"You've got a friend in me"

This post is inspired by a very close, true, and honest friend.
And this post is also intended to spark some sort of like-mindedness amongst the reader, hopefully.

So, let me tell you how awesome God is.

I come to Him on many occasions and, in some sense or another, hand Him my list of wants (which sometimes are more demands than they are requests) and I sit, I wait, and nothing happens. So I'm left wondering..  Why, God?

One specific request fell in the category of friends. You see, I thought I had an idea as to who I needed to be beside me as I go through life and how such people needed to be, act, look and make me feel. It often doesn't cross my mind that I'm basically telling God how my life needed to be. The very One who gave me life and some how I feel entitled to inform Him as to how it's going to go - because who knows me better than I know myself, right?

Wrong.

Had God given me what I thought I needed, I'm pretty sure I'd have ended up being a very uptight, stuck up, rude, arrogant, self-absorbed person.

What was I given instead of that?

True and honest friends.

People who know me so well they may as well be my family.

Isn't that what's desired in this life, though?  To have people that know you inside and out, people who you can have something akin to a mental conversation with (meaning no words are exchanged but only looks and facial expressions), people who keep you humble, people whom you respect and look up to, who can be authoritative one moment but leveled with you the next, people you trust. God never intended us to go through life alone and because He loves us He gives us awesome people to go through life with.

Upon this realization - who honestly wants a "friend" who just makes you look good cause they're cool or something? I still struggle with this, if I'm honest. As stated in previous posts I struggle with mans approval and would tend to shy away from having friends that were like me and instead go after the beauty queens, cool skater chicks, or what have you. Why? Solely for the sheer hope that some of their "beauty" or "coolness" would rub off on me and that people would want to be my friend and look up to me cause I was beauty queen pretty and popular and skater chick cool. Which thus resulted in focus being taken off God (who focuses more on the inner beauty of a person) and put back on me (only focusing on what I didn't have on my outside appearance). Bottom line - life isn't a popularity contest. :) 


So thank you, God, for not listening to my list of demands. Thank you for showing me that there are different ways to have beauty and "coolness." Thank you for knowing me better than I know myself and that I can always have complete confidence that that will never change. Thank you for the gifts you've given me in the form of friends, brothers, and sisters. Thank you for being awesome. 

Acceptance

Acceptance:

Where does yours come from?

This is a question that has been circulating around in my head for some time now and I've earnestly been trying to give it meaning or some sort of definition but I come up empty handed.

You see I've never been able to truly put my finger on my seemingly overwhelming lack of self-confidence coupled with my desire to just be accepted. I've tried changing things about myself - my fashion, hair, view of things and even gotten ridiculous and changed my laugh a time or two.  I know, ridiculous. However I can't seem to figure out why, even after all these changes that are all attempts to please other people, why I still feel so empty.

I talk to God and ask Him why it's so important to me to be accepted by everyone I'm around. It's crushing to me when 1 out of 10 people don't like me. So then I make it a point to change their mind even if it requires me changing myself. But in the process of doing all of that I think lose myself the most. So not only am I without their acceptance I also lost myself along the way.  Which then begs the question - is it really worth it? 

All this to say that at the conclusion of this horrific and unsatisfactory search for "acceptance" I realized that which can be summed up in a few words - "I must decrease so that He may increase"

So basically, I need to shut-down my pride and worldy-desire to be accepted by people who are probably not going to be around for very long anyway.  I need to stop worrying about whether or not people think I'm "cool", or guys thinking I'm pretty, or people finding me hilarious, or finding acceptance based off all I've accomplished in my life - be it honor-role at my school or finding the greatest sub ever created.  Life isn't about gaining acceptance and approval from others because in the end people change and are prone to thinking differently about someone. We're human, it happens.

What matters, then?  All this struggle to come up empty handed and reach a conclusion that a lot of people have come to as well?  Nope.

What matters is God. He created me for a specific purpose. To try and change that for someone else is turning out to be a lot harder than originally anticipated. So I'm giving up. I'm done trying to make people like me just so they'll like me. It's an empty search filled with empty promises. There are those who accept me just for who I am and that's enough - not to mention I'm accepted by God who created everything and it is in that I find contentment. 

I want to be known as someone who loves God and loves well as opposed to one who has the most popularity votes from others.