Fear: We will feel it, but does it have to rule us?

Fear. Ben and I are currently doing a bible study together on fear. Fear seems to rule my life. It is most definitely not the way I want to live. I want to live free from fear. Not allowing it to hold me back or keep me from pursuing relationships. Honestly, I want to get to a point where I choose to trust God rather than hold tight to fear.

Fear has never done me any good. I don't think it has done anything for anyone. It only serves to tear apart relationships, destroy the discipline to work. "Fear herds us into a prison and slams the door." - Max Lucado. And it's true: when you let fear take hold, all that surrounds you is darkness; light is not found in the presence of fear.

I am hoping through taking time to study God's word, learning what I most fear and how to battle it with scripture, and opening up with Ben so we can pray together, I will learn to let go and let God. Those situations I think I can control I can't. Those situations I fear turn me into a mean monster and allow me to trust no one, not even my closest friends, family, and fiance.

There is hope in Christ: 2 Timothy 1:7 - "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and discipline."

May our hearts and minds rest on this knowledge so when we fear a loved one being hurt, making a bad grade in school, failing at our job, failing our loved one or child, we will break through the chains that could confine us and live in the light of God trusting His will prevails in all circumstances.

Return, O Sleep

Return, O Sleep
Where have you gone?
You once were my dear friend
But now you toss me back and forth
Eluding deep, true Rest
You once were dear
And called me true
To fellowship with you
But now you leave me wondering
where wee morn hours hath gone

Return, O Sleep
I hear you beckoning
I dearly want to come
To sit a while in fellowship
As Rest wraps secure its arms
To find my hours of no memory
Have brought with them a dawn
A dawn of hope and blissful dreams
Of no more tossing waves
Of energy renewed

Return, O Sleep
Please be my friend
Of kindred hearts combined
To hold me sweetly, tenderly
As Nights come passing by
Protect me from the looming dark
Where Rest is swallowed whole
By Monster come from Neath-the-bed
Valiantly severe body from head
Return to me sweet Rest

If only every day was Saturday...

Yes, for some reason the weekend seems to just fly by. You can't make time move quick enough during the week, but your weekend you would love to enjoy and relax during just passes on by with a wink and whistle, thank you very much. I imagine a conversation with the Weekend going something like this:

"Oh I'm so glad you have come for a visit, Weekend!"

"Are you? I'm not here long. I've come to tease you."

"Come to tea..."

"Toodle loo."

And off it jaunters only to leave with the week ahead of you ready to be stumbled through. You don't have a choice but to tumble your way through it. It doesn't care if you didn't find all the rest you needed. Nor does it worry about how excitedly anxious you are for your wedding. It just keeps on trudging through the hours, minutes, and seconds. You begin to think seconds are minutes and minutes hours and hours days until your Monday becomes your Tuesday and your Wednesday your Friday. And yet by the time your Friday seems to be coming to an end, you feel as though those hours, which have become days, are really weeks.

Even worse is the speed your weekend always maintains so that days are seconds quicker than a blink and the begrudgingly slow week-month is ready to haunt before you can even begin to subconciously think of stopping the Weekend from leaving.

Thus it feels as though October is being pushed further and further away until you can watch it being sucked in by a black hole, never to return, always out of reach. I know it will come, but I am not feeling the "blink" everyone says it will be here in. I am feeling the week-month slowly turn into an entire year causing months upon years of waiting (thank goodness we weren't having to have a longer engagement than what is already planned).

A Love-Hate Relationship

Yes. That is exactly what it is: a love-hate relationship. Would you like me to expound? Well, I feel like it so I guess you are about to find out.

I am currently sitting in the ceramics building with Ben for who knows which # time, for I have lost the count. I am unsure of how many more times we will frequent this building; I know he will be here much more than I with our different schedules. Yet, it still seems I am here with him most every day, once off of work.

As I was talking with my mom earlier this afternoon, I was ending our conversation when I blurted: "You know...it's just a love hate relationship. It can be so frustrating that the majority of my time with him right now is spent just being with him while he works on ceramics. But I know once it's said and done, we grow comfortable in our normal day-to-day with jobs, activities, exercise, etc., there will be times I will miss this phase of our relationship." As often as we do it, it can grow very dull for I often feel extremely useless. However, I also know it does mean a lot to him that I would spend my free time to just be with him.

It is fun to watch him intently working on a project a majority of the time. Something about his relationship with the clay, the purpose in his gaze, the gentle, yet firm, movement of his hands. The artist with his masterpiece. It is equivalent, to me, of listening to someone work on music. The art of building the masterpiece, of which most people do not understand the depth of emotion and length of time put into it.

There is also the knowledge of the support I am giving. I might not say much. I may not even be doing something or saying anything related to his work. But somehow, just being there says more to him than if I didn't go with him at all and were to later tell him it looks amazing (which his work often does).

But sometimes, I can't stand to do the same thing every day. I don't want to go with him to ceramics. I want to be free of anything that has been assigned as work, even though it is not mine to do. There really are some days I absolutely hate to be near that building.

Thus my love-hate relationship. It will end come May, when Ben proudly walks for two diplomas he has spent 5 1/2 years of his life working towards. And I will be extremely proud of him (I already am) for his accomplishment. And although I know I will initially be excited to be rid of this building, there is a part of me that, after some times has passed, will miss the time, memories, and normalcy found here.

My Prince Charming

Yes, he is completely 100% MY Prince Charming. He didn't come with perfection, but I love him just the same with all his imperfections. I know in my last post I hopped on my soap box with tiring of etiquette and what people think of it. I love the comment my sister left. And I completely agree (thanks, Linds)!

And with that, Benjamin and I have completely enjoyed planning this past week. We have weeded through several different tunes, some of which I don't even know why people would use as a reception song. It was a lot of fun just listening to the crappy, fun, "why on earth do you want a song talking about this at your wedding" tunes. It was a great stress reliever and, although I had yet to read my sis' comment, a great reminder of this is OUR wedding. And whether or not someone else would do exactly what we have planned, it is what we want to do to celebrate the beginning of the rest of our lives together.

We also have ordered the invitations.....and I am SOOOOO excited about them! First of all, I was able to get something I really, really liked, which was not originally how I was going to pick. Price ruled my thoughts, thus I wouldn't even allow myself to look at something if it was overbudgeted. Then I realized, along with Benjamin, we were not going to have to order as many invitations as we thought originally. With that in mind, Laura, our wedding coordinator, told us to start from the beginning. "I don't think you picked any of these because you just loved them," she said, "Let's go through this again. You shouldn't have to think about whether you like it. This is a flip through because you're supposed to love it right when you see it."

So we started glancing at the invite samples as Laura quickly flipped through pages. There were a couple we like but they were waaay too expensive, and she agreed. So we kept flipping. We made it through one book without really just loving anything out of it. So she pulled out another and began flipping through that. About half-way through, she had barely flipped a page when we all made a statement about it at the same time: "OH WOW! I really like that one!" I said, "Hey, what about that one?" Ben said, and Laura, with her fingering pointing at the design said, "This is really pretty. Oh and look at the way the worded the invite to the reception." Needless to say, those are the invites she sent the order out for yesterday.

I'm just loving how everything is falling into place and am so excited and building with anticipation as the day is drawing near. I just am enthralled that I am going to be spending the rest of my life with my best friend. I know I'm currently on cloud nine with my realization of doing what we want for the wedding and the idea of being with him every day, but I don't think there is anything wrong with it. I am not disillusioned into thinking we will never fight, we won't have our hard moments, its going to be "happily, ever after". Trust me, we've already had a couple nasty fights and had to come together to work through them. But as awful as I feel after, and I know he's apologized and told me he feels the same way, there is always this feeling of, "Wow! To work through this disagreement has only brought us closer together." I'm not saying, by any means, I want us to fight more so we can grow; I think we can grow together without it as well. I just know that being committed to each other no matter what may happen in our lives or what we may argue about makes me enjoy the rainbow after the storm.

And right at this moment, I just was thinking about us but more so him because I know that no matter what it takes, he is always going to do everything he can to take care of me. His dad is currently replacing my brakes, and of course Benjamin is along side him working as well. Well, when Dad #2 (that's what I will refer to my father-in-law as) popped my hood, we discovered that more acid had built up on both my + and - receptors on the battery. he said he would clean it and then started telling me about these felt pads you can place on the battery which help with build up because of some chemical in them. Of course I figured I would just get them later, however, my Benjamin just walked in the room and told me he had put some of those pads on the battery. I then said, "Oh, you guys had some here." "No," he replied, "I went to go purchase them so it would stay clean."

No, not perfect, but DEFINITELY my Prince Charming!