Contented... Still Hungry

I've been waiting to post again until I had a digital camera and could show off my new place! But the camera part is taking more time than I expected, so I'll put some fresh words up on the fly.

It's a beautiful day. I left work early as I was sick. Slept for a bit and am enjoying a quiet house, listening to the sounds on the street. Life is good. I moved into my own place and have a great roomate. I loved decorating my own space. I was surprised at first, having LOVED housesitting earlier this year, that I really struggled with this new-found independence. To feel myself for the first time as a person completely out on my own... Making decisions, keeping track of responsibilities, embracing the new reality that it's better to learn to take care of myself than to always rely on whatever safety nets have been available to me so far in my life.

It's a scary thing to embrace independence. To look at myself as an individual with my own thoughts, my own feelings, and to practice trusting them and share them with others. A lot of my life has been centered on dependence, within my family and within the church. I think we get so confused about love. In my family, I thought love meant you "needed" each other. In the church, love partly meant you always "needed" God and resigned yourself to the fact that real Christianity was never having a mind or heart of your own.

Thank God, thank you God, that this is no longer true for me. To begin knowing a God who isn't eyeballing me from heaven, wanting to own me and disconnect me from myself and become some clone of his. To know a God who delights in the person he created me to be... who actually, in all lovingness, says to me, "You are free to make your own choices Carla. You are free. You can give only when you want to. You can receive and not feel like you owe somebody."

That verse, God loves a cheerful giver- how many times do people preach it like we better have a good sit down with ourselves and make our hearts cheerful??? What we really need is to know real love, to know we are loved, and that these truths are true for everyone no matter what. We need our hearts to be filled up with this truth before we can give cheerfully, on some level. So many of us are starving on the inside... I know what that's like.

So, I'm getting filled up but still wonder- what do I do now? Where do I go? How do I give of myself the best I can? Exciting thoughts. Like a big white canvas waiting for paint. I've been getting it ready for awhile, got most of the painful unwelcome stuff washed away, though I'll still be working on that from time to time. Now I'll get on with creating new things. Well, really, just learning to let the good stuff flow out of a heart created by God to give forth good things... cause I'm made in his image and that's what he is like. That, I believe, is what he's had in mind for me all along.