Acceptance 3
How God is Teaching Me Acceptance. {Amanda Taylor}.
I'm delighted to share the first guest post of 2016 with you. It's a fitting first as it is this writer's first time guest posting as well. Please welcome writer, photographer, artist Amanda Taylor to A Voice in the Noise today.
I over think everything, and I do mean everything.
Last year I tried to come up with one word to try and meditate on, one word to lead me through the year and recenter me when needed. I would come up with a word that I thought God wanted me to have. Then I would over think it, second guess it and dismiss it. I would think to myself maybe it’s a word I want but not the word that God wants me to have.
I could never settle on a word. Feeling defeated I gave up and let it go. I stopped thinking about the word and what it could have meant for my year, how God could have spoken to me through that word.
This is year I have taken a new approach to it. I started early in December. As I anticipated the birth of Christ I started to ask God to show me a word that he wanted me to focus on. I started softly whispering to God that I was ready to hear what he wanted to tell me. This year I wasn’t going to try and come up with it on my own. I was going to wait however long it took to hear and feel a word that came from Him, not from me.
Shortly after Christmas I took a trip up to one of my favorite places to think, reflect, recenter. I wanted to hear God clearly. This monastery is so dear to my heart that I feel at peace as soon as I drive onto the grounds.
I sat and wrote some notes to myself, some things to remember this coming year and I thought more about my word and then I corrected myself - God’s word. It was God’s word I was asking for that would become mine over the coming year. But first I had to understand it was his word.
During vespers as the monks sang out the feelings rang through my soul and I quietly sang back. I took in all that God was trying to tell me and for once I wasn’t quick to second guess it or jump to conclusions.
I thought maybe, just maybe, he was pointing me in the direction he wished me to go so I asked louder for Him to please show me what it was he had for me. What word would propel me into the new year and closer to what he had in store for me?
It wasn’t until just a couple days later as I was getting up, still feeling heavy from sleep and groggy in my thoughts, that one word shouted out to me as clear as a bell. I could barely focus on pulling myself together and heading to the shower but one word was so clear it sparkled. Continue Reading
Zen and the Art of Acceptance – for Mudroom
My sister and I sat cross-legged, waiting to learn about meditation.
Someone filled the little porcelain cups with steaming green tea; they grew warm in our hands. I looked around the makeshift temple in what looked like it used to be a gas station. Bars on the windows reminded us we were in the heart of the city, but inside, the peaceful atmosphere wasn’t threatened by the outside world.
I smiled at my sister, my eyes wide. I had asked her to come to the Zen Center with me, part of research for a college paper that asked me to step outside my religious background. I knew she would jump at the chance to explore a new experience, not for the sake of a grade like I did, but for the mere knowledge of it. This was her way. Together, we had been everywhere from Hindu temples to dingy rock clubs, from synagogues to Bollywood movie theatres. The world lay open before us.
Not long before, though, we never would have sat knee-to-knee like this.
In my teens I had found Jesus and alienated my sister. I shut people out who didn’t fit the mold I thought my life should fit. That’s when I started seeing my sister--who had been my best friend my whole life—as “other,” an outsider in my new community of faith.
Today I am over at The Mudroom talking about Connection and Acceptance. Join me there?
Fringes {The Longing for Acceptance}
Freckle Face. Carrot Top. Shrimp. Two by Four. Trailer Trash. These were all labels I received as a child.
I have always felt like the odd one out. Look at me and you'd say that is rediculous. I am not a minority (though I have lived in a country where I was, in race, language, and religion). I come from a loving family, have parents that are still together. Middle class, white Christian living in the Bible belt. Outsider. That is crazy.
But growing up I never felt like I fit in. I wasn't one of those "cool kids" and I struggled to belong, my freckled face, red hair and skinny legs screaming, "pick on me!" I bounced from trying to fit in to trying to stand out, anything to be noticed and accepted. I had this gnawing emptiness inside of me, always searching to belong somewhere. Having not grown up in the church, I discovered both Jesus and His Church when I was in high school. Finally, a place to belong...or so I thought.
I didn't know all the right "church" words, didn't know all the Bible stories and songs the kids grew up learning. I didn't know how to say and do all the right things that made me a good youth group kid, but I sure did try. In the process I alienated my family who didn't share my beliefs or desire to belong to the church. I tried so hard to fit into one world that I walked away from the family I did belong to all along. I started dating a guy who was in the group of the "real" youth group kids and I thought I was in...until that relationship went south and I was the pariah of the group I tried to so hard to belong to.[pullquote]
We all have this intimate cry in our hearts for belonging.
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It was the end of summer and I was getting ready to start my senior year, still as lost as ever. I sat on the fringes of the youth group at an outside event we were having. I don't remember any teaching or songs from that night. I just remember the people who called me friend a few short weeks ago sitting together and laughing, excluding me. Every bit of laughter felt like a slight, like it was directed at me.
I walked away from church that night and it would be three years before I returned to the body of Christ, finding a new home at a campus ministry in college. I looked at the people who talked about love on the weekends and walked into school and showed nothing of the love of Christ to the people around them. If that was Christianity, I wanted nothing to do with it.
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