And as my heart grows faint lead me to Your rock, be my Shelter....

If you have eyes, you've noticed that my blog has changed!
Well, if you haven't...you might wanna get your eyes checked. Or get a seeing eye dog. Maybe both.
But ANYWAY! I changed the title! Because I thought "Hmmm....'stranger in paradise' doesn't describe me at all. I'm no stranger, and I don't think this is paradise! Not yet, anyway.
So I was looking through my itunes to find a song to name my blog after. I'd find good ones, yet to my dismay, they didn't fit just right.
My mom forgot to delete her John Bevere CD series off my computer, and "A Daughter's Healing" jumped out at me. And so I thought..."Dude. That's ME. That is my life. My journey. What's happening RIGHT NOW."
Like I said a blog or two ago...with my word picture, I'm a daughter.
Story time everybody!
sorry I haven't done bullets in a while. I think God's screwing my head on straight. I can think in straight lines WAHOO!
Anyway.
In February, I was dumped. Pretty horribly, I'd say...at the time. Now I look back and think "Dear goodness Leah, this boy was not your life."
But I cried. Hard. VERY VERY VERY HARD. Because being dumped makes you think "Well, something's wrong with me. He didn't like something about me. Or everything about me! OR didn't like anything about me!" Or I guess that's just me. I take things very personal. Okay okay, I'm not declaring that over my life. I USED to take things very personal.
So I was dumped. "to be friends". "i see you more as a sister". "you're a wonderful girl, just not for me".
You know the gist. And everytime I used to look at those words, I'd scoff and think "what a jerk! Why can't you just tell me that I'm not good enough???"
When truth is, he was saying I WAS good enough. We just...weren't the same kinda good, you know? He was looking for something different and so was I!
He had an octagon shaped hole and I was a hexagon. Close, "but no cigar"
Can I just say that I had NEVER heard that saying until being in Georgia doing puzzles with my Aunt? Now I hear it ALL the time.
Anyway. We were close, but it wasn't right. And you can't take away part of that shape, because that's just what it is. That's what it was made as. A hexagon. It wasn't meant to be an octagon, otherwise we wouldn't have this problem, now would we?
Back to the story. My mom and I prayed for a couple hours, she painted my nails to make me feel better...whatnot. We asked God for a word picture,
and he gave me one...for what my heart looked like.
When I think heart, I think love-cartoon heart.
When my mom thinks heart, she thinks aortic-pump organ heart.
So i'm talkin love-cartoon-valentines heart.
But it was pale, and it had been battered. It was bruised...like an apple! Yeah! Just like an apple. It was limp and lifeless...like it was beaten with a baseball bat and left to die. It had been cast away, like yesterday's newspaper.
This may sound a little crazy, or it may hit close to home. Just bear with me por favor =]
But the next part was just...amazing. Completely. Jesus had taken it in his hands (scars, dirt, and all) and brushed it off. Like a toy dropped in the dirt. Just kinda blew it off, and it came back to life. Sure, there were scars, but they weren't open wounds anymore. They didn't hurt. They were still there, and they would always be.
I will always remember every person that has hurt me or made me feel bad about being who I was...completely and totally. God has used them as lessons for me, and I'll never forget!
The whole "forgive and forget" thing never worked for me anyway. Since if you forget, you have to learn the lessons multiple times until...I don't know! Until you're dead.
And dying stupid isn't too much fun, I'd imagine.
So I still think of this word picture. The flawed yet beautiful, red, lively heart...doing what it always did.
You know when you get some kinda nasty wound that scars up pretty badly?
Hair or freckles or birthmarks or WHATEVER can never grow on a scar.
As I learned with Nick, I gave little pieces of my heart away, thinking it was worth it...he would use these pieces, and return them in working conditions when he was finished.
Oh ho ho, little Leah. Nieve little Leah....
they're not returned. They're packed away in his heart. I don't know why or how...but I feel like God has told me that. I invested way too much of my heart in him, and that's love that can never be used again.
If I have to cite When Dreams Come True one more time, I think I might lose a follower. Oh well.
If you read this book (like Amelia and I did) you'll realize that I'd say....mmmm....75% of the world doesn't know what love is. They know human love, and they use it to the best of their ability.
But the ONE true love is the love of Jesus Christ!
It's never ending, unfailing, and unconditional. Like I've said prior to this blog, relationships need to be built spiritually, emotionally, THEN physically...from Authentic Beauty.
and like Sonia has kinda-but-not-really suggested, I put some of my favorite books in a little thingy on the side of my blog. They vary in....genre....anyway. Back to the building relationships.
You can't build it on buddha, or muhammad, or...i don't know, madonna (kabala? does anybody know what happened to that religion anyway?)!
You're not gonna find nirvana. You're not gonna find TRUE love...without Jesus Christ.
If you read Song of Songs at first you think "Oh WOW! This guy really loved that person. She must have meant so much to him!"
I read this book of the Bible for the first time and TOTALLY fell in love with it. I kept asking Sarah H. all these questions about it.
Solomon wrote it obviously, since it's also known as "Song of Solomon"...
but it's a love letter from the Lord to his people. The church.
Which is what I thought it was in the first place, but my bible is pretty bare-bones so I wasn't too sure.
I suggest you read it thought =] I have to say it's my favorite...with psalms as a close second. I know, I know. There's a couple lines like "with hair like a flock of goats" and "a neck like the tower of David"
but once you get past the old lingo it's....beautiful. It's the most lovely, beautiful, flawless thing I've ever seen. Love in its purest form.

I've always kinda been a sucker for the love of God. Some people are amazed by His power, some by his peace, by His awesomeness?
But the thing that makes me break down and cry EVERY SINGLE TIME is how much He's in love with me. He's CRAZY about me. He loves me to the very ends of the universe and back again...a million times. His thoughts for me outnumber the grains of sand on the ENTIRE earth. That's a whole lotta sand.
I'm healed by his love. His love was the needle and thread that sewed up the wounds in my heart. His hands were the ones to put on the bandaids. Not Nick's. Not my Mom's. Not my own. But God's hands...because I'm His daughter, and He hates to see me heart broken.
His heart breaks to see me so...distraught in my emotions. He wants for me to think of him as my Dad. A daughter in her Father's arms....
when I fall off my bike, He brushes me off and says "Now are you gonna do the same thing again? I won't let go"
when my best friends decide to leave me over barbies, He'll cry with me and say "They weren't the right friends for you anyway."
and even when everyone has left me and I'm completely alone, He'll comfort me and say "Now we can be alone. I love you, Leah. You have no idea how much I love you. You'll never know. I know you'll understand the best you can, but I died just for you."

And this is how I'm finding my healing: Through the love of Jesus Christ.