Literally. the best blog you will ever read

it·er·al·ly adv. - In a literal manner; word for word.


Im sure many of you have heard many rants by me on this subject. rightfully so. because it is one of my ( many ) biggest pet peeves.
but I have noticed alot more lately, people using the word literally, way out of context and saying things like

“I’m so hungry, I could literally eat a horse.”

When you use the word literally, you are stating that you mean exactly what you are saying with no exaggeration, or metaphor . It means that until you have eaten an ENTIRE horse, you will not be full.

Literally is commonly MISused to emphasize or qualify what your saying is true

So if your saying "it was literally the worst movie iv ever seen" and you actually mean it. just say it and mean it. Don’t qualify it. If you’re a person of your word, which we all should be, we will all believe it when you say it.

I am one to pick on phrases and words, but I will rarely suggest that one is thrown out. But dare i say. I think this is a word we could do without.

Throw out literally. No one will miss it.

So go ahead. in your day to day walk. you will be suprised at how often people ( without thinking usually ) misuse this word. its often halarious. but mostly annoying
Me and a friend were going to illustrate a book called

" Literally. the best book you have ever read"

and draw what people were LITERALLY saying ( phrases we have overheard personally )
We already have collected quite the hefty list of offenders.
some of my favorite being.

" We are going to literally turn this city upsidown! " ( that would take ALOT of work and ALOT of people will probably be angry )
" He was literally living out of his suitcase" ( small man? or obscenely large suitcase? )
" Their jaws literally dropped" ( ew )
"When we got off the plane. there were literally a sea of people " ( really? when you got off the plane there was no other option of mobilization but to swim through the twisted and mangled crowd before you? or did you need a canoe!?)

Post script: Anyone that has spoken with me in person knows that I am guilty for using ALOT words out of context, so if we are announcing a nationwide 'free for all' on the English language, maybe I would be able to speak more freely in person without fearing regret or embarrassment for my lack of speaking abilities. If that is the case, I will literally fly up into the air, spin three times, and ironically fall to my impending doom

Written by my friend mitch. but profound none the less

As the title suggests. this was written by my good friend mitch. so all credit goes to him. but it was something that challenged me big time. and i thought i would share it with you guys





So. This morning, as I was eating my cereal, I was reading about Noah (Genesis 6,7 & 8) and what a fun little story it is! Perhaps it seems like a story that everyone knows, sunday school, and I guess it is. Thing I love is how God works through the bible in new ways all the time! No matter how many times you've read a particular passage or heard a certain story there is more that God can and will show you through it.

Anyway, I'm reading away, somewhere about Verse 15 in Chapter 8 where it says something to the effect of 'Release all of the animals so they can be fruitful and multiply, filling the earth'. Thing is there were only two of each animal to do the fruitful multiplication gig. I don't know about you, but I'm cautious kind of guy, I like to have a few fail safes in place when I'm planning something. If this had of been me and God said, take two of each animal to repopulate the earth, I would have been skeptical of the tactic to say the least. I probably would have argued with God, and maybe would have tried to sneak a few more of the cuter critters onto the Ark as well and disguise them as furniture or kids toys. TWO ANIMALS. What happens if one of the animals gets sick (everything would have been mighty damp, lots of room for infection!) or hurt (I've seen a brand new $50,000+ stud bull be rendered useless to everyone but McDonalds by the careless stepping of one of his girlfriends) or lost or or what if they got off the boat and the two anteaters simply decided that they didn't like each that much after all, decided to split up all their possessions half and half and went their serperate ways? I'm not going to be joining Greenpeace anytime soon but I do like animals, you'd think Noah would have been allowed to take some extra cattle on board just to ensure that a good steak could be had in generations to come or a couple more pigs so that his great great grandkids could know the rapture of a bacon and eggs brunch. But no. God was specific, and surprise surprise true to his word. He looked after the animals. They were fruitful. They multiplied. We still have anteaters, we still have cows, we still have bacon. Praise God.

I don't know if Noah had any of these doubts going in, maybe he did, maybe he was too distracted by the other major issues of Ark building, snooty neighbours and impending global distruction, maybe he was a man of quiet faith. It leaves me with a question though, when God's speaks into my life. How much faith do I have?

Desperation

Desperation......This topic really has seemed to come up alot lately. at Youthstreet, Church, Staff Meeting and now my quiet time. So this gave me a desire to outwardly prossess all thats been going on in my head.

The main point I was challenged with is, are we REALLY desperate for Jesus, are we so Desperate for a relationship with God that everything but spending time with him seems dull and mundane and you cant even fathom choosing something else over a good, quality hang out time with Jesus.

Now. what does being desperate really mean? Its easy to say it and not know its full intended meaning. We often ask Jesus to make us desperate to seek him. but do we truly know what we are asking ?

So naturally...I was intrigued and I looked up the definition of desperation and what i found was this .....Recklessness arising from despair
Now, I started to think of what desperation could mean, in a tangible way, and I thought out a scenario in which recklessness WOULD arise from a situation of despair

Now... Imagine for a second that your drowning...
Tell me.... Is your first instinct to go and watch TV? Hang out with friends? Sleep? ( although, techincally thats what you would end up doing if that was your first instinct )
NO!, its to get AIR, and nothing else matters in that moment except to get that oxygen in order to survive. Everything that is rational, safe, and sane escapes you and your left clawing your way to the surface by any means nessasary! No matter what! thats what your body is programmed to do in such a situation. a situation of dire despair, your body is called to survival mode. Its programmed to give you that DESPERATION to fight for your life.

What also comes to mind is that Lady in the Bible who was hemmoraging for a ridiculous amount of years or something. She had no other options left. She tried everything and she was in a desperate state. So she did what she HAD to do. She PUSHED through the crowd of people , into the centre of a mob probably getting no less than stomped on and yelled at. But no matter the consequence. Her mind wasn't fixed on what people would think, or what would happen as a result of that action. The only thing she was fixed on, is the only thing she had left, and that was touching Jesus.

Desperation is like having tunnel vision. To zero on your subject. your healer, Your breath of air, and fight for it with an intensity like your life depends on it.

I love you, I respect you, and im sure your a very very nice person but GET OUT OF MY WAY because i have GOT to touch Jesus!!

So last night I prayed a very dangerous prayer. One that I understand a bit more then when i started ( but far from understanding it fully )

" Jesus. Make me desperate for you "

ripping off teri ( or being inspired by....whichever)

Lately iv heard the phrase
"what are you planning on doing with your life?"
thrown around alot. and especially being in YWAM. i get this question alot more than most (being a non profit organization, i dont get paid, so surely i cant live like this forever right?......right???)
Well iv been thinking alot about what it means to " do something with your life" and ive come to a short list of things i can answer with. maybe not the answer they want. but a response i am happy with none the less

so what do i want to spend my life doing?


I want to spend my life actively resisting everything that destroys life. I want to love people unconditionally, I want to understand people and their motives, I want to watch people discover themselves in ways they never thought possible. I dont want to see people close to me ( or even those not so close ) waste away from drug addiction, instead i want to work towards seeing someone set free. I want to give "troubled youth" a 2nd chance. Heck, I want to give them a 3rd 4th 5th 6th 59th chance. I want to love the unloved. i want to share my stuff with people who need it more than I do. I want to make people understand they are valued and worth something.
I want to take more photos and use it as a tool to show Gods faithfulness and beauty. I want to take more photos of people and tell the amazing stories of the people i meet. I want to create beautiful things out of something ugly
I want to go for walks to appreciate Gods creation, I want to dream.
But most of all, I want to love God with all of my being. ( good call on the last line teri haha )

It really depends on what your view of life is, as to what you want to do with it...




( ps. , again. thanks for inspiring this post Teri )

Im having a hard time remembering the things i should remember. and forgetting the things i should forget.

If anyone knows me. they know that im an outward processor. so this is just a outward vomit of everything thats been in my brain the last week.

The topic of choice lately with some of my friends lately has definatly been the inevitable subject of dating * dun dun DUN * ( in fact my mom even asked me today if i was bringing a date to my cousins wedding, i mean really. thats a pretty big commitment haha....bringing someone they havent met to scary family functions across the world? no thanks. )

....and you know.....Im kind of over getting all excited about it anymore. I go about my life and I am surrounded by attractive (and not so attractive) males and I only know a few deep level, I mean some i would even consider some of my very best friends...but it never goes past that. and there's no reason to drool over guys that aren't into me or share my beliefs

Anyways, i'm just so sick of thinking about it all the time. Every time i meet a guy i think: "Could he be the one?" And of course he's not. He's not interested. He's attractive, he's nice, but he's not him.

And part of the problem with this is the way i've always veiwed things... and I've always been honest when the subject comes up: i'm waiting for a guy to pursue me.
People act like i'm crazy when i admit that (that i want the guy to make the first move). They act like, "How can you honestly expect a guy to have the guts to make the first move?!?"

So after a certain stage. I got sick of waiting. and started to question if i had some sort of horrible deformity growing out of my face i was unaware of , asked everyone i knew about it and the only response they ever gave was that "you'll find him when you stop looking for him"
(who in the world is "they" anyway? it drives me wild how they always feel that they're an authority about my life)
anyways.... they say you'll find him. So i gave up on guys. I didn't find one (i thought i might have, but we never got past the crush stage: he didn't want to be friends even, apparently....).

I slowly started looking again as i got more and more lonely, more and more desperate. I still haven't found him and now i'm a whiney damsel in distress. I don't want that. --i mean. not that want my husband to replace God in my life, but i just don't feel complete being single, either.
Now i know that a lot of people are saying to themselves right now: "You don't need or want a guy, you don't know how lucky you are," blah blah " your travelling the world and doing stuff. focus on that" blah blah

But Frankly i don't want to see the world alone. Sure, i want to go on the Amazing Race but have no one to do it with. I want to travel around the world, but not alone. ... i just want to at least find a guy to give me my first kiss.

Now im not saying I want to find some random guy and date him ( because God knows i would have done that long long long ago if i were that desprate ), but i'm tired of crushes not getting past eye tag and long conversations where we click but nothing happens.

I know i'm weak, i know i should have more patience, because yeah. I am only 20. But with all the dating mumbo jumbo going on around me. every corner I turn makes me want to be in that position...just once.


But the more i think about it.....on the flipside and realisticly ( dont worry guys this is the redemption bit you were hoping for im sure )
i find it funny now that i used to love to use that one verse in (Genesis 2:18-24) to claim my right to want somebody in my life.

When God created Adam and all the animals He saw that Adam was alone and lonely, that there was no companion suitable for him, and so He made one And so if God did that for Adam and Eve i believe that i am designed to perfect one man's life just as he is designed to perfect mine. God made us for each other.

So basically its saying.....adam had complete intimacy with God, yet he still was lonely, or alone, whichever one. its true, we are wired to connect with people.

but here's one thing that i overlook and maybe other people do in the process of trying justify wanting something. My friend told me that he read from a donald miller book, "searching for God knows what". when you read the genesis account, the text says that adam is lonely and there was no suitable helper for him. but notice what comes next. BEFORE adam gets his beautiful wife,
what happens. he names all the animals. now when i read that, it takes me only 5 seconds and so i move on to the next part. but think about that task for a moment. he names all the animals. one by one. now i'm not sure how long it would take. but i imagine a lot more than 5 seconds. somehow i imagine it happening instantly. but it could have taken days, months... who knows? and then after he's done naming them, God gives him what he is looking for, what he couldn't find in all of God's existing creation.
i guess that's where trust comes in.


So....im 20 and still waiting for that first kiss. you can probably say that i've never really had a real boyfriend. crushes, yeah. special friends...yeah. But its worth the wait when you put it into perspective....at least when you think about it long and hard for weeks on end.....