A New Chapter Begins.....

          Every day in church, my old Sunday school teacher sits down in the same row as me - my Mom. Now the baton has been passed, it is my turn. I could call this an answered prayer, because certainly I have prayed for this. I could call it a commission from God, because from the moment I gave my heart to Him, my soul itched with this desire to teach. I could call it craziness, because despite the fact that I'm working two jobs, going to school (Finals Week!), and I already direct the church choir, I took on this additional responsibility. But I chose rather to call it a new chapter....

          Walking down this Holy Road, trying to avoid the obstacles and distractions has not come without its hardships. Being here in this corner of the world, where so often it seems like I'm the only lover of Christ under the age of 20 to be found for miles..has not come without its tears. I look back on my life just about every day, and the things I did (and didn't do) as a child to come to accept Christ sooner and avoid the crap I went through stand out to me most. Ever since I started college, and barely started to actually think about my future, I felt so drawn to a career in teaching. Intimidated by years of studies, I've found my place, my joy, in teaching young children. Working as a substitute preschool teacher's aide has been quite the pleasurable challenge. I fall in love with every child I get to work with (some more than others) and I find myself remembering their faces and little voices even weeks after I worked at their school. It's my passion, it's been questioned and criticized as "not my full potential", and just the same, it's my dream job and God has been opening the way for me to do it.
          Of course, as soon as my humble little church started getting some kids into its population, my heart leaped! My pastor agreed, and here I am today preparing to embark on this new journey. Call me overly-passionate, but I feel it is a HUGE responsibility, and I approach every single thing I plan to present to these kiddies with the awareness that I will be building upon a foundation that will eventually shape who they become in the future. Where the pressure comes in, is that it's not whether they'll go to college or become lawyers and astronauts, it's whether they'll have a stable foundation and awareness of God to eventually become followers of Christ.
           My earnest prayer is that God equips me with whatever I'll need to give these children (a total of about 7) the things He wants me to. In the process, I am praying harder than I have in a long time, and trying to clean out the avenues to my soul so that God has His room to flow through. I'm excited, I'm nervous... I'm ready. Every so often my heart gets this warm kinda feeling, and at that moment I know that God is letting me know I'm right where I need to be.

A new chapter begins....

Nonconformity : Freedom

You either live anxious to become a combination of people that already exist, or you spend your life getting to know who you are and giving yourself the freedom to be that person. 

                                                                -Me

         We are born to be nonconformists. No two human beings are exactly alike, therefore, we are all born to be unique. Most of life's distress, most of it's struggle, comes from dealing with reproach for not wanting to conform....Yet we do it anyway. Monkey see, Monkey do. I don't believe we have any genetic link to monkeys other than we share the same Creator, but for all intents of purposes, we are monkeys. We see, we do. We deny ourselves, and follow. I wonder how I would be right now, what state of mind and spirit I would be in, if I had never seen a TV, magazine, advertisement of any kind, or listened to radio or popular music. Some might say that I'ld be "missing out on life" super ignorant to the ways of the world, but I say I'ld be simply untouched by the weapons of mental oppression. I'ld be more "me", more uniquely creative, and more in-touch with my self than any human in modern society can boast. 

              Society is pollution, a network that is deliberately clogging the channels of love, peace, communication, culture, individualism, harmony, balance, true satisfaction, self-respect & outward respect, all for financial, political, or other evil motives.  There was a time where salt was worth its weight in gold, and like it, humans' lives too have lost their value. We are fashion models, We are robots, We are a generation of prisoners destined to a lifetime of having our minds trapped between two headphones and our bodies weighed down by gadgets that carry the weight of the world within them. I commend whomever called it the "world wide web" because in it are caught the souls of many beings. That's it. Stuck. Stuck in "how it is, so roll with it" and "Rock on". 

               No choice but to conform, or so they subliminally advertise. They say "Be Yourself" and then sell you a magazine with "10 Great Ways To Be Yourself (See page 31)" plastered on the cover. They say "Rock your own style" and then fill your world with ads on clothes and accessories you should buy that are guaranteed to "Set you apart" from the rest, and then sell it to you for twenty times more than what it cost them to make (several times more than what you should spend on article of clothing anyway, which is such a vain principle to begin with). They make sure you hear what they want you to, and their robots hypnotizingly flash it in your face all day long. We like based on what we feel like we should like. Their agenda was making it a weird, embarrassing, even shameful thing to be truly different. Truly different, as opposed to Hollywood "different" (I hope that the point that there IS a difference has at least been made). 

                Nonconformity should be our goal, not as an indie trend, but as a duty to ourselves. Established individuality even within society and amongst its robots, our Victory. Don't conform. Be the you that you actually are, not the one that you feel like you should be. Trust in God, He made that "real You". Resistance. Resilience. Confidence. We can. We must.