deyensee

[deyensee]

I can’t pretend to be someone I am not.

I am not a strong man. I am not forgiving. I am not loving or selfless or compassionate.

I am arrogant and selfish and prideful and inadequate and insufficient. I am rude.

I can’t look past my hurt. I’m not that strong. I can’t love in the face of pain. I’m not that strong.

I hurt the ones I care about. I get hurt and so I hurt back. That’s weak. That’s the most unmanly thing I can possibly thing of. A man is supposed to be someone who is willing to suffer for the sake of the ones he loves. A bulwark of protection. A bastion of security.

And here is me. A toddler playing with nukes. Who is both completely convinced of his ability to self-navigate through life, while being completely convinced of how he is utterly and wholly incapable of navigating through life with any degree of satisfaction.

I am riddled with insecurities to the point that Swiss cheese looks well founded.

I think I’m in a good place to be, though, because I’ve finally stopped believing the lie we all tell ourselves.

“I am enough”

I am not enough. The only thing my self sufficiency will ever get me is death.

I am not enough to truly love and feel empathy for the man on the corner who propagates hatred.

I am not enough to truly forgive wrong done to me

I am not enough to be the man that can speak words of life and healing into someone else’s brokenness.

I am not enough to support myself, let alone anyone else, in any way.

I am not enough to satisfy anyone else. Live for the praise of man? Why would I ever subject myself to that hell? Oh, wait.

I started believing the lie that I could become enough as God works in me. Then I morphed that to just “I could be enough”. Then, I morphed that to “I am enough”. And now here I am back in reality. I was created to be dependent. There are a million things I could fit into the hole of need and dependency within me, but only one thing is right.

I am not enough to grow in or seek or understand or walk down the right path with God.

But that is why he calls for us to come as children. Wholly in acknowledgment of our insufficiency. I acknowledge I lack the motivation and strength to seek Him. I acknowledge every way that I know of in which I am not enough. I acknowledge that I am broken.

And I acknowledge that I need a mender. A healer. A doctor. A savior.

So, I come humble and broken, with a shattered heart and broken desires and all of my insufficiency, to ask that You would work me in whatever way You want to work me. Create in me a clean heart, oh God. Shape and mold me, as you have been and are doing and will continue to do. I come with no expectations or hopes or reservations or caveats or stipulations or aspirations. I just ask that You do what You think is best, because I trust You (in the mustard seed way that I do).

Be my strength. Be my heart. By my ability. Be my sufficiency. Don’t be “everything that I’m not”, be my everything. Don’t just help me, as if you would come along beside and bolster my efforts. Be my effort.

Not only my feet, Lord.

[deyensee]

The hurt of heartbreak

Why does it hurt so much? Why is it that everything reminds me of her? Why is it that the one thing I want to do is to wrap her up in a bear hug, feel her warmth and love and care. Why does seeing the distance between us now make me ache to the root of my bones. Why am I hurting so much over this? Why am I stuck in the past? Is the only right answer to love to become jaded enough that you never open yourself up to this much hurt because you remain emotionally distant? Father, why have you brought this into my life to take it away? What am I to learn from this pain? Why have you brought something so beautiful into my life just to rip it from me? I am not a righteous man. I am not a Job or a Moses. I am a broken, sinful, failure of a man. If this is discipline, help me to see it. If I am to have my deepest desire of knowing I am loved and cared for fulfilled in you, then let me see it, I beg. I know I am not one to question you; what is man - who am I - that we, being the created, will question the creator? Does the chair question its builder why he sits on it or why he stands on it or why he leaves it empty so often? But I am not a chair. I have been given thought and a heart and curiosity and aptitude and emotions. Right now, this pain in my heart is consuming. Maybe it isn’t proportional to reality. Maybe I didn’t lose her, but my dressed up dream of who she is. I feel this to be true in some small ways. But still, it clouds my thoughts and motivations. I just want to respond in whatever means is the one He desires. I want to learn whatever He desires I learn. My motivation is to avoid this pain in the future, and maybe end my pain now. It is self-preservation. I don’t think this is the right motivator, and I know that he is acting in love but this amount of pain leads me to question. How am I to respond? Show me, lead me, guide me, enable me. I am so tired of this pain. I am so tired of feeling this pain in my life. The pain of rejection, of crushed dreams and unfulfilled desires, of loss. I am so tired of feeling this loss. It makes me weep. Yet, my heart, time and time again, leads me to chasing fulfillment from other’s love for me. Why? Oh, how many times must lighting strike in the same place till you'll call it trouble? And if this level of fulfillment was never meant to be found in another, then how do I find it in God? How do I find overwhelming affection, love and desire to please for God? How do I feel and know his overwhelming desire, love and affection for me? Why can I read about it, but feel little connection? I hurt so much God. I hurt from the situation that you guided me into and brought about. How can I heal? How do I heal? If the answer is “harden your heart and don’t let others in” I would rather die. If the answer is “Let others in but keep them at arms length” I would rather die. The only thing I know to do is to fall at your feet and ask and plead for help. Help me through this pain. Show me how to see and understand this situation so this pain doesn’t take my breath away anymore. Maybe the point is that I don’t want you, I just want your healing. Well, maybe I am so broken that I don’t know how to want or seek you. So even then, I ask, help me. Give me truth. Don’t let me be satisfied with my partial and incorrect way of seeing you. Let me see you. If you are what I need in life, if you are the source of every good thing and the source of love and the source of beauty, then I need you more than I need the air that I breath. I need my soul to be satisfied in something transcendent. Nothing else will do. Nothing else will fill the hole within me. So please, God. Help me.

[deyensee]

Soul: Searching...

So, I’ve just come back from a weekend road trip. 908 miles, 3 days, 1 night camping. Up the (beautiful) Oregon Coast and down through central Oregon. In short order, here is what I learned: - The world is a big place. It is much bigger than our life and all of its problems. It is easy to get tunnel-visioned on all of these seemingly large things in life that dominate our view. Traveling literally helped me to get a new perspective on my life and my problems and the bigger picture of it all. - There is tremendous value in going or doing something alone, especially if you need the time to process and mull and consider, especially especially if your daily life allows little of that precious time. Make more time to pray and remember and consider and think, especially if big problems in your life need a lot of consideration to grasp the whole of. - Gas is cheapest in Oregon in Crescent, Oregon. 2.59 per gallon! Dang! Sadly, the things I really gained from this trip can’t exactly be bullet-pointed, so here is my trip in long-order. (Warning: VERY LONG -  but filled with spiritual insight)      I have (had) been feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Rock was continual suffering and the Hard Place was being selfish and unloving and running away from it all. Neither of them felt like the right solution, or at least not in the way I was handling either of them.      The last weekend before my trip, I decided I just needed a lot of time on my own, in companionship and communication with God throughout it. Letting my thoughts wander to my stresses and concerns and hurts and bringing them to God, heart-brokenly asking for help and guidance. He was there, and he did provide the help I needed.       On the last day of my trip, I figured I needed to take a big picture view of the past 10 months and try to make sense of it from a Heavenly Perspective. Considering what God was doing and how He was working and what He was trying to achieve. Writing is typically the best way for me to bring a lot of ideas into focus at once, so here Is what I wrote, with some additions for clarity      “I was in a good, growing spot with God. My idol of relationships that I have built throughout my life was in full view of God, and he decided to have a go at it. I was chasing God and saw another who seemed to be doing the same, and so started pursuing her alongside God. As my pursuit of her grew, my pursuit of Him lessened as I was being whispered to that the longing in my heart would be better fulfilled by her. With no hint of ill-intent or any desire to leave God’s side, I slowly grew more and more enraptured by this relationship, with ample encouragement from friends and family, and less and less in love with God. it was a relationship of selfish-enjoyment. She was and is great, and I was becoming close with her family, with some struggles here and there. I was chasing my desire for acceptance and love in Humans, which, if granted, would have contented me for this life.      I was then wholesale rejected by her family; I was cut-out. My closeness with her was destroyed and I am now distant from their family, by their desire. I hurt from that. I had huge dreams of love and relationship and family and beauty that had been subtly planted in my head by the relationship and her family and those close to me and my own longings. Images of the man I could be and the life I could have. None of those images or dreams excluded God, but God was not the focus, My life was. I wanted my reward in this life.      As the reality of their rejection slowly and continually settled in; first as rejection as a boyfriend, then rejection as an adopted member of their family, then rejection as a close friend, then rejection even to the point of simply being good friends, all while not understanding why I was being rejected, I struggled. Each one of those dreams or hopes that was ripped away was like a stab in my heart. I struggled with deep frustration because of the seemingly contradictory actions from others who claimed love as their highest pursuit. I struggled with confusion over whether their actions gave me the right to be spiteful and run away from them outright - and whether that would be the loving and Godly response (hint: it’s not).      When your deepest desire is to be Loved and Accepted and you face rejection mixed with obfuscation and hypocrisy and selfishness (I am in no way claiming to be above those things myself), alongside loneliness, with no human whom you can reach out to for support while also truly understanding the situation and being wise enough to counsel you in it, what do you do?      Do you continue trying to fulfill your desires to love and be loved and be close with them even though every rejection is ripping you apart? Do you love them in an impersonal way somehow, without being bitter? Run away from them entirely because it just hurts so much? Be depressed and mope and give up on life because you have been affirmed yet again that you aren’t good enough to be loved by someone without obligation? Be so furious and hateful that you see red and proclaim their injustices to them and the world, though they wouldn’t listen anyways, then cut all ties with them because You have been Hurt by Them? Do you seek to be loving and be Godly even though it is actually like dipping your heart in acid every time you are around them? What does love even look like in that situation? Are you even strong enough to love like that? Or, do you just give in to the never-ending, ever-present, anxious whispers of hurt and pain and injustice at the cost of everything you have tried to stand for and everything you believe?      Or, do you instead seek to try to understand what God is purposing with all of this, in order to comply with his direction and move with his command and learn from his discipline?      I went through many of these questions in some form. I tried to be loving in the face of rejection and found only deep hurt. I was depressed and gave up on life for a while because I was affirmed, yet again, that I am not enough. The thought of cutting all ties out of hurt and abandoning everyone there crossed my mind so many times that I���d lost count. Most of the time, I tried understanding what God was doing in all of this but received scarcely a reply. I couldn’t tell what I needed to do or how to move forward without it just being wrong. All the while, those never ending whispers of pain and hurt and bitterness whispered to me in my quiet moments, when I wasn’t forcing myself to distraction; when I lie down to sleep but instead only stayed awake for hours in anxious tension until falling into troubled dreams.      So, here seemed to be the root of all of this:      My heart wants love and acceptance and seeks it from people because I have a hard time accepting it from God.      But, here is the reality of all of this:      God brought me to all of this pain intentionally. It wasn’t like he was completely surprised by this turn of events. No, he orchestrated and planned every bit of it. Then did he do it out of malice and evil glee? No. Read the Bible if you want to understand God’s heart.      He showed me that the more I seek and hope for satisfaction in humans and come to expect it from them, the more I hurt from disappointment and pain and the worse I make the situation, as sin is wont to do. No Man (or woman) Can Satisfy Me. It is a lie to believe that I will be completely and finally fulfilled and happy if I find the right person. Maybe I will be happy for a while, maybe even for a lifetime, but likely not for long and certainly not at the end of this life.     Here is the reality. God loves me so much that he will hurt me in the deepest, most excruciating way that I know to be hurt, for my own good. He will bring me to the very precipice of my deepest desires then violently rip them from me, with tears in His eyes as I weep in agony, because I have a health condition that will kill me called Misplaced Desires and he has graciously set himself to healing me at any cost to himself or me. He will lovingly rip me apart and suffer the heartbreak of a Father having to amputate His child’s legs from the boulder that crushed them so He can save his child’s life and so they can spend eternity together in joy. He is loving enough to see me through every step of my painful treatment as both my Father and my Doctor. That is his role. He loves me enough not to stop, even though it breaks his heart to see his child in agony.      “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, How will he not also, along with Jesus, graciously give us all things?”      “All things” is not defined as “All Materially Beneficial Things”. It is defined as “Anything that ensures that my human son, David, will live with me for eternity, because that is the best thing I can give.” This graciously includes my own suffering and heartbreak and hurt, because it all leads to healing.      So, I am not healed of my heart problem, yet, I think. I may not ever be till my death. But, God loves me enough to see me through it, at any cost. He has already paid the highest cost, that of his own Son’s life, what else wouldn’t he give to keep me? And because he has set me as his son and patient, I will undeservedly reap the reward at the end of this life. (John 17:3). And the one thing that will offset, and completely overshadow, the excruciating pain of the treatment is knowing that I am so Loved now, and that my Reward is coming. I will dwell in the house of Yahweh all the days of my life, I will gaze upon the beauty of the one who truly loves me, and I will inquire in his temple.      God Himself is the point of Heaven. Having and Knowing God Himself is the point of Jesus on the Cross and of every ounce of suffering, both to unbelievers, being subjected in hope of their hearts opening to him, and in believers, being transformed into the same image of Jesus, from one degree of glory to another. Knowing of his love empowers me to embrace the suffering and even share the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ to others who are in dire need of hope for treatment from their terminal illness. Delighting in the beautiful person of God is the purpose of every created human, and is what He is offering.       So, this is all more or less what I learned on my journey.      God loves me enough to hurt me. I love him for that, and desire to grow in knowledge of his goodness even more.      I can love the Rock and avoid the Hard Place by finding forgiveness to replace my bitterness and acknowledging that God has set me on a treatment plan and has plotted a course for my life that does not have me in certain relationships at this time. My Guide and Lover and the One I trust has direction for me, and I accept that and can embrace the state of relationships that He has set.      There is one more thing I realized. It is how to forgive. God uses everything for the good of his children, both the “good” things in life and the “bad” things in life (such as others acting in ways that hurt you, physically or emotionally). Those people might have had ill intent in their heart, or maybe they didn’t. However, what they set out to hurt you with, or what you have been hurt by, God is using for good. My landlord who strangled me and forced a drastic change in my life, God used to reunite me with Himself and bring about good change. Can I in good conscience hold that against my landlord?? Sure, my body was injured but God used even that for Good. This rejection by the ones I sought acceptance from, how can I hold it against them when I know that God is using it for my good, as an act of love? (Gen: 50:20, Rom 8:28) Forgiveness isn’t only only in knowing that “they will get what they’ve got coming to them”, in fact, I don’t truly think that is forgiveness at all. It also isn’t only in knowing that any harm done here should be forgiven because this flesh is temporary and that better is coming, or in light of what we have been graciously forgiven for (Eph. 4:32). Those can be motivating reasons to forgive - but truly, how can you be mad at someone who did something with evil intent (at the worst) that turned out, by God’s hand, for your good?      Perhaps I will think differently in the future regarding this, but it makes a lasting sort of sense. Forgiveness is easy when you have benefited from the wrong (or perceived wrong), which, for an adopted son or daughter of the King and Creator of the Universe, is every wrong. And every right or good thing is only given to reveal more of the goodness of God’s person within that gift. God is the gift.

[deyensee]

It’s been a while.

Well. Yep.

Some things happened.

In short order:

Moved in with buddy and his wife.

Found God (or, God reminded me of himself)

Fell in love with a community.

Fell in love with a couple of families.

Found a God fearing, food loving horse girl.

Learned A LOT. About the man I have been made to be. About what real happiness consists of. About humility and goodness and reality.

Got a full time job working as the public works lead for the city of Dorris.

Enrolled in school and am taking a total of 15 credits.

Learned the value of time management.

Learned (still learning) the value of putting God above everything including but not limited to: dreams, life, relationships, goals, money.

Also moved into a house somewhere in there.

I’m just learning what humility looks like. When I came back to God, I had nothing and was content because now I had him. There were no challenges to my love for him. Since then, he has grown and is growing me beautifully through challenges of idolizing a relationship, idolizing money, idolizing possessions, idolizing my goals and dreams that I see as reachable with God in my pocket. (Completely wrong way to view this by the way)

My latest learning is that my dreams suck! Like, really. Lately, I’ve wanted a cushy life with a ranch and a family and a happy wife and a good job to provide all of those things, with a side of serving God and glorifying him. I’m realizing that to live my life in that way is to live my life for myself. I’ve already learned that to live my life for my self is a scary and painful and destructive place to be, if you can’t tell by my post history.

But, to live for Christ’s dreams is so much better than any foolish thing I could set my sights on. To be sold out with stars in my eyes for Christ and what he offers is the best and most joyous way to live. Who needs to worry about relationships or family or anything at all when you have the God of the universe as your owner and caretaker with you as his loving servant.

So, I’m done with setting my sights on material pursuits and acquisitions. Of hoping for family for the sake of my short term (read: *only* lifelong) pleasure. Of wanting the cool laptop to show off or the sweet keyboard so others are jealous or the well designed house so people compliment me.

That’s all fruitless and turns to dust.

I want my treasure to be the kind that does not tarnish. The eternal bliss of being with my God and King and Lover. The unending pleasures of getting to know my father for all of eternity. Can you comprehend that? I struggle to.

So yeah. God is good and loving. Life is a short time of growing in our ability to glorify him to bring others to him, for the sake of the joy of all those who find him.

Finding God is a joyful and exciting pursuit. My life bears witness to that. I want the rest of it to scream it.

[deyensee]

[deyensee]

[deyensee]

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Gorgeous, natural sunlit room

[deyensee]

If love were as touch

A short(ish) poem that I wrote for my mom when she was having a bad day. Love you, mom.

If love were as touch.

If love were as touch, my love for you would fell mountains. Volcanoes would tremble under the weight of my love, and stars would burst for the fieriness of my care for you. Tempest gale would batter raw against the fortress of my heart for you, and none would speak ill under the tidals of protection I'd have for you. My love for you is as far as the east is from the west, and is from the smallest concern to the largest of fears. My love for you would conquer empires and capture every warm raindrop of a summer storm to suitably replace the tears you've left by the wayside. My world without you is a widow with no spouse to mourn, a carpenter without house to frame, a forest trail with barren trees. You are the sunlight through the dark window, the soft breeze through the blooming garden, and the gentle cultivator of my wandering path. You are my mom, and words fail to describe my love for you.

[deyensee]

[deyensee]

My 9016 Beckman’s Cigar Featherstone. They age and wear in insanely beautiful. Can’t wait.

[deyensee]

Mens Look

Most popular fashion blog for Men - Men’s LookBook ®

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Goals

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