when you're happy and you know it, clap your hands!!

Whenever I have a down or depressing week(s), I tend to be at my most creative. Lately, thoughts have been coming in and out of my head that I never seem to have the chance to write down. So, in as coherent of a blog as I can write, I will try to recall some of those moments of insight.

For some reason, this week the thought that keeps reoccurring is to live at the edge of your emotions. Simply put, don't hold back. Why do we have a tendency to hide how we really feel or act in certain ways to mask our emotions?

So I challenge you (the one reader I have), to live at the edge of your emotions.

If you feel like laughing; laugh loud, long, and until your belly aches. If you feel like crying; cry, sob, weep, and let the tears flow. If you feel happy; be joyous, tell people your good news, dance, sing, praise God. If your heart aches, mourn, grieve, allow it time to ache. If your mad, be mad, though not for long, get angry, punch a pillow. If you feel silly, be silly, giggle, crack jokes, be a dork. Just allow yourself to have emotion.

In our society we try so hard to fight emotion. We take pills, we cover our faces, we go to another room. We act as though know one should know how we truly feel. We act as though we are "fine", because heaven forbid we ever get down or feel sad or become emotional.

We hold back because we don't want to let others know that there is a problem. We are all fighting to be strong for each other, but in doing so we forget how to just feel. To just be. To just laugh, cry, get mad, or be silly.

Also, I challenge you, and me because I struggle with this so much, to allow others to see your down emotions. Its a lot easier to be happy and goofy with someone than it is to be sad or depressed.

What is life if we don't live it fully? Why do we have emotions if we are just going to mask them?

God gave us feelings, he gave us tear ducts, funny bones, smiles, frowns, and laughter for a reason.

Try it, don't hold back, go for it. You will feel much better when its all over. Promise.

Never ceases to amaze me

I have a fitting saying for my life at the moment (it goes with the weather as well), When it rains, it pours.

I feel like everything is just crashing down around me. People are getting arrested, my great grandmother died, and marriage turns out to actually be hard at times.

Lets start at the point that this all started, last monday I got a call that my great grandmother had passed away that morning. Now, most people may think because she was my great-grandma, that I probably wasnt close to her. BUT, due to the young mothers in my family she was only 89 (if that requires an only in front of it) and she is the reason I came to Christ. She was more like a grandmother than anything. She put me through high school at a Christian school (at a cost of like 4500/yr) because she thought I would thrive there. She helped my mother and I financially on many occasions and she cared for our futures. So, I miss her and wish I would have been a little less selfish with my time and spent more time with her. Bad day/week 1.

Next off, I come home to find out that I have some serious problems at work, I have a kid about to be in the hospital and another whose parent was just arrested. Awesome. Burn out is supposed to happen after like a year, not a month. Social work.

Then, marriage gets hard. Nothing monstrous or terribly bad, just coupled with everything else creates more tension in my life than I prefer. Dont worry, Im not badmouthing my husband and we aren't fighting. Marriage just has its downs sometimes, and right now is one of them. Life happens and things come up. Life.

Oh and the wabash is flooding, possibly for a week or two, which means I could have to work from home for the next week or so, and I had a ton of paperwork to do this week. Floods.

So there is my little rant. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day. Maybe.