My Wish for You this Year

I hope you experience things that challenge you this year.

Things that make you uncomfortable with how things are and make you strive for change.

My wish is that you also see things in this world that give you hope, things that keep you reaching for that better and brighter future.

This year, I hope that you seek to learn more about yourself.

That you try to change the things you don’t like and strive to be who you want to be.

But in that, I hope that you are also able to find acceptance of who you are now.

I hope that you meet new and exciting people to help make this journey of life more enjoyable.

I hope that you have the strength and wisdom to let go of the relationships that are weighing you down or holding you back.

That you realize who the people are in your life that really push you and help you to grow, and that you find ways to show them how much they mean to you.

I hope that this year is one in which the good will outweigh the bad. A year you will one day look back on as a good year. A year that was different somehow.

Many blessings and well wishes to you from me as you start your grand adventure of the year 2013. 

God is not color-blind

“Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. 

Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. 

Jesus loves the little children of the world”

Tonight my family watched the movie “Crash”. This film follows the lives of several individuals in LA and shows how they interconnect. It highlights the prejudice, stereotyping and racism that are prevalent in today’s culture. (If you have not seen it I really suggest you check it out!)

Many of you may feel that racism and stereotyping are largely things of the past and that our society has passed that. The media is continually boasting about how we are multi-cultural and a mosaic of cultures, but over the past few years I have taken several sociology courses that highlight just how real these issues of racism still are today.

One of the ways in which society has tried to stop racism is by creating a so-called “color-blind society”. A society in which we do not see an individuals color but we see them simply as people and ignore their ethnicity entirely. In many Christian circles I’ve even heard it said that God is color-blind, and I’m not sure that I agree with that.

This past semester I wrote a paper on racism in sport and in my research I found an article, which pointed out a flaw in the idea of a “color-blind society”. It basically said that as race evaporates from the socio-conceptual landscape, racism is pushed further and further out of sight, unmentionable because the terms by which we recognize and reference it fade from view. This actually allows racism to flourish, because it is harder to detect and recognize when racism is occurring.

Not only that, but regardless of how hard you try not to, you will always see someone’s color. And that’s not a bad thing. In my first sociology class the professor asked us a question: what are some things you notice about me? The class responded with all the politically corrects answers: you’re a professor; you’re a woman, etc. etc. Eventually the teacher stopped us and said “I’m BLACK! You can say it.”

By ignoring someone’s race you strip them of part of who they are. I believe that one’s color and race is something to be celebrated. We can learn to appreciate the differences because, let’s face it; it would be terrible if we were all the same boring shade of beige. And if God really was color-blind He could have created us all the same color if He wanted to. But He chose to create people of many different tribes and nations, of different colors, ethnicities, and races, because each is special and unique in its own way.

So although race should not define how you view someone or how you treat them, it should still be something that you recognize, respect, and appreciate. 

Sleep

She let out a gentle sigh as she repositioned herself against his body, clutching part of his pajama shirt in her hand: a habit leftover from the days when she had slept with a security blanket as a child. He took comfort in this gesture; he took it to mean that he was her security now. Her lying there, holding that fist full of fabric made him feel like more of a man than anything had ever done before.

Make me up, before you go-go!

“I wake up in the morning

Put on my face

The one that's gonna get me

Through another day”

--Avril Lavigne, Naked

This semester I am doing a practicum in a grade 1 class. The other day I was handing students their school pictures, upon receiving her picture a little 6 year old girl said “Oh no, I look terrible!” This shocked me because quite frankly she is a very cute little girl and she looked lovely in her picture. I couldn’t help but wonder where she had picked up the idea of how she ought to look in a picture...

Society has always constructed ideas of beauty, particularly with regards to how women should look. Through the decades women, luckily, have had something to help them adhere to these ideas and fit the mold that was set for them: Makeup.

Makeup was there when your face was expected to be all the colors of the rainbow in the 80s and make up was there when you wanted a natural look in the 1940s. And I personally have nothing against makeup when used properly to accentuate your natural beauty. However, I do think there is something wrong when girls feel they have to wear makeup to be beautiful. I think you should be able to walk confidently regardless of whether you have makeup on or not.

I grew up in a family with 5 girls in it; my mother, my 3 sisters, and myself and none of us were particularly uptight about makeup. Yes, my older sisters went through the “raccoon phase” when Avril Lavigne first appeared on the scene, but other than that none of us were really all that concerned about it. I don’t think any of us ever spent more than 10 minutes on our face in a day...

My Makeup-less face..

My mom always referred to it as “putting her face on” and this is a habit I picked up on, although I really only started wearing makeup on a daily basis late in my teenage years. But I’m pleased to say that there are plenty of days where I don’t want to put my face on and can quite comfortable walk around outside without one. And honestly, who wants to get up 30 minutes earlier just to put makeup on their face so they can look well-rested? I'd much rather sleep for the extra half hour!

The other day on Facebook a friend of mine posted a picture of herself without makeup on and she looked stunning. There is something beautiful about a girl who is confident enough to not have to wear makeup to know she’s gorgeous. So I would like to put forth a challenge to you girls out there. Pick a day this week and don’t wear makeup. Just be confident in who God made you! You are beautiful regardless of how even your skintone is or how long your lashes are.

“Staring at you taking off your makeup

Wondering why you even put it on

I know you think you do, but baby you don't need it”

--Rascal Flatts, Fast Cars & Freedom

(I hope this didn't offend or upset any girls out there who do spend a lot of time on makeup and wear it everyday, there is nothing wrong with that! I just hope you know you're pretty without makeup, too!)

C.S. Lewis//In Love

Creator > created

It is Thanksgiving weekend here in Canada. This past week has been building up to coming home and just taking some time to be thankful. Yet, this past week a theme that seemed to keep popping up in my life was the wickedness of human kind. Not a very fitting topic for the season.

This year at school I am leading a Discipleship Group and we are making our way through the book of Romans. For those of you who don’t know the book of Romans very well, it is a very “meaty” book of the Bible and it touches on a lot, and I mean A LOT, of topics that make you feel a little uncomfortable. So this week the passage we were looking at was Romans 1:18-32 God’s Wrath Against Sinful Humanity. As the title of the chapter suggests it’s a pretty harsh bit of scripture, but the verse that stood out to me most in this chapter was verse 21: “ For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened”.

This verse points out that our wickedness and sinfulness is rooted in one key mistake we make. We ignore God. We turn our eyes to other things. Verse 23 of the same chapter says that we have traded in the glory of the immortal God for images. We have stopped worshipping the Creator and started worshiping the created.

My roommate and I watched the movie Blood Diamond this week and it showed what the effects of this verse are in real life. The people in that film were so obsessed with diamonds that they were willing to steal, cheat, lie, oppress, and even kill to get this diamond. All that for what is essentially a rock. Unfortunately this film was based on true events that happen frequently in Africa and other places around the globe. And when we look at the wars in the world, most, if not all, are caused by us wanting something: gold, oil, precious stones, power. All these things are rooted in us worshipping the created rather than the Creator.

“…although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him…” This weekend I want to take time to give thanks to God. Not only for the things He has blessed me with in my life, but for who He is. I want to thank God for no other reason than for being God. Because that in and of itself is something that I am thankful for with my whole heart.