a new season.

This is best read while listening to the song "Comptine d'un autre été, l'après-midi" by Yann Tiersen and can be found on the soundtrack of Amélie. Please qeue appropriately and then continue on. :) So, my blog is going in a new direction. There is so much to write about that I don't even know where to start. First of all I guess I should address my title. A new season of my life has begun. A time where I'm going to attempt to strip from myself of all the things that I worship in unhealthy ways...my image. Things I let come between me and God. Sins I have rooted myself in that have allowed me to grow crookedly and allow me to see my life in a skewed way. Over the past couple weeks and 8 more to come I've been participating on the general track in Redemption Groups at Mars Hill Church. During these sessions I've been broken down and forced to evaluate and expose all of my sins and the sins that have been committed against me...to other people. In this case, since the actual groups were too full (I'm joining an official one in the Fall), I'm on the general track which means I attend the sessions where the leader speaks and instead of breaking off after the talk into group, my best friend Rachael and I break off and do the group together. The actual groups have leaders who are trained and are counselors. But this time with Rachael has been so great. We've been able to remove that "image" we put up to protect ourselves and have been truly and vulnerably real with each other. Our first task was to tell your group (in our case just Rach and I) your story. They talk about your story as being a series of dots. Your story is basically you going all the way back to when you were first sinned against or sinned and sharing those things and how God has redeemed you or how you are working on it with God right now. But you have to be real, brutally honest, and so in my story there were so many dots I'm just now discovering. I haven't even begun to connect them. I knew the big ones but as I evaluate them, new ones are popping up all over the place....eventually leading me to where i am now. I'm going to share that story at the end of my 8 weeks and hopefully be able to give a cohesive account of God's work in my life so far. I share the raw unconnected version with Rachael and cried almost my whole way through it. I am praying for strength the whole way through this time in my life and I truly feel like He's given me a new heart. It's so hard to explain right now. I've recently had to re-write my testimony for church membership and wanted to share what I wrote. "Just setting up the story, I grew up in a home that was both non-religious (my dad a non-practicing Catholic and my mom a non-practicing protestant) and a very unstable environment. My father was and remains an alcoholic and my mother really went (and still does) through emotionally unstable times all throughout my childhood and suffered from random bouts of depression. To top it off, my parents were always on the verge of a maybe divorce. While my parents loved me and my brother and thought they were doing the best for us, I grew up with a lot of pain, insecurities, and the inability to express my feelings. We were never encouraged to say what we thought or think for ourselves so it's been something I've had to learn recently. As a result, I didn't have any concept of God or had really even thought about it. I filled my free time with sports and a friend on my team invited me to church when I was in the sixth grade. I attended and learned all about who God was, the character of Jesus and how He had saved me. It was a lot to take in. While I thought I had become what I consider now to be a Christian, I was really just beginning to understand what it meant. At the time I was a surface "Christian" and got baptized, joined my church, and all through middle school and high school did the social/super involved/super Christian thing. Never really developing my personal relationship with God. I just didn't understand. Then when I graduated from high school I attended a youth evangelism conference called "DCLA" and it was there I learned that what I was, wasn't a true Christian. My life got turned upside down during my realization. I went to college away from family and friends in CA and it was there that I experienced the lowest low in my whole life. God broke me. He broke everything I knew to be true about myself and about Him. I spiraled into a deep depression as I pulled away from Him in anger and frustration and was completely lost and sad. I had thoughts of suicide, not so far as to plan anything out or things like that, but it was enough. During those darkest moments, I was able to turn to God and I cried out many times for Him to be there with me...and He was. 1 Peter 2:9-10 were the verses that I turned to and was able to relate to the most. The idea that I am God's people and He chose ME. He loved me so much that he called me out of my darkness and into HIS wonderful light. He saved me again. It was here that I started from scratch. I graduated, moved home and settled into life with new perspective and a new love for God. It was more real than I have ever experienced in my previous 10 years as a "christian." I started attending Mars Hill shortly after and began to grow deeper in my knowledge of God and learning the bible and it has been here over the past 3 years that I've been rebuilding my relationship with God and I've been learning SO much here. God has been SO merciful and so gracious to me and loves me SO much. And throughout my journey I know that I STILL have so much to learn and have a lot more growing to do." Friends & anonymous readers, I ask for your prayers! :)