Joyeuse

the-absolute-funniest-posts: ghostnun: teaplusbeardspluscake: po...

Fri, 10 May 2013 23:21:14 -0400

ghostnun:

teaplusbeardspluscake:

pobbadist:

best post i have ever seen.

Literally the best

Pretty girls doing ugly faces is the best thing ever

This post has been featured on a 1000notes.com blog.

the-absolute-funniest-posts: oldblueeyes: CS Lewis: To love at...

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:59:24 -0500

the-absolute-funniest-posts:

oldblueeyes:

CS Lewis: To love at all (x)

My lovely followers, please follow this blog immediately!

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Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:48:36 -0500

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Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:30:57 -0500

markmuldez: There’s so much more to life than making the right...

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:46:48 -0500

markmuldez:

There’s so much more to life than making the right decisions.

As Christians our decisions are based on how God speaks to us and how He directs our very footsteps in order to lead us to His good and perfect will for lives. But if we are honest there’s so much more to God than any of us can see or understand and a lot of times making those decisions aren’t easy especially if your options are both ‘good’. But at the end of the day, our goal is not necessarily to make the ‘right’ choices, rather making choices that aligns His good and perfect will.

Recently over the past few days I’ve been struggling with hurt, loneliness and disappointments. The things that took place in my life 7 months ago was a mixture of good and pleasing things. But on the other side there were times of struggle. Honestly, there are no words to describe or express what and how I’m feeling right now. It’s like sleeping and enjoying a good dream and ended up waking up because the good dream turned into a bad dream.

Sometimes God leads us to embark on a journey without knowing if we are even going to make it to the end. Sometimes in those journeys He is teaching us something in order to grow our character as a Christian. Along those journeys is making some hard decisions that aren’t necessarily ‘good’ and it can really sadden us or even break our hearts, but rather He leads us into making those choices because it’s for our best after all He is working “all things for the good of those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose.”

And as I was processing these things, God brought me back to this passage in Isaiah:

¹⁸“Forget the things that happened in the past.
    Do not keep on thinking about them.
¹⁹I am about to do something new.
    It is beginning to happen even now.
    Don’t you see it coming?
I am going to make a way for you to go through the desert.
    I will make streams of water in the dry and empty land. - Isaiah 43:18-19

The after effects of our past situations whether good or bad can really make an impact as to how we approach our future. If it was a bad situation, we can either learn, grow, move on and never make the same mistakes, or allow ourselves to wallow up in sadness and bitterness and just repeat the same cycle over and over again. If it was a good situation we can just continue and keep growing and as we do that inspire and encourage others to do the same thing.

If there’s one thing that I learned over these past 7months it’s this one truth: ABIDE IN CHRIST.

We will all face moments of difficulties, trials, struggles, doubts and uncertainties and in the midst of all these things, if we continue to Abide in Christ and in His word, we will find ourselves secure in our Savior’s heart. Never regret the things you’ve gone through because God allowed them to take place in your life. It just means that He is teaching you something that you will need in the future whether it’s a relationship aspect, ministry, etc.

At the end of the day whether your relationship with your significant other ended, or lost your job, or flunk a test, or made a stupid decision that led you to where you are now, remember that after those things take place they are considered part of your ‘past’ and God promises to immediately restore you and do something new.

You may even think at that time that your situation is impossible to fix and it may seem to appear that there’s a no way out, but God again promises to make a way for you even in that lonely, dry and deserted season. He is able and all powerful and will bring you to where He wants you to be all for the purpose of His glory.

As Christians, There’s so much more to life than making the right decisions. It’s about Abiding in Christ daily and allowing Him to be the center of our lives and allowing Him to influence our every decisions. So that we are not stepping outside His will rather we are always secure and aligned in His pleasing and perfect will for us.

There’s always a sweet beginning for every bitter ending.

Grace and Love in Christ,
Mark Muldez

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Sun, 06 Jan 2013 13:49:54 -0500

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Sun, 06 Jan 2013 10:48:29 -0500

let the Son shine.: One of my favorite excerpts from Kisses From Katie: “I am learning. I...

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 10:27:25 -0500

let the Son shine.: One of my favorite excerpts from Kisses From Katie: “I am learning. I...:

sweeterthansunshine:

One of my favorite excerpts from Kisses From Katie:

“I am learning. I am learning to hope when nothing makes sense and to know that God knows best, even when what He is asking of us seems so impossible. I am waiting and God is teaching me this: I beg Him to bring me closer to His heart, to…

the-absolute-funniest-posts: Follow this blog, you’ll love it...

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 09:11:03 -0500

the-absolute-funniest-posts:

Follow this blog, you’ll love it on your dashboard!

justsaskia: “Don’t allow the coldness and fear of others to...

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:00:28 -0400

justsaskia:

“Don’t allow the coldness and fear of others to tarnish your perfectly vulnerable beating heart.” - Zooey Deschanel

the-absolute-funniest-posts: Follow this blog, you’ll love it...

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:58:11 -0400

the-absolute-funniest-posts:

Follow this blog, you’ll love it on your dashboard!

resolutewoman: how very sweet…

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 14:53:44 -0400

resolutewoman:

how very sweet…

"So then you started reading the Bible?” I asked. “Yes. We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes..."

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 14:37:46 -0400

““So then you started reading the Bible?” I asked.

“Yes. We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me. Don, the Bible is so good with chocolate. I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn’t. It is a chocolate thing. We started reading through Matthew, and I thought it was all very interesting, you know. And I found Jesus very disturbing, very straightforward. He wasn’t diplomatic, and yet I felt like if I met Him, He would really like me. Don, I can’t explain how freeing that was, to realize that if I met Jesus, He would like me. I never felt like that about some of the Christians on the radio. I always thought if I met those people they would yell at me, But it wasn’t like that with Jesus. There were people He loved and people He got really mad at, and I kept identifying with the people He loved, which was really good, because they were all the broken people, you know, the kind of people who are tired of life and want to be done with it, or they are desperate people, people who are outcasts or pagans.””

- Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz (via -witheverything)

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Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:55:59 -0400

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Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:49:32 -0400

The Rom-Com Confusion via Relevant Magazine

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 13:45:26 -0400

When Paul broke up with me, I gave him back everything he’d ever gifted to me and told him to walk across campus and go home.

We were in college, and he was befuddled as to how he might accomplish this feat of lugging a record player, a stack of vinyls, a mason jar, a buckeye (I have no idea why I needed to return this), and a mix of other devastatingly sentimental items, but I told him to leave, since he’d already decided that’s what he wanted to do anyways. He’d figure it out. He had arms and legs and feet and hands. Get out. Go. Away.

And yet there was this part of me that thought the next day that thought he might be outside my window. Tossing rocks or sticks or buckeyes up and singing lines from Boyz 2 Men or Peter Gabriel or maybe just howling apologies up at me, doubled over with the regret of his own mistakes in the pouring rain after building me a house. (He never did this.) Or maybe, I thought—months down the road—I’ll come home from class one day and he’ll be waiting outside my door with his confessions and we’d smooch our faces off and he’d propose. (He never did this.) Or maybe he’d call me years later and we’d reconnect over coffee and he’d ask me to marry him because, gosh, I was the best thing that’d ever happened to him and he’d been miserable ever since. (This never happened.)

I realized much, much later that part of my epic disappointment and perpetual heartbreak about the Paul saga was due to my naiveté and the fact that I was never going to marry Paul, but also to something far more frustrating and pathetic: the astonishing number of romantic comedies I had seen. They confused me. They blinded me. They unnerved me. Ultimately, they misled me. These fictionalized, grandiose tales weren’t real, and my tiny human brain couldn’t—and still can’t always—process the difference between truth and well, Hollywood.

Because Christians think of this truth differently, every form of culture that we ingest is processed through a distinct filter. So, when we read books and stories and most aggravatingly, watch movies, we are affected differently. Particularly when these movies are about love.

Movies have this way of making us believe that this is the way that life is. It happened on screen—why not in our lives? He came back for her in a movie, why wouldn’t he come back for us in real life? She forgave him in a movie, couldn’t a grand romantic gesture from us warrant the same bursting forth of charity? There’s a moment of fleeting inspiration, and then the feeling of insufficiency starts to creep up into our sternum. This is the lure of the romantic comedy—the genre that fuels confusion, distorted expectations and disappointment.

This is the feeling I got while The Five Year Engagement earlier this week on Pay Per View (I owe you 5 dollars, roommate), the movie ended and I felt utterly empty. It’s a cheap, toothless comedy about a couple whose wedding continues to get postponed for myriad reasons. Hijinks ensue. Some of the reasons are small. Some of them are significant. When it’s all over, it ends happily for a couple who would clearly have never have made it out of the gates in real life.

The Five Year Engagement presented love in a way most movies present love. If the feelings are there, they will triumph over everything: Circumstances, mistakes, brokenness and even (especially) reality.

And I started to wonder why my frustration with this movie was so overwhelming. That’s when it hit me: as Christians, we see the world differently.

WHILE WE KNOW THAT HAVING GOD IN A RELATIONSHIP WILL NOT INSTANTANEOUSLY MAKE SOMEONE ROMANTICALLY PERFECT, WE KNOW THAT THINGS ARE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT FOR TWO PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW CHRIST.

We feel fear differently. We feel the pain of ourselves and each other differently. And, most importantly, we truly do view love differently. While we know that having God in a relationship will not instantaneously make someone romantically ideal, we know that things are fundamentally different for two people who follow Christ. There are different expectations. Conflict, forgiveness, celebration, priorities, sex—everything has a different filter on it.

And we know that the proposal isn’t the end of the story but more likely the beginning.

Perhaps it’s this absence of God that leaves us unsatisfied with movies sometimes, because the expectations on the screen and in our lives are in such opposition. When a relationship gets really messed up, we know that some grandiose gesture like showing up from across the country, or standing outside a window with a boombox, or chasing someone down a traffic-filled bridge in a cab isn’t going to make it better. A grand gesture provides an exciting climax for a movie and it might make us want to live out romance every second of the day, but it’s not real—it’s not the ultimate band-aid for a broken relationship or a mistake, it’s hardly even the starting point for forgiveness.

The starting point is God shaping the hearts of ourselves and the people important to us. God cleans the mess of our broken and confused hearts. God brings the leading man to his knees in repentance. And, frankly, it usually takes more than Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” playing outside someone’s balcony for that kind of healing.

People don’t always just show up. They don’t realize their wrongs or recognize their shortcomings. They don’t even necessarily apologize. But when we let movies define our romantic expectations, we suddenly find ourselves hoping that the boy who broke our hearts will pull into the driveway. That the girl who stomped on our affections will call us up one afternoon and everything will be sparkling and new and different. That how we feel will be enough. That the betrayal we committed will disappear and suddenly we’ll be opening our arms and hearts and next thing we know, we’ll be happily married.

If we’re not mindful about what we’re watching, these movies convince us that if the main duo can just find their way into each other’s arms, everything will be perfect. If they could just get together, it will all be fixed. That finally falling in love trumps everything that might come afterwards. The credits can roll now, because their lives are presumably perfect. You don’t even need to see the rest of their lives.

It’s this mentality that thwarts so many of our expectations, relationships and lives. When I watch movies like this, for a few hours I tend to forget that God exists—that he has made me us different than this. Better than this. And that we have been created to write a different story.

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Wed, 19 Sep 2012 13:19:35 -0400

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Wed, 19 Sep 2012 08:42:55 -0400

"God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him"

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:18:49 -0400

““God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him””

- John Piper (via infinite-paradox)

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Tue, 18 Sep 2012 10:18:13 -0400