False Comforts- inspired by a cardboard box.

As i'm finishing up the last few exams and papers that bind me to my freshman year of college, I'm surprisingly finding a lot of time to think. I love to think. And I love to think in silence. Two of the big things I have learned about my being-sanctified-self during this season. Most of my thinking time during the past few days has been in the midst of packing. The necessity of packing and cleaning has honestly presented me with a great excuse to take frequent study breaks. And the necessity of studying has conveniently made the typically frustrated task of packing, highly therapeudic. It's a lovely game of tug-of-war.

It's a funny thing; moving. Moving out, moving in, moving to and from different cities and "homes." I always thought the learning experiences that came from moving would come after the dust of the actually "move" was settled.  However, I'm quickly learning that there is just as much potential to learn from the actual process itself.

A few days ago, I decided it was time to start packing the "small things." The "decorations." The things I knew I really wouldn't need around for the last few days. As I began pulling pictures off the walls, off the counters, off of my desk, and arranging them into a box, I found myself marveling at them all over again. Some of them had been hanging on the wall, next to my head where I've slept for the last 9 months and I hardly ever noticed them. I found myself carefully wrapping picture frames and strategically placing them between cardboard walls, as if they were my most precious possessions. As if they hadn't sat, collecting dust, for my entire freshman year.

I started to wonder why I even brought them here. Why I took the time to pack them up and drive them hundreds of miles just to sit idley, taking up space, creating obstacles I had to weave around while walking through my 10x10 dorm room. I guess some of it was for decor. To add some color to these bare white walls. But I'm beginning to think that most of it was simply an attempt to feel comfortable. A shot in the dark at making this, at the time, new and scary place feel more like home. But now as I sit on my still not-broken-down futon (there are some things we simply need men for, i'm admitting), in between two bare walls, staring at piles of boxes of these "trinkets" I thought I would need, I'm realizing I'm not feeling any less at home than I did before. I am not any less or any more comfortable, knowing that all these "priceless" memories are folded and tucked away in a box that reads "multipurpose paper, 50% recycled." My life does not lie within those mounds of cardboard. It would not end if one of my vintage owl figurines cracked on the way back to Anderson.

My goal is not to come across as an anti-trinket, anti-photo, anti-possession woman. My goal is simply to express the deepest joy I've found this year, in all of life for that matter, in the best way I know how. Joy lies within a knowledge and understanding of the character of God. The most precious gift we can ever receive is an intimacy with our Creator. It is unmatchable. It is unfailing. It cannot be wrapped in un-used drawing paper, masking taped, and placed within the confinements of cardboard.

Christ is comfort. Christ is home. And best of all, more of Christ is freeing. Seeking a better understanding of the Character of God, of Grace, allows us to see how ultimately satisfying He is above anything that's buying for my attention in this world. As children of God, we were freed by the finished work of the cross of Christ. Not for the possession of our trinkets, or for the stacking of our recycled paper boxes, but for the Glory God is given when we realize we weren't made for this side of Eternity. When we begin to seek above things. When we begin to create space in our hearts for more of Him to reign. When we see that, despite the changing of location, we aren't being sanctified so that we may feel more at home in our earthly realms, but rather, less. 

The Christian life is not about the colorful snapshots we catch and paste to our white walls. In fact, every picture, every splash of color, every montage we've displayed for the world as "us," must come down eventually. And as I've seen over the past few days, sometimes removing theses false "comforts" leaves more damage than it's worth.

Sweetly Broken

Here are my thoughts in regards to the Lord today. They are ever-changing, ever-increasing. But today they are this:

Sweetly Broken

Few moves of yours’, make sense to me.

Few things you know, I believe.

I am a ladybug on a grass blade,

and you are the wind.

I am a centimeter small.

I am quickened with weary worry,

you nestle me plain within your knowledge.

I am a sharp jolt of pain;

a spear in your side.

You are living liquid;

cure to my raging disease.

I am a pond frozen thin like glass,

you are a pulsing hand; warm with blood

and vigorous defeating.

Your knuckles are lead mounds

of gentle fury.

Your hand is on my head.

The dust specs in the sun rays are

your mercies and the coral of the

tree tops is your grace.

Your whispers are tornados to

my enamel.

The cracks of your hands are valleys

for my thoughts.

I am a child tucked discretely

behind your shoulder blade.

Carried up your hill and sprawled

out, face down, beneath your selflessness.

You are a beacon of Hope to my doubt.

Your words are thick blankets of wool

spreading warmth on to my winters

and my eyes are like a newborn’s ,

quaintly adjusted to this Life.

My ignorance is far from blissful,

like the loose brace of a carrier pigeon.

 I am a mess of a woman and

you are far from man.

Yet when I reach, I graze your brow.

Your cheek is of porcelain,

hard as my heart.

I am angered and you are perfection.

I am a callous to your flawlessness

and you are sorely pleased.

Your tears are the matching of

my silence.

Your belt is the sustainment of

my breath.

Your sword is the promise of

my suffering.

And I am sweetly broken;

wondrously torn.

The Young Poet

She referred to me as "the young poet."
Indirectly, I suppose, but there was eye contact.
I sank.
Deep into the cup of my chair,
floating on glassy inexperience,
flawlessly punched.
Even my punches are flawfull.

I am a nothing.
Wondering when something comes,
on a bus or a train,
or on the back of a tortoise.
Ridged with grips to cling to
as if the ride wasn't slow.
It can only get slower.

I wait for wrinkled hands that
know their craft and that shake,
as they scrape graphite knowledge on to
blank slate and screwtapes without care.
They know their purpose,
Lived their purpose,
Hell, cramp with purpose.

I dress in tired colors and
paint my eyes dark shades just to
feel more like them.
She, who is writing of this winter's regret and
an ash-sea floor; all he left her.
The boy who knows the reason why men rape
little girls.
I'm not sad enough.

Wind Slams Doors

Today I am on Sanibel Island, off the gulf coast of the sunshiney state of Florida. I am here on spring break with a handfull of some of my very favorite people. The weather is magnificant. Low 80's, the occasional afternoon rain shower. I've spent the last few days soaking up the warmth to the point of a slight sunburn. And for a girl who wouldn't exactly label herself as a "beach lover", I'd say this is a sweet little get-a-way. Though, I will say, I feel somewhat guilty being on a "break" from my Charleston life. It's not at all a tough one. My school load this semester is particularly light, the community God's placed me in there is a total blessing, I absolutely adore my job, and I feel as though I get more than adequate rest. Not to mention Charleston is lovely enough itself and I graze by more incredibly breathtaking scenery on my runs than most people could anyday. However, seeing that I am here, and God IS sovreign, I suppose I must assume that this is where I'm supposed to be and there is purpose in that.

SO today, while everyone else is having fun on the beach, I am setting myself up for my own fun. The perfect kind of fun for Katelyn Bridges. The fun that involves a beast of a back porch, a comfy cushioned sofa, sun tan toes propped up on a coffee table that hosts a cold glass of lime water, a playlist of my favorite piano instrumentals and a stillness in the Lord, His word, and who he says he is, met with a blank page, a blinking cursor, and anxious fingers. I am home. Despite the somewhat unfamiliar surroundings, I am home. Despite the absence of that sweet comfort I can always grasp in the embrace of those certain few, I am at home.

Earlier today, as I was inhabiting this very same seat, spending some time in conversation with God, I was startled by a loud door slam. Myself and one of my friends were the only ones in the house at the moment, so I assumed it was him. But when I turned around, he was walking out in the hallway with the same somewhat puzzled look on his face that I had. After a few seconds, we realized someone had left the front door standing wide open when they walked outside and the wind must have shut it. The slam echoed through house and the only thing that was more astonishing in that moment than the fact that the wind made such a noise, was the simple comment my friend spoke afterwards. "Hmm...Wind Slams Doors." The poet in me was jumping at the chance to scribble this among the sea of other mental notes of phrases I can't wait to mingle in harmony. However, the daughter of Christ in me, was craving some silence to think through how this could somehow be received as a word from the Lord.

I sought silence and got it. (If you are a college student, you'll understand when I say this is often a tricky thing.)  And in the silence the Lord reminded me of a time when he not only shut a door in my life, but he slammed it. Growing up, there was no doubt in my mind that I would one day be a Clemson Tiger. I went through several stages, the most unimaginable for me now was the years I spent dreaming of being a Clemson cheerleader. Then there was a Geneticist, a YoungLife leader, and the countless other snapshots of myself in orange that I always saw when I thought about my future. However, when time came around for college applications, my prayer was this, in variation. "God, I want to go to Clemson. I've always wanted to go to Clemson. I want to stick around the upstate, continue on working with middle schoolers at Fuse*, be emersed in the wonderful community of NewSpring Anderson, and be "just the right distance away from home to not be too comfortable." So if that's not your plan, if it's just mine, then you're going to have to decline my acceptance. Otherwise, I'm going." So when the time rolled around for us to get our acceptance letters, I was shocked to find I wasn't accepted.
Door=slammed.
Suprisingly, I wasn't too upset. The only slightly confusing aspect was the presence of a few "peep holes." Examples: the Bridge program (a year at a tech school, then I could transfer into Clemson in the fall semester of '11) and some connections my dad had with the engineering department that could've gotten me in fairly easily. But neither of which felt right. I was so humbled by the slam of the door that my family and I had spent 18 years building, that I fell to the floor in submission to God's plan. No pressing desire to look through the peep holes, just a forceful reminder that my plans, for lack of a better word, suck. So by June, I was meeting with other people who would be facilitating the launch of NewSpring's new campus, and by August I was packing up and almost-willingly moving my things to 8 Liberty St. Charleston, SC. During all of this time, I had peace in the Lord and His plan for my future, though to me it was and still is, so unknown.

So today, my question is why isn't decision making always made this simple? Why isn't the voice of God in my life ALWAYS loud enough to force me into submission, without doubt or question? Or is it that He is always speaking at the volume of a door slam, and i'm simply not always in a place where I'm willing to hear him?

Maybe his interest is in making our decisions simple and clear, but most of me, if not all of me, is thinking maybe he is less concerned with the actual decision itself, and far more concerned with my willingness to listen, and hear, and bend into submission at the echo of his voice.

Whether in a door slam, a punch in the gut, an owl on a bridge, or a whisper; the point is, I have His ears. I have the abilty to hear, discern and act, and the volume is somewhat irrelevant.

The Season

Every once in a while, I find myself in this place. This unidentifiable "season," that quite frankly, I do not much enjoy. Normally, it takes being at the latter end of the season for me to see it for it's purpose. But this time, I am wondering if God is willing to teach me sooner. Give me His eyes, while i'm midst the "season," so that his glory may be increased. For me, the process of learning is lived out heavily in writing. So forgive me if this post falls short of any expectations you may have. Because to be honest, I have no expectations but to write and to sort through my thoughts in what will most likely be an unorganized, caotic mess. 
                               
Just love me.

Call me sinner, but throughout my Christian life I have frequently found myself doubting Christ in me. Not necessarily Christ himself (though because I'm human, I've probably been there too) but rather Christ is His daughter, Katelyn Bridges. And not my salvation, just the power of Christ in me to advance the Gospel. Think of it like a questioning of God's right-mindness when he chose me. I think it might had gotten to the point where God was calling me to take a step of faith OUT of my unbelief and into belief in myself as a woman of God, and I failed to take it. For me, it was much easier to wallow around in the shame and guilt and bondage of my past, then it was to just receive grace. Seriously, no one ever told me receiving grace would be hard. I mean even just a small precoursor to the difficulty of comprehending the fact that "God has infintely more grace than I have sin" would've been nice.

All that being said, lately I've begun to brokenly allow God to seap his way past all of the "presentable" places of my heart, the ones that I've so eagerly showed him, and make a gentle home in all the dark corners of my past that I've tried so desperately to forget about myself. This has been a somewhat overwhelming experience. The kind that makes opening the word intimidating and closing it weakening. I am drained of energy. My thoughts are constantly flowing, which makes resting nearly impossible. I am being humbled by the moment.

The other night, as I was drifting in and out of sleep, my phone rang. A call from my past. A call that came with memories of brokeness and emptiness and pain. And as much as I hated the call, I loved what came out of it. For once since accepting Christ in April of 2009, the memories were just memories. They couldn't make me feel ashamed or worthless, or guilty or condemned; all the feelings they brought about for me four years ago. The memories had lost their power. The voice had lost it's power. My past sin had lost it's power over me.

Christ has won. The Gospel, the Gospel, the Gospel of Christ. It is freeing and it satisfies.

Godly womanhood is calling and our steps are far lighter when our feet are chainless.

"But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace." -Psalm 36:11

Gray

Spanish moss, its' choaking shrugs.

BIC's various granite contributions.

Chair-back gray, darker in the curve of crests.

My mothers thining strands,

drained of pigment. Her graying eyes,

weak from the neon chemicals that must be doing

something good. Something gray.

The gray coat drowning childhood bedroom walls with innocence.

Momma painted those, too.

Gray flats on my feet that "bing" as I click my heels in the

gray rain.

Gray light hits the beams that hoist that sail-boat molden bridge,

you know the one.

Gray with freshness; its' roaring strength.

Gray of cracking hands in winter, the tarnished gray that rims my finger

with palace dreaming.

My gray contentment.

The first gray coat of vine charcoal on a blank page;

never black enough.

Gray flakes of clay off his

brown-whale belly.

Eight months removed and still stuck to my shoes.

Gray of haze, blanketing my front porch with the stinch

of an aging man's cubans.

The Minnesota moon; probably still no bigger around than my thumb.

Specs in white knit fabrics, flecs of metal, the pain I never felt.

Thirteen Ways to Look at a Yellow Bead

So our latest assignment in poetry writing was to model a piece after Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird." We were prompted to steer clear of objects that had any sentimental value or could be taken as symbolic for a larger idea. As I sat in my favorite study room on the 3rd floor of my building, (it overlooks the intersection of Liberty and King with such brilliance) I struggled to find an object in my sight that lacked sentimental value or that I didn't treasure for some odd reason. I honestly sat there pondering objects for atleast 15 minutes and it was growing closer to 10pm than I appreciated. So, I opted to get strange. I prayed. Literally asked God to help me pick an object to stare at and reflect on for the next 1 to 2 hours. And though it may not show up in my writing, there was so much purpose in his choice for me. A yellow bead. A tiny, microscopic, yellow bead.

Somewhere in all of our years of being taught how to grow up, we were forced to lose sight of our child-like ability to marvel at the small stuff. Look intently at things the world deems insignificant and wring out every drop of beauty, or disturbance, we can. To form an unexplainable reaction to something we've seen as pointless to react to, and try to give it a voice.

"I will put in the desert
the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive.
I will set the junipers in the wasteland,
the fir and the cypress together,
so that people may see and know,
may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
the Holy One of Israel has created it."
                                -Isaiah 41:19-20

So here's my attempt at being ridiculously descriptive of a meaningless object, and trying not to judge the outcome for beauty.

Thirteen Ways to Look at a Yellow Bead

I

Among a crowded sea of

burnt shag carpet and adolescence,

drowns a single yellow bead.

II

I squint with one eye

And land in a world in which there are many eyes

And many yellow beads.

III

The bead is yellow and it turns

around a fishing line;

a tiny piece of a larger whole.

IV

I hover over a mustard mass

The yellow bead and its’ others

Making one big blob of yellowness

And I stare

V

The green jumps at my eye

And I begin to wonder in my distraction

If yellow was the right choice

Or not

But it’s too late now

VI

The tiny boy with his bubble belly,

Black covered gray with desert dust,

hands me some yellow beads

for they  are nearly falling off his celery-stick wrist.

VII

The chalk dust sticks to the yellow bead

As it scrapes against the border of my board art

And though I am clumsily foreign, they remain intrigued.

VIII

Your wristband beams gold

And you scowl at the yellowness

of the bead you can’t understand the beauty of.

Don’t you know there’s life beyond the borders of

your gated drive?

IX

I know proper words and tricks of tongue

And I could make a name for myself.

I know the pain of parasites but I

know too that the yellow bead is involved

 in what I know.

X

The old man strolls his Sunday route

And stops to put a finger on what’s out of place

in the crest of cobble stone.

He tucks the yellow bead in his trouser pocket

and moves on.

XI

At the sight of the yellow bead

the wide eyed child rejoices

the perfect final touch just before the knot of pretty.

XII

With just one tug, the line is broken

and a stream of flowing ROY G BIV

bounces rhythmically on the hardwood.

Red bead, green bead, black bead

I cannot find my yellow bead.

XIII

The flyer scrapes a power line post

as the townsmen pass by glance-less.

My watch is coated with charcoal,

so I lift my chin to the sky to see

That the sun is standing still,

like a yellow bead.