Someday We'll All Be Free

This morning I woke up renewed, refreshed and single-minded. Tomorrow is my 25th birthday and I’ve had a revelation of sorts concerning how I’ve been spending my twenties so far.

Last week, I googled “Things You Should Do By the Time You’re 25” and I came across a few lists that people had come up with. My takeaway after reading a few lists was that the general idea is that the years between 18 and 25 are when we should be carefree and adventurous. So what does that mean for life after 25? According to what I read, most 25-year-olds have been out of school for a few years, and are settling into a career. They are (apparently) starting to save for retirement, get married and have babies. But for those of us who don’t fit into this category, turning 25 doesn’t have to mean it’s time to get comfortable in your situation. This can be a catalyst to reevaluate how you’ve been spending your 20s. Maybe the relationships in your life are not where you want them to be. Maybe it’s time for that solo trip to Europe. Perhaps that idea you had for a business could actually work. 

When I considered the things on those “by 25” lists, I notice that there were a lot of things that I haven’t done. I’ve said no to many of them (happily, with no regrets), but there are also a few that I’ve said no to because I didn’t believe I could make it happen or because I was afraid of taking a risk. But now as I’ve been reevaluating, I’m noticing that I’ve said no way more times than I’ve said yes.

So, what’s the difference between a “yes” and a “no”? How many of our life decisions are made based on thoughtful consideration and how many are based on fear? I feel like I’ve been so focused on not doing certain things, when I should’ve been focused on the things I should have been doing. Saying no can help us to avoid bad situations or relationships, however if we don’t also say yes to other things, we will most certainly get stuck. Sure, we’re not doing any harm, but we’re not doing any good either. I know this is something that I struggle with — my problem isn’t with saying no; it’s with saying yes.

Being halfway through my 20s now is a sobering thought. These last 5 years flew by, so I have to assume that these next 5 will do the same. What are the things that I want to accomplish in my 20s? What are the steps I need to take to follow through? What are those things for you? As the Langston Hughes poem says, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” This is not the time to let your dream dry up. Now’s the time to act, to give, to build, to create, to love and to take risks! 

Below I’ve left a great TED talk that I came across yesterday that discusses the idea that your 20s is not a throwaway decade, but a defining one. The changes we want to see happen in our lives can be done this year, this week, even today. To me, turning 25 doesn’t mean my years to try new things have passed me by, it’s just the opposite. I’m in the perfect position to make my 20s really count.

Things are not okay. The lyrics to this song hit me right in my spirit this morning. New music of the week by Jon Thurlow.

com·mu·ni·ty  

/kəˈmyo͞onitē/

Noun

1. A group of people living together in one place, esp. one practicing common ownership: “a community of nuns”.
2. All the people living in a particular area or place: “local communities”.

I feel like I hear the word “community” a lot lately. It’s been this … this thing hanging over my head. By definition, it is something wonderful. But in practice, it seems a lot harder to navigate.

“Community” is a 30 min comedy that is currently in its fourth season (view clip below). No matter what you may say about the show, that crazy group of characters have made me laugh a lot over the past few seasons. Although the name has something to do with the fact that it takes place in a community college, it is rooted in the importance of being in a form of community. The greatest communities allow us to become even more ourselves — we feel freer to take risks because we know that there are people to support us if we should fall. 

Our families can be seen as the first real community that we are part of: good or bad — depending on your situation. We don’t get to pick who we are related to. We are born into this little community and it has a major impact on how we see the world and the people around us. But what about the communities in our lives that we do choose? A close-knit group like this is something that interests all of us, so why does it seem as though so many are living without it?

The most common place where I hear about the concept of community is in church. Community does not only happen there, of course. It can exist in a book club, a gym, a study group — Pop, pop, anyone? :) It can be found in any place where people get together regularly enough to get to know each other well. I’ve experienced community in its truest forms only a handful of times in my life — I remember the feelings of acceptance and camaraderie that I once experienced and ever since, I’ve tried to recapture that somehow. Community, like any relationship, asks much of us. As much as it can help in our own lives — it also calls us into the lives of other people. We can stop worrying about our own problems and help one another. This, of course, is the challenge of it all. Yes, I want my life to be mixed up with other peoples to take on the good and bad times — in theory. In practice, it terrifies me. As much as I know that I desire to be in a community, I find myself often wondering how much I am supposed to be trying to purposefully create one instead of waiting for one to happen organically. Or even worse, trying to force myself into an already-existing one. 

The best communities allow you to forge great relationships with different types of people where you can communicate through shared looks and inside jokes. I may not know the answer to my questions right now but in the meantime, the allure of community is enough to keep me hopeful and positive that I will get to be in one again!

I remember talking with a friend about marriage one day and she said that if she ever got married that she would never take her husband’s last name. When I told her that I would take my husband’s name if I got married, she asked me why I’d ever do that. It was an interesting question, I hadn’t really had to explain this decision before. “Well,” I said, “I would do it to honour my husband and his family.” Her face looked confused by my answer. “Honour? What does that even mean?” And so, here I am wanting to understand that very question. Honour was a foreign word and concept to my friend, but really, I don’t think that point of view is that uncommon nowadays.

hon·our  

/ˈänər/

Noun

High respect; esteem.

Verb

Regard with great respect.

Synonyms

noun.

credit - respect - homage - dignity - glory

verb.

respect - esteem - venerate - revere - dignify

When I think of the word honour, I think about a badge of honour. Honour is a concept that is based in the perceived quality of a person or thing. An honourable man, for example, can be judged by their adherence to a culture’s moral code. This person of honour will earn the respect and even reverence, in some cases, of the people around him. However, for that respect to mean anything, it has to be followed by an action. That being said, the word, honour as a verb is what I really want to focus on. To honour someone, to me, means doing something nice for them, or living in a way that will bring them honour. The idea of honouring those in authority over us, such as our parents or our leaders in government, is important to remember. I feel like honour may be a forgotten word because people are equating honour with self-denial, which is really not a popular way of thinking in our Western culture. We are people of immediate gratification — we have to have what we want right now.  

Today’s individualistic society sees honour as a noun, not a verb. It is something we give, and not something that we do. But if we want to honour our parents, friends, spouses, etc this requires thinking about someone before ourselves. Heaven forbid, we actually would have to deny ourselves in deference to someone else. I’m just as guilty of this individualistic thinking. The idea of ‘looking out for #1’ is a way that we can get ahead or protect ourselves from disappointment, but it also interrupts the act of honouring others.

I want to have honour be a part of my regular vocabulary again. When I sing, “I honour You, Lord” in church, I want my life to reflect that. This Easter weekend reinforces my desire to live in way that honours the sacrifice that Christ made on the cross. Honour is not an old-fashioned concept, as my friend once thought. It is something to strive for. Because if we can’t even take honour seriously, where are we headed?

Don’t let honour be forgotten anymore.

“The Father judges no one, but has given all judgement to the Son, that all may honour the Son, just as they honour the Father. Whoever does not honour the Son does not honour the Father who sent him” (John 5: 22-23)

Soon I will be starting a mini blog series called, “Forgotten Words”. Each blog post will be on a different word that has had its definition changed in today’s culture - or even overlooked completely.

The first post will be on the word, “Honour.” I’ll be looking at what this word means in today’s post-modern culture, what it means biblically and really, I just want to better understand what this word/concept really means for a twenty-something living in 2013. Look out for this post by the end of the week! In the meantime, if you have a word/concept/idea that you think has been forgotten, misinterpreted or whatever, let me know and I’ll try to tackle it in this series.

Thanks!

Tara

When’s the last time you fell down? I mean, literally fell down on the ground. Probably a lot when you were younger, but not so much anymore, right? (Maybe not for the less coordinated among us). Anyway, I was thinking today about how I used to be afraid of falling. It hadn’t happened in a while, so I had built it up into a great fear. Suddenly falling down wasn’t merely falling down — now it had become embarrassment, injury, wounded pride (and tailbone!). I remember slipping on ice one day, and mid-fall thinking to myself, “Oh no, this is actually happening!”, bracing myself for the worse. But you know, it wasn’t nearly as embarrassing or painful as I thought. But because I had  done all I could to avoid it, I had made a mountain out of a molehill, as they say. This can be applied to a lot of other things - fear of not having that steady 9-5 job, fear of failure, fear of committed relationships etc. When we avoid these areas of fear, it may keep us comfortable, but it can actually stunt our growth.

People deal with the unknown in life in different ways — for some, it’s exciting. Drop them into the middle of a unfamiliar environment and they thrive. Me, not so much. I’m the girl with a map, a list, a schedule and then another back-up map.  I’ve planned everything and have done all I can to make sure I know what is going on. I don’t travel too far into the unfamiliar. Lately, however, I’ve been seeing the effects of this in my life and I didn’t like what I was seeing. But still, I struggle with this. I’ve written about fear before — this is not a new revelation for me. But I need this reminder in the picture above to embrace the unknown with curiosity instead of fear. It’s a daily check-in I have to do to take life off of autopilot and go out to live intentionally. I need this reminder today - maybe you did too.

“This is my command - be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9 (NLT)

The curse of comparison has plagued me for a long time — but my God is good and He is faithful. Read my story of overcoming my self-esteem issues at DevotionalDiva.com.

“Storyline” - Donald Miller

Longing for Light

I have been a Christian for most of my life. I remember going to an altar, saying the prayer and deciding to live life for God. And it’s been good — I’ve been blessed! Things seem to be going smoothly. But to be honest, it seemed like I needed a bad story to truly be able to tell people about Christ. People like drama, as we all know, and so the person who once was a drug dealer, but now is a missionary has a far more interesting testimony than someone like me.  What could I say? I wasn’t living some crazy criminal or wild lifestyle. I didn’t know if I had a testimony. At least I didn’t know if I had one that would be compelling enough for anyone to hear. 

But then tonight I read Isaiah 59. The words just jumped right off the page to me…

“We look for light, but all is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in deep shadows. Like the blind, we grope along the wall, feeling our way like people without eyes. At midday we stumble as if it were twilight; among the strong, we are like the dead” (v. 9-10)

This is how I felt — lost; morally confused. While I’ve been learning about Christ for most of my life, I have also been growing up and learning about the world. The two don’t exactly mesh (huge understatement!) We hear one message on Sunday mornings, but are also hear messages in our culture everyday — who do we believe? This kind of ‘stumbling around’  that Isaiah 59:9-10 refers to is exactly what I’ve experienced. In Western culture, there is a lot of darkness, but it’s often passed off as ‘normal’ which is really confusing! Looking at myself through the culture’s lens, I didn’t understand who I was. I was hoping to find light in the darkness, but couldn’t do it — it’s impossible. God sees us wandering around, desperately looking for answers to the moral ambiguities that we are sold by the media, by our friends, by our families, even by our churches. He sees us and offers us a way into clarity (v. 15-17). He comes in full armor to save us from our desperation and our confusion.

I may not have wild stories of partying or crime to say that I’ve been saved from. But I’ve been saved from an evil that is much more subtle — one that hides itself in cultural norms. I’m tired of seeing so many people profess Christ on Sundays and profess the world every other day of the week. We can’t leave the heavy lifting to our pastors — we have to seek after the Truth daily, continually, without ceasing. We are all lost, ‘groping along walls’, walking in the shadows — even those of us who have grown up in church. Thankfully, when we are confused and lost, Christ offers us clarity through the Word. With that new perspective, with that new life, all the blurry lines in our lives will come into focus. 

I’ve never been a huge rap fan — ask anyone who knows me well. I have a few songs by artists like Jay-Z, Kanye and Missy Elliott on my iTunes, but the play count is not extremely high. They have a good beat and are great for listening to at the gym or whatever, but frankly, I could take them or leave them. In high school, I remember a Christian rapper came to perform at one of our weekly Friday morning assemblies. Now my high school was a private school of kids mainly from the CRC Dutch background — so you can imagine how that performance went over. As one of the few ‘ethnic’ kids in the school, I felt it my duty to stand up and give the guy some feedback from the crowd. Me and a couple of my friends would be the three lone students standing up and waving our arms…lol. Wow. ANYWAY, I didn’t have much to do with Christian rap after that. I think I had a ‘Gospel Gangstaz’ CD as a kid…lol…but that’s it.

Fast forward to today — artists like Lecrae are changing the game. Rapper Andy Mineo actually performed at the Urbana conference that I just came back from and so I bought his CD for $10 and got to listening which led me to other rappers like Trip Lee and KB. Now I believe the reason I never really got into mainstream rap is because I didn’t feel like I could relate to what it was about. I don’t care much about expensive cars or making lots of money. I can say that I grew up in Malvern, a neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario that has a history of crime, but my parents moved our family out of there before we began high school. I am not impressed by the self-important, women-objectifying, making-it-rain rappers that are popular today. The rapper I’ve been listening to most recently is Shad, a Canadian rapper who’s currently in graduate school (bitly.com/UtN6qF). Now that I can relate to!

With rappers like Lecrae and Trip Lee, I feel like I’m understanding the power of hip hop for the first time. This music is powerful, but it becomes a mighty force when it stands for and represents something that is actually important.

Above you’ll find the music video for the song, “One Sixteen” by Trip Lee, featuring KB & Andy Mineo. You can find it on Trip Lee’s “The Good Life” album. They go in with lyrics that glorify God and…wouldn’t you know it, a sick beat that makes me feel like I got swag for days! It’s awesome to see these young guys living for God, reppin’ Jesus and also producing quality music.

Well, I got to go and get back to whatever I was doing before this song played on my iTunes and got me all hyped.

Enjoy!