El Rastro 4

Born and raised a book worm. Groomed early by my father who took my sister and I on wondrous treks to the local library when we were little and on Saturdays took us to our most coveted spot of all - the main Library in Center City. The building was old and had a huge marble stair case. The children's section was tucked away in a beautiful basement nook. Much more than a nook because the space was immense and the options for reading seemed endless to me at that time. It's weird, I can almost picture my dad, the young professional dad wearing his fro shaped low holding my sister and my hand's. Both of us wearing long pig tailed braids, with a straight part in the middle, just the way my mom liked to do our hair. striped shirts, shorts and sneakers. Skipping along side my dad as he made up some fantastical game to play on the way to the library. He was always great at that. At taking nothing and making it something amazing and fun. A walk that could have been long and hot was one of the best things we did with him.

I didn't know it then but my dad was planting seeds in us. Seeds of a love of reading and learning. And since then I've loved books always being able to escape whatever surroundings I was in to immerse myself in worlds far away and detached from my own. As a young child I devoured books easily reading probably about 150 books per year. As I got older, my trips to the library became less frequent as the books became longer that I read and held me over longer. But there have been plenty a night that I've stayed awake until 3 or 4am, unable to go to sleep until I finished the current amazing page turner that I had in my hands.

With motherhood came change, diapers and potty training and work and school was so hard for me to juggle the necessary requirements to my life that reading became a luxury I could no longer afford. My time being too precious and reserved for so many others. But that was then and now today, we're past the pampers, past the potty training and none of my children are actively trying to pry electrical outlet coverings to stick little pudgy fingers into. They just don't. So time has come again.

And with that time has come books! But the books that I read now are different. No longer seeking to escape from reality, but choosing to embrace reality. I have this amazing love and passion for God who has healed me from so much in my life. And I seek him even in books! So every year long, every day there is one book that you will find me reading -- the Bible. I've actually never read anything like it. Every single time that I sit down to read it I find out something new about God and about myself. About how much He loves me, about the depths that He will go to, about how much He waits for us, how He longs for us! It's life, heart and spirit changing stuff!

So as I sat thinking about how many books I read per year, I thought wow, born a book worm, I never thought I would ever find a book that I couldn't devour in under a week or two. But I've found one that I can devour for the rest of my life over and over again! And what joy!

thats all for now,
I'll be where I'm at reading to the day I die,
yours In His eternal love,
Aimee (LatinaBella)

To dress up or not to dress up? That is the question...

Happy Hoosier Halloween

Halloween has always been one of, if not my favorite holiday of the year. A time to get dressed up and be different even if it's only for a few hours and get candy. What could ever be wrong with that? I'd heard some people tell me that they didn't celebrate Halloween and I thought it oddly fanatical and strange. I mean we didn't actually turn into real witches, or ghouls or monsters, or whatever we were dressed as on Halloween ... we just pretended to be whatever it was for a few hours. I never liked the idea of having my children dress up as devils, so we had never taken it that far... but then this year something changed...

This year in fact, has been a year of tremendous change for me. It's the year that I found God really. Well, I shouldn't say found Him, as if He had been lost for all of my life and I just completed a maze and received a God prize. No, it's almost like for the first time in my life, I've taken my blindfold off and I can see Him so clearly now. Even when I look back on my life, I can see Him and how He's always been here for me. Where before I felt so lost and alone and confused and aimless, now I see He's been here all along, guiding my steps, holding my hand, picking me up when I fell, even dropping blessings on me that I didn't even deserve.

And now that film has been lifted from my eyes, everything looks different, everything sounds different even. Music that I used to listen to, doesn't sound the same. Shows that I used to watch on tv, disturb me. And now Halloween just makes me think... what really are we celebrating?? What is the purpose of celebrating the dark things of this world? The things that cause destruction and turmoil in the lives of so many?? Why should I and my family essentially glorify them?? I'm here to glorify God now.

So I decided this year would be different. We will not stop celebrating Halloween, my kids could never understand that. We will still give out candy, and go trick-or-treating. We will dress up. But this year will be a "positive" Halloween. We will not dress up as any scary ghouls or monsters or goblins. I wanted us to only dress as positive things for Halloween. And decorations, just never really happened this year. I have decorations in the basement but I just didn't pull them out.

But all in all, I feel much better about embracing the holiday in the manner that we are. Next year, when I have even more time to really think about this topic, I'm going to come up with different ways for us to really celebrate Halloween while continuing to stay true to our beliefs. This year, it's just the beginning of bigger and brighter Halloween celebrations to come...

Cut away my dead leaves so I can grow...

meakly pruned crape myrtle

One thing that I've learned recently is that no matter how much we want our worlds to stay the same, they won't. They can't even. I mean I think it's against some sort of laws of nature or gravity that things cannot stay the same. People die, change, and grow every single day. Nothing in fact, can stay the same. So as much as we struggle to hold on to what we know right now, what we've known for years... sometimes we have to let go so that we can get to know all of the wonders of what is to come.

it's funny because I used to work in a position where change was a daily occurence. Your whole day could get turned upside down at the end of a meeting or when someone walked past your desk. And so I had to force myself to embrace change. And embrace I did. I held on to change so tightly that I began to live my life as one daily roller coaster of change. And my life was full of all of the wrong sorts of changes...

And now I've found that I'm facing the biggest changes ever in my life... losing my job, and most recently losing someone who I thought was my best friend for the past 18+ years. The losses keep on coming but what I'm losing I'm losing for a reason... I know that there is something 100 times better waiting for me in the near future and that's why I have to go through these losses. And all I can say is that I'm keeping my face facing forward... there is no reason to look behind me anymore, it's the past after all and I'm looking forward to newer, bigger, and better things.