?  I think we’re all familiar with it.  It’s the Comfort Zone.

But here’s a theory.  Maybe it’s not so cozy.  Maybe it’s not really all that comfortable, either.  Maybe it’s getting too small, or too easy.  Maybe it’s not all you thought it would be.

There’s a reason why humans have progressed from first learning about how to make fire to the technologically advanced place we are now.  It’s because even though warm, cozy Comfort Zones are really nice for a while, desire and necessity keep us from living there.  God created us to be curious, to push limits, and to challenge ourselves to follow our passions and dreams no matter how difficult it might be.  He challenges us to step out beyond ourselves into something much, much bigger.

In my experience, there’s a couple ways to move out of a Comfort Zone.  One is when you feel the growing pains, you get a little courageous, and you make the choice to push out.  The other is when the walls shake and crumble around you and you find yourself booted out whether you think you want to leave or not.  Both ways can sometimes be scary, emotional, confusing, and even exciting - but whatever comes along with it, stepping out of a Comfort Zone is almost always UNcomfortable.

So far for me, 2014 seems to be The Year Of Leaving Comfort Zones.  Little by little, I have felt God calling me onward into new territory, and found myself being challenged to climb out of a few of my warm, cozy holes and into the somewhat scary Unknown.  And it's not like all the changes are bad.  Some, like building new relationships or going further with my music, are actually very exciting.  But as crazy as it sounds, even to me, I find that I am wary of even those ones.  My cozy burrow is what I’ve known for a while, and Out There there are no guarantees that things will go smoothly.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that, most of the time, leaving a Comfort Zone does NOT go smoothly.  But what a loss for me if the fear of something different keeps me from reaching out, learning new things while conquering old fears, and experiencing an even deeper trust in my Father.

So, I cautiously but deliberately walk to the edge of my Comfort Zone, take a deep breath, and make the choice to step over the line into Something New.  And it’s not a one-time choice, either.  Most of the time it’s a daily resolve to trust God in these decisions, and to keep pushing my toe further and further out past that line.  The only thing I know for sure is that, in the beginning at least, it’s pretty uncomfortable.  I may immediately fall flat on my face, or make a complete fool of myself, or get lost because nothing is familiar -- or all of the above.  But right now I’m willing to take that risk.  Because I can’t stay where it’s cozy.  I don’t want to be lulled to sleep and miss the wonderful things that I can learn and do in the Land of Something New.

If there are new things you are facing that you’re afraid of, I hope you’ll make the choice to step out of your Comfort Zone, too.  Heck, we can all make fools of ourselves or trip and fall flat together.  And then we can laugh (or cry if we need to), get back up, and resolve to keep going, while helping to hold each other up.

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”  Most of us are familiar with that line from the poem The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost.  What a wistful, beautiful, but almost painful poem that is!  It’s about choices, big and small, and how they affect our future.  It’s about where we’ll eventually find ourselves in time, and how we never really get the same choice twice, because paths just keep going, and splitting, and going again.  Away and away....

But sometimes the choice isn’t which path to walk, but whether we’re going to walk at all.

I have days where I wake up with my hiking boots already on - I’m ready to hit the trail, climb the rocks, and leap the scary potholes in a single bound.  Those days are awesome!  But those days, for some reason, are also few and far between for me.  Mostly I find I have to fight myself and my reluctance to walk anywhere, my fear of failure and of being mediocre, and the often unexplained heaviness that is waiting just outside my peripheral vision before I can even think of getting my hiking boots out of the closet, and by that time I’ve already lost half of my Umph.

So instead of it being about which road to follow, it ends up being about making the basic choice to either let today slide away into ambiguity again, or to tap into a Strength that is beyond me and just focus on putting one foot in front of the other.

Have you found yourself there too?  It’s not fun.  It sometimes makes me want to question whether what’s at the end of the road is worth the fight just to walk.  But you know what?

It’s worth it.

It’s worth it on the days when you feel like you have winged feet and it’s easy to visualize the End Zone.  But it’s also worth it when you can’t see through the fog and you just have to go on the faith that this road really does lead somewhere.  It’s worth it when the only thing that drives you is the hope that what’s up ahead is what God created you for.  It’s worth it when you’re tired and all you can hear is the continuous tromp-tromp-tromp of your shoes on the road, on and on and on.  It’s worth it when you get through the bracken and you catch a much-needed and refreshing glimpse of the reward ahead.

Don’t lose heart.  Please don’t give up.  Make the choice to keep walking.  And look for the little beautiful things along the way, even if you haven’t reached the fulfillment of your goal yet.  And if all you have the strength for sometimes is to keep walking with your head down against the wind, it’s ok.  Even if right now it’s lonely, or difficult, or painful, or discouraging, or tiring, it’s worth it.

God is molding you into a beautiful person, and every time you make the choice to walk the road, you get that much closer to the goal-line, which, really, is about becoming who He made you to be.  And it’s going to be beautiful.  It’s going to be so much more fulfilling than you thought possible.

It’s worth it.

I am convinced that the majority of us have no clue what that really means - the idea of The Bigger Picture.  It’s a little evasive.  It oftentimes ends up being a source of both hope and discouragement.

I’m gonna bunny trail for a minute.  Yeah, right at the beginning.  Why wait, ya know...?  But I promise there’s a point.

The movie Noah comes out today amidst a lot of controversy about whether too much “artistic license” was taken in the making of it, whether it strays too far from the real story.  As I was reading up about it the other day, some of the descriptions of the movie made me go back to Genesis to reread about it in more depth.  And I was very interested to find some things I hadn’t noticed before.  And I was thinking that, even if the movie strays away from the actual facts of the story, maybe it will at least cause people to go check the source.  God can use anything He wants to...

Anyway, I was kinda shocked to not find any place in the account where there were people jeering and making fun of Noah as he toiled on the ark.  And yet, that’s the picture I’ve had in my mind for years.  People surrounding him, laughing and taunting as  he slaves away for YEARS on this crazy massive wooden thing in the sun.  Haven’t we all been taught that?  And not to say they weren't.  But, after reading and rereading Genesis chapters 6-9, and doing a search of Noah’s name throughout the Bible, none of the places in the Bible that alludes to the incident ever mentions anyone directly laughing at him, that I could find.  It does say they were living their normal lives, not being aware of impending doom.  But isn’t it funny the interpretations that sometimes get taught as fact...  Does anyone know of a place in the scripture where it describes that scenario?  If you do, let me know - I’m really curious.

It also was amazing to me to remember that Noah was 600 years old when the flood finally happened.  That’s a long time to have lived before something that significant happened in his life.  And to spend as long as he did on building that boat, day after day, year after year, working by the faith alone that God had commanded him to do this.  I realize people lived longer during those days anyway, but really, think about it: if we cut that down to a tenth, which is about how long our life spans are today in comparison, that would have had him being almost 60 before God came to him with the warning and command to build the ark.

And here we come around to the point.

It got me thinking about how fast and full we have come to expect our lives to be.  How many significant things we plan to accomplish.  Especially here in America, we’re so used to seeing immediate, or very nearly immediate, results on things we do, work for, or want, that if we don’t, we fight discouragement and even anger.  I tend to think part of the reason God had people living so long at the beginning was because He knew things took time, and since the world was so new, there were a lot of things that were going to take a lot of time to figure out.  Patterns of weather.  Patterns of crops.  Patterns of the human body.  Patterns of social relationships.

I was reading with Jasmine during homeschool a couple weeks ago about Samuel Morse and the telegraph.  It took him his whole life to first have the idea that maybe communication didn't have to move so slowly, then to figure out that sound and electrical impulses could travel, then inventing the machine that would harness it to make long-range communication possible, and THEN convincing other skeptical people to give large amounts of money towards his work so he could keep building it.  He didn’t see it really start to be fulfilled until he was much, much older, and he was pretty poor the whole time.  But he kept going, often alone and without immediate significant results.  Without being able to see the serious impact it made, the huge technological gate it eventually opened.  He just had a vision, a drive, a passion, a belief, and he simply built his life around it.

There have been countless people over the ages that have begun things and have not lived to see their success.  And yet they were extremely significant things that ended up moving history and humanity forward.  And then I compare that with my very shortsighted views of starting, and continuing, projects in my little corner that I feel that God has put in my heart, and the discouragement that threatens to make me quit during the times it seems too hard.

Puts a few things into perspective.

The Bigger Picture.  The one that God has seen since the beginning of time.  All I have to do is keep going with what is in my hands and heart today.  It may end up being significant, it may not.  But all I have to worry about is doing it, and not quitting.

We gotta start somewhere.  Just do the Next Thing.

It’s 2:45 in the afternoon and I’ve been whiling away my day watching movies with my kids, doing absolutely nothing productive.  How sweet, you might say.  You might even be jealous.  Don’t be.  Both the kids and I woke up last night with the flu, and of course all the lovely things that the flu has to share.  So as much as I love having days where there’s nothing to do, THIS is not that fun kind of Nothing.  Besides being just plain uncomfortable, having the flu is always a rather humbling experience, you know what I mean?...

If it was going to hit, though, the timing was as good as it could be, since at least it was kind enough to wait until after my unusually busy weekend was over.  

Saturday I had the opportunity to sing a few of my songs that are close to my heart at an event called Arts in the Park.  I don’t usually get to perform my more artsy stuff, and, sandwiched in between poetry reading and artistic dances, this was a perfect place to share it.  I really enjoyed the experience.

Sunday afternoon I had a photo shoot for the upcoming album with Rachel from Maggie and Rachel Photography.  It turned out to be so much fun!  And seriously, quite adventurous.  The part of me that revels in the perfection that comes from everything coming together just right, was having a heyday.  I won’t SAY we trespassed where there was a claim to be attack dogs (fortunately we only saw pidgeons, but that was scary enough), but, oh, the cool places we found!  And I have to admit I love throwing a little bit of possible danger into the mix to get that perfect shot - could you tell from the burning piano picture on my home page? - and I’m happy to have chosen a photographer who understood exactly what ‘feel’ I wanted and was willing to go the distance to create it.  All in all, it was a great shoot, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results!

My Other Project is progressing, and I have a tentative launch date of May 30th!  Of course, more on that later.

So, I will now recede back into my glassy-eyed stare and hope this flu won’t last too much longer...

I realize the blog has been pretty quiet lately.  But that's only because so many projects are happening right now.

As you can see from my Albums page, the recording has been going very well.  It's actually been a little disappointing to not be going to the studio once or twice a week since those 3 songs are finished - I think I must have gotten bit by the Recording Bug.  I still have about 7 or 8 songs to go before the album is done, but I'm waiting on a couple more things to take place before I start recording those.  It's a little hard to wait.  Hearing these 3 take shape the way they did makes me all the more excited to start (and finish) the rest!

I have also lately been immersed in my Other Project.  It's still not to the reveal stage yet, but it's certainly progressing pretty quickly now.  I am learning SO much about things, like How To Start A Business and How To Build Websites That Don't Look Cheesy.  That last one has been a kicker, but I think I'm actually learning, and it's fun!  If someone had told me just a week and a half ago that putting together websites on my own WOULDN'T make me crazy, I would have laughed.  Yet here I am.  Thanks to God.  And Weebly.

This is all very new to me.  And I'm not done with the new things by a long shot.  I have spent several days starting the morning out frustrated and unable to see how to proceed, and then 15 very busy hours later realizing I got past another huge rift I had originally been overwhelmed by.  I feel kinda like God put me on a raft heading down the Ocoee River and I have just hit the whitewater part, and one moment I'm hanging on for dear life and the next I'm having the time of my life.

So, I will try to not make it so long before I post again.  And hopefully soon I will have my Other Project up and running.

'Til then...

New things are afoot.

For the last month I have withdrawn a bit from the normal routine of my life and have found myself in a little Creativity Cave.  I realize that is a terribly cheesy name, but I can’t think of a better one.

Have you ever felt the imminence of Something Happening, thought you maybe knew what it was, and then it ended up looking completely different than what you were expecting?  Well, that’s been my circumstances the last few weeks.  I kept feeling like I was getting ready for something to shift, move, happen, and I thought I knew exactly what it was and I was excited.  I saw the road ahead, that coveted goal line, and was headed right for it.

And then everything went crazy.  Or maybe it was just me that did.  All I know is, almost from one moment to the next I felt like nothing was ok, and I was ready to hang up several of my hats and call it a day.  A really, really long day.  And I was prepared to never wear some of those hats again.  Then, slowly, I started to understand that God was still leading me into some changes, but in a different way than I expected.  And as I have been letting some ideas go, I am embracing new ones, and excitement has begun to grow again.

Part of the new happenings is that I have begun recording songs for my new album at Black Cat Studio.  Three of the songs will be done very shortly, and I am beyond excited.  To hear songs that have only been skeletons begin to grow flesh in the hands of some extremely talented people has been an amazing experience.  I will keep you posted on when those will be available to hear.

I also have another project in the works, one that is kind-of an unexpected turn, but one I am so excited about!  I don’t want to spill the beans about it just yet because it is just in the planning stages, but I’m looking forward to getting it all into focus and launching this baby.  I will be posting more soon!

What am I learning from this?  To keep an open mind.  To read the signs, and really listen for God’s direction when He’s getting ready to open a door.  To not be discouraged when something looks different than what I expected, because it could end up being even better than what was originally in my head.  To wait for God’s timing because He knows how all the steps work together SO much better than I do.  And to not think everything’s going to be rosy because I’m being led to a new place.  There will always be giants, some that just come with the territory, and plenty of my own making.

I will post more news as I have it!

Loneliness.  Waiting.

Neither of these are things I would have asked for at the start, given the choice.  I love the idea of squeezing out every drop of life I possibly can, being carried in constant forward motion, anticipating with joy and excitement the Next Step.

But God has chosen large portions of this road I walk to be accompanied by two of the things that are easily on my Top Ten Dreads list: Loneliness and Waiting.

Waiting in the holding pattern.  The place where I know there’s a Next Step to Somewhere, but the little green Go light isn’t on yet.  So I Wait.  I can’t go back.  Lord knows I wouldn’t want to, even if I could.  I wouldn’t want to have to relearn the things I’ve learned during this time.  But I can’t go forward either.  If I tried to, things just wouldn’t be right.  And I want them to be right; I want to learn all the things I need to learn from this so when I DO take that Next Step I have what I need to do it the best way possible.  But it’s hard to Wait.

And Loneliness.  It’s not about being alone.  I like times when I’m alone and have the opportunity to be quiet, and think, and get things done, rest my mind, recharge.  But Loneliness is a whole different matter.  It’s a state of being, one where I can’t press an eject button and get out whenever I’m done.  It doesn’t matter how many things I’m doing or how many friends are around.  It’s just there, under the surface, always.  I lived in disgust of it for years, wishing I could get rid of it.  But I’ve come to realize that the more I stop shunning it and learn to embrace it, the more it changes from being an ugly, hateful thing to something that is beautiful.  Because it makes me need.  In the Waiting, the Loneliness makes me so much more aware of my absolute and undeniable need for God.  And that is something I would not trade for anything.

So I’m learning to thank God for the times of joy He gives me.  And I’m learning to not just exist through the times that seem stagnant.  Even though I don’t exactly feel like I thrive during these times of Loneliness and Waiting, there are treasures to be found, Truths to dig for and examine and grow from, and things to tuck away for use later on when this particular Waiting period is done.  And though I know there will be other times of Waiting even when this one is behind me, I will strive to stay encouraged, knowing that it only means there will be new hidden gems to discover during each one.

So, there I was, believing I was a lover of Truth, and all the while I was hiding from it.  I have been a prisoner trapped in my own brain, afraid to accept what was in there, let alone let the monster OUT.  So I’m on a bit of a mission to crank that old rusted door open and let the Light in, to scrape off some layers and see what’s under there.  And it might not be pretty.  In fact, it most definitely will not be.  You have been warned.

Truth is, I can be Ugly.  Yes, Ugly with a Capital U.  I can get angry.  I am opinionated and sometimes judgemental.  I am afraid, almost all the time.  Afraid of life, afraid I’ll take the wrong road, say the wrong thing, write the wrong song, make the wrong decision, hurt someone’s feelings, be too odd, be too honest, lose friends.  I’m afraid of being thoughtless, stupid, of making a fool of myself.  I’m afraid of being invisible; I’m afraid of being noticed too much.  I’m afraid of the road this country is travelling.  I'm afraid of any member of my family getting seriously sick or hurt.  I’m afraid of being chased by mammoth mice with chomping teeth.  Ok, not really.  But seriously, if there’s something to be afraid of, gosh-darnit I’ll find it and attach myself to it. 

I am afraid of truly being myself.  So I bottle everything up, shake it, barely crack open the lid, and filter the heck out of whatever finds its way out.  It’s ‘safe’.  It’s crazy.  Really.  And ridiculously exhausting.  And after all that, I end up being dissatisfied with everything around me because I can’t respect myself for being too afraid to BE myself.

Sheesh.

One thing about me that I know is True - I belong to God.  He is my Maker and Savior and I am hopelessly lost without Him.  I also know I want to shine His light, but I don’t always.

So here’s to recommencing the serious journey to finding Truth and the perfect Love that casts out fear.  It may not always be right, but it will be honest.

So, work on the current album continues, slowly but surely.  Sometimes it’s harder to keep working on it than I thought it would or should be.  As much as I love music and used to joke about how I’m a walking note, as life has played out I find myself having trouble knowing sometimes exactly where music fits into it.  

As a homeschooling mother of a 2nd grader and a cutie but time-consuming 3-yr-old, my brain and energy get tied up with household and mom duties, and music often gets left on the back burner.  I find that I have to talk myself out of guilt when I DO set aside time for music - guilt over letting my focus be taken away from my kiddos and put on something else that is a passion of mine.  God gave me these precious children to care for and teach, but in His wisdom and love He also gave me a husband who knows I have music guilt issues and helps me shake them off when I need to.  And it’s important that I do that, because music is not only something I love to do, but more importantly it’s one of the ways I can be a testimony to the unconditional love of God.

I know God put music in my soul.  It’s one of the ways I can connect to Him.  And because I love to worship Him through song, I have often wondered why He gave me the writing style He did, which isn’t what I’d think of as “worship music”.  My songs are more like stories, pieces and parts of my daily walk.  Sometimes they’re light and fun, other times inspirational and hopeful, but often they are darker and full of questions and struggles.  And for a while I was afraid to write and record those kinds of songs, afraid that in writing them I would be painting a picture I didn’t want anyone to see.  But an interesting thing I find is that, strung all together, the songs I write actually create a picture of the love of a God who is wise beyond my comprehension, and the faith in the core of my being that keeps me seeking Him.

God knew exactly what He was doing when he created each one of us.  He knew our life here wasn’t all going to be cake and ice cream.  He knows that the roads He gave each of us to walk are there to stretch us, humble us, shake us, and teach us, and that there are going to be times when we question His love and compassion for us and others.  But I believe that through the creative expressions of our struggles, if we let Him shape us, we will learn and be able to share beautiful things.

As the song by Gungor so simply expresses it, “He makes beautiful things out of the dust.”