Tag Archives: Love

Move!

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Quotes that make me think and that make me get up and do something!

Good things come to those who wait. Good things come to those who work their asses off and never give up.

The way to love anything is to realise that it may be lost. G.K Chesterton

Learn to let go of things you cannot control.

Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress. Epictetus

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

11 Not that I was ever in need, for I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. 12 I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. 13 For I can do everything through Christ,[a] who gives me strength. – Philippians 4: 11-13

Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. Helen Keller

You cannot dream yourself into a character: you must hammer and forge yourself into one. Henry D. Thoreau

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. Paul Valery

And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time. Donald Miller

I’ve gone for too long living like I’m not alive. So I’m going to start over tonight beginning with you and I. I don’t want to run from anything uncomfortable. I just want, no I just need this pain to end right here. Miracle – Paramore

March Madness

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Things I can be thankful for/excited about in March:

  • The opportunity to celebrate. I think everyone I know is born in March! That’s probably the first lie I’ve told on this blog because so many people are born in July too. But March is an especially big birthday month for me, which is great, I love celebrating people and birthdays.
  • University. Look, I don’t always love university. In fact, mostly I don’t. But I CAN be grateful for it. I start a new major (I think it’s actually more of a minor but I can never tell with my uni) this year and I think it will be a big challenge.
  • I’m grateful for grace. I think I will need God’s grace this month. So many things, so little time.
  • I’m excited about the Hunger Games movie which comes out in March. I LOVED these books and I think they actually won’t destroy them in the movie. I get goosebumps every time I see the trailer and I’m so glad March is here.
  • I’m excited for sweet little moments. I’ve been having so many moments lately where I am so overwhelmed by life. Someone will let me know how much they love this blog and I just die a little with happiness. God whispers in my ear that he’s proud of me and I die a little with happiness. Someone sends me a text that just makes me laugh so hard that I die a little with happiness.
  • I’m grateful for the last year when I’ve been able to see my brother every weekend. He moves to Sydney this month and our relationship will be long distance, along with my Dad. It really sucks to have half your family live in another state but I’m know I’m still lucky.
  • I’m grateful that once Pierson does move, the 4th bedroom will return to the old scrapbooking/study room that I know and love.
  • I’m excited about COLD weather! Well, not freezing weather, but I’m grateful that the sticky, sweltering Queensland summer is on it’s way out. I love scarves and jackets and I want them in my life.
  • I’m so grateful for how wonderfully happy I feel nearly all the time. I’m excited about life and what all of Autumn holds.. but I will especially appreciate and enjoy March, because it is here now.

Happy March everyone! I hope it’s the perfect mix of warm days and pleasantly cool evenings.

Love and hot cups of tea,

.Steffany.

First Time for Everything

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Today I used Skype for the first time. I never understood why people raved about it so SO much, but now I do.

It’s actually so important to see someone face to face, to hear their voice and to see their expressions and hand movements. Grace and I had a tea date today over skype. We talked for about an hour and a half and drank tea and discussed and chatted like we normally would. Skype is the best thing ever! Next to Grace Davis.

Grace – I love you and can’t wait for you to come home.

In true love the smallest distance is too great, and the greatest distance can be bridged.

The Hunt for True Love

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Love is really the thing isn’t it? I mean it was the thing back in biblical times, it was the thing back in the 18th century and it’s still the thing now. It’s what consumes so much of our money, time and emotional resources. We search for it. Fight for it. Live for it. Die for it. True Love. You’re kind of kidding yourself if you aren’t interested in it.

As a single Christian female, the hunt for true love is unique. In fact it’s basically the opposite to how those outside the Christian worldview search for love. We aren’t in a position where we can try, try and try again. Trial and error gives us a bad reputation.

It’s a really fine line between knowing what you want and writing down those all important characteristics and then allowing yourself to be flexible, open and acknowledging that sometimes God knows what we need better than we do.

Throw into the mix the whole confusing concept of God’s timing, your life’s calling and the slowly diminishing number of Christian males on the market, and girls begin to panic. We start lowering our standards, we stop letting guys make the first move due to fear of being alone and we push push push.

But I mean really? What’s a girl to do?

Evidently, girls don’t know what to do. They don’t know when to be bold and when to hold back. They don’t know when something’s right and when something’s wrong. They fall for the worst kinds of men and then wonder why they are unhappy and alone again. In fact, most of the time they just wonder why they are alone. What’s wrong with me? Am I not pretty enough? Is my heart too broken? Do I cry too much? Am I too outspoken? Casey Chambers anyone?

If you kept reading this post thinking that I’d have all the answers, then I’ll be honest like I always am and tell you right now that I don’t. I think people would assume I have it figured out.. so many of my friends are all married and settled and I seem pretty content so I should know right? Sorry ladies. I’m also in the dark.. BUT.. despite the fact that my last relationship was so long ago that I actually forget how old I was.. I know quite a lot about the Hunt for True Love.

I remember when I met my true love. I remember falling in love. I remember specific moments and I remember specific seasons. I remember bad times but mostly I remember good times. My true love makes me laugh, cry and fall on the floor so grateful for how much He loves me.

Oh I know it’s cliché.. Fall I love with Jesus and all your problems will be sorted? Really Steff? That’s your answer. Thanks for the help.

I don’t want to offend anyone, but if that answer wasn’t a good enough answer for you – then I’d hazard a guess that your quest for true love is unfulfilled.

I’m so rarely lonely. I’m so rarely confused or frustrated or concerned about timeframes. And that’s not because I’m overly confident, or I have a healthy relationship with my Dad or just because I’m busy and my life is naturally fulfilling. Trust me, I could choose to be unhappy and scared and alone. But I’m just not. I made a choice that God was enough. It doesn’t always feel like that, but I always know that He is.

Actually, maybe I do have it figured out. Isn’t that the goal? To really be in love with Jesus and to never live life afraid of being alone. I think God actually cries when His daughters feel alone. You are NEVER alone and you are NEVER far from His thoughts.

Pure truth.

Thoughts on a Monday

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I don’t really care about being liked or loved by everyone. I’m happy to accept that not everyone gets along with everyone in this world, so I don’t really care about being loved by everyone.

BUT

I do want the people I know to love the One that I love the most. In order to do that, I have to love them. They have to know that I love because he first love me. So I refrain from being cruel, I refrain from speaking my mind all the time. Not because I care if they love me, but because I care if they love him. All for the sake of His glory.

Clean White Love

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Hello my lovely friends and blog readers,

Welcome to Spring! In my opinion, spring is by far the best season. The weather is perfect, I’m born in spring, the flowers are delicious, its wedding season and all of sudden you feel like things that were difficult to achieve in winter, are now possible in spring.

This spring proves to be the best so far. One the 17th of September, my best friend, Tegan Churcher, will become Mrs Tegan Swanborough and this profound and precious occurrence will make this September amazing.

Most of the time I remember that I am a grown up now. I go to say things like ‘When I grow up I want to be a race-car driver’ and then realize that I actually am basically all grown up. I’m not old by any stretch of the imagination, but I am technically grown up. I have a job, bills, responsibilities. Most of the time I remember I am grown up.

Except for when I don’t remember. And I still feel about 12/17 years old and I wonder how I am even old enough to get a speeding ticket, am I really old enough to chaperone my sister on her schoolies cruise? I don’t think so.

I’m also not old enough for my best friend of the last 15 and ¾ years to be getting married. Now I have other friends who are married. My first close friend from school got married at 19, and I had a bit of a flip out then too. But then it became more normal, not so with Tegan. I think it’s because I’ve know her since I was 7.

To me we’re still sitting on the stairs at her parents place drinking green cordial and laughing about nothing. To me we’re still making our own Christmas decorations and decorating our bedrooms. We’re still making dance routines to the Backstreet Boys. We still have fairy parties and McDonalds parties. To me it still feels like the days when I used to try and force Tegan into going for a swim in her pool because I thought it was warm enough. Tegan was very over the novelty of a pool because she actually had one at her house. I still feel like we’re old enough to turn the trampoline up on its side and throw our bodies at it to try and knock it over and land on the trampoline. It doesn’t seem like that long ago when we were swinging on the playground and I got my hair caught in the swing as Tegan twisted me up so that when I untwisted I would spin around in circles. To me we’re still doing fashion parades and playing offices. I remember when we did ‘Twinkle’ the musical together, and I remember having Christmas Eve parties together, I remember talking about our first boyfriends back in primary school and it really wasn’t THAT long ago.

There’s something about knowing someone as well as I know Tegan, that I know marriage doesn’t really change anything much with us. We’ve done best friendship long distance, we survived seasons of boyfriends, break ups and seasons of both being single, we’ve survived financial troubles, and parental troubles and I know, that nothing really shakes our friendship. We’ve sustained one or two knocks, but in the end, they’ve just made it better.

I actually can’t adequately express how grateful I am for Tegan. I honestly don’t know how people survive without friendships like this. There are only really a few people that shape you as a person, and for me, those people are Jesus Christ, my father and Tegan Maree.

I can’t wait to see you get married. I can’t wait to see my childhood best friend and my adult best friend get married to one of the most amazing guys I know. I’m so proud of you. I’m so honoured to know you and to be a part of your life and your big day.

Five is a Four Letter Word

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While it’s quite obvious I pay more attention to my other blogs than to this one, tumblr is a great post inspiration tool. I follow mostly fashion blogs, a couple of blogs that post about tv shows I like, and anyone who regularly posts nice images (and of course people I actually know). But in the midst of the great posts, you can get some kind of awful ones. The ones where the blogger decided to actually post their real thoughts (people think ugly things) or the EMO type posts. I saw one that got me to thinking about a five letter word that I think is really difficult to deal with.

I think LOVE is a hard word for a lot of people to say. But for me it’s probably not so much, love, as is it TRUST.

If I really think back to the root of any kind of pain I experienced, it wasn’t from a lack of love, or unreturned love or love necessarily gone wrong. Almost all pain, can be traced back to broken trust.

Divorce. It’s broken trust.

Abuse. It’s broken trust.

Gossip. Broken trust.

Failed economy. Trust again.

Relational breakdown. Broken trust.

No matter what the hurt or pain, at no point in my life, do I believe I forgot how to love, or that I refused to let love into my life or that I became afraid of love. If anything, because of the pain, I give away love to the wrong kinds of thing. Love isn’t the issue. Trust is. I don’t trust people. I’m afraid of people breaking my trust. I withold the most important parts of myself until I feel like I can really trust people.

If you don’t trust, then you don’t hope. You don’t put your hope in things because of the fear of having your hopes dashed. A life without hope isn’t really a life at all.

Life shouldn’t be lived like a blind fool where you trust everything. I wouldn’t let just anyone borrow $2,000 off me and TRUST that they would return it. But a live lived hidden because of pain, an inability to trust, is a sad thing indeed.

People will let you down. Life let’s us down. I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t been at least slightly bruised by life and I know far too many people who’s life wounds are deep and painful and raw. But I’m slowly learning to put ALL my hope and ALL my trust in someone who never lets me down. I’m not as scared of trusting others because my trust is ultimately in my heavely father.

The key to heart issues is often trust. We think we need sort out our ‘love’ issues, when really we need to ask God to heal us and help us with our issues with trust.

Life Lessons from Logan Huntzberger

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Yesterday I posted a facebook status about the effect Logan Huntzberger (one of Rory Gilmore, of the TV Show Gilmore Girls love interests) has had on my perception and opinion of men. The response was interesting and as we all know social networking is the key to knowing what people currently care about. I thought I would explore the thought further.

I’m going to be very honest and say that I love fiction. I love fictional novels, I love fictional tv shows, movies, theatre. I LOVE fiction. I love the ability it has to draw you into a different world, similar to ours, or completely surreal and the ability it has to provoke our imagination. I also think, it’s a very very dangerous thing to become enamoured with.

Logan Huntzberger has many great qualities. He’s extremely well spoken (a killer vocabularly is very important to me), well read, charming, intelligent, rich, sweet, adventurous and good looking. He is however, quite a bit of a jerk. He’s rebellious, lazy, a lady killer (not literally), entitled, thinks ‘frienefits’ is a good option, has commitment issues plus probably a lot of other attributes that I choose to overlook. And therein, lies my point. I choose to overlook, qualities that are harmful for the sake of what appears to be something better. It’s that whole ‘bad boy’ thing that girls seem to be interested. We see it sort of work out in Hollywood, girls that somehow manage to tame their bad boys while still keeping that element of danger we fell in love with in the first place. It’s actually a really harmful flaw that if we’re actually being honest, most of us can relate to.

Sure, we definitely look at that screen and think to ourselves ‘This kind of guy is probably really very harmful for Rory’. Do we ship the relationship? Of course. If you’re not a Lory shipper than your a Jess and Rory (which I’m guessing is Ress or Jory or something like that) which is truly just as bad. Does anyone really ship Dean and Rory? The eternal good guy (let’s exclude end of Season 4 and beginning of Season 5). I’ve never met a massive Dean fan. And I’m not really sure why? I put it down to the fact that girls have had their opinion of men tainted from fiction.

When amazingly lovely, sweet gentleman knock on our front doors, we turn them away because we are secretly hoping Mr Bad Boy climbs through the window later on, despite his lack of good manners, commitment and their negligent treatment of our hearts. Sure, I found it super hot when Logan climbed through the window at Rory’s – despite the fact she’d just turned down Marty (A-Typical Sweetheart).WHY? What is wrong with women?!

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m a MASSIVE Gilmore Girls fan and a big Logan lover. But I don’t necessarily think it’s the healthiest thing to dwell or to want in my life.

So thank you Logan Huntzberger for the life lesson. You’re amazing on screen – but I’m a good girl and as such, looking for a good boy.

Logan Huntzberger – Gilmore Girls

Logan: It’ll be fun, it’ll be a thrill. Something stupid, something bad for you. Just something different. Isn’t this the point of being young? It’s your choice, Ace. People can live a hundred years without really living for a minute. You climb up here with me, it’s one less minute you haven’t lived.

Photo Courtesy of oy with the proodles already.

Heart Felt

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Honest Thoughts. If you can’t handle the truth. Get off my blog.

#1 Lately I’ve been feeling very in touch with my inner emotions. Maybe I am feeling things more deeply for some particular reasons. I’m feeling joy on a very extreme level, but that also means I am feeling pain on a more acute level. I think though, that I’d much prefer to live with intense emotions. To live in a constant state of mundane and lukewarm feelings would be depressing.

#2 I’d rather be a honest and true friend with few, than a fake and popular friend with many.

#3 The hardest thing about learning a lesson twice isn’t actually the pain from the lesson. It’s the fact you had to learn it all over agin.

#4 My future husband should be the only one who gets the privilege of seeing me in all my glory. I ain’t giving my glory away to just any random.

#5 I care too much about the way that I look. If you see my rocking some bad hair do’s and many repeat outfits, I’m trying to care less.

#6 I’m fairly intelligent. Sometimes people feel the need to explain simple jokes to me, and they seem shocked when I tell them I’m completely a university degree, so I wonder if perhaps I give out a ‘dumb’ vibe. Just for the record, I’m really not dumb.

#7 My sister and I have way too much in common. Either she is really mature for her age, or I need to grow up a bit. Maybe the latter. Probably should think about getting rid of some Zac Efron paraphernalia.

#8 I want my future husband to be surprised once we get married. I want to have not given away everything I have to give away before then. I need to hear ‘Wow I really had no idea’ every now and then.

#9 You can only really keep about a handful of people in your life that you reguarly and meaninfully connect with. Who’s in your hand?

#10 I would be even happier with my life if I could end up being a writer/actor/professional Gilmore Girls expert.

If I’m being really honest. All I really want out of life is love. Love of the Father and if I’m lucky, my friends, my family and a hunky hottie that can tolerate and love my crazy ways.