how shakespeare was a prophet

I can always find my way back to myself by spending time with one of two things (both for best results):  Jesus and the piano.  I know that sounds goofy, but it's true.  Add a little writing in there and perhaps some coffee and I begin to feel like a whole person again.  And if I get to watch a Cards game with a couple of girlfriends, it's like icing on the cake :)

I've recently realized this yet again.

No wonder I felt so lost last spring.  I was dating Jonathan and had abandoned both of these important things wholeheartedly in an attempt to keep up with him.  Granted, not the piano completely.  I had to make a living.  But I never worked on my own stuff.  And I was headed down a path that would eventually lead to abandoning my career if we'd have stayed together.

Katie...

Amazing what a lost puppy you can be when you try to make someone else's story your own.

"... in the movies we have leading ladies and we have the best friend.  You, I can tell, are a leading lady, but for some reason you're behaving like the best friend." 

And of course this has been brought to my attention yet again by a lack of time given to these two items of importance recently.  Life is such a hard balance sometimes.

Awareness is half the battle though.

A dear friend of mine informed me the other day that the word "passion" comes, not from a word meaning "fire" as so many of us like to think, but from the Greek word "paskho," which means "to suffer."

This was revolutionary for me.  Turns out passion may be a gift, but it's also a responsibility.  How did I know this for so long and yet struggle to understand it within myself?

"The battle is not with the instrument, it is with ourselves."  - Vincent Chicowicz

Chicowicz wasn't lying.  Not one single bit.

And of course I get to the point where I haven't been in the Word for... well, too long for my own good.  My counselor tells me I perpetually run on fumes.  Awesome, right?

"Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day... whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them."

Tonight I went back to my Bible study... the one that I'd abandoned for the past two weeks in favor of making it through the Christmas season without major injury.  I would have been better to keep at it.  Our small group at Central is going through the book of John this year and I've been behind... 

But I think about the chapters we've studied already... about the wedding at Cana and how Jesus turned a bunch of Jewish purification water into wine.  And about the woman at the well whose life had put her in a position with no choice but to be desperate and how Jesus knew her, mistakes and all, and revealed himself as God to her anyway.  And about how he fed 5,000 people bread and fish from a sack lunch.  And then how he turns around and offers himself to us as those things in the following verses and chapters.  And I think about Don Miller and how he compares Romeo and Juliet to what it's like to find life in Christ... about how Romeo takes Juliet up on her offer to doff his name and take all of her instead... about how both die so that they might have life together.

Suffer indeed.

Maybe this is how I'm supposed to be a leading lady.

... how is it that I keep forgetting this?  Maybe I get in the way of myself?  Maybe I keep expecting life out of other things?  Maybe that it's just too simple?

O true apothecary!  Thy drugs are quick.