My Bridal Shower.

These are some pictures of my bridal shower today. My bridesmaids did an awesome job. Everything was coffee theme. The favors were chocolate covered espresso beans!! I had so much fun. I can't believe I'm getting married!! It's so crazy. I am blessed with an awesome family and great friends. Today was a blasty blast. I loved it. Thanks girls. You are the best. And special thanks to Melanie Kendrew for the egg mcmuffin maker. Jim is still talking about it.

Inspired by a true story. Based on a written book. A college graduate burns his money, gives his graduate college fund to a charity, and starts hiking America with nothing but a backpack and a jug of water. He sees nature at it's most beautiful state, he meets broken people that he brings to life along the way. But his drive is resentment because of his parents lying to him. He doesn't know how to forgive. His journey is seek the truth.


See this movie. I did.




See what love in its purest form looks like.



Without love, surely we will all die.





Burn your possessions, seek God's beauty, love a stranger who is broken more than you know.


You can do all of these things. But without forgiveness, you are nothing.

Today.

3 years ago today my brother Jesse knocked on my bedroom door.

I had locked it because I had a bottle of pain killers and clouded mind. I was around 89 pounds and scared. I couldn't sit alone in the silence.

Jesse tried getting in. I told him to leave me alone. He knocked again. He screamed that Tommy, our oldest brother, was dead.

I can't explain to you the feeling in my stomach and heart and head. I know now that they have a name for it: Trauma.

I drove to the UPMC Passavant and saw my mom outside in the snow, looking at the ground with her hands still at her sides. I ran over to her looking at her for hope that this was all a mistake and that he was fine. She looked at me and nodded her head.

I dry heaved. There was nothing in my belly to give. I passed all the people crying in the lobby and just walked around, vending machines and public restrooms and water fountains. I sat in a hallway for a few hours wishing it would have been me in that car. I had no appreciation for life. I should have been in that car. It should have been me.


Tommy always bought me the most ridiculous presents-- a refrigerator, a gum ball machine, a Spiderman toothbrush set with gift cards taped to the bottom of it.

He took care of me like big brothers do. He made sure I had the things I needed. The last time I saw him, he was driving me to work. He said, "I'm not going to lose you, Desie."

He was baptized in high school on March 5 in the early nineties.



He was killed by a drunk driver on his way home from getting groceries. On March 5, 2005.


God is beautiful.


I can picture God holding my broken beaten heart, just holding it in his hands and speaking words of love and encouragement and beauty and everything that is good into the open wounds and then sewing it back up and doing it over and over again until my heart is so full of love it could burst and I'd keep breathing.

God gives and He takes away but He never left me. He cried with me when I cried and He blessed me when I wanted to die. I know now that it wasn't me in that car because it was never supposed to be. I hadn't had life yet.


My brother was a lover. He had so much and gave it all away to people around him. At his funeral, there was a line out the door for 2 hours. They had to turn people away.


Today I feel like celebrating. I feel God.
and I have one thing to say:

It is well,

it is well,

with my soul.


I am a lover. I will give until there is nothing left. I will love like it's the only thing in the world worth doing. I will come back to God empty and tired and marvel at His grace. I will be broken again and again until I am called home. I will remember joy in the midst of pain and struggle because I am not alone.


I was never alone.

To Write Love On Her Arms.*

"we are called to be lovers bold in broken places..."

the present.

"I do not know much about this man, but I do know that his whole life conveys this one message: 'anyone at any moment can start a new future.'"
-Robert Garaudy, communist philosopher

so many of us get lost in the idea that Jesus is the past and Jesus is the future. we forget that Jesus is the present more than anything. the risen Christ is now, today... yesterday... forever. He is available for any person at any moment. just like God breathed life into Adam, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into us. "And with that he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven." [John 20:22-23]

this Spirit is the living Christ that we tend to miss. Brennan Manning writes in his book Abba's Child that "pessimism and defeatism are never the fruit of the life-giving Spirit but rather reveal our unawareness of present risenness."

this present Spirit means we can cope with anything, we are not on our own. "I pray that you realize... how vast are the resources of his Spirit available to us." [Eph. 1:18-19]

this present Spirit is freedom. "Now this Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." [2 Corinthians 3:17]

this present risenness is the resurrection. "Know that I am with you always, yes, to the end of time." [Matthew 28:20]


following Jesus is an act of faith in Jesus as the present here and now.

"Christianity is not simply a message but an experience of faith that becomes a message, explicitly offering hope, freedom from bondage, and new realm of possibility."
-Brennan Manning

Little Desiree'.

Here's me at 5 years old. Not much has changed. :]

Story.

So after Donald Miller's talk as well as all the other great speakers at Jubilee, I've been thinking. I've been thinking alot. I've been struggling with this whole salt of the earth idea. I want to be the kind of salt that breaks things down or makes ground fertile. I don't want to just make things taste better. Most of the time salt is just a seasoning that covers up something that doesn't really taste that good at all.

Ok, allow me to elaborate. At Jubilee I learned something pretty profound that I kinda didn't know about before. Jesus calls us to be the salt of the earth. But not the table salt stuff. Actual, physical, big granual salt. Back in the day people used to gather the left over salt from the Dead Sea that washed up on the shore and used it to break down manure piles and to fertile dry, unproductive land. Salt brought life from death. How friggen' cool.


So back to me and my thinking.


I want to live an exciting story. I want to be life in a land of death. I want to glow in dense fog. I want to balance out my cushy life with someone who has no life at all. I run myself to exhaustion with all the stuff that I have to do that I need to stop and think that Jesus is here. And He wants me. And that is all the motivation I need to jump into a ....

time out. Jim just texted me. "can I tell you something?"
my reply... "always."
Jim's reply... "I think you'll understand. I wanna hold you hand."


that made me smile.


back to my thinking.


I want to dive into something that will make me lesser so that He becomes greater. I want to travel around the country with a big sign on my back that says street children in Guatemala are murdered everyday because no one is there to love them. I want to bring salt and love and friendship to the people who have no idea what that looks like. I want that story. I'm standing here in a knee length skirt, high heels and panty hose with a huge runner in the foot. I am so much more than this. I want out. I'm sick of working for a place that says "we love people" but the only reason they pretend to care so much is so they can charge over $200 a night on hotel accomodations. This ain't no salt. This is straight up cayan peppering people out of their own misery. And I want out.


I think I'm going to have a lot more to think about in the next few days.