On Being the New Girl

image- Fido's Coffeehouse This is where all the cool people hangout. They have great coffee and awesome music playing overhead so I like to go there to work.


This has been long overdue. Let me just preface this post by saying that I don't claim to be an incredible writer. I don't think that I would even go so far as to say that I'm a decent writer, but I do think that it will be beneficial to me to blog as I have the tendency to go through this world with my fingers in my ears and my eyes shut in order to not have to see all the garbage that is going on. Not only am I missing unpleasant things, but I miss a lot of the simple things that bring great joy to life. All that said, this is not going to be award winning work. Just me being me and hopefully this will be beneficial to the one writing and others reading.

To all those back in Illinois. I miss you so much! There is not a day that goes by that I don't think of you. You are so often in my thoughts that I take for granted that you don't have any clue as to what is going on here. Things are getting better. Actually they are going really well, but that is another topic for another day.

This is especially for my junior high girls back at home- Tonight for the first time in a very long time I did devotions. With the Thompson clan being home in Illinois, the house is especially quite. Too quite. I'm not used to this much silence.

I pulled out the Brennan Manning book that I've been trying to read for the past 6 months and started from the beginning yet again and this is what stuck out. Speaking on what real Christians should act like- "We will find ourselves not on the path to power but on the path to powerlessness; not on the road to success but on the road to servanthood; not on the broad road of praise and popularity but on the narrow road of ridicule and rejection." (The Signature of Jesus by Brennan Manning).

Galatians 6:14 May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Wow.

1. Boasting is something that I'm really good at.
2. The world is still a huge influence in my life.

On boasting. I have struggled with boasting since as long as I can remember. Usually, if not always, it rears it's ugly head when I'm feeling insignificant which... is pretty much all the time.

Last year or maybe even the year before that, I made a point of not telling people that I'm a drummer. I bring that little fact up when I'm feeling out of place or not cool and usually I get instant cool points by saying that I am. It's sick and I hate that about myself!

I was doing fairly well back at home with not feeling the need to puff myself up. I still did it, but day to day there wasn't a need to. Everyone knew me, people cared about me, and for some reason, people even liked to hang out with me despite the fact that I didn't play drums in a band anymore.

Now I'm the new girl, in a very trendy music town, where no one knows me and everyone is WAY cooler than me. Boasting has reared it's ugly head once again trying to get the trendy cool people's attention. I feel so out of place here. Everyone knows someone or is trying to be someone. Everyone has amazing haircuts (I can't even get mine to stay straight in this gosh darn humidity) and cool clothes, and little, dorky, not impressive Erin is lost in the crowd going "hey pay attention to me". But you know what? The more I try to get people's attention, the more lost I feel in this crowd. No matter what I've done, I have nothing to boast about. The trivial little things that I've done in my life are just that, trivial and that's a relief to me because no matter what I do, I'm never going to impress everyone and if I have to impress people to get them to be my friends, heck with it.

John 15:5 ...apart from me (Christ) you can do nothing.

There is no reason for me to boast about anything. Any little bit of good I've done in my life has been Christ's doing, not mine. Everything crappy that I've accomplished is courtesy of yours truly, but God still loves me all the same and continues to use me to do amazing things. My biggest prayer right now is that I will understand how unworthy I am and how blessed I am that God is using me. I pray that he will use me to affect others and that I will be completely oblivious of what "I'm doing" and only see God working through me. Please pray for me to allow God to shape me into what he wants me to be and not try to be the creator myself.