Winning friends and influencing people!

A few years ago, my college BFF's and I traveled to Southern California over spring break. It was fantastic. It was cold but we still went to the beach and dressed up and ate Chick-Fil-A and acted crazy. There was one picture where I'm hugging a tree and then Abby joined me on the other side and Diana jumps in to and Jenn's caption was something like "Melissa apparently knows how to win friends and influence people."

I have lived the majority of my life caring so much about what people think. Let me emphasize the "so much." I still spend a lot of time devoted (not on purpose) to replaying conversations and situations trying to figure out what I meant and what they meant and why I said and why they said... And the list could go on and on. I am beyond analytical. In college, I finally found friends where I could just be me. It was a relief, it was freeing, and it was real.

See.. The only way to win friends that you will keep and influence people is to just be yourself. No one else can do that! Today I met two students, from a couple of years ago, for lunch. They were asking how this year was going and what's going on with the students and my life in general. Then they began to talk about they life in 8th grade and how they would come and talk to me ALL the time. They would... They asked for advice, asked about my life, and knew me personally. They saw and lived my happiness, bad moods and emotional wrecks and they still loved having me. The beauty of it all was that I was just me, there was no need for a cover up or a make believe scenario. They just know me. I love that.

One of the speakers at Hope's student ministry talked about this topic in a message I listened to a while back and said we need to stop worrying about what other people think and focus on what God thinks. When we do that, we are truly us. We are no one else and no one else is us.

Be free and be you! Then you truly get the opportunity to influence the people around you because you're not pretending. It's worth it, I promise!

Will you do this with me?? -Melis

Just you and me.

Tonight at the last service of Exposure, Scott said to imagine that it was just you and Jesus. Would you be able to live with nothing else?? Ugh.

Would I?? Would I really?? I've thought several times over the last few weeks about how often I believe that I require other things-- material things, relationships, and daily needs to an over dramatized level. No need for that. For any of that. In college, particularly at summer camps, we sang a song:

"It's just you and me here now.
Only you and me here now.
If you could see the view,
when its only you."

I would close my eyes and it was as if I had been removed from the crowds of people and entered a room where only Jesus and I existed on the same page, I knew what He was doing and He was in control. I trusted Him. In those silent moments, I trusted Him. The problem was the walking away from those moments in which I became wrapped up in reality, the real in life and the black and white.

Tonight as I stood and worshipped and was super excited about all that Jesus was saying, I realized that my life has to be full of moments where it's just me and Him. If I can't be confident in those moments, I can't follow completely. I can't love Him with my life if I don't trust Him. I want to trust Him-- my ongoing battle.

I give it up. One of my favorite lines ever is from a movie that I cannot even name "I gave it all up. I just want you." That's it. I give it up Jesus. I trust you- it's yours.

All of me completely- Melis

You embrace my mess

The lyrics, "Bind my wandering heart to thee," often leads my mind to a picture of a cartoon story of the prodigal son that my sister and I watched as kids. The prodigal son left his father's house with his inheritance, ran, and lost it all. When he gains the courage to return home, he decides he will have to work off what he owes and eat with the pigs. The cartoon shows an early 20's boy eating the slop in a pig trough. A pig trough. That's just absolutely disgusting. Yet, he was worried that his father would not take him back.

My sins often do that to me. I eat at the pig trough wondering how angry and disappointed God must be. My appealingly innocent mind has been ravaged and become a battlefield that Satan loves to fight in. My thoughts wonder and make up a fantasy future life. It's not weird to dream or hope but it is too much to dwell on an unrealistic world. I cleaned my movie and book shelves. I cleaned them of media that makes me just think about marriage and a wedding. They're unrealistic and demeaning to women who everywhere are making up these fairy takes that do not come true. I am not opposed to fairy tales at all but realize I'm not at a place where I can just watch or read about it all the time. They make my mess. They cause my heart to wander and wish.

I thought about these things a lot today during both messages that I heard. Jesus has made me new. He, like the prodigal son's father, opens his arms wide open at the edge of his field and when He realized it was me, He ran. He ran and picked me up, dusted me off, kissed me on the forehead and forgot my wrongs. He cleaned me up. He embraced my mess. He didn't leave me where I was, He made me new. In real life, we are moody and emotional, easily entangled by things that don't matter. If we would drop those things or not, we would realize that God stands in the very middle of the mess we've made with wide open arms and a huge smile on his face and a twinkle in His eye. He does not fail. He does not.

"Prone to wonder, Lord I feel it.
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here's my heart, Lord, take and seal it.
Seal it for thy courts above."

He embraces your mess too. -Melis