Steps towards the horizon...

A ratty-haired, bruised-kneed, chaotic adventurer trying her best to love people and to love God as she goes along...

[salty-inc]

Gonna tell y’all what I can hear now that I got my hearing aids

[salty-inc]

Birds! They chirp and it’s so beautiful.

[salty-inc]

Far away cow moos

[salty-inc]

My friend has this is his back yard and to say I cried is an understatement.

[salty-inc]

My best friends singing voice

[salty-inc]

Chickens: *chicken noise*

Me, sobbing:

[salty-inc]

The filter for my fish tank! Bubble bubble bubble

[salty-inc]

I sit in the bass section in band. Today I could clearly hear the flutes up at the front! They’re not great, but I can finally hear them!

[salty-inc]

The sound of walking in sand.

Soft but kinda crunchy? Very nice sound 10/10

[salty-inc]

Me playing guitar for the first time. Took the hearing aids out. Not a very good sound… yet

[salty-inc]

Tree leaves in the wind. I got a little spooked at first because it’s 1 am and I’m alone in the park but it’s a real good sound.

[salty-inc]

Bees

Let me say, it was really fucking terrifying walking past the flowering tree in my backyard and hearing zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz coming from it.

[salty-inc]

“sunlight” by Hozier

I sat in my car alone while listening to it. I knew it would be special but wow, that was a religious experience.

[salty-inc]

Their hooves make sounds in the grass but they are completely silent. Beautiful creatures. Beautiful sound

[salty-inc]

Pine needles and pine cones make crunchy sounds!!! Oh my! Very nice

[salty-inc]

Colored pencils make a real nice scratch noise when I’m drawing. I didn’t know they did that

[salty-inc]

I forgot to add this is the beginning! But that little sniffing noise that dogs make when they’re smelling the air or the ground? Wonderful!

[salty-inc]

OCEAN!!!!!!

[unkaglen]

When you look into the vast, gaping unknown future, it’s easy to become fearful, anxious, and worried. Then suddenly your present is as bad as you worry your future might be. God is calling you to a life of passion, today. Your future life will look a lot like the life you live today. Remember: those who seek, will find what they’re looking for. Those who ask, will have their answer. And to those who knock, the door will be opened.

Unka Glen (unkaglen.tumblr.com)

[unkaglen]

God likes you. Well, yeah, He loves you, so there’s that. But God truly delights in you. He made you, and every inch of you is adorable to Him. Okay, yes, He doesn’t like everything you do, and neither do you, so whatever. But God doesn’t just put up with you, He actually likes you. God is your biggest fan. He likes your style. He thinks you’re funny, He likes the way you dance, and He loves just being together and talking about anything and everything.

Unka Glen (unkaglen.tumblr.com)

[i-wildest-dreams]

[cute-animals-only]

[unkaglen]

YOU ARE FORGIVEN! How will you live with that? A fork in the road opens before you. You can choose to live like you’re not forgiven, and live in the darkness of legalism, pointless drama, and the failure to meet self-imposed expectations. Or you can embrace the humility that comes from knowing that you needed forgiving, the peace from knowing you have it, and the thankfulness from knowing God was pleased to give it.

Unka Glen (unkaglen.tumblr.com)

[unkaglen]

Your amazing future

Let me tell you just one thing about your future: you don’t know. God is moving pieces around on the board that you can’t see. Opportunities will come from nowhere. Blessings will come disguised as curses. Your plans, to the extent that they aren’t God’s plans, will fail. You will find yourself at the shores of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army bearing down on you, and before you even get over being terrified, you will find yourself on that far shore watching that same army being swept away.

God will make a way out of no way. You will go through the desert ‘til you think desert is all there is, and suddenly the Promised Land will heave into view. You think the way it is now, is the way it always will be? God is not powerless to help you, and you are not just another person in His eyes. 

Offer your busted up life, your shrimpy dreams, your “safe” goals, your broken and weary and lonely heart, and you will feel His mighty hand lift you up. You will be taken on a journey where people walk on water, and storms are silenced with a word, and where it’s not about your weaknesses, it’s about His strengths.

[luna---belle]

If you inherently long for something, become it first. If you want gardens, become the gardener. If you want love, embody love. If you want mental stimulation, change the conversation. If you want peace, exude calmness. If you want to fill your world with artists, begin to paint. If you want to be valued, respect your own time. If you want to live ecstatically, find the ecstasy within yourself. This is how to draw it in, day by day, inch by inch.

Victoria Erickson  (via thursdays-at-the-coffeeshop)

[unkaglen]

Will your life matter? If you leave it up to the world, the answer will be no. If you leave it up to God, the answer will certainly be yes.

Unka Glen (unkaglen.tumblr.com)

[unkaglen]

Avoiding the jagged rocks

epoque13 asked: Hello Unka Glen! I’ve been in a relationship for about a year plus, and before we got together, my boyfriend was not a strong Christian, and I prayed for him to rise up, and he really caught the fire. However, I started to fear that he would get busy, and it would mean less time for each other. How do I overcome these insecure thoughts and be a support and encourager for him, instead of feeling this fear? [edited for length]

Unka Glen answered: Well, on a practical level it’s easy to sit down and schedule the time you need to connect with each other, and catch up on new developments, and, much more importantly, to have extended make out sessions (Unka Glen knows how it goes down, yo). But none of that will really address the underlying problem: fear.

You’re doing what people in addiction recovery call “finding the fear”. This involves trying to navigate through life by asking yourself, “what should I be afraid of?”. It turns out to be pretty seriously unhealthy to spend valuable time and energy trying to avoid a looming disaster that isn’t really here yet.

Think of it like this: imagine you’re standing in the bow of a moving boat (that’s the front-part, yo), and imagine that it’s the middle of the night, with nothing but a candle to light your way.

You could lean out over the rail with your dim little candle, and strain forward trying in vain to see if you’re about to run aground on jagged rocks, and poke a hole in your boat, and sink, and then try to swim away, and then maybe get eaten by a shark before you ultimately drown …or…

You could look up and see that precisely because it is night, you can see the stars. You can light your candle, take out your nautical charts to see where you want to go, and use the stars to find your direction.

Good and healthy living isn’t about trying to squint into the darkness, gripped by terror, it’s about using the Word of God like a map to chart where you want your life to go, and it’s about looking up to Heaven itself to get your sense of direction.

We shouldn’t be asking, “what should I be afraid of?”, we should ask, “how good could this thing be?”, “what’s holding me back?”, and “what am I missing here, Lord?”

[getmotivatedtoday]

[unkaglen]

5 things you can know --for sure-- about your future

1. Wherever you’re pointed, that’s where you’ll end up. Don’t bother worrying if you’ll be able to do whatever it is that you that you want to do, keep knocking on that door long enough, and sooner or later, it’ll open. The problem for most people is, they spend their whole life trying to see if they can do something, and don’t take a second to ask themselves what they’ll do with it when they get it. Or even why they’re chasing it.

2. There are no risks in following God’s plan. Risky and dangerous are situations where we feel the need for a “Plan B”, in case God doesn’t come through for us. Plan B has a way of becoming Plan A real quick.

3. It gets sweeter and sweeter. If you keep walking with the Lord, if you keep growing closer to Him, it gets sweeter and sweeter. Sure, the challenges get bigger, the stakes get higher, the adventures get wilder, but I promise you. Underneath it all, that intimacy with God gets so good. 

4. As soon as you stop needing stuff, you’ll start receiving it. If you feel like you absolutely need to be dating someone, the Lord might just end up blocking that path. In your loneliness, you turn to God, realizing that you should only depend on Him that way. And so you learn to lean on God. That’s when you meet the hottest person you ever saw, AND they love Jesus, AND they’re looking at you right now from across the room. And that’s when you give the Lord a big ol’ prayer high five. Like I said, sweeter and sweeter.

5. God’s plans are bigger than your mistakes. Let’s say you head down the wrong path. God is bigger than that. Let’s say you totally screw everything up from the beginning and make a huge mess. Who doesn’t? God can fix it. Sure, it’s worth figuring out how to get things right in the first place, after all, why waste all that time and go through all that suffering? But as long as you’re on the green side of the grass, God has something important for you to do.

[stephaniegraceofficial]

Hold everything with open hands. I don’t think we are ever allowed to grab hold of anything or anyone as though they matter more than the kingdom of heaven. When you hold relationships with open hands, then people come in and out of your life as gifts of grace to be cherished and enjoyed, not objects to be owned and manipulated. And then when you hold your dreams with open hands, you get to watch God resurrect what seemed dead and multiply what seemed small.

Angela Thomas, A Beautiful Offering  (via stephaniegraceofficial)

[unkaglen]

Christianity is not a belief system. Christianity is how I got rescued from being lost in darkness for all eternity. Christianity is how I was sought by God, ransomed, and freed. Christianity means I owe God everything. And more. So I’ve given Him myself.

Christianity is not a religion. Rules and rituals had nothing to do with my rescue. I was ransomed by the blood of the only Son of God Himself. Rules and rituals did not save me, and they can’t keep me saved.

Christianity is what I do. In ancient days, sometimes when a slave was freed, he decided to stay with his master anyway. That slave would press his ear to the doorpost and his master would pierce his ear. This would tell the world: I am free, but I choose to serve.

Pierce my ear, oh God. Let me dwell in your house, and show you my thanks. This is what a Christian is. It’s not just something I chose to believe in, it’s the life I live in my Master’s house.

[unkaglen]

You’re casting off from a familiar shore, into uncharted waters. It’s scary and overwhelming. You’re tempted to ask: what if I just can’t handle this? You can handle it. You plus God equals life gets handled. The real question is: will I take advantage of this chance to remake myself, will I discover more of the person God made me to be, and will I have the courage to set out on the amazing adventures God has for me?

Unka Glen (unkaglen.tumblr.com)

[classyhustleronline-deactivated]

Bolts in the Backwaters Tampa Bay by Galen Burow

[iztarshi]

Inspired by various tumblr posts.

Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.

Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.

You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.

That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?

You really want a human.