Quote of the Day
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Once upon a time
Once upon a time there was a little munchkin named Cait. She loved Barbies and nail polish, America and heaven, sunshine and flowers, boy and babies, family and friends, sparklers and birthday cake, nightgowns and puppies, Christmas and
fairytales. She liked to think she was the epitome of the American girl
if there ever was one.
When she was just a wee one, her momma and daddio took her to Sunday School where she heard about
a man named Jesus.
She knew He wasn’t just any ordinary fella, but He was the very Son of
God. She learned that Jesus came to earth and died on a cross because
He loved her. He died so that she could be set free from all her fears,
all her worries, all her cares, all her concerns. After three days of
being dead, He came back to life. He rose from the dead, so that all
who believed in Him wouldn’t ever really die but would get to live in
heaven forever in the great and glorious land for which they were
originally intended – together with their Father, unafraid, unashamed,
joyous and peaceful, safe and secure, filled with love and compassion.
Little Cait so looked forward to the day she could be with Jesus. She
believed He was the Messiah. She believed that He had saved her, and
that He loved her unconditionally. She knew He was mighty and powerful
and had authority over the heavens and the earth.
Yet as she grew up, she noticed she was often afraid.
In fact, often may have been an understatement.
She was afraid of practically erryyyyyything.
She feared it all. She was afraid of the dark, elevators, spiders,
getting lost, Splenda, scary movies, diabetes, cancer, car wrecks,
drowning, airplane crashes, tornados, mold, french fries, ticks,
medicine, slip-and-slides, germs, hair nets, cockroaches, Fox News,
mice, talking to boys, guns, gangs, and everything in between.
Cait was sometimes so afraid of getting sick that she made herself sick.
She was afraid of what the other kids at school thought of her. But
even more so, she was often afraid of what God thought of her. She
worried that one day He might change His mind and decide he didn’t
really love her. She sometimes wondered if he’d ever simply stop loving
her.
She was afraid He wouldn’t really protect her because she was too gross
for Jesus to really love her. She was afraid that one day the terrible,
dark enemy would over take her and snatch her out of her Father’s
hands. She was afraid of her thoughts and deeply afraid of rejection.
She was constantly fearful that something was wrong with her, that she
was unloveable, and suspicious that God couldn’t really be trusted. She
feared making decisions – particularly making the wrong decision. She
was afraid that if she chose incorrectly, she would walk out of God’s
will for her life and she would be removed from the house of God
forever.
In her heart, she knew that God would never remove His love for her and
that her fears were irrational and ridiculous and grounded in nothing
but lies, but yet she was still afraid.
She lived in a constant state of anxiety – her mind running wild with a
thousand what-ifs, her stomach full of what felt like icky worms that
rolled around inside her all the time, and her back full of tight knots
that seemed impossible to get rid of.
She felt as though she was a slave to fear. She served fear – not God.
In her head, she knew God loved her, but in her heart, she often
questioned how much and if His forever really meant forever.
—Anonymous
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Verbs
To write without really knowing why or how. To produce without any discernable goal. To let things lie, to accept for the sake of acceptance, to forgive for the sake of
forgiveness, to say something aloud, to cease to think. To let the other
person talk instead. To be aboard a train at midnight with no real
sense of time or fatigue, only the number of sidelong glances thus far
(five?). To finish a pack of cigarettes long after you’ve quit. To look
right not left. To spend $20 on the fucking train because of blind
error. To long for multiple shores, both here and there. To watch the
man across the aisle change his mind about his seat at least thrice. To
draw a triangle in the memory of one’s mother. To recount shared time
with no detail forgotten. To live through September without a battle. To
arrive five minutes earlier than anticipated. To slowly subtract, and
subtract, and subtract some more. To deduce. To sigh and only realize it
after the fact. To write only on overland trains. To offer the benefit
of the doubt a third and final time. To be resigned to a native accent.
To bury past lives along the Northern Line and then, four years later,
fail to find them. To follow a stranger’s conversation, not by choice.
To retract a plan. To compile and then condense. To leave behind a
language. To let the city exist without subjecting it to any sort of
romance. To feel the seasons reordering themselves in spite of protest.
To do, for once, instead of to know.
—Anonymous
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