The clock read 8 am.

I had managed to get myself out of bed at this (ahem) early summer day.

Teeth had been brushed.  Clothes had been selected.  The lawn had been masterfully mowed if I do say so myself.
Shopping had been accomplished.  Backpacks had been found (some being found outrageously expensive!).  The asparagus had been cooked, the squash put away, and the zucchini fried (just for your info, a little pepper goes a looonnnggg way).

And somehow, the couch had welcomed me into its embrace... as I sat... and moaned.

You see, the daunting prospect of two things loomed ahead of me.  These two things, I did not want to do.  at all.  I felt that basically nothing on this earth could possibly entice me to get up and do them.

How in the world do we find the will power to get up and do those things in life which are so repelling?  How can we muster the strength to do that which nothing in us wants to do?

I was out of an answer.

What struck me was that, once I accomplished these two tasks, I would not be home free for the rest of my life.  Mundane and painful tasks face us repeatedly.

Feeling helpless, I sunk deeper into the couch's plush and moaned some more (not recommended).

After a long conversation with my angel of a mother while I was in this unpleasant mood, I have now recovered and learned some things, things which I am going to share with you.

What to do when those dreaded tasks are particularly full of dread:

1. Be truthful about the situation.
Alright, let's start with brutal honesty because self-deception is a a killer of basically all good in life.  When you are facing that which you dread, truly be dead honest.  You might have to admit, "Okay, this situation is terrible."  Let yourself agree with that and don't feel it necessary to pretend your feelings aren't what they are.  That just never helps.  Problems still hurt, even if they might be "easy" on the outside, and the truth sets us free, even if the truth is simple.

2. Remember the end goal.
 That trigonometry homework, that person you need to call, that email you need to write, that mile you need to run - there is a reason you are doing it all.  Keep the "reward" [the benefit of completing the task] in front of you.  And guess what?  Not only is there a tangible reward that is gloriously awaiting you, but your character is growing as well.  Do you admire perseverance in others?  Do you want to be a hero in your own life story?  Do you want to be that stellar person of integrity?  Just keep going, and you're well on your way.

3. Choose thankfulness.
Has anyone ever told you to count your blessings?  Well, as simple as it sounds, it is a powerful practice.  Reasons to be thankful are like sparkling bundles of joy waiting for you to come join the party.  Instead of grumbling in every task, look for these reasons and be thankful for them.  Yeah, cleaning up after your little sister might be annoying, but, hey, at least your little sister played with the toys on the floor and not your favorite sweater, right?  There's always good.  We just have to choose to see it.  (And the party's happening whether you join or not, so might as well join).

4. Grow up (no matter if you already are an adult).
Ultimately, we are responsible for the choices we make.  We can choose to put our big girl and boy boots on or to stay throwing a tantrum on the floor no matter if we are fifteen or fifty.  It's up to us, and we alone have to face the consequences or reap the benefits.  The choice is ours.

Thus, next time you just want to melt into your couch and moan, choose the boots you want to put on.  Then, go and change your world.

Additionally, remember this >>>
"Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." (Psalm 73:26).

All things are possible with God (Matthew 17:26).

When life gives you lemons, I am realizing there's a whole lot of sense in making lemonade. 

From the lemonade moments in life, then, I've been doing some list making. 
After reflecting on high-school so far (which I talk more about in two posts you can see by clicking here and here), I've written the following with the sweet and sour tang still lingering on my taste-buds.

Those Bittersweet Lessons

1. Life's often not as hard as you're making it.

2. People are always just people, and it's not worth stressing over their acceptance or approval. 
Everyone's "weird" in their own beautifully unique way.

3. Stop thinking.  Seriously.  Nobody's thinking about you as much as you are, anyway.

4. Choose to laugh instead of cry.

5. Lighten up.  What your facing still isn't going to be there on your wedding day, honey bunch.

6. See others' needs instead of focusing on getting your own met.

7. Do what you know is right, every time you can.

8. Try to lean on the side of more than less when it comes to kindness and patience.

9. Soak in every moment.  Life's too short to not be fully engaged.

10. Say what you mean.

11. Spend less time creeping on other people's lives and go live your own.

12. Get out of your comfort zone.

13. Be uncomfortable.

14. Risk awkwardness.

15. Be real.

16. Don't be afraid.  Just don't.

Time can't go backwards.  (That frustrates me almost more than anything).

During the time each of us is given, however, we learn lessons.  Lessons made for sharing.
Each one of us has a story, a gem of wisdom capable of saving - saving time, energy, heartache, or maybe even a life.

It's easy to wish we could go back to certain moments in life and share a gem of wisdom we now have with ourselves.
But we can't.
Time won't go backwards.
Other people, however, may be at a point where they desperately need just what you are wanting to say.

Please, for the sake of all those around you, say it.

What I've written below what I wish I could've told myself four years ago.  I talk more about those four years, in particular, in the post "Of Tears and Four Years: A Prelude" which you can read by clicking here.

Here, especially for you, is that bit of what one fumbling high-schooler has learned along the way.

- - - - || Three Words || - - - - -

GROUNDED.   INVEST.   BLESS.

1. Know who you are.
 No, I don't mean "know what you like, what you do, your style," or anything like that.  I mean know, without a shadow of a doubt, your identity - who you are at your core because everything else about you will stem from that.
Don't only know who you are, though; believe it and live from it.

(Want to know who you are at your core?  To see seven things you just can't help being, click here. For more thoughts on your Biblical identity, click here.)

2. Now, stop focusing on you and live responsibly.
You know who you are, so you are freed up to do what you need to do.
Invest in what's really important - not in worries, not in dwelling on what other people think of you, and not in obsessing over either the past or future.  All you've got is right now, so use it and invest wisely.  People matter - invest yourself in them, in relationships, and in building others up.  Faith matters - invest yourself in seeking His face so that you can hear and know His will.  Then you will know where else He is wanting you to invest.
Finally, no matter where you are, always invest all of yourself.  Don't hold back.  It's pointless (let's be real.)

3. Be an intentional good-doer and problem solver.
The world needs you!  Daily, you have opportunities to speak life and plant hope.  You know where in your life.  You know the girl who just needs a hug, your friends who just needs to hear that you love them, your sibling who really needs some help with that homework.
You bless people, though, not only with what you do but also by who you are.  Somebody needs to see a smiling face today.  Someone is hearing that conversation you are having with your mom.  Someone notices how you responded to that situation.  You are leaving a fragrance behind whether you like it or not.
Further, you have skills needed in problems that are asking you to solve them!  So go.  do.  Purpose to pour yourself out because when you've emptied yourself, you will be filled in a whole new way.

My message is this:
Be grounded in who you are.
Be invested fully in all the responsibilities that come your way.
Be a blessing by leaving a fragrance of hope as you pour out yourself for this world's healing.

For time will not go backwards.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Now, you, wonderful person at the other end of this screen, have a message, a story, a wisdom gem, too.  You know the world needs to hear it.  Please, then, bless us all by sharing it in the comments below.  Thank you for choosing to touch somebody's life.

I woke up this morning with my arms wrapped around myself and tears on my face.

I'd been dreaming.

In the distance I'd seen my elementary school best friend who I hadn't talked much with since I left that school over four years ago.

It's been a tough, insanely challenging and stretching four years of growing up.

I've felt  anger almost to the point of hysteria while screaming in my grandma's bathroom because injustice burns, people lie, and people like to believe the lies sometimes.
I've felt the hollow loneliness of never feeling like you have a place to just belong.
I've felt the resounding slap of someone you had let get close literally disown your family.
I've faced countless whys as I grapple with my own failures and struggle to deal with failures I feel have been committed by those around me.
I've stared at the sky countless times and wondered what it would have been like if only ... If only I would have done something different.  If only I would have gone to this one school.  If only I would have not said that.  If only she would have stood up for the truth.

Yet, the girl from my past called out my name and came running towards me.  She gave me the biggest, longest hug as we sunk to the floor and both started crying.

We didn't speak, but even though we weren't using words, I was somehow unloading all the pain of the past years - frustration at myself and the world, obstacles that I didn't ask for, hurts I've battled - the growing up of the past four years that was unknowingly compacted in me.

Tears where the thread that slid through my dreams into my reality.

I slowly came out of the dream and found myself back in my room with the tears reaching my polka-dotted pillow case.  I reacquainted myself with reality through a bowl of spaggetti-os and fumbled to resume life.  My ACT scores had come in; I worked out some VBS details with a friend; I pulled out my old to-do list leftover from the school year and sorted through papers demanding attention.

But the heavy somberness of the dream has persisted like the heat of the summer sun that won't leave lingering your skin.

The last four years.
The tears.  The fears.  The whys.  The pain.  The confusion.
Growing up.

I haven't had a particularly hard life, I'd say, but life itself is hard enough for everyone.

These past four years have left me battered and broken beyond what I sometimes believe to be beneficial.

But, somehow, that's the beauty of it - everything that I look back at with regret, that which nags and frustrates me, the circumstances I cannot understand the full meaning of - that's the very things that. God. gave. me.

He had a purpose for placing me in every situation.  He knew what I'd experience and new the growth that would come.

Every one of my "whys" are His "I"s - where He speaks "I AM, Deborah, even when you've failed, even when you don't understand."

Every one of my disappointments are His appointments,
and all I can do is surrender this sloppy, broken mess to Him and choose to trust Him - to trust that He makes beauty in the broken and to focus on Him, the source of all beauty.

Because even when I just don't understand, when I wish I would have been different or circumstances were different - He is.

As plain and basic as that sounds, the impact of that simplicity is striking.

What more is there?

... And, all that I wish four-year-ago Deborah would have not only realized but also believed?  Those lessons have found their voice.  Check out the two blog post they debut in by clicking here and here.

BuzzFeed quizzes.

They get to us all (don't they?) and try to define from the depths of our souls who we are.

I am not immune from these either.  It fact, they can be quite funny!  I have a propensity to get some rougher characters.  I've quizzed as Prince Humperdinck, Loki, Haymitch, Jafar, Sherlock, and Prince Hans.  Simultaneously, I am also Princess Anna, Legolas, Tris, Mulan, Aladin, and Liesl.  Apparently, I would be from Paris, live in faction candor but, in reality, be divergent while my life would be portrayed in the musical Wicked where Emma Watson would play me.

Who knew I was such a complicated mess?!

Truth is, though, the popularity of these quizzes has got me thinking a lot about identity.  All these try to tell us who we are.  So many movies have a main plot line of characters endeavoring to discover themselves.

So... in real life, what defines us?

We have to look no further than the living word of God, itself, where we find what we cannot help being even if we tried.

1.  You are worth dying for.
"For God so loved the world [that includes you!] that He gave His one and only son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

2.  You are royalty.
"See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!  And that is what we are!" (1 John 3:1a).  If you are a child of the King, you are royalty, plain and simple.

3.  You are forgiven.
"As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us" (Psalm 103:12).  They're gone!

4.  You are set apart as holy.
"We have been set apart as holy because Jesus Christ did what God wanted him to do by sacrificing his body once and for all" (Hebrews 10:10).

5.  Yet.. it's not about you!
"But whatever things we gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.  More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ" (Philippians 3:7-8).

6.  You are crucified.
"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.  the life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).

7.  You are called.
"All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them.  And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us" (1 Corinthians 5:18-20a).

You are His; He is the Rock that's the foundation of your identity.

And, He's got a mission for you.

It's time to step up.

As my white and silver tennis shoes continually hit the pavement, the hill continually seems endless.  The heaviness in my legs reveals that I'm about two-thirds done with my mile run (or more like easy jog).

Even though I am well over half-way, only one thought remains: Stop.

All I want to do is give up.  Why am I still running?  There's no one chasing me, for Pete's sake! 

My ambition to get back in shape and the reality that I'll be running a 5K in less than a week have evaporated as my thought morphs even further: I am going to die. 

I somehow manage to run every step of that mile and finish it out.  As I re-enter my house, all I can do is be thankful that it's over. I honestly wonder if I can ever bring myself to run again.

As the hours grow between me and the almost traumatic run,  I find myself laying on the couch, staring at bookshelves.  I have shut the door between me and my growing mental to-do list for almost a month.  (For the record, I do not recommend ignoring life. It's not going away).  The very strength to get my self off that couch and do one of the many things I (pressingly) need to do seems legitimately beyond me.

So I sit.  I stare.  I watch some more episodes on Netflix.  As another day slips by, I let my room grow into a mess which mirrors the mess behind the door in my mind I've chosen to ignore.

I cannot help but wonder where has our strength gone in moments like these? in not only the physical runs, but in the times when fight, determination, and sheer grit and self-will are necessary in everyday life?

Life can seem to be like smooth sailing one minute and like all hell has broken loose the next.  We can feel invincible one moment and like Rue facing Cato the next when all Rue wants to do is go climb a tree and hide from her problems.

The truth of this whole phenomena is becoming more clear: In life, we inevitably are going to be running.   
Our choice is where we are running to.

Are we running to surrender or to refusal?

Are we surrendering ourselves to the will of the One who made the Universe, or are we stubbornly refusing to give in to the One who gave His life for us?

We only are capable of running in one direction.  It's our choice which direction to go.

Yet, beyond the choice in itself, the rest necessary for surrender is provided in Him.  All we gotta do is decide to run to Him, muscle up that strength while asking for His help, and trust Him with the rest of ourselves - our weakness, our lack of determination, our failing endurance.

For when we are weak, then we are strong:

"And He has said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.' And most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.  Therefore, I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong" (2 Corinthians 12:9-10 NASB).

We can refuse to surrender, or surrender our refusal and let God be God in our lives.

He will give us all the strength we need.