Hopeless.

One of the reasons I am so itching to leave Auckland once and for all is because of my family. I truthfully hate mine. I hate that I was born into this one and that I live with people I have no respect for. Let me explain.

I get jealous when I see a mother and daughter embracing and saying 'I love you' to each other... when I see a father who spends time with his children and have play fights with them... when I see a brother who is protective of his sister... and it sounds silly, but also when my friend's parents call them to ask them when they are coming home. Because my parents have never done that even though I won't get home til early in the morning sometimes. I wish that I'd had more discipline in my life, but I raised myself more than my parents raised me.

It's deeply disappointing that my mum is never home and that I have taken responsibility of raising my little sister. I am in no way motherly and it gets me down when I know I am not doing a good job of taking care of her. I love my mum, and I know she has been through so many hardships, but I wish she were there for us kids more... to feed us and teach us and spend more time with us. When she is home, however, you can just feel a incredibly grown presence of safety and love that only a mother can exude. I know my mum has it hard as my dad treats her like crap, and a lot of the time she takes her stress out on me, but nevertheless her aura is comforting.
I hate that my dad is never there. His gambling problem is sickening, and sometimes I don't see him for days due to it. I hate that he steals everyone's money only to lose it all. I hate that he is jobless and all he does when he is home is sit on the computer or watch TV. I hate that he treats everyone, especially my mum, with no respect. He acts like he owns the house and everyone has to respect him, when he doesn't make any money, never pays the bills and never helps around the house. Even though he is by no means the head of the house, my mum still has to fear and obey him even though it should be the other way around as twisted as it is.
I hate that my brother has followed in his footsteps. I remember days when my dad would beat my mum up and my brother would try to defend her, but instead he would end up getting beaten up too. No one taught my brother that hitting women is not okay, and now he's violent and disrespectful to them. Just like my dad, he's becoming a lying, money hungry, thieving and abusive person. I wish my brother had a better role model so that he didn't have to spiral out of control, but it's just such a sad fact of life that a lot of the times, a dad is not worthy to look up to. I have experienced upsetting things from my brother, like him ripping my clothes up, breaking my CDs and more recently stealing a lot of things from my room and selling them. My ipod, laptop case, mobile phone and such things have gone missing and no matter how many times I confront it he swears at me and calls me nasty names. It's like talking to a brick wall and I know he's beyond my reach to help. It's a dreading feeling when you have to hide your own stuff in your own room in your own home.

I wish, that for the sake of my sister, my family would be better people. I can see that sometimes her innocence is ruined at just 11 years old, and I can see cracks of my family in her, which is not a good thing.

I am harsh and honest about my family because that's the way it is, and I am sick of it. I always hear about 'dysfunctional' families and how it's crazy at times, but at the end of the day they all love each other. It's different in my family. There has been so much screwed up, twisted history that I feel we have gone past the line of dysfunctional, and worse yet is that we don't even like each other. It's hurtful and shaming for me that I was born into this kind of family and not a loving, strong one. It is hard for me to believe I can amount to anything when all my family are thieves, drunks, gamblers and money greedy people, even though they go to church. People ask me why I say I don't want to get married or have a family, and this is why. Why, when so many marriages are unhappy and abusive ones? And why bring a child into a dark and twisted world where they will continue the cycle of hurt and sin?

I'm so keen to move out and get away from this broken home once and for all. To leave my mum so that I can give her one less thing to worry about and one less mouth to feed. To leave and never see my 'dad' again, who I have no love or respect for. To leave a thieving, abusive brother and not worry all the time what he stole and sold from my room. I want to leave this deep pain in my heart left from a family won by the dark. Where is God in such a place?

Tragic.

I wonder, if two people are in love, why they can't be together. Instead, they are separated by distance, by another person, by time, by fate. 

I'd like to think that I had prayed so much to God, wished upon every shooting star and 11:11 I saw that He was fed up with me and let me see the one man that I love more than anybody else on earth. I'd like to think that if I keep praying hard enough and wishing hard enough that my love will stay in the country... maybe God will be tired of that too and make him stay. 

Loving someone then having them being taken away from you is a tragic thing to happen, but it is simply reality. Contrary to movies and fairytales, sometimes your prince ends up being with another girl and not you. Sometimes, he moves to another country, forever. Sometimes, you two won't ever end up together and it may never heal for a long, long time. I wish everyone's lives had a happily ever after... I'm at a point in my life where I am struggling to accept the fact that this is not always the case.

Currently listening to: Willow Smith - Sugar And Spice

Redeeming.

I know some of you know that dreadful feeling, when the one person that you never thought would hurt you, does. To me, the worst thing someone can do to me is gain my trust, know everything about my past, and yet still betray and hurt me. Tonight, I felt this kind of pain and a sense of loneliness that went to the extent of what I have never felt before. In my head, I have never been more happy to leave Auckland once and for all. I can't wait to go to Wellington, leave away bad friends, bad people, a bad family and the bad past I have lived here. I cried and I cried, knowing that I had no one to cry to. Knowing that there was nothing that was worth living for anymore. Knowing my best friends are not there when I needed them the most. Knowing that, unlike movies where the antagonist breaks down once and everything in their life falls perfectly after that, I'd had more than my fair share of tears. I have never cried so much in my life than in the past year. It seems like every time something goes right in my life, a break down is right around the corner. It seems like everything is falling apart so quickly that I have no idea where to begin fixing, or even if I should bother trying to pick up the pieces anymore. And no matter how far I run to get away from these problems, I know that at the end of the day the problem is me. I know a lot of you can relate, and I wish I had the answer to your problems and make it go away. If God gave me the choice to die so that everything in your life would get better, I would. But unfortunately, and fortunately, God is not that kind of God. He's so wonderful that he can let us go through these struggles because he's cheering us on to get to the other side, more stronger, more beautiful, more purer. I know that if I am not going through these trials now, His plan for my life will never come into fruition.

I re-read the prophecies that I was given while I was studying at Bible college, and the words that God spoke through these prophets and prophetesses were like refreshing, cold water upon my soul. I felt the water run through my heart, and it reassured me that there are better things to come and that my life has a purpose, even when everything right now is slowly breaking apart. I remember, when a man of God named Len Butner was giving me a prophecy, he told me that I will tell people that my God is a redeeming God. When he said the word 'redeeming,' it was as if he was almost about to cry. His voice shook and his eyes watered. To see such a valiant man of God nearly break down at such a word was something that I will never forget. I can imagine that his life is a beautiful story of a God who threw his past in the ocean, forgave him even though he was unforgiving and loved him even though he was unloving.

I know my God did the same for me. I was a broken and empty soul, never would I have thought that I could get out of the lifestyle I was living. Because I was abused mentally, physically and sexually, I went off the rails trying desperately to fill the void in my heart with anyone who showed me even the slightest amount of love. I was drinking at 14, doing drugs and underage clubbing a little later, giving myself to men and letting them do whatever they wanted with me. I was depressed and thought of suicide at 15, on my knees begging God to take me home because I was so tired of this world. He rescued me and He saved me.
He waited for me and told me to come home, even though I ran away from him, not hundreds of times, but thousands.
He loved me so damn much and forgave me every single day of my life, even though I was disgustingly hateful and unforgiving.
He embraced me when I came back, but never closed the door when I wanted to leave.
He healed me from my depression and He took me away from the destructive life I was leading, even though I deserved to die from my sin.
He took away my suicidal and dark thoughts, He conquered all the demons that had lived in my soul and he replaced it with his Hope.
He let me drown in His grace and His love, and in all my life I have never found the bottom to it.

My God is a redeeming God. And if His grace saved me and loved me and embraced me and forgave me despite all this, I know there is nothing, nothing that you or I are facing that he won't do the same.

  

Currently listening to: The Ember Days - Fingerpainting

'God Is Not A Christian.'

Excerpts from Bishop Desmond Tutu in a conversation with the Dalai Lama:

“The glory about God is that God is a mystery. God is actually quite incredible in many ways. But God allows us to misunderstand her... but also to understand her.”
“I’ve frequently said I’m glad I’m not God,” Tutu continued. “But I’m also glad God is God. He can watch us speak, spread hatred, in his name. Apartheid was for a long time justified by the church. We do the same when we say all those awful things we say about gays and lesbians. We speak on behalf of a God of love.
“The God that I worship is an omnipotent God,” Tutu intoned, opening his arms wide. He paused to let this sink in. Then he said, “He is also incredibly, totally impotent. The God that I worship is almighty, and also incredibly weak.
“He can sit there and watch me make a wrong choice. Now, if I was God... and I saw, for instance, this one is going to make a choice that is going to destroy his family, I’d probably snuff him out.
“But the glory of God is actually mind-blowing. He can sit and not intervene because he has such an incredible, incredible reverence for my autonomy. He is prepared to let me go to hell. Freely. Rather than compel me to go to heaven.
“He weeps when he sees us do the things that we do to one another. But he does not send lightning bolts to destroy the ungodly. And that is fantastic. God says, ‘I can’t force you. I beg you, please for your own sake, make the right choice. I beg you.’
“When you do the right thing, God forgets about God’s divine dignity and he rushes and embraces you. ‘You came back, you came back. I love you. Oh how wonderful, you came back.’

“You have to remember that religion is of itself neither good nor bad. Christianity has produced the Ku Klux Klan. Christianity has produced those who killed doctors that perform abortions. Religion is a morally neutral thing. It is what you do with it. It is like a knife, a knife is good when you use it for cutting up bread for sandwiches. A knife is bad when you stick it in somebody’s gut. Religion is good when it produces a Dalai Lama, a Mother Teresa, a Martin Luther King.”
“And a Bishop Tutu,” the Dalai Lama interjected. Tutu stared at him, stuck a finger at his own chest, and admonished, “I’m talking!”
The Dalai Lama leaned back in playful recoil and laughed with abandon.
“But we’ve got to be very careful that we don’t say . . .” Tutu continued, ignoring him. “Because there are bad Muslims, therefore Islam is a bad religion. Because there are bad Buddhists, Buddhism is bad. Just look at the Buddhist dictators in Burma,” Tutu said.
“We’ve got to say, what does your faith make you do? Make you become? I would not have survived without the faith of knowing that this is God’s world and that God is in charge, that evil is not going to prevail despite all appearance to the contrary.”

Beautiful.

After 6 months, I am still feeling the pain of a lost love. I had thought that as time would go by, my heartache would subside and I would be on the path of healing, but I have realized that such a chasm of hurt would simply take time. I cried on my bed tonight, telling God that if I had one personal wish, it would be that I didn't lose my first love and that we were together. Afterward, I looked upon a star outside my window, and and I was gazing at it, my thoughts turned into a different direction. This star, I thought, was once in God's strong hands. He gently placed it into the sky and took the time to name it. He had looked upon this very star and thought it lovely. This star was an expression of God's beautiful mind, and I was looking at it, my mind burst open with the thought that if this star was, to God, lovely, then how lovely am I? A living, breathing, moving soul that God thought as the cherry on top of his creation, the masterpiece, the most grand thing of all. A star does not compare to my beauty, nor does any wonderful creation in the universe compares. This is mind blowing to me, and I cherish this thought that is true for every person on this planet. Funnily enough, a friend of mine posted this picture below on Facebook. Be blessed.

Dead ends.

I hope everyone has had a great Christmas and New Years! I know I had :) It was wonderful for me to get away from Auckland and it's messes with my close friends to a beautiful part of New Zealand, in a beautiful bach, overlooking the beautiful Pacific ocean.

I have decided recently to move to Wellington to study Psychology, Sociology and Management (triple major come at me!), and it has been a mega stressful month trying to sort out University, Studylink, work and particularly apartment hunting all at once. Getting decline after decline for apartment viewings due to the owners wanting someone ASAP, having no savings to my name, not getting anywhere with sorting out Uni stuff and having family problems have weighed me down so hard that I can't help but feel like a limp and hopeless soul. I could go to God... but the truth in my heart is, I don't trust him and I feel that if I do go to him, he will tell me something I don't want to hear.

It has been a hard, surprising, disappointing, crazy 2013 so far... and I believe that every soul on this earth is no exempt from such emotions, but all of us do have a strength to carry on even when things don't go the way we want it to. And I will carry on.

Some photos from new years...

Our beautiful view from the bach at Corammandel 

 My friend Bear and I

Sun and sand at Hahei beach

Currently listening to: Brooke Fraser - Love Is Waiting