It's a Saturday night, I'm sitting on my couch watching Grease (hence, the title) and avoiding writing a paper about ethics for one of my nursing classes. I digress.
There's 16 inches of snow covering the Shenandoah Valley. 2 days of classes were cancelled because of it. I'd never seen so much snow in my life, at least not that I remember.
~GRATEFULNESS LIST~
- that the movie Grease exists
- big coffee shops in Crozet
- visiting my best friend at UVA
- that someone one day decided that rum and coke should be mixed together
- snow days and not leaving the apartment for 2 days
- my car being dug out of the snow by my roommate's boyfriend
- combining Chipotle and Chickfila milkshakes on Valentine's Day with a wonderful friend
- VA's gay marriage ban was overturned by a federal judge, just in time for Valentine's Day too!
- not having class for 12 days, that's right, 12 DAYS
- OLYMPIC CURLING, and getting a good laugh about the Russian team's pants
- that the Braveheart movie soundtrack exists, and the movie too, for that matter ("FREEDOM!")
- learning more about who God is through the Bible
Now that I'm looking at it, that's a really random gratefulness list. But I kind of like it, I think it accurately portrays my life these days.
I'm going to write a little more about what I've been learning about God these days.
I've read through Genesis before, and every time it strikes me how much I try to put God in this little box and shove it in the back of my closet. But God is majestic, great and mighty. He remembers Noah and keeps His promises to never destroy the earth again. God constantly reassures Abraham (it gets kind of annoying) that He will have a son and as many descendents as stars in the sky. God foretells the 400 year slavery of Abraham's descendents. God finds Hagar, the mother of Abraham's son, Ishmael, because He heard her affliction and promises to make a nation of Ishmael (God was with him as he grew up, how cool). God is merciful - He sent 2 angels to tell Lot and his family to leave Sodom before it was destroyed. God provides a ram to sacrifice instead of Abraham sacrificing his only son (foreshadowing?). God uses dreams, like Jacob's dream of the ladder and God saying He is with Jacob wherever he goes.
I could go on. I think the Old Testament is helping me understand who God is on a deeper level, not that the New Testament isn't deep, it's just different. I say, you can't understand where you're going until you know where you're coming from. Not that the Bible is easily understood, because it isn't. But I think it's important to cultivate your mind and not just blindly believe something.
My mind is something I've always prided myself on. It is the greatest gift God has given me, given all of us. And it should be devoted to Him entirely. While the heart is important, for me, I think my mind has to come to God first. Knowing that I belong to God and that my life is devoted to serving God, everything makes so much more sense. And in order to know that, I must constantly learn more about who God is. It's a journey. It's about listening, hearing and really hearing, staying quiet in the darkness, being devoted in the right areas of my life and constantly looking to God.
How willing am I to spend all my energy toward serving God? I don't believe that God left us on this earth just to be saved and sanctified. I believe He left us on this earth to be of service and work for Him. And I'm still figuring out what that means.
Maybe I should re-name this blog "A 20-something reading through the Bible and trying to make sense of something that the world hasn't made sense of for thousands of years." Yeah, that sounds about right.
*getting off of soapbox now
I spent part of the snowpocalypse of February 2014 watching Braveheart, I regret nothing. This quote really stuck with me:
"It's all for nothing if you don't have freedom."
I imagine this is what Team USA thought after their heartbreaking loss in curling to the Russians. And it's just a great life quote.
Finally, here's one of my current obsessions:
Let It Go (Africanized Tribal Cover)
Cheers,
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