A new theme

God has been really working with me over the past couple of weeks, and it has been marvelous.

It’s always humbling when God shows you your shortcomings. Luckily, the Lord doesn’t want us to dwell in those shortcomings, he wants us to move through and above them. He shows us our weaknesses and then he shows you that he is your strength. Thank goodness for that, because no matter how strong I think I am, I am certainly not strong enough to live the life he has called me to without him.

I’ve been doing a bible study on Daniel, and the story of King Nebuchadnezzar has really struck me. For some reason I only noticed his selfishness and all of his shortcomings. I guess some might call that humanness, but I never recognized it as that. To me it was horrendous the things he had done, yet in reviewing my own life, I find that I am not much different. In chapter 4 of the book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar realizes how much he has wasted his life, and how horribly selfish he has been, and he repents. He turned to the Lord… I never noticed that. He was pretty old when he made the turn, and I hope that I can learn from my mistakes now, rather than when my life is almost over. But Nebuchadnezzar did redeem himself, if you ask me, because he made sure that everyone would know his story and how terrible of a mistake he made. This life is not about glam and glory, at least not for us. Our purpose is to glorify God alone. In all I do I must glorify him.

So my new theme is a mixture of humility and love. I realized this week that I will not be truly happy without there being a real change in the deepest part of me. My selfishness resides in my desire to hide in my apartment and not be in fellowship with my friends and family. I spend so much time by myself, keeping interaction with others to a minimum. I remember many times in my life asking God to give me good girl friends in my life because I so missed having these female partners as a support system, yet I treated the friends I had like dirt. I wonder why God denied me new friendships? After allowing God to speak to me, he revealed that I have to let him make a change in my heart, and I have to learn to love as he loves. He desires for me to be in community – with him and with others. I am happiest when I am in community with him and with others. I feel I am taking a giant step in the right direction, for once.

There are challenges. I feel the enemy really pushing me to continue my selfish behavior. And wouldn’t you know that my main means of communication – my cell phone – is broken right now. Kinda hard to call someone up for a coffee when the phone is busted! But it doesn’t matter. I won’t give up that easily. Praise the Lord for being willing to work on me even though I have failed him over and over. He’s not scared to use me… so I shouldn’t be scared to let him.

Drama

I know in my last post I said that I was going to steer clear of writing about my feelings… But since this is my second blog, that means my total blog will only be 50% feeling-focused. I apologize in advance; I just really need to vent.

Something you should know about me: I HATE DRAMA. Let me re-phrase that. I hate real life drama. I love dramatical movies, books, plays, etc. I read crime novels, and they are very dramatic. I am currently watching Fox’s new show, ‘Fringe,’ which would be classified as drama. However, when it comes to my personal life, my daily life spent at my job, and my friends’ lives, I would do anything to avoid the slightest hint of drama. In case I am not being clear, the way I feel about drama is this: I HATE DRAMA.

My hatred of drama stems from many things. First of all, I don’t deal well with situations of confrontation. It is a flaw of mine that I wish I could overcome. But the thing is, if someone calls me out, asks me point blank how I feel or what really happened, or somehow makes me feel uncomfortable by putting me on the spot, I cannot come up with a valid answer. My mind goes blank, I forget details, my fingers go numb and I get confused.  Say my husband and I get in an argument. I say something, and he responds, “When, when did I ever do that? Give me an actual example.” I never have a comeback, and I never have that example, even though I was just thinking about it 15 minutes earlier. Because of this, I end up taking the blame or changing my mind about my feelings because I don’t know what to say. To my husband I would most likely say, “Let’s just forget about it. I don’t really care that much anyway.” Or if it’s something I am really upset about, I’d either cry or give the silent treatment (but only because I can’t validate my point – not because I like upsetting him by not talking). I hope I never have to testify in court.

Another reason I hate drama is because of many things that happened during my childhood. I won’t go into all of it, but if I were to psychologically evaluate myself I would say that I learned early on that I didn’t like to be yelled at or to get in trouble. I remember one time, I must have been 5, maybe 6, and my parents had invited friends from church over. My parents’ friends had kids my age, and we were all very close as we had known each other a long time. Well, I remember my best friend (a boy) was holding hands and swinging around with one of the other girls that was at my house. I experienced what I remember to be my first real encounter with jealousy. If I could have understood what was going on well enough to put my feelings into words I would have said, “that’s my best friend, why is he playing with her? Why doesn’t he want to play with me?” So what did I do? I decided to join in the fun, and what seemed fun to me was to grab the closest object (which happened to be my raggedy ann doll), and hit their hands with it. Well, to my dismay that only made things worse. My best friend started crying, which drew the attention of his mother. When she found out what happened she gave me the most evil of looks and went inside. The next thing I knew I was in the bathroom with my dad, getting a spanking. If that’s not reason enough to avoid drama, I don’t know what is.

So, when people in my life make drama a daily priority, it irritates the snot out of me. Today at work I was so peeved, just thinking about all the drama. I felt like I was going to snap. A few weeks ago I was suffering from a rash that had no apparent cause. It lasted for two weeks, and I still have a few bumps. After documenting everything I ate and everything I touched with no luck of pinpointing the cause, I thought, “I wonder if I got it from harboring all this stress?” Stress from all the drama. I don’t let things out the way most people do, so maybe the stress released itself in little itchy bumps. All because someone can’t keep her issues to herself. Can’t just do what needs to be done and leave her personal life at home.

I hate drama. I HATE DRAMA. And now I have even MORE reason to hate drama. I think I’m starting to itch again….

My First WordPress Blog

My husband is a blogger, and a pretty good one at that. I am inspired by his expression of himself through his blog. I, on the other hand am not much of a blogger. I have attempted many times to be one, but always find myself getting bored with it. No offense to all you bloggers out there – I guess I just never seem to be able to write about things that really matter to me… and let’s be honest, it gets kind of old just simply writing about your feelings all the time.

Feelings are great; they are very necessary, especially for a 26 year old who got married just over three months ago. I mean, I’m sure it’s normal to feel a little overly emotional during a transitional phase… but I think the success to my blog will be to take some creative liberties and focus a little less on my feelings, and maybe a little more on my beliefs, my experiences, my imagination. So, if you read this blog, please tell me if I’m getting too emotional, if I’m boring you with all of my crazy inner thoughts that more than likely won’t make sense to anyone but myself. I want people to read this, not look at it once and never again!

So, to start… here is a little background info on Holly Myers. I was born in the early 80s – my last name was Lavender. I lived with both of my parents and my younger sister and younger brother in Grand Rapids, MI. When I was 11 my dad was transferred from the GM plant in Kalamazoo to the Saturn plant in Spring Hill, TN. We actually stayed in Fairview, TN, which is about an hour from Spring Hill. I went to Fairview Middle School and Fairview High School.

I went to a church in Nashville and the 4 years after HS I spent my hard earned money made at Starbucks and the YMCA on spending my summers in Northern Ireland. I spent a lot of time reading about the peace process over there (yet would never in a million years consider myself and expert on the subject). After those 4 years I realized I might need to think about going to college, so I enrolled in Nashville State Technical Institute.  I chose English as my major, and later switched to Spanish. After only one year there I decided I didn’t want to finish. I didn’t believe it was worth my while, for whatever reason.

I started pursuing getting my own apartment after that. Initially I worked for a storage company so that I could afford to pay rent. As soon as I could I changed jobs because the storage company had me working in dangerous areas of Nashville by myself. Eventually I ended up in my current job, surveying health care professionals and patients for health care companies. I’ve been there for three and a half years.

I met my husband two summers ago. I honestly cannot remember the date of our first “date.” I don’t know if you’d really call it a date, we were just hanging out. But it was obvious we were interested in each other, and from that day on we were connected. This past April we made the decision to get  married, and in June we tied the knot. We did it perfectly- it was inexpensive yet elegant. All of our friends and family were there to share it with us, which was really all that mattered.

So that will bring you up to date on my life thus far. Tomorrow I turn 26, so I’m hoping this is the year I will put my skills to use and get this blog going.