Inexpressible Joy: "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger": quotes of my present life

Wasssssup, blog world! I've missed you! Would you like to see what's going on in my life? Maybe?

1. What doesn't kill you makes you strongerStand a little taller
Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone
What doesn't kill you makes a fighter
Footsteps even lighter
Doesn't mean I'm over cause you're gone --Kelly Clarkson

This is a secular song (oh dear! :P), but the chorus is really amazingly true about anything tough that we go through. Just because you feel like you're dying doesn't mean you can't get back up and keep fighting. Which bring us to my next quotation...

2. "There is no happiness in comfort. Happiness is bought with suffering. Man is not born for happiness. Man earns his happiness, and always by suffering"-- Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This was in a article I had to write an essay about, an example of the death-by-schoolwork I've been living in lately. I don't have the answers for how to deal with stress...but what feels SO GOOD is to give it all to God. That's hard. That's my only hope!

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

~Emily Dickinson

I don't know if I've mentioned how madly I love Emily Dickinson's poetry. But seriously. It's beautiful. This was actually quoted in the end of a Kiros song that I was listening to earlier--ironically as I was driving past a cemetery. It was definitely a "God thing"-- I realized how ridiculous all the things that I put my hope in are. They will all rot in the ground with my body...to put it not very poetically. The point is, how AM I living my life? Because it's pretty important that I'm putting my hope in the right Person.

4. "Any time we allow someone to displace God as the focus of our affection, we've moved from innocent appreciation of someone's beauty or personality to the dangerous realm of infatuation. Instead of making God the object of our longing, we wrongly direct these feelings toward another human"--Joshua Harris in I Kissed Dating Goodbye.

If you haven't read this book, I dare you--GO BUY IT. It's not goody-two shoes, it's not idealized, it's real. What amazed me about this quote was that it doesn't have to be about guys or girls. ANYTHING that we let separate us from God is wrong--just liking someone or something isn't sin--acting on that feeling by letting the person/thing become more important, more thought of, more focused on that our Savior is the sin. This is something that I've really been struggling with, honestly, but it's gonna be okay in the end. I hope this quote connects with you!

Well, I guess that's me lately! I'll leave you with an awesome song: