You look like so many adjectives.

driventolive:

March 19, 2012. By Ryan O’Connell

Source: Though Catalog

Leave work Friday not knowing what the weekend has in store for you. You’re getting drinks that night with a friend but other than that, you’re pretty open. Feel slight anxiety about this. Sometimes your weekdays are such a blur that you forget to actually figure out what’s going on for the weekend. Then you wake up on Saturday not knowing what to do with yourself and the whole rest of your free time just drags on. On Sunday night, you’re almost relieved to go back to your routine the next day. At least then you won’t feel bad if you don’t do anything fun.

Sometimes, however, the stars align and you end up having a weekend so good that it feels like some hazy dream. I’m talking here about the kind of weekends that are spontaneous, that just take you from one place to the next like a 48-hour rollercoaster, and then spit you out on a Monday morning. Great weekends can feel like a drug and when it’s over, you’re definitely going to have a comedown.

So often it seems like everyone is too busy to hang out and to make plans you need a two week notice. But newsflash: No one (who’s not married with kids) is that busy. On The Best Weekend Of Your Adult Life, social gatherings just fall into your lap. On Friday, everyone decides to come to the same bar or party and you end up having one of those special nights where everyone feels close and connected. You wonder why this doesn’t happen more often but then you  realize that if it did, it wouldn’t feel so special. The night leaves you with an electric buzz and you sleep soundly.

The Best Weekend Of Your Young Adult Life will remind you of your youth. It’s hard to explain what it means to feel young when, in fact, you areyoung.  In a sense, all it does is make you realize that being spontaneous is the ultimate luxury. The fact that you could spend over two days running around with your friends acting foolish, only coming home to change and maybe catch five hours of sleep, is proof that you’re still young. We forget that there will be a point when that will end, when we will have someone else to answer to. Don’t take these kinds of weekends for granted. When they happen, you need to hold them tight. You need to hold on to these days that are covered in margaritas, laughter, and hickeys for dear life because they will leave you.

On Saturday morning, wake up to a text inviting you to brunch with many of the friends you spent Friday night with. Even though you only got five hours of sleep and feel like hell, you’re running on adrenaline so you go. You leave your apartment and meet them for food and conversation and maybe drinks I guess, who knows, do whatever you feel like. The meal lasts for hours and when you step outside to leave, the sun makes you wince and you realize it’s already almost 4 o’clock. You vaguely recall having stuff to do but you’re not ready to ruin the buzz of the weekend, so you split off with a best friend and go to the park. Lay in the sun, feel your bones become jelly, eat a popsicle. Define leisure. Listen to music and creep on all the babes. Then feel the sun start to go down and begin to pack up.

Make your way to your friend’s apartment to cook dinner. Put your feet out the window and lay in their bed. Contemplate going home after you eat because you need sleep but ultimately decide against it. You know the second you get to your apartment, which will somehow already feel foreign to you, you’ll just start to feel lonely and wish you were still riding the wave of the weekend.  Stay out.

The second night will be even more intense than the last one–perhaps even more so because you’re slightly delirious. This time you’ll still be surrounded by a group of people you love but maybe the setting will change. A house party? A stranger’s home? A boozy dinner party? Whatever you’d like. It’s YOUR weekend. Well, sort of. What makes these weekends so great is that they’re often out of your hands. You just go where you’re told and are pleasantly surprised when you have an amazing time.

Maybe you kiss someone, maybe you don’t. It doesn’t really matter though because the weekend is more about celebrating your friendships and yourself. They’re about detaching yourself from your anxieties and feeling a sense of togetherness. They’re about letting go and being the lovely mess you deserve to be. You should feel safe and secure, even in the “mistakes” you  make, because you’re always surrounded by people who love you.

Sleep over at your friend’s house. Normally you hate sleeping in someone else’s bed but it feels right this time. You wake up next to your best friend feeling so happy you did. So much better than waking up alone or next to a one-night stand. Let the whole day go by at a languid pace. You’re still with people but things are calming down. You’re preparing for a soft landing.

When it’s all over, you’ll initially feel sad returning to a reality of boring work and sometimes even more boring weekends. Life doesn’t always feel so alive, so when it does, it sort of acts like a shock to your whole being. Take comfort though in knowing that you had the shock. Take comfort in knowing that there will be other weekends that will move with an electricity. You’ll feel alive again. TGIF! 

denisecua:

Dear Christianity.

I’ve known of you my entire life, but I never got to know you until recently.

I’m sorry for that.

In Vacation Bible School you were fun. If I knew enough about you, if I memorized enough verses in the Bible, I got stickers and candy.

I knew that the B-I-B-L-E, yes, that was…

by Joel Helenbolt

“If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.” – Luke 9: 24 (NLT)

Why is it so hard for us to FULLY submit? We are creatures of worry – always making a backup plan for when something might not come through. *But is it worry, or a lack of faith? There are a lot of stories I hear of people putting all of their eggs in one basket, left to rely solely on God to survive – but very few people I actually know. How can we expect God to fully bless us if He knows we have a fallback if He doesn’t ? That’s like getting wedding insurance just in case you don’t feel like loving her or him one morning (sadly, I think this is how a lot of people view marriage today). The reality is that isn’t how it’s meant to work! Faith, like marriage (so I hear), is a lot of work. It’s not something to be given up on. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.’ Turns out, it’s true with faith too. You have to work through the struggles to know your real strength. I am definitely an over-analyzer. I’m found guity of buying ‘Faith Insurance,’ and I definitely recognize this as something I need to work on. Here’s something I think about when I find myself buying the ‘faith insurance’ that is so intriguing: When you meet God and he asks what you’ve done, do you want to say, “Well God, I tried to live radically, following You, but it didn’t work out, so I guess it’s a good thing I had that job lined up JUST IN CASE,” or do you want to be one of the ones saying “I had no other option but YOU. Times got hard, but YOU were ALL I had to hang my hat on. “ It makes it pretty obvious why our plans might not of worked out when you look at it from the view of a conversation with God – we were never fully invested, so what did we really expect? If we live like the second guy, imagine the sheer joy of that moment when God comes through and executes His plan. When it comes to faith, we should probably delete the phrase “JUST IN CASE” from our vocabulary. Ever notice how JUST IN CASE sounds a lot like LACK OF FAITH?

“Without Christ a man must fail miserably, or succeed even more miserably.” – William MacDonald

[From my blog at http://jhbolt.wordpress.com/]

(Source: relevantmagazine.com)