Passion Play by William Fitzsimmons

I should not have hid where my heart can't follow,
'cause this grace gets so far and too hard to swallow.
I've been running from Saul, he's been giving chase;
when I look in his eyes, all I see is my face.

You're still on my back after all these years,
chasing me out of hell and my nice veneers.
I don't know how you stand when you've got no floor,
or how you can breathe with your hands on boards.

I just want to be not what I am today,
I just want to be better than my friends might say,
I just want a small part in your passions play.

Do you hear when I call in the midst of wrong?
Do you hear these here words while I sing this song?
Are you caught up in me like I heard you say,
or just some big cashier that I'll have to pay?

'Just want to be not what I am today,
I just want to be better than my friends might say,
I just want a small part in your passions play.

Fly

I'm tired of reading the same page of my life recurrently.

http://youmeandcharlie.com/daily-inspiration/fly/


Thanks to You, Me, and Charlie.

2CELLOS

To be able to find something you love this much, and to be this connected to it...if only.

http://youmeandcharlie.com/daily-inspiration/mastering-your-craft/

Thank you, You, Me, and Charlie.

Wounded Healers

"And I had heard that term before: Wounded Healer. Yet I had never applied the term to my life. It makes you wonder, doesn't it, whether or not God calls specific people who have specific pain into the authority of empathy? Experience is, after all, the best education. We are the ones...who will mentor others through the difficult journey of life, perhaps rescuing them from what we have been rescued.

"I knew...that if these people in South Africa who had suffered unconscionable wrongs could rise in dignity, God would expect nothing less from you and me, having encountered lesser pain...if John and I have a prayer for you...it is that we would not be arrogant victims, but wounded healers." -Donald Miller, To Own A Dragon

All I Have To Give

Speaking of Glee...

On tonight's Michael episode Artie said something that struck a chord in me.

He said all he had left was his pain. That's all he had left to give.

I won't be able to get that out of my head or heart, especially because that concept, that way of life: it will either make or break you. And that's frightening one moment, and empowering the next.

When Desmond Tutu was asked for his opinion about who should be asked to be a part of apartheid, he "responded, essentially, that the commission should be comprised of victims, of people whose lives had been ripped open by the horrors of oppression. But not arrogant victims, he stated, not people looking for vengeance. Instead, Tutu said softly, these should be people who have the authority of awful experiences, experiences that educate them toward empathy, and yet still have within themselves hearts willing to forgive...These people will be wounded healers." -Donald Miller, To Own A Dragon

Glee may seem like a silly fad to you. But this was essentially their interpretation of Michael Jackson's life and work: to be wounded healers and not arrogant victims seeking nothing but revenge. It is a beautiful show if you look with your heart and not pop culture hype. Glee is the real deal. Making the marginalized feel loved, liked, and maybe even cool. They are a group of wounded healers and I'm proud to be a Gleek.

May any and everything inspire us to give our pain back to the world in a positive way.

You, ME, and Charlie

If you don't know about this website, well, then you aren't a Gleek and you don't use twitter, but I am here to bring brilliance directly to you--so, none of that matters. (Well, it matters, well, Glee does, but Twitter? Eh.)

http://youmeandcharlie.com

is an amazing website that is full of life and inspiration. It's the perfect site to lose a day to, and even then that's not enough. Trust me when I tell you that you need to check it out. It's...well, it's fun, but I believe it to be important fun.

You're welcome.

Apologetics: Conflict and Clothes

"We understand conflict because we experience conflict, right? But where does conflict come from? Why do we experience conflict in our lives? This helped me a great deal in accepting the idea of original sin and the birth of conflict. The rebellion against God explained why humans experienced conflict in their lives, and nobody knows of any explanation other than this... Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story about Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all." - Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

"I wondered why it was that when people talked about the fall of man, about the Garden of Eden, they never talk about how people went around naked. If you ask me, the most obvious thing that happened after the Fall was that people started wearing all kinds of clothes. Just go to the store and look around, and you will see people wearing clothes. Everywhere you go you see people wearing clothes...I mean, evolution may explain how we came from apes, but it does nothing to explain why we wear clothes." - Donald Miller, Searching For God Knows What

It is important to not just be able to say what you believe, but to be able to know it well enough to defend it. If you can't defend it to someone else, how will you survive the Devil's temptations in the desert like Christ did? Christ had God's answer for every trick the Devil threw at Him.

"There is a vast and important difference between a Pauline creed and a Pauline life...Paul was a seeker and a finder and a seeker still. They seek and find and seek no more." - A. W. Tozer, Keys To The Deeper Life

Know what you believe inside and out. Keep asking questions. Keep seeking answers.

Romance

I cried within the first two minutes of Moneyball. I expected to cry, but within the first two minutes? That's incredible...But beautiful.

"How can you not be romantic about baseball?"

Miracles: Rare, But Real

Every once in a while God does something so amazing, so perfect, you can't even bring yourself to believe it's true. It just overwhelms you how much He loves you. He gives you exactly what you needed-- even and especially if you weren't aware how much you needed it. It may possibly even be something you never thought would happen. I mean, how could it? But it did. It's so unbelievable you wonder if the world is playing a trick on you. It feels too good to be true. But, you wake up every day and it never goes away. You are living proof that miracles really do exist. Maybe not in the way we think they do, or want them to, but they do nonetheless.

“That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.” - C. S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain

God, L--, I love you both! You both are two of my favorite miracles.

The Thing About Sexy Carrots

"Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us." -Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz


A Story About Don Rabbit

http://www.donaldmillerwords.com/images/DonRabbit.pdf