I’m lucky, lucky lucky lucky.

I am.

I am lucky.

Make that blessed.

Top Ten Reasons Why I am Blessed

1. I have found my passion and can spend my life living in that.
2. I come from a loving family, and have an awesome relationship with my parents.
3. My best friend is the best friend a girl could have.
4. I live in New Zealand, and this means I get to go camping in beautiful places, with great friends.
5. I can sing and write.
6. God Loves Me and I Love Them, all Three in One (and we, all of us, know it).
7. I have really truly great friends who inspire to be just like them (and also, serve as warnings of how not to be….J)
8. I have so much to look forward to – holidays, jobs, people, music, dreams and ambitions.
9. I’ve done the coolest things – camping for a month in the NI, the Rail Trail, tramping to Lake Daniels, mini-breaks with various people, road trips with Simona…
10. I love who I am, and who I am becoming

Yep. I am blessed.

So go on, I dare you. Post the Top Ten Reasons Why YOU are Blessed. Or comment them.

I’m accepted by the one who matters most

AND Lincoln University.

Yep, it’s true. I’m officially accepted into their Masters of Applied Science programme. My particular specialization is International Rural Development.

Basically I will be learning about the process of development as it applies to the rural sector of international……well….nations.

I’M SO EXCITED! I just can’t wait to get started.

Plus, I get to go to Samoa for 10 days to visit a real live project.

The world is a good and beautiful place (even if Greenland is loosing 400 cubic kilometers of ice very year…panic stations…)

Anchor Me In the Middle of Your Deep Blue Sea

So anyways, the key word for me these last few years has been surrender. I’ve been learning to lay down my agenda and let God “take me where you will”. YOU lead ME has been pretty much my motto. It’s been a life changing thing. Learning to release my wants and needs and allowing God to meet them in his own way has been frightening and freeing. But it came from a place of knowing of his love for me.

It kind of all began at Parachute a few years ago. I was in serious pain from a year or three of battering (O afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted…). I was dying inside really. I went to one of the night concerts and quite honestly, everything changed. Tree 63 was playing – I’d never heard them before. They had the lyrics up on the screen and one of their first songs literally changed my life.

It goes like this:

Can we hang out tonight underneath Your ceiling
I could stare up at a million lights and listen to You breathing
If I fall fast asleep it's just because I feel so safe in You
It won't take much to wake me up

Could I walk out to sea way beyond these breakers
We have no place amongst the movers and the shakers
Yours is the only throne I'll ever get down on my knees before
You have the whole of me

Lover come away
Come away my lover

I heard You say
You've stolen my heart with one glance of Your eyes
When I fell down You raised me up
That's gravity

Yours is the only throne I'll ever get down on my knees before
You have the whole of me

Lover come away
When I fell down you were standing there waiting for me
You picked me up, welcomed me home
That's gravity

Won't You come away
Won't You come away with me
Lover of my soul

I stood there and cried and cried. I was overwhelmed with the knowledge that He loved me and also, that I loved him.

Another lyric said “they tell me to abandon you to make all my dreams come true. Well what am I supposed to do, I only dream of you”. It was a crazy moment because simultaneously I knew that I loved him and he loved me. Real deep passionate love like oceans and skies and mountains.

Perhaps the key line in the song above was this “yours is the only throne I’ll ever get down on my knees before”. This for me totally sums up the surrender that I needed to make. The throne that I had always bowed down to was the throne of myself – my desires, my passions, my fears, wants, needs, insecurities – my agenda. But no, that night at Parachute, I sang the words from the song and they’ve stayed with me ever since.

Anyways, the big change for me now is moving past surrender into submission. For me now, it’s not enough to just say ‘here is my life’ (YOU lead ME) but to actually submit myself to him. I come to him with my feelings (most often) and I give them to him – not just to keep but also to do with what he will. Make sense?

This a bit of a random blog, but just had to get some of these thoughts out and in an order of some kind.

I have a lot of FEELINGS at the moment – some woken up from a long sleep. Good ones and terrible bad ones. Some people who’ve been out of my life for ages have come back in. Some of these people stimulate good feelings and some not so good. I thought I’d dealt with a whole bunch of stuff but here it is – stirred back up.

I thought I was over it! But no. So back to the submission drawing board, time to let him have his way in me.

YOURS is the only throne I’ll ever get down on my knees before.