crookedtooth:

Surrender is not the same thing as passivity. God’s will for your life involves exercising creativity, making choices, and taking initiative. Surrender does not mean being a doormat. It does not mean you accept circumstances fatalistically. Often it means you will have to fight to challenge the status quo. It doesn’t mean that you stop using your mind, stop asking questions, or stop thinking critically. Surrender is not a crutch for weak people who cannot handle life.

Instead, surrender is the glad and voluntary acknowledgement that there is a God and it is not me. His purposes are often wiser and better than our desires. Jesus does not rearrange the outside of our life the way we want. He comes to rearrange the inside of our life the way God wants.

In surrender, I let go of my life. It is a Copernican revolution of the soul in which I take myself out of the center of the universe and place God there. I yield to Him. I offer obedience. I do what he says. I am not driving anymore.

-John Ortberg

Needed this today.

chrisyoungblood:

She’d be an inch and a half shorter than me with three freckles that make a triangle in the middle of her collarbone. Hazel eyes would make my blood electric with every stare. Her cheeks would hit the hang up button on her cell phone and they would warrant a perfect line from a song to be dedicated to them as we dance in circles on the carpet of my living room. She would wake in the middle of the night and ask, “Where are you?” when we’re only three inches apart. 

My cells would pioneer new skin at the touch of her fingertips just to breathe in their first breath of air that surrounds her body. So they could find a connection with the flakes of death that fall upon them and mourn their collected beauty from a life they just fell from.

Her words would be full of hope and wisdom. Full of fight and God. Full of purity and passion. Her heart would create sparks that would ignite a fire inside me. A fire that burns for our foundation for God and our genuine love for each other in His honor. We would find ourselves showing love that would be for people to pull from. To find hope in. To know that they don’t have to settle.

My perfect girl is real. She is beauty in it’s purest form. She is my love. She is my blood. She is perfectly structured grace. She is soft skin, high hips, and a voice that makes a southern boy smile at rebellion for breaking the rules and tradition of his state. She loves sweet tea, fried chicken, and the asphalt under her feet. She is someone who doesn’t cloud my life with our God, but strengthens it and gives it new meaning.

Girls, if you don’t have someone who can talk like this about you when it’s what you desire most, seek God and wait for him. Do not settle. Guys, if you can’t say these words about a girl with the purest intentions, seek God and find her. Do not settle.

They exist!