This Month’s Picks: June 2015

“I have only one hope in life and that is to be used by God. The more highly we think of ourselves and our abilities and our talents, the less God can use us. I pray that God might humble me so that I understand that I am just an instrument in His hands.”

A. W. Tozer 

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I am sending you greetings from the study cave. It feels like June lasted a year. In the month of June: I graduated, moved, traveled through different states, studied like a beast– it has felt like an eternity.

It was a month of more dreams come true. It was a month of seeing places I hadn’t been to in a long time. I learned nostalgia is strange. I also learned that the world changes so much that it forces our dreams to change with it. Sometimes, we live borrowed dreams. Other times, we live limited by fear. And most importantly, I have learned that life is shaped so much by our choices. We often end up choosing a path among many that changes everything; and sometimes, that path we end up choosing became a choice because it kind of chose us.

Life changes us. People change us. And often, life is about choosing what matters more. We are constantly prioritizing whether we realize it or not. We are constantly choosing.

Too often, we are worried about external things. But when it all comes down to it, the only thing that matters is what we believe in and those we love; the things we hold dear.

June reminded me of how far we have come as a society, and yet how we continue to fall so short, despite the decades and technology.

I hope that as this month comes to a close, we look deep. Let’s look deeply at our world and conflict; let’s look deeply at our desires, choices and priorities; let’s look deeply at scripture and who God wants us to be; let’s look. I think that these days, we seldom even take the time to look.

If necessary, let’s look at our dreams and sync them to our realities; let’s look at the things unseen.

And as always, let’s see fear where it lurks, and defy it.

[Images featured from Tumblr]

“We need women who are so strong they can be gentle, so educated they can be humble, so fierce they can be compassionate, so passionate they can be rational, and so disciplined they can be free.“

Kavita Ramdas, in her commencement speech to Mount Holyoke graduates 

“Ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, ‘God is hard to find.’” Venerable Fulton J. Sheen   

“They broke your heart and you’re left with the question, ‘Am I enough?’ and it will beat against your mind like the ocean crashes against a mountain. Know this, you are enough, and you were right to not delude yourself for someone who could not distinguish what beauty is. You were right to let your heart be open, and one day it will open again, but remember to heal and grow from this pain because the next person who peeks into your soul will know that they are dealing with a heart that is ready to be unleashed. Wait for the person who has never wanted to hold anyone back, but rather wants to run free and wild with you. Never settle for what is easy, find what is good and worth fighting for, and unleash that big heart of yours so that some day, you can guide someone to a land that is better than the places they have been. Be the lighthouse you have always longed for because this world is a raging storm, and we need to let people know that they are not alone in this restless life. You are hurt now, but you are not finished, and you will not be defeated.”

T.B. LaBerge // You can be a lighthouse, even after the storm.

Decades

       “In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term —the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.
It was a decade of protest—church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self.
Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion….It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.
Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore.”

Ravi Zacharias, Recapture the Wonder

A Different World

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Part of growing up is facing a world that is very different from what it was when you were a child.

Countries that once existed now rest in their graves; dreams change; groups move; the arts evolve; what was once great may now be insignificant; what was once valued is now trashed; old conflicts return. And as the world keeps spinning, we have to learn how to deal.

Humanity, however, we realize is always the same. We cling to our same pride, our same battles, our same selfishness, our same games, our same wonder, our same confusion.

How curious that as so many things change, some remain very much the same.

Monday Inspiration: June 22, 2015

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I saw the bar exam countdown calendar. Thirty-something days left. I shuddered. This is insane; the way time has run away, kidnapping our summer. For those still in law school doing internships, their internships are halfway done. It’s that time in the summer when exhaustion settles into numbness, and even Shakespeare in the Park is too long to enjoy.

Summer has officially just begun, but my mind is already escaping to one of my favorite times of the year, autumn. Too soon, I know. But with the way time is running, it will be here before we know it. Maybe all this talk of autumn and summer ending is crazy talk. Maybe. Perhaps, it’s the bar exam anxiety getting to me. Maybe it’s the fact that this is my last summer. Once one enters the working world there are no more semesters, no more summers, and no more long-long, Puerto Rican style holiday breaks… This exciting professional life will begin. A new apartment, a new routine– it will be great, but different. Anyway, what is to come will come, soon enough. Focusing on now, there is summer (which in every Floridian’s mind started before this Sunday in Florida because of the 100-degree weather May and June offered us in the Sunshine State), a slowly building tan on my olive skin, a heat that doesn’t want to let me breathe (causing me to reminisce on the summer when I first moved to Florida)… It’s one of those sunny, hot, half-naked summers in Florida with an occasional evening thunderstorm that turns steamy.

And it’s Monday, on top of all of this badinage and rambling. Monday has been a bit frustrating, tiring and anxiety-filled. I won’t lie. But here we are, at the start of a new week. Let’s make it one of fighting the fear, the exhaustion and the clock.

I am off to review flashcards in a hammock. Got to keep at it, and keep marching up my own mountain with my 70-pound books. When we climb up obstacles, maybe anxiety weighs heavier than everything else in the load. So before climbing, maybe it’s worth exchanging it for hope. Hope doesn’t weigh us down, instead it takes us higher.

Off to climb. I hope your climb this week is one that in the end makes you smile.

Friday Glee: Appreciative Love

“Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’

Need-love says of a woman ‘I cannot live without her’; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection – if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.”

C.S. Lewis

Bar Exam Body Image Goals

By: Gabriela Yareliz

When you sit and study for 16 hours a day, something is bound to change or give. I am not going to lie, it freaked me out a bit. While you can remain healthy, the sedentary lifestyle takes its toll. Mind you, I am not planning on gaining thirty pounds. That is not the point. The point is, I guess, as much as it pains me to say it, that even when we think we are over some insecurities, they somehow pop up to haunt us. The truth is, New York and my work schedule made me thinner, and there is some wiggle room my hips used to fill that I have been pretty afraid to gain back.

So, I have decided that instead of fighting the inevitable and falling into a negative body image mindset, it is time to channel an icon. A woman who doesn’t believe in diets or cutting back on carbs. A woman who has always expressed herself with security and loves fullness. The one and only (and very Italian) Monica Bellucci.

My new motto, as I study for the bar and consume more food than usual to fuel the brain power, is: “Instead of going to the gym, I dress in black – a lot more practical and much more fun,” Monica Bellucci told the Daily Mail.  Maybe, if I play my cards right, I’ll score some Bellucci curves by the end of the summer. Or at the very least, I will walk away with her badass mindset.

Soul Structure

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I live in a wilderness that is quietly loud. And while I may not rest here forever, I carry the wild to my every endeavor.

It’s simplicity mixed with what is natural; mixed with extravagant colors and memorable fragrances.

It’s peace, mixed with hope and belief. It’s miles and miles of freedom and openness. It’s honesty, with its pain and beauty.

It’s purpose, mixed with the clean and dirty. It’s loud, mixed with deafening silence.

It’s the hot and the cold and creatures untold. It’s curiosity mixed with discovery; the obvious and the hidden.

This is the world I carry inside.

Elizabeth Brewster was right–“People are made of places.”

And I am made up of here.