Wings of Desire..

I discovered this video recently and it really resonated with me... enjoy!

Hope in a hopeless world.

God has done something incredible within me these past 7 months of tours.. it's like He has breathed new life into me and I feel like i've stepped into this whole new place and I'm seeing with scales removed from my eyes.. and through His lens. It's pretty incredible. I understand more and more that we can't 'save everyone' but we can move.. love.. embrace.. because it doesn't stop with us. it starts with us. every little bit helps. the world would not be spinning otherwise.. Can you imagine if everyone had the attitude: who am i? i can't do anything so why try..? That's just the way the world is. Then again.. why do you see people who seem to 'have it all' continue to seek.. search..? because we've been reconciling our soul back to the beginning.. because we were created for much greatness.. not for our own glories.. no. because it doesn't stop with us ;) ..

I've witnessed things that I never ever thought.. or could comprehend. And to think.. so much worse is there. I pray I never witness.. When I am in Europe for long periods of time.. alone.. it's a battlefield on my soul as March and June seemed to be. Because.. I know. The war waging within at times becomes so overwhelming that I have to remember where my comfort and strength lies.

Remembering that first moment .. when something within me recognized darkness beyond what lay in me.. I was in my freshman year of college. Having just come back from watching a movie with my roommate, we settled into our dorm room for the night. This was in the fall of 98. The tv was on and Dateline began a segment... 'The Trial of Tears'. Sitting on the floor, I watched images of mostly women and children walking great distance in a land foreign to me.. the bare landscape and balding mountains, snow capped. The look in their eyes.. This was in Kosova. It was the first time it clicked within me. I sat there with tears streaming down my face.. not able to comprehend what was happening. After all we were on the cusp of the new millennium and this was Europe.. yet these faces told a different desolate story. In those moments, I felt something surge deep deep inside of me.. I felt empowered and powerless all at the same time..

It started there... like i said.. no longer did it stop with me, but this is where it started. I understand more how much my life since then has been a bit of a patchwork quilt.. made up of experiences.. moments.. people and places.. held together by the stories. And it has been the same Spirit which has moved me..

This past year while in Greece, I met with a ministry called Porta (means door in Greek.. Albanian and Italian). They work with Albanians who live in Greece (mostly in Athens) in helping them learn anything from life skills to english, building community and fellowship.. and just loving them. I spent two nights with this group of sweet beautiful people.. and as they sang in Albanian.. praising God in their language.. It was everything in me to not weep from joy.. but so humbled.. Ten years ago.. I sat on the floor of my dorm room feeling helpless yet with every ounce of my being wanting to reach across the vastness of this lonely world and give them something.. anything.. hope. What had been given to me in an inward place of such darkness, i know experience hope in my own life. Walking back to my temporary 'home' for a moment.. I felt the realness of God. I wanted to tell someone about this.. but wasn't sure who I could say as who could I begin to explain this journey? But God knew... He knows my heart.

it's a choice you make.. you choose how to live your life, to make manifest each day as it is the only guarantee you get! As I am sure you look back at your own life and think.. how have I come through all this? how is this my life..?

The more I travel.. i understand that travel for me isn't about collecting postcards or checking off a list of places i've been.. for me, it is about the people. For me it has been about not acquiring good experiences.. as they have been.. but God experiences. All these moments.. people.. experiences.. places.. form a constellation in the sky of God.. It's not a institution.. a word.. not something i do.. but it is a revolution that changes you.. moves you.. And I haven't stopped.. ;) I no longer feel helpless.. hopeless.. powerless.. but empowered to be a part of something much great than me. As we are each called to such greatness.

music by my bedside.

Moments before I was to board the cruise ship leaving the port from Turkey back to Greece, I found my way into a little music/book shop. Weeks prior my wallet had been stolen leaving me with limited cash. Wandering the rows, I was drawn to the image and title of this book. It was not only reading the back of the page but the opening lines of this book that I knew I must by it. For going lunch for a few days to buy this book served a good choice.. before the ship even left the port that night, I dove into this beautiful book in which I found such a reflection of myself..

Below is a few pieces from within..

I cannot sleep without music by my bedside. Since I was a kid. An old love song always plays on that small music box, carrying me to the unforgettable images of days long gone. How strange is human memory! Without warning, image come alive, their colors become manifest, pulling you into the realms of the past as if you stranded in a broken time machine. The images and their dates jumble together. You cannot tell which scent pairs with which memory. Perhaps, instinctively, you know which of them is precious, and sometimes, as you are twisted around in the intricate mechanism of recollection, the images flow by, gliding over windowpanes of a racing train. Suddenly, a single memory glitters, catching your eye for a moment and at that very moment, you yearn, more than you have ever yearned for anything, to go back to that image, to that one and only feeling that has remained unnoticed. Since my childhood, I have always wondered about the recording mechanism of the human mind. Images, colors, faces, scenery, photographs, houses, roads, clothes, scents, smells, sounds and feelings are all registered in my memory with unfathomable speed. So the next time you chance upon something or someone- a spitting image- you remember..

Time after time, I stroll through the sophisticated, every growing, gargantuan archives of my mind and lose myself in a myriad of twirling concentric circles. Wishing to catch and recall a memory, an emotion, or a moment gone by, I find myself engulfed in an utterly different time and place. I wonder how I happened to find myself by the seaside, inhaling the scents of an unexpected spring just as I was listening to the half destroyed records of a conversation that took place in the rooms of my childhood.

Nowadays, space travel is possible. However, setting off on a journey in time is only possible if our destination is the unknown cities of our memory, traveling through our inner selves.

If I had been told that I cold stop at a certain moment in my life and stay there forever, I would have chosen one of two moments. The first is when I was rocking in the swing hanging from the branches of a tree in the backyard of my childhood. The other is the day I first kissed the man I loved more than anyone in my whole life.. many strived to write the common language of falling in love. In fact, it is quite simple: you are in live if you feel as if you’re rocking on a swing when you kiss the one man you loved more than anyone..

Tantalizing Glimpses.

CS Lewis understands that longing deep within us all too well...

"Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year after year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.."

Taken from his book: The Problem of Pain

Do these words not move something within you..? reading this always leaves me saying.. 'wow..'.