Yes, little babies! It’s snowing like crazy again!! Not sticking yet, but Crowder*Band posted a pic on twitter and there were about 5 inches on the ground! Excitement all around!
As finicky and strange Texas weather is, I don’t know that I’d understand the weather anywhere else. It’s just… unexpected here. 🙂
Well, that was real short but it’s time for me to head home!
Yeehaw!
Melody.
I had to blog this as soon as I could.
I was at work this afternoon looking through my Twitter and saw that Bethany Dillon had a new blog so I hopped over and looked then commented and went back to my blog and started reading a couple of my most recent blogs. (Unfinished and Ramble). I read them with fresh eyes. I only wrote them a week and a half ago at the most and already I am changed and think a little differently. (This is why I’m glad I started this blog.) My “Unfinished” blog talks about how I just pine for something to happen inside of me. That ‘happen’ to be somehow becoming this worship leader I see in my head and doing all of these things everyone around me is doing. Well, I think God has a prerequisite plan for me.
With and without my knowledge God has been showing me just how much pride is rooted in my heart. These blogs are about how I want to be a worship leader. How I have this passion and how I just want to do what I do. Well, coincidentally, (but really it’s God working) we’ve been reading John Piper’s “Don’t Waste Your Life” in college Sunday School–it’s so deep, we’re still in the preface!–Dad’s (our teacher) been talking about how we should plug into the church and find what our spiritual gifts are. We, as a church body, are to edify the church. The church does not edify us. So, if I think my spiritual gift is music, then I should plug into our church’s worship team or church choir. My goal, as a Christian, is to edify Christ in the church. To glorify HIM alone. My goal should NOT be making a record or recording music or joining a record label. I should just long to glorify God alone with my singing and music. And if He chooses to lift me up and allow me to do those other things then GOD BE PRAISED. I am a meek and prideful human being. God, this past week or so, has been showing me my pride in a very real way. I never consciously knew I was prideful. I just wanted to sing and be on a stage. But God is showing me that my heart is in the wrong place. I now catch myself when I think a prideful thought or want to say something that will edify myself. I ask that God help me in ridding my heart of this disease.
When I reread my “Unfinished” blog I almost wanted to delete it. I felt so ashamed that I would put prideful things like that for people to read about me. Now, I leave it. I want proof that I have changed. I want to come back and reread this blog in another week and see just how much I’ve changed.
To finish the reason I started writing this blog..
I was on my way home from work after reading Bethany Dillon’s blog and rereading mine, when Needtobreathe’s “Something Beautiful” came on. I was at the intersection on the highway before my house and just started to cry. Something strong had a full grip on my soul. It was covered in the Holy Spirit. I’ve never felt anything like it. It was the most incredible thing I have ever felt! I was driving and crying and mascara was running into my eye and it started to burn so I couldn’t cry a whole lot more lest I have a wreck but nonetheless I cried. When I pulled into my driveway I just sad and soaked it in. The thoughts running through my head the whole time were, “I don’t care. I just want to glorify YOU LORD! I love you! God, I glorify YOU alone.” Everything prideful fled my heart at that very moment and I was able to see Christ and His infinite love burdened on my heart in a way that I can only hope will happen again. I wanted to jump out of my car and scream and raise my hands to the heavens. It was so phenomenal.
As for now, I’d like you to pray that God continue to break me of this pridefulness and continue to show me His love and how much I should glorify Him instead of myself!
:)Melody
Well, I’m up way past my bedtime so I thought I’d just hop on over here and chat a little with the few “readers” I have!
More and more I find myself committed to just making it through the week without any sense of being. I suddenly look up and it’s Friday and think, “…What just happened?”
Feeling ashamed of not accomplishing anything I deem worthy of counting as successful doesn’t really help the Friday surprises either. I know this seems like a re-hash of my last post but it’s something I just can’t get over, yet can’t really get to stick in my mind.
I. Am. Unfinished.
That’s my new theme of life, I guess. Though I know I’m unfinished I seem to over analyze and obsess over my unfinished-ness until I get so downhearted and depressed I can’t wait for some air!
I wish I was better with words and I wish you all could just read my mind.. It’d be so much simpler that way! But such is life!
Anyway, some good news.. Wedding planning is going great. Whatever I seem to obsess over and seem to not be able to find, there is suddenly this beam of light that fits perfectly into the plans I had. That sounds like someone I know… (hint! It’s Jesus!)
Goodnight. 🙂
Melody
Last Saturday night the local Christian radio station, KVNE, hosted an incredible Leeland, Francesca Batistelli, and Brandon Heath concert on the Kilgore College campus. Leeland being one of my favorite bands, I made solid plans to go. I didn’t have any expectations for this concert. Only to go and listen to some incredible Christian musicians show their stuff. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised.
The three of them started the concert out by worshipping together with a song they wrote called “Follow You.” I immediately had tears in my eyes. I can’t describe with words what I felt that night. It was the single most real thing I have ever felt at a concert or a camp or a retreat or conference or anything. Listening to Leeland’s music I knew how passionate they were but I never knew just how much. Watching the band’s namesake sing with tears rolling down as he worshipped our Lord brought hot tears to my eyes and made my heart overflow with passion and love for the people in that room and for my Savior. They weren’t faking to make us, the audience, feel good or fuzzy or make us think we feel Jesus. His excitement and he jumped up and down as he sang and praised, his huge grin, his wet eyes and his choked up words made me realize that God isn’t some fuzzy feeling. He is a real Almighty God. Something about Leeland is more real than other bands I’ve seen perform. Something about them made me feel the passion and realness they felt when they wrote their songs. That something is the only real thing in this world: Jesus Christ.When my fiance looked at me and saw me grinning from ear to ear with tears in my eyes he knew exactly how I felt. He said, “The same passion you see in Leeland, I see in you.” Ladies and gentlemen this is why I am in love with this man and am going to marry him. 🙂 He knows me to the core. (But that’s another blog! :))
I have never seen so many people in a band feel as passionately about what they do as Leeland. I felt encouraged, blessed and loved as I stood in awe of what Christ was doing through those men. As Francesa Batistelli says in her song, “When I was just a girl, I thought I had it figured out. That my life would turn out right and I’d make it here somehow. But things don’t always come that easy and sometimes I would doubt.” You see, I doubt my life all the time. I know I have this incredible passion to worship God in song, but I think about how I don’t have the opportunity to move to a big music city like Nashville or Los Angeles to pursue my music career. I think about all the artists that got their start younger than me and are successful now at my age. But then I remember that God gave me this talent and passion for a reason. He will use me in His mighty way in His good timing. That puts my doubts and fears to rest. 🙂
I pray that all of us would find that realness that we can only find through our Lord.
Hello everyone!! Exciting news!! On October 3, 2009 I was asked to be a wife. 🙂 My fiance is a wonderful man named Jason Rich. The first time I saw him I knew he was the one. On our first date we were both shown just how much we needed each other for the rest of our lives. I feel undeserving of such a perfect match for me. No one knows me as well as he does and it is truly unbelievable. He encourages me, makes me laugh hysterically, keeps me in line, knows what to say when and how, and most importantly he LOVES me more than I even love myself. I love him so much I honestly have no earthly idea what I would do without him. It is clear that God knew what he was doing when He created each of us. I have never been so thankful for anything in my life until that blessed moment when he asked me to be his wife. 😀
That precious moment started back in June when he talked to my parents and told them he wanted to marry their daughter. (without my knowledge, of course!) He’d had this planned since about April of this year. (I know!) I got off work an hour early the Saturday it happened. He had no plan to distract me from going to my house where the surprise was waiting. Thankfully, I was starving for lunch and wanted our favorite sit down Mexican restaurant, El Sombrero! (yumm-o!) At some points during the meal he would giggle like a little girl, like I’d never seen him do before. I was hardly suspicious. We had planned to go to the mall and shop around for odds and ends and to leave my car at my work and pick it up later. He asked if I would mind taking my car to my house so we wouldn’t have to swing back by and pick it up. I was ready to get shopping but I said, “Alright.” When we pulled onto my street it was lined with familiar cars; his parents, my pastor, my youth minister. I had no idea what was going on. He got out acting like nothing was happening. We reached the door and I was greeted with an unexpected “SURPRISE!” My birthday had been the previous Wednesday and it was a surprise “birthday” party! Food, family, and gifts crowded our living room and dining room. When I began to open the gifts everyone was silent. It was only when I reached Jason’s present I knew why. I reached into the bottom of the gift bag and there sat a black ring box. He pulled me up off of the chair, told me he loved me, and got down on one knee. I cried and nodded yes because I was so shocked I didn’t know what else to do. I have never been so surprised and happy at the same time. 😀
Signed,
Future Mrs. Rich
My birthday is tomorrow! I will be nineteen. 🙂
Well, I’m over the sickness I had last time I posted. It was terrible! Sick is never good for a voice major, let me tell you.
So, I’ve had a few more revelations since my last posting. Can I just say that I’ve never been so directly contacted so often by God these last few weeks? I think there is a reason I don’t turn off KVNE or KLOVE. It speaks so solidly to me. Sadly, even though I am being punctured by Christ through the Subway man, Christian radio, and even school, I still cannot seem to get my heart in better shape! It’s like me trying to lose weight. I think about it all the time and obsess over it and know better but I just can’t seem to buckle down and do it! Why is this!?
I guess it’s the ‘getting older’ in me that is pushing me to finally change all of the things I need to change. Like my bedroom closet, for example. I’ve bought a lot of new clothes since I started working last fall and just didn’t have a place to put them. My closet was full of clothes too small for me. Why did I keep them there even though I had plenty of time to clear it out? It finally took the pressing of my wonderful boyfriend to make me do it. He stayed over for FOUR solid hours helping me hang new clothes, clear out old ones and bag them up, vacuum and completely organize. Needless to say, my room feels lighter, cooler and is much cleaner. So why don’t I learn a lesson and get everything else in shape?
I found a pretty solid answer, my friends: LAZINESS. Because of my chronic laziness disorder, God, in His omniscience, paired me with a man of the utmost opposite of the word. This man will not stop until things are done. No surface is left unorganized, unclean, or unwashed if he has anything to say about it. I, on the other hand, will leave things for another day if at all possible. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good clean room. But that would mean I would have to clean it. Do you see the issue? 🙂
This is clearly a sin! Laziness is keeping me from having a steady quiet time, getting up early for Sunday School, even praying regularly. It’s something I have struggled with my entire life! It is something I need to repent of and relinquish to Christ and lay this care at His mighty feet. Until then, I lie in a puddle of lukewarm doubt. If you think of me, say a prayer. 🙂
melody.
