Why live on the edge when you can jump off?

Here is what’s up:

I’ve been in love with New Zealand ever since I traveled there back in ’09.

About a year ago, I found a work exchange program that allows one to work in a foreign country for 6 months to a year.  At first it was just a dream, but lately it’s becoming more and more of a definite possibility.

For the past few months I’ve been struggling as to what I should be doing, where I should be living, etc. It’s amazing how cloudy and confusing life can be sometimes…. And it’s even more amazing when all of that cloudiness clears and God provides subtle hints here and there as if to say “YES, this is where you should be right now!”

God wink #1: The choir at my junior high school is competing in the world choir games. Their pen pal school is (WAIT FOR IT!) a school in New Zealand. 

I know it’s not a huge deal…. But I thought it was kind of cool that out of all the choirs competing in the world choir games, they got paired up with NZ!

God wink #2: I normally don’t make small talk when I’m out and about on elevator calls at work…but one day I decided to start talking to the guests overlooking the mini bungee jumper in the display (me)… We started talking about my interest in bungee jumping when the lady I was talking to said that she, too, had been bungee jumping. I asked where she had gone and she said (WAIT FOR IT!) New Zealand.  Now come on… that is pretty amazing!  Not many people have been to New Zealand so the fact that I ended up talking to this woman… who had also been bungee jumping in New Zealand was extremely exciting.

Not to mention I know a few people who have some kind of connection down there.

New Zealand is beautiful. And, HELLO, it’s the bungee jump capital of the world! 

If all goes as planned, I'm hoping to be down there sometime next year :)

a note of importance

I’ve heard it said that it takes around 7 compliments to overcome the effect of one criticism. Regardless of the number, we all know that criticisms stick with us longer than compliments.

I never thought I had a problem with self-confidence. That is, until I was faced every day with people who didn’t like me, didn’t like my work, talked about me behind my back, and would email me paragraphs upon paragraphs, almost on a daily basis, telling me everything that I had done wrong.

Living in that kind of world and being surrounded by that sort of negativity every day does damage. Major damage.

I was reading an article the other day and here’s a snippet of it:

An idol is anything more important to you than God. Therefore, you can turn even very good things into idols. You can turn a good thing like family, success, acceptance, money, your plans, etc. into a god thing–into something you worship and place at the center of your life. This is what sin is. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything (even a good thing) more than God.

1 of the 4 root idols is APPROVAL. You know you have an approval idol if your greatest nightmare is rejection.

Last summer destroyed almost everything inside of me. From mental breakdowns to self-doubt and everything in between…I had forgotten who I was…so much so that I feared rejection on a daily basis.

I was brainwashed into believing horrible lies about myself. I believed the lies that said I would never be good enough.

“Good enough.” Now, that’s an intense phrase…. And something I’ve thought about a lot this past year. When Whitney Houston died, there was something spoken about this very idea.

"The Whitney I knew was still wondering 'Am I good enough?' 'Am I pretty enough?' 'Will they like me?' It was what made her great, and what caused her to stumble at the end…Escorted by an army of angels to your heavenly father. And when you sing before him, don't you worry. You'll be good enough."

Why is it so easy to let other people get the best of us? Why is it so much easier to believe the lies that society tells us? I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know that “It ain't what they call you, it's what you answer to.”  (W.C. Fields)

It has taken me this past year to truly believe that.

April 27, 2012 I had a breakthrough. My advisor had spoken to me about this idea before, but that day it really hit me. I’M the one that chooses how I respond to other people.

I might work with someone every now and then that isn’t at the top of my list… I might interact with someone on a daily basis that I don’t care for all that much, but guess what? I can choose to treat them like a human being and offer them the respect and decency that was NOT offered to me.

That seems so elementary, but it has become a huge claim to victory for me...that I have the power to be better, and to treat people better, than how that agency treated me. They hold NOTHING over me and I know that now. By treating people with respect, I know that I am the one who has WON (not them!) because let's face it...they couldn’t even do that much.

I know how much I was harmed by the spiteful actions of others and now I’m at the front of the line… Maybe because of my experience, there will be one less person who has to deal with a workplace full of negativity and one less person who will question their own worth on a daily basis.

I’ll end with one of my favorite quotes that I thought about every day last summer:

“Thank you, God, that through my oneness with Christ my actions become a way of giving love rather than trying to earn an ego-building response from other people. I no longer need to depend on how people respond to me, and I escape from evaluating myself in the mirror of human approval."--Ruth Myers

THIS IS MY VICTORY. 


Go God.