because He first loved us.

We love because He first loved us.

1 John 4:19

i generally hear people throw in a "Him" between the words "love" and "because" in that verse and that becomes their response to the question "why should i/you love God?"

i'm sorry, but i have never in my life loved someone just because they loved me. their love for me may have let me see their heart in a vulnerable state which then allowed me to love them, but that makes their love only an avenue to the heart of theirs that i love, not the reason i love them. so then i loved their heart, not their love.

and at least for me, God's incomprehensible vastness and power does not automatically evoke love from me. fear? sure. but not love.

and if i were to be completely honest, Christ dying on the cross for me did not automatically evoke love from me either. it evoked a very deep and life-changing curiosity about a mystery i have been sensing my entire life, but i cannot honestly say that as a stranger to Him, what He did for me made me love Him for who He is. and i say that because i WAS a stranger to Him and therefore i could NOT love Him for who He was at that point.

if i found out a stranger somehow saved my life without my knowledge and i later found out that it was because he loved me, i would not automatically think "woe is me, i have no choice but to love him back!" i would rather think "who IS this guy??" and put in a significant effort to discover who he was. and that is what i believe what Christ did on the cross is meant to bring about in us. we are meant to feel called to a journey of discovering who He is, and that will inevitably become a love story.

well i had more that i wanted to talk about on this topic, but it may have to wait because i need some sleep for tomorrow morning. i'm going to get to see Madelyn for the first time. :)

goodnight friends.

oh so finally...moved in!

alright so i just finished putting away all my books and clothes and i bought groceries earlier this evening, so i feel like i can officially relax and call this my home. :)

not to say that i ever thought that sharing a room with Missy would be a challenge, but i have been pleasantly surprised by how well our temperaments and lifestyles coincide. i think i'll keep this room cleaner than i did my room in my parents' house because i'm sharing it with someone else that i care about and whom i know to be quite fond of cleanliness. i'm always more motivated when someone else is involved, it seems...except group projects for school.

anyway, that's that. it's been a pretty big step for me that i will probably feel more of the weight of as time goes by. for now, it's rather great. :)

love you all.

a NON-philosophical update. relax.

i'm officially moving in with Missy! i'm going over there to chat with her and Sarah and possibly Cathi about some general house stuff and then i'm planning on getting most [if not all] of my stuff over there by the end of Sunday. our small group is meeting over there tonight so i'm going right after class to get there early so me and Missy can coordinate where furniture can go and what not. one fun fact is that we both now have bedspreads from Target's DwellStudio line, so they go together really well and we can color coordinate like crazy! we'll have quite the time with it.

here is mine:



and here is Missy's:



we'll probably do a lot of brown accents and work with the green and orange somehow. we may even paint some canvases for our walls. yes...we are girls.

anyway, all i have left in my classes are my final papers and projects, it seems. and i'm okay with that. it hasn't really hit me that summer is approaching. last year i was pushing forward to it like no other, but this year i think i really am going to miss my classes. i picked some good ones. speaking of which, i need to go get ready for the ones i have today.

love you all.

Psychology ramblings.

if you know me pretty well at all, you know that i am studying psychology, and that it is almost as intrinsic to my thinking as my love for music is.

in the specific classes i'm taking, i'm beginning to realize that Abraham Maslow was right in saying, "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." every issue is one that is psychological, according to the psychologist. every issue is one that is biological, according to the doctor. every issue is one that is spiritual, according to the pastor.

that's not necessarily something that i'm learning directly from my professors, it's just something i'm beginning to pick up on more and more. but aside from that, i really am learning about how incredible the human brain is and how much it directly influences our lives. that sounds rather obvious, but i have been around Christians my entire life who considered every thought, feeling, "random" emotional response, etc. to be utterly supernatural and "obviously" from the Lord. and they weren't old ladies who have a pin-sized view of the world, either.

so much...so incredibly much...of what you think, feel, believe, say, and desire depends on how your brain has developed up until now. a balance of genetics and environment have created synapses that you reflect as your personality and all that you consider your "self." even how you react to what i just said depends on all of this.

speaking of how you may react, i know plenty of people who would read all of the above and proceed to question my faith or consider all that i am learning to be misconceptions and lies that i am buying into. so i guess i should explain where my faith comes into this and how learning all of this has actually brought me closer to God than i ever thought possible.

it's the same process i went through when i started learning about other religions and seeing similarities between them and Christianity. at first, i felt like Christianity could just be put in the list of world religions with no distinctions or significance among the rest. i also met people who had knowledge, passion, and devotion to those other religions that i had only ever seen in the Christian community if at all. so it got me thinking...if what i believe is true, then what aspects of it make it distinctly the truth? it can't be JUST the history behind it, because other religions lean on history as well...it can't be JUST the passion and emotion it evokes, because other religions evoke just as much or even more passion from people...it can't be JUST how devoted its followers are, because that can be seen in other beliefs as well. so what IS Christianity?

i came to the conclusion that Christianity, stripped of all that humans dress it up in, is embracing the Love of God and the Person of Christ. everything else simply follows from that [you may think i am leaving important aspects out of that description, but i probably have a broader definition of "embracing" than you do]. and those things that follow from that are things that other belief-systems technically can stand behind as well, because we are all humans and have a fairly general range of reaction as a species.

so in the same way, after learning all that i have about the brain and the mind, i had to sit down and ask some really tough questions. it was a difficult process because i was beginning to see that so much of what has been deemed supernatural by the Christian community is actually quite physical in its psychological nature. so i started with that concept; supernatural. if i randomly feel something or think that i know something is going to happen and i cannot explain how or why that is, are such feelings and thoughts supernatural? not necessarily. that would mean that we have no true subconscious state of mind [which we do] and everything we are unaware of is from something outside of ourselves. can some of these feelings and thoughts be supernatural? sure, but to lean on that automatically is unintelligent because of what i just explained. i even wonder whether that is important to know or not, because either way, it's worth investigating the significance of that feeling.

i would even go as far as questioning whether or not there really is a dichotomy between something mentally created and something God-given. if God speaks to me through the complex and innumerable intricacies of synapses in my brain, as if He'd spent my entire life span weaving them together for this moment [which will bring me to the next and then to the next and so on], i feel that something that can completely be explained on a physiopsychological level such as that does not take away from the power and sovereignty of God in it all. i'm not saying that i believe God has intentions for absolutely everything coming out of one's subconscious, but that there's no reason why that couldn't be the vessel through which He works for those personal revelations people feel. so then is anything supernatural? a better way to ask my true question would be...does anything need to be supernatural in order for it to be from God? is that a concept that could technically be false?

i could go on about this, but this blog has gotten long enough and i need to go enjoy the rain while it lasts.

here's an early Happy Easter to ya.