evieroo

Some things take effort. Things like finishing a degree, getting fit, eating healthy, your spiritual life. You add to them every day little by little and not so suddenly, after some time you realise you’re closer to where you want to be. It’s called perseverance.  I struggle with perseverance. I always have an excuse. Right now, I’m supposed to be studying for my exams but I’m writing this. When I’m not, I’m watching Brooklyn 99 and even if watching tv shows usually helps me study, 95% of the time that’s just my excuse to procrastinate even more. It’s tough stuff to persevere sometimes, especially after 6 years of uni, but that’s just another excuse because this started well before uni :P. Honestly sometimes it feels like I’m swallowing a bowl of nails when it comes to persevering.  My personal relationship with God has definitely been the area of my life where I’ve persevered the least in the past. Only recently its come to my attention that it doesn’t need a million gran

Sometimes there’s things you don’t want to do even when you know it is the right thing to do. Your heart just doesn’t want to. If we spent our lives following what our heart wants we’d end up in a deceptively wicked place because the way of the heart is deceptively wicked. We’d be swaying back and forth and wouldn’t go forward in our journey. I used to argue with my mum about doing the right thing. I had the epitome of the classic rebellious teenager attitude. I argued that I didn’t want to be fake so I should be behaving on the outside as I feel on the inside. She said I should behave correctly on the outside even if I didn’t want to on the inside, because atleast half of me was doing what was right. I thought it was ridiculous! The hypocrisy! But as I grew up I realised that sometimes you just have to do the right thing even when there’s nothing in you that wants to. That’s what they called obedience. (Disclaimer: obviously there are exceptions to this and we need to be c

Obedience in the Bible means to have a hearing heart that is intent on doing whatever God asks from us. Most importantly, a hearing heart that is rooted in love. I must admit that obedience was once the word I hated most in the bible. The word I ran from when I was a flighty little kid. The word I rolled my eyes at when I was an emotional teenager that already knew what was best, clearly. The word I skimmed over and ignored when I moved out of home and started uni. I mean what harm could come from a little bit here and a little bit there? Surely this was a flexible thing.  "It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." - C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1).

According to the Royal Children’s Hospital’s guidelines on pain management in infants, small amounts of sweet solutions may be used to reduce pain and distress during minor procedures in infants (1). This is because the taste is pleasant on the tongue. I’m going to apply this, not based on any evidence based research, to us, now, today, on RUOK day. Since we were all babies once, I’m sure that there’s a baby in all of us that could use some sweetness to numb the pain. The theme this year will be, "Whatcha gon do with that dessert?” (Recommendations at the end!) Suicide has the onion effect.  In the wake of RUOK day more suicides have been occurring around me than any other time of year. A friend of a friend, a mother or father of a friend, a friend. When a person is affected, all the layers of social contacts around them are shaken too. Suicide creates confusion.  Like most unexpected death you wonder but by far the most common question related to sui

When our motivation is GOD and just not OUR self improvement the whole plot changes. Its no longer a drive to become a better version of yourself, which will eventually drain everything from you. You don't go to God to make yourself better for this world, to be more successful or more likeable. You go to God for who God is. In this you find a drive to become God’s version of yourself because you believe God is good and knows all things.  It happened several times that even going to God was about making MYSELF better, more likeable, more agreeable. Go to God again and again and again until going to him is for him, not for you.  This automatically means you are striving for the best version of yourself that can ever exist, and you know as soon as you reach this truth that at this moment God has worked a perfect work in you; all your quirks, all your weaknesses and failures, he knows them and he knows you. Every dark corner you hide from the world, he knows it. And he loves a

When I was running yesterday, I thought about how God made this body.  There is a way that our body functions. It has weaknesses, emotions, desires and impulses. It was made with those. We eat the food we want to eat, we treat people how we want to treat them and we live the way we want to live. We go the way we think is right toward the destination we set up with the map we create. All of this is influenced by the media and our culture and the other voices in our ears. We’re slaves to our desires and our fears. The whole journey becomes all about what we want. But following what we want just follows the course of this physical body and sometimes, a lot of the time, what you want isn't what's good for you. Sometimes it feels like I’m   forcing a body that naturally depreciates in value to appreciate and I’m doing it my way. Im just a human and I’m living this life for the first time, how am I supposed to know what is good for me? I don’t. In God we have a stable fo

To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one,  not even an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries;  avoid all entanglements.  Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.  To love is to be vulnerable. - C.S.Lewis 

When his baby son was sick he lay on the ground, fasted and prayed But God was, as always, bound to have his way. He still wondered whether the Lord would be gracious,  For he’d followed him and fought his battles through the ages. Then his innocent baby son died,  to never again return to his side.  Then he washed and from the ground arose,  He ate food and changed his clothes,  And he went into the house of the Lord and worshipped. Through his sadness and hurt, Through the days of laying in the dirt, He went into the house of the Lord and worshipped. After all of the faithfulness of the Lord to him through his life, After his own manipulation and indiscretions with Uriah’s wife. He went into the house of the Lord and worshipped. This was, after all, the Lord he leaned on from before his birth,  The Loving father who’d always been kind and just, foremost and first. For the plans of a man’s heart are many, we’re often lead by pain-

Break our hearts and bring us down. If that's what it takes for us to look at you and see, There’s no point in our animosity. There’s no space for hatred. There’s no space for lies. There’s no space for judgement, jealousy and impatient sighs. Someone might die tomorrow. There’s no more time. Someone might die, someone who, yesterday, was fine. Help us to see each other the way you do. Help us to look beyond ourselves. Help us to remember the beautiful memories collecting dust on our shelves. Remind us t o love each other, as you have loved us. Remind us that we are one big family, That we need every organ to function, for through the blood of christ we are the body. - evieroo

The vine needs to suffer. Going down into this earth-fighting to survive among stones, among the lime rock-this is what gives it its from. Its taste. Its unique character. These grapes will create a wine few other vineyards can compare with not because their life was easy, but because they had to struggle to survive.  The vine  needs  to suffer? To be at its best, it needs to suffer, yes. And fight. I’m sorry for it, then. No creature should have to bear pain.  Pain is part of this life. No one can escape suffering. Not the vine, nor we humans, as you well know, my lady. But what if we are like the vine and that affliction only makes us better?  Consider, my lady, I’m the gardener and I know what the vine needs in order to thrive. You only see the stripping, but I cut the vine in order to restore it. I take away from it to enrich it. You hold in your hand a withering branch and that’s all you see now, but I know that I have given the vine a more abundant life. Tw

Over time we let the world make us less compassionate, more bitter. Going into the medical field it feels like an inevitable destination, not always the one we hope to reach and never the one we want to remain in. The bitterness that built up was an accumulation of several things, realisations that- Life isn’t fair. Good people get bad deals and bad people get good ones. Life, Love and Death don't discriminate between sinners and saints. They come for all of us. Everyone has some kind of suffering, some pain that no one else can do anything about. People aren't always as nice as you believe they should be. Sometimes "friends" aren't very friendly. Not everyone will like you. And the ones that do sometimes won’t as well. If you love people too much they can hurt you too much and it’s not always clear whether it’s worth it, even when you’ve been told it is.  You won’t always understand why. People enjoy labelling you because it helps them think they

Proverbs 14:10 (KJV)  Although I’ve read proverbs before, the reason I looked into this passage today is because I came across it in The Pilgrim’s Progress. Christiana, her four boys and Mercy are going through the Shadow of Death with Great Heart as their guide when they quote this verse. Proverbs 14: 10  The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy. The writer of proverbs means those times when you feel like no one can understand the pain you are going through. Our hearts know their own bitterness but no person, no matter how intimate, no matter how close or like-minded they may be, can see into the depths of our heart. There are many dark corners, knees falling to the ground, heads bowed and tears shed that even our best friend does not know and may not ever understand. Although now it’s become clear that being vulnerable with others is vital to the human connection, I’ve also learnt that it’s okay that they don’t fully and 

A line of cold sweat ran down his face. The same idea was occurring to everyone on board. “We shall never get out, never get out. He’s steering us wrong. We’re going round and round in circles. We shall never get out.” Lucy leant her head on the edge and whispered, “Aslan, Aslan, if ever you loved us at all, send us help now.” The darkness did not grow any less, but she began to feel a little - a very, very little - better. “After all, nothing has really happened to us yet,” she thought. “Look!” There was a tiny speck of light ahead, and while they watched a broad beam of light fell from it upon the ship. It did not alter the surrounding darkness, but the whole ship was lit up as if by searchlight. Lucy looked along the beam and presently saw something in it. At first it looked like a cross and at last it was an albatross. It circled three times around the mast and then perched for an instant. It called out in a strong sweet voice what seemed to be words though no one unders