Life.

This is not for you, it is for me.

Life is such thin fragile thing, and most of the time I forget that. I act like what people think of me is going to matter for centuries instead of brief moments. I would do better to remember how incredibly transient and frail my little life is.

Life is too short to not be me. I have about sixty years left at most and I could even possibly have less than a day left.

So I want to do things and say things and actually live, even if that means risking people misunderstanding and not liking me, because the only way you avoid criticism is to do and be nothing.

And I’m so weary of hiding who I am because of a long list of silly fears.

My name is Ming,

And I am loved much more than I believe that I am and so are you. You see God, loves and likes us an awful lot way more than we think he does, not because we’re that cool or awesome but simply because he is that good. I want this to be my anthem.

I want to believe deep down in my core that grace changes people, I want to believe deep down that grace will change me. I am loved and I want it sink down, down, down into my bones until it becomes so much a part of me.

I want to believe that grace is big enough and wide enough for even me.

I am odd and I love Jesus. I like books and all the words they carry. I smell old books and I swoon. I am tall, a dreamer and an idealist. Trees make me want to dance and climb them, I've made friends with all the flavors of the wind, and I am a big fan of watermelon, cinnamon rolls, and laughter.

I am broken and worn and torn and bleeding.

I’m a commingling of darkness and light. I do wrong things and I do right things for wrong reasons. I pass buckets of grace around and then refuse to accept it myself because I don’t think I deserve it, because I know better. I am a firstborn and I beat myself up often.

I write but I only know how to write from the spaces between my ache.

I’m twenty plus three and in a handful of months I’ll change the three to a four. This means if I live to die at “old age” I have approximately 60ish years left on earth, and that’s assuming I don’t die from cancer or in a car wreck or fire or some freak accident involving man eating snails.

This means that most of the things I spend my time worrying about, honestly don’t matter, because at the end of the day I’ll either be laying in a pretty wood box with my face painted like a clown or encased a little ceramic jar as a small dusty pile of ashes.

This means that I can either use these moments I have left trying to be someone else, or I can be myself. God doesn’t call me to be an angel, He calls me to be His.

One day I will die. It won’t matter how much money I had or how smart I was or any of the million silly things we use to ascribe worth to people.

What will matter is how I lived, how I loved, and what the God who spoke me into being thinks of me.

And my Father is awfully fond of me. (grin)