there is beauty in imperfection

Cecilia // 19 // All about that Jesus

[both-seeker-and-sought]

prayer

Hey y’all, I got a major prayer request: a couple I know, and their families, could use some massive, massive prayer tonight. 

Nate used to babysit me when I was like four, I think. After years, he and Amy got pregnant with twins, but quite early on, she started experiencing a lot of complications unrelated to the pregnancy. At 28 weeks, she gave birth to twin girls, Libby Sunshine and Prairie Tigerlily, via emergency c-section. Together, they weighed three pounds and were rushed into one of the best neonatal ICU’s in the country, right in Boston.  Within a few days, Nate and Amy got devastating news: she had stage 4 colon cancer. It has spread to her liver, and more. I looked up the survival rates. They are lower than ten percent. About a week ago, little Libby had to undergo some major surgeries to relieve pressure in her brain, but after a few hours, she slipped away in her parents arms.  Today, I got the news that Prairie has also gone home. Her parents made it to her just in time to say goodbye, as Amy had been undergoing her first round of chemo.

If you could, would you just spend a few minutes in prayer over the next few weeks for these sweet people? They had already been through a lot together before this latest tragedy, and they need comfort now more than ever. 

If you’d like to read more about their story or contribute a little towards medical expenses, check out their YouCare Page. 

Love and Thanks,

Schuyler

[breezeymama]

Please pray, brothers and sisters.

[both-seeker-and-sought]

Thank you, dear friends, all of you who have been keeping this family in your prayers in the last two nights. Your generosity of heart is so profoundly encouraging.

Today, I turned around in church and saw Nate’s mom, Melanie, sitting behind me in church. After the service, my mother went over and put her arms around this sweet woman of God. What a testimony that lady is, even now.

She shared how she spent nearly every waking hour parked between the two incubators that held Libby and Prarie, a hand on each plastic dome as she lifted these precious ones up in prayer, and how she got to hold each of them as they slipped away.

And she told us in a little more detail how gravely serious Amy’s condition really is. My experiemce with oncologists, as a rule, is that push treatment after treatment until the eleventh hour. If one round of chemo stops working, they try again, and even into the final days, they encourage experimental treatments. So, for an oncologist to suggest, upon diagnosis, that a patient go home for palliative or hospice care, you know it’s serious. When two more doctors suggest the same, even more so.

Finally, one physician said, “I believe in miracles. I believe God can heal this. Let’s give it a shot.” And so they started treatment, trusting that God would work a miracle.

I don’t know, brothers and sisters, if God is going to heal Amy, but I do believe He can, and that He listens and He cares.

So pray, dear hearts, pray.

[medeae]

You stand red-handed. You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grass What are you supposed to do with all this loss?

Margaret Atwood, from “Down”, Morning in the Burned House  (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)

[yesdarlingido]

Love is not making someone feel good; it is not avoiding conflict; it is not merely getting along. Love is a commitment to see Christ grow in the heart of the other by offering a strength that disrupts patterns of idolatry and a tenderness that invites reconciliation and hope. Love will be tender and long-suffering; it will also be bold and wounding. If it involves one without the other, then it is an offer of something less than God’s character. We are told that God is a God of mercy and strength (Psalm 62:11). To love others is to give them a taste of the full character of God.

Dan Allender (via both-seeker-and-sought)

[quotes-shape-us]

But the man who is not afraid to admit everything that he sees to be wrong with himself, and yet recognizes that he may be the object of God’s love precisely because of his shortcomings, can begin to be sincere. His sincerity is based on confidence, not in his own illusions about himself, but in the endless, unfailing mercy of God.

Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island  (via yesdarlingido)

[estaloo]

how to forgive

“Most of the wrongs done to us cannot be assessed in purely economic terms. Someone may have robbed you of some happiness, reputation, opportunity, or certain aspects of your freedom. No price tag can be put on such things, yet we still have a sense of violated justice that does not go away when the other person says, “I’m really sorry.” When we are seriously wronged we have an indelible sense that the perpetrators have incurred a debt that must be dealt with. Once you have been wronged and you realize there is a just debt that can’t simply be dismissed — there are only two things to do.

The first option is to seek ways to make the perpetrators suffer for what they have done. You can withhold relationship and actively initiate or passively wish for some kind of pain in their lives commensurate to what you experienced. There are many ways to do this. You can viciously confront them, saying things that hurt. You can go around to others to tarnish their reputation. If the perpetrators suffer, you may begin to feel a certain satisfaction, feeling that they are now paying off their debt. 

There are some serious problems with this option, however. You may become harder and colder, more self-pitying, and therefore more self-absorbed. If the wrongdoer was a person of wealth or authority you may instinctively dislike and resist that sort of person for the rest of your life. If it was a person of the opposite sex or another race you might become permanently cynical and prejudiced against whole classes of people. In addition, the perpetrator and his friends and family often feel they have the right to respond to your payback in kind. Cycles of reaction and retaliation can go on for years. Evil has been done to you — yes. But when you try to get payment through revenge the evil does not disappear. Instead it spreads, and it spreads most tragically of all into you and your own character.

There is another option, however. You can forgive. Forgiveness means refusing to make them pay for what they did. However, to refrain from lashing out at someone when you want to do so with all your being is agony. It is a form of suffering. You not only suffer the original loss of happiness, reputation, and opportunity, but now you forgo the consolation of inflicting the same on them. You are absorbing the debt, taking the cost of it completely on yourself instead of taking it out of the other person. It hurts terribly. Many people would say it feels like a kind of death.

Yes, but it is a death that leads to resurrection instead of the lifelong living death of bitterness and cynicism… If they simply refuse to take vengeance on the wrongdoer in action and even in their inner fantasies — the anger slowly begins to subside. You are not giving it any fuel and so the resentment burns lower and lower… Forgiveness must be granted before it can be felt, but it does come eventually. It leads to a new peace, a resurrection. It is the only way to stop the spread of the evil.” 

– Tim Keller, The Reason for God

[culturenlifestyle]

[heavenlyblessings]

[ceciliatwo]

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! CHRIST HAS COME!!!!

[drownmydisbelief-deactivated201]

Don’t bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior

C.S. Lewis (via makingplansdrawingmaps)

[craigtowens]

There is no secret of the heart which our actions do not disclose.

Moliére (via both-seeker-and-sought)

[scout-joy]

[eyeswideopenblog-deactivated201]

The world screams ‘We are what we do, we are what we have, we are what people think about us!’ Christ whispers ‘You are mine and I am yours.’

Mike Donehey  (via arrowandthought)

[ceciliatwo]

Facebook is a breeding ground for jealousy

[ceciliatwo]

Mom taught me how to make apple pie this afternoon :)

[ceciliatwo]

tumblr purpose & authentic christianity

Tonight, I went through old posts and edited his name out. 

It’s only fair to him and the people who find this tumblr through his tumblr, or through mutual friends. For anyone else who who will read those posts here on out, it’s unnecessary to know his identity. 

I know who I’m writing about. The people who know us know who I’m writing about. At this point, more people than it involves know who I’m writing about. 

The important thing is that my story is told openly. Not for a specific individual to be judged. This isn’t the space for assigning blame and meting out guilt, whether to him or me. This is my personal space on the interwebs to speak my truth, where I boldly say what I want to say in spite of feeling that what I have to say doesn’t matter. But I don’t write just for myself - I write for you guys, the people who read my tumblr. I write for others in the hopes that someone out there will feel less alone and hopefully encouraged. And second, so that someone who is reading carefully and listening very closely will learn from my experiences. 

Until about a year ago, I felt like God and theology were very abstract ideas that were mystical and ethereal, completely removed from my everyday reality of piles of schoolwork and family conflict and practicing piano and struggling to make friends and being overwhelmed with becoming the ideal college applicant. I dearly wished for real life examples of how exactly I was supposed to walk the Christian walk. Of how to do Christianity right.

So I offer up my own life as an example: an insider’s view into what it looks like when a real suburban teenage girl does her best to give everything she has in order to know and love God. Maybe this way, other people will learn sooner than I did that God is not a mystical, ethereal, invisible, far-away, removed being. Instead, God is ever-present, real, tangible, and knowable. God’s love can be experienced in your real life if you have the eyes to see it, and it will transform your heart and reshape your actions if you let it. 

And maybe this way, other people will learn sooner than I did that the true surrender that Christ demands from each of His followers is surrender. Surrender of your own free will to choose how you want to spend your time, what career you want to pursue, who you’re hanging out with this weekend, the location you’re studying at this afternoon, everything!! That every single decision of the hundreds before you every day are no longer yours to make, but Christ Jesus’s. And in this complete, absolute surrender, you find true freedom. Because God doesn’t take something away without giving you something in return. And sometimes, when you give Him something, he gives it back to you, whether immediately or in the future. Because at the end of the day, God is like the most loving parent in the world who does everything in their child’s best interest. That’s why we call Him “Father.”

For most of my life, I was asking the wrong question. I asked, “What should I do to be a good Christian?” But the question I should have asked is, “Does God love me?” 

The answer to that is: YES, more than you’ve ever been loved in your entire life and more than you’ll ever be loved. An infinite God that exists beyond the physical world, that is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient loves you enough to voluntarily sacrifice the person that meant the most to Him because you were worth it to Him. what the?! I mean, I’ve heard a lot of crazy things in my life, but a divine being, the GOD OF THE UNIVERSE, sacrificing His son for me???? because he LOVES ME???? and this is real????

The only vaguely appropriate response to that kind of love is Christianity.

[ceciliatwo]

In love with this song so much. listening to it on repeat ~ 

I feel pure joy when I sing it. This band stands for everything I think worship should be about: using musical worship as a springboard for a life of worship, day in and day out. And just worshipping out of pure joy and happiness and overflowing thankfulness of God’s love for us and how we’re transformed by HIs presence moving in our lives, how we’re made new by knowing and loving Him. 

btw, Zealand worship also does the best cover of Good Good Father :D even better than Bethel, I swear.

[amaliaandrade]

[ceciliatwo]

a reminder to stay vulnerable in both my writing and interactions with other people.

i may be an artist with words, but i don’t need to heal my own wounds by myself. Jesus heals them, and if He chooses to use art in that process, then praise be to Him.

[ceciliatwo]

Ahoy Followers!

I’ve never really broke the fourth wall until now, but I extend warm greetings to you all :D

For those of you who’ve been around for years, thank you. Thank you for sticking it out with me for so long and putting up with all of my quote and photo reblogs, along with the giant confessional text posts that come every so often. 

And to all you newcomers, hello! Thanks for giving me a chance and for hitting that follow button. Welcome to my corner of the interwebs.

Most of the original pieces I write stay in my drafts folder (43 posts in there that will probably never see the light of day) or in my journal - writings that only my eyes have seen. I prefer to keep most of my writing private, but sometimes, there are things I want to say that I desire to share with the public eye. With you! Internet strangers, faraway friends, and nearby acquaintances - anyone who wants to hear my voice, really. The purpose of this tumblr is to create a safe space for me to publicly post my honest thoughts, feelings, emotion analysis, writings, philosophizing, and general musings of both the sensical and nonsensical sort. It might not always be pretty or even logical, but I’ll try to keep it real. 

So that’s roughly what you can expect around here. Making my voice heard by other people is the whole reason this tumblr blog exists. 

Something in me believes that my voice is important enough for me to try to make it heard somehow. It’s lonely writing for an audience of one. I’m tired of keeping my writing to myself, locked away in moleskines and tumblr draft folders and files on my hard drive. I want the world to hear me, even if my voice doesn’t carry very far.

I suppose at this point, I should introduce myself. Hi. My name is Cecilia Too. And yes, that really is my last name, and yes, my username is a play on it. I love Jesus a lot so I’ll probably be talking about him a lot here. I’m a sophomore at the University of Washington intending to study Biology. I’m leading a small group this year with my beloved college fellowship, Intervarsity Undergraduate (IVU). When I’m not hanging out with people or trying to get schoolwork done, I like to read books: literary fiction, YA fiction, Christian nonfiction, literary criticism, books on philosophy, and pretty much anything that catches my eye. I also really enjoy papercrafts like making cards. And I like to write. As for what exactly, that’s something I’m still figuring out. So far, I’ve written a few poems, awful short stories, and a lot of journal entries, all of which are unpublished save one poem. We’ll see where I go from here. 

Welcome aboard, fellow sailors. Whether you have traveled long or briefly with me, I cordially invite you to stay aboard a while longer. We have sailed through calm waters and stormy seas, but the journey has only just begun. There are miles to go before we sleep.

All aboard, mateys!