beloved.

"I am the beloved. I am God's chosen one."

This was the premise of Jeff's (one of my church's teaching pastors) sermon on Sunday. He spoke of how despite the fact that the world may try to tear us down, we are God's beloved ones. He is well pleased with and delights in us. This initial message alone struck my heart with a hammer.

Then later that afternoon I continued to ponder this idea of being God's beloved. All of these thoughts led to the realization that no boy has EVER loved me the way God has (nor will they ever be able to). Furthermore, no boy has ever even thought as highly of me as God has. Despite the fact that this is hard to admit, I feel I need to share this openly, otherwise the wounds only grow deeper-I feel that I have never truly been a boy's first choice girl. If a boy were to confront me today and tell me I'm wrong, I'll gladly take his word for it. However, I feel I have never been treated this way. There's always something "wrong" with me or there's a girl that they wish I could be more like. They wish I could play this instrument instead of that one, compete in some other sport or dress differently than I do.

side note: all of this is not to say the guys I've dated are not GREAT guys! They just aren't the guys for me, nor am I the girl for them.

The fact of the matter is, I am who I am. As far as I'm concerned, that should be good enough. For God, that IS good enough. In fact, to Him I'm wonderful.

After processing through all of this I realized even more so how important it is that I have given my heart to God to hold until it's ready to be given away. I want only God's best for my life.

I know that I deserve this. I know that ALL of us deserve this.

WE are His beloved. WE are His chosen ones.

=]

self.

thoughts:

It occurred to me this morning as we sang in church a song that includes the lyrics "He is mine" that we as humans are soo self centered. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with calling God "mine," "ours," etc. But how often do we see ourselves as His? Sure, we say we're God's servants, but in terms of seeing ourselves as God's possessions, what does that even mean to us? If we truly belong to God, and God is Lord above all, wouldn't it make more sense to celebrate the fact that we are His rather than the fact that He is ours? We as humans don't own anything. And I do mean absolutely nothing. God owns all and allows us to take care of His possessions. Knowing this, that we own absolutely nothing, I feel like the focus should be that we are God's people. The other side of this is that when we do claim God as our own, I feel that it should be done in a manner of reverent awe. The fact that almighty God allows us to call Him our own is so amazingly significant. To realize the importance of it makes all the difference.

Prom

So I'm going to take a moment to be totally lame and say how STOKED I am for prom! =]
It's one of the three events (the other two being Spring Break and graduation) that I'm looking forward to for the remainder of my high school career.

Who else is going? =]