The tongue no man can tame!

Oh stars. Don't you just love when Today's Life Lesson With Love From the Lord is so clear? I do.

"You have got to stop talking!" I heard those exact words from multiple people today. As harsh as they may sound (maybe they don't sound harsh--maybe you've had to listen to me a time or two haha), it was all in the name of being considerate and helpful, since my voice decided to take a vacation this morning. A weekend full of chilly air, road-trip karaoke, hayrides, campfires, and hymn sings took its toll by Lord's Day morning, and my voice had checked out. I, however, being the talker that I am, just couldn't hack the lack of communication, so I spent all day trying to squeak out as much as I could, and lots of people spent all day rebuking me for the abuse I was laying on my vocal cords. However, in their rebuke, I felt a Stiller, Smaller rebuke. You know the voice.

It's something I've been feeling a little poked about for quite a while now. I say lots of words to lots of people. Some people talk a lot, but do it quietly. Some people don't talk much, but when they do, you hear it. I happen to have the "best" of both worlds. I am a rambling queen, and I do it at a decibel level that some people equate more with yelling.

I think part of my poked-ness is a little about self-consciousness--it bothers me how loud I am. I honestly can't hear it most of the time. If someone points it out to me, I can tell, but I am usually blissfully unaware of the loudness left to my own devices. I can't count the number of times I've felt like I was just speaking normally and seen my listener grab their ears in agony. It's embarrassing actually. I always used to get really discouraged when I read the verses about having a meek and quiet spirit, because there is nothing quiet about the real me (my I-don't-know-anyone self can be pretty silent, but she doesn't get out much). I eventually realized when I was a little older that a quiet spirit is different than a quiet mouth.

But I've also been realizing that a quiet mouth has got a value of its own. In the interest of scaring people less often, I've been trying to take the noise down a notch in the actual-amount-of-noise-you-hear sense. But I feel like the Lord's been working with me a little bit to take the noise down as in the amount of ridiculous and unnecessary words that I speak. And having my voice all of a sudden vacate my premises was kind of like a little "Know that I'm not joking about this," from the Lord.

It's just that I spend so much time talking about nothing. Either I'm talking frivolous and trivial things, or I'm complaining, or I'm talking about myself, the list goes on and on. I'd be afraid to calculate what percentage of my audible speech is actually about the Lord, or how much of it is in the interest of those walls we're building up for Him. So much of my breath is wasted in talk of worldly things, in complaint, in passive boasting--I won't mince words, I am sometimes boastful and proud even if I try and hide it in the way I word things--and it makes me scared to think of being at the Seat, watching the Me slideshow with my Lord, and seeing how little of my time, my activity, my voice was really truly devoted to Him.

So having my voice gone, even for just this short amount of time (maybe it was more of a staycation--it kind of comes and goes a little bit) has just been like the Lord's showing me how ugly my mouth can be, and yet the potential it has for good. Just, when there's only so much you can get across, you don't want to waste your energy on words that don't matter. You want to spend your time conveying to people important messages.

I don't want my mouth to open up and spout a bunch of icky stuff with a little bit of His sweetness mixed in. I want Psalm 51:15--"O Lord, open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall shew forth Thy praise." I don't want Him to open my lips only to hear a bunch of garbage spill out. So instead of letting me empty my cotton-candy-and-garbage filled mouth (to avoid confusion, I mean cotton candy as unsubstantial and empty, completely separate from the "sweetness" reference earlier haha), He's shutting it temporarily, I think so I can see what's going on in there, and what's going on in my heart, to produce such garbage, since we all know that out of the abundance of the heart man--or wo-man--speaketh.

So for the next day or two, my mouth will be a little less flappy than usual, and will hopefully get on a path to staying that way. No man can tame my tongue, but the Lord is no mere man. He's Almighty God, and He's up for the challenge if I let Him.

What good even IS a shower then?

This blog must be super boring to basically anyone who lays eyes on it. I feel like I'm no fun anymore! I am slowly making the switch to responsible adult, and that scares me, because I haven't learned yet how to walk the line between "responsible" (read, boring) adult and hooligan kid. It seems I'm always either one or the other. I'm either getting busted breaking curfew, or asleep before ten, before the legitimate old people quiet down.

I know I'm not a boring person by nature, at least I hope, but I need to learn to do fun stuff, without it being super childly. Like, I was just realizing today, I stopped singing in the shower! Like a long time ago! How sad is that?! It's really sad, for all of you who don't do that. You should start. I'm going to.

I don't need any help being immature--I feel like I've basically written the book--but I do sometimes need to loosen up about things, and relax. I've been reading a bunch on mylifeisaverage.com, and it's been depressing me, because I used to have oodles of stories that were worthy! But most of them were not mine, and I can't think of very many past high school, and I can think of none recently. I miss magical life! This kind of hearkens back to my "This is the day" post a while back.

Just, the Lord has made so many great things, and there are so many little ways to find a little bubble of--laughter, joy, magic, whatever--in life all the time! That's probably the cheesiest thing I've ever said, but it's true! So tomorrow, I'm maybe going to play in the leaves with my dog. Or maybe leave a "Pick me!" note in a favorite book for some future reader in the library. Or maybe just sing in the shower? Oooh, I have to pick a song! :) I miss being excited about little things...

Writing?! I feel old...

So writing in general does not make me feel old. It makes me feel good, and sparkly, and smart. I thoroughly enjoy writing. I find what makes me feel old is reading writing I wrote in days of yore. Yuck.

So I just googled my old-slash-junk email address to see what came up, and one of the three or four results was...(dun, dun, DUN) my old xanga. Ugh. It pains me even to type the word xanga. It seems like such an emo-kid thing looking back at it. I know normal people had-slash-have xangas, but for me, I got it during a period where I was like, into Christian rock (not K-love-contemporary stuff, but like legit rock), and legitimately emo. I didn't even know I ever was! One of my sundry and divers bffs (aren't I glamorously popular) is reading all her old journals, and we're finding out she was legitimately emo too. I thought I was a pretty chill teenager, like I'm a pretty chill adult right now. I don't stress too much, I try not to whine a lot, and I would consider myself a super happy person, relative to most of the world.

But wow, was I ever wrong about my old-timey self. I kept the xanga for basically my junior year of high school. As 21 year old me remembers, junior year was like my fave teenage year. I had the most fun at school--senior year would've been more fun if my school bff didn't die in the middle of it, buuuuuut...she did, so not as much fun as it could've been. I promise, I'm not trying to be emo right now. :) I've healthily worked through that deal, seriously. But so in my memory, junior year was for serious good times, albeit busy ones. But reading that xanga, wow. I WAS EMO. It makes me want to cry. And privatize all the posts. Which I've since done. I'm keeping them so maybe one day if the Lord leaves us and gives me teenagers--my own kid form, or cool aunt-niece-nephew type--I can prove to them that I really do know what it's like to be emo and teenagerly.

And I would not have wanted to be friends with my old self. It seemed like I spent the whole time posturing, saying stuff that, looking back, was obviously an attempt to coolify myself or something, and listening to music that I pretended was all top-forty-deviant, and mature for me to have picked...I was...I don't even know. not such good times.

Like I've read bloggish things, and like myspaceish stuff of different teenagers, and I'm always struck with a do-you-think-life-is-really-like-this type reaction, and think like, get over it, teenage life is not that crazy. It was scary though, because I got the same exact feeling reading my own blog from being seventeen. I'm just glad that nearly five years are now separating me from my 17 year old self. I went through an old journal the other day, where I said something about being embarrassed to read some of it "five years from now," when I realized that it had legitimately already been five years since I wrote it.

I've consciously felt like a separate entity from my thirteen and fourteen year old journal self, but this is the first time I've ever realized how much I've changed since even my older high school years. Like last time I re-read my xanga stuff, which, granted, was like 2 years ago or something, I remember being kind of proud of how funny it was. So I was excited to find it again, but once I started reading, I was like, how could I ever have liked that I wrote this?! It was just as embarrassing to read 17-year-old-me's journal at 21 as it was to read 13-yr-old-me's journal at 17. Makes me feel kind of old, that I can't connect to my teenage self anymore.

And I just want to say right now, if I ever start blogging like an emo, teenagerly little girl, please slap me well upside my head. I don't even know. And my new prayer is that I've somehow become a better writer than what I apparently used to think was good. Yuck. We'll see how like, 30 year old me looks at this blog. Ipes. Time is so weird...