A Very Valiente Wrestling Match

So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. Genesis 32:24

During my horse's ass phase, I wrestled with God ECW-style. I was mad at God for not going along with my carefully crafted plans! I took my life into my own hands, and once I came out of that phase, I knew I had to turn it back over to God. I decided to stop wrestling with God about the direction of my life.

I never anticipated the weighty feelings I have about my past. I am not a killer, drug user, thief, etc. But I treated a lot of people really badly for a long time, in various ways and I carry a lot of guilt and regret about that. I made some terrible choices and banked on being able to simply ask God's forgiveness and press on. I did not even consider consequences. When I went through my journals last weekend, so much of my wrongness and rottenness was in front of my eyes!

As I contemplate the concept of CONTENTMENT this year, I do believe I shall have to confront the weighty feelings about my past that I carry. This week I've spent a lot of time in prayer, simply repeating these words:

thank you Lord that my past is my past
and not my present
for today is indeed a gift
thank you that my past need not be my future
please help me to carry the lessons
without rehashing the details

And you know what? It's helped. The physical effects anxiety and sorrow that creep in when I dwell on old memories longer than a second have been noticeably decreased. I do believe this may be a life-long project, but this small prayer has been my spiritual leatherman this week.

Have a nice weekend, Lovelies.

A Very Valiente Change of Direction

Last last year I decided that My One Word for 2012 was going to be LESS. I laways give my years a theme. Here's a list of themes:
2011: PROACTIVE
2010: Getting over the Boogey Man God
2009: The year of getting my s--- together
2008: Survival, plain and simple
2007: The year of getting rid of things
2006: The year everything changed
2005: The year of trying new things
2004: The year of finding a place for everything
2003: This is a complicated year to talk about, so I'll skip this one

So last year was PROACTIVE and this year would be less. Except that in 2007 I decided to stop arguing with God about the direction of my life, so when He pressed upon me that this had better would in fact be a year of searching for CONTENTMENT, I not-as-quickly-as-I-should-have changed my theme.

When I moved to Savannah in 2003, I was so very angry at God with assigning my life to that city. I moved with a rotten attitude and there was nothing that would have changed my mind. This was the beginning of a downward spiral I call my "Horse's Ass Phase." Because I was, indeed, a horse's ass during that time. When I moved to El Paso in 2006, I decided that I would and could be content anywhere that I could praise the Lord and pay my bills (I've added "love my husband" to that). So now that I am living in New York with fewer local friends than I can name on one hand, I am struggling to find contentment here.

It's tempting to say I was content in San Antonio, because I was for the most part. It's also tempting to compare life here to life there and think that I'll never be content here. But that won't work. Not at all. That's a sure-fire way to end up right back where I was: a horse's ass.

So I am re-emabarking on my journey for 2012, in search of CONTENTment. Not sure how I'll find it or make it, but I'll pursue it and lay it (and my prayers) before the Lord and wait expectantly as David described in Psalm 5:3. Perhaps I won't be content by the end of this year, but I find that proactively pursuing a goal is infinitely more fruitful than passively succombing to mediocrity.

Stay tuned and keep reading, won't you?

A Very Valiente Take on Church, no Christmas, no Church at Christmas time

A few confessions before we get started and then I promise only 4 paragraphs of writing.

The Yankee and I are not good at going to bed "on time" or even at a reasonable hour, even if we have something important the next day.

I love love love Christmas and I love going to church.

I get migraines, which I find to be completely BS.

The Yankee and I share a love of dry, cynical, offensive, and crude humor. We do this in the privacy of our own home 99% of the time, with occasional leaks around the edges. This may or may not be a recurring theme in future blogs.

Church

We have not gone to church regularly since we moved to New York since 2009. We've had bursts when we went every Sunday and stretches when we didn't go at all. However, we were involved in a small group since April of 2010 and we've just joined one here. There is something about the communcal experience of eating together and having regularly scheduled human interaction that - and the Yankee put this best- really feels more like how the Corinthians did "church." For them, it was a community and a life style- not something that occurred once a week. It was certainly this way in San Antonio, and we hope that it will be here in New York.

Going to Church in December

I've had a migraine for 10 days now. The kind that gets sharp for a few hours, dulls down a bit, then feels gone- only to reemerge when I get out of bed or stand up. So we've been planning to go to church for a few weeks now and haven't- last week because of this migraine and this week because of this migraine+the Yankee is sick. My favorite time to go to church is during Christmas and Lent, because I love hearing sermons that remind me of the "uglies" of Christmas and Easter. It's so easy to remember the high points of the story, without remembering how badly a young Jewish woman would have been treated if she's been engaged, gotten pregnant, and said it was God in her womb. 

The thing is that I really WANT to go to church right now. And then my alarm goes off and I struggle with wanting to go, but not wanting to get up, get dressed, go to church, etc. And then I stand up and my head feels like a fiery knife is slicing through my brain stem and it's too easy to decide not to go. I want to go see people and hear a sermon. I've missed being actively engaged in the word of God, pondering and seeking, and learning. Even though I am terribly introverted and it takes a lot of work to talk to people, I want to meet the body of our church and recognize faces and stories. But I am in my pajamas, struggling with whether or not I really could have made it to church this morning (which started about 3 minutes ago).

Christmas and Life

So NY is in full-swing Christmas hustle and bustle. We just got our tickets to see the Rockettes, shopping is almost done, and we have a nicely-scented beast of a tree in our living room. I miss my parents so badly this time of year, as well as our Care Group in San Antonio. This group was my "people." When good things or bad things happened, when something funny happened- honestly, when life happened, we couldn't wait to share it with our Care Group. Christmas is my mother's favorite time of year and my father's favorite time to complain. He grouses about putting up lights, and then spends the day making it all perfect (he's sweet to my mom like that). My mom does an over-the-top Christmas that I just love. I miss these two groups a lot.

The End- these four sentences does not count as a paragrah.

So we're in a new group and do want to go to church, but haven't. We're in the middle of Christmas, missing our people. The Yankee is sick and I am migraining. Stay tuned for my next post; I shall be writing about how the Valiente Family does Christmas and later doing a retroactive post in which I compare and contrast how the Yankee and I behave at parties.

My One Word

Have you heard anyone chattering about One Word? Maybe you’ve seen it on Facebook? Here’s the idea: instead of writing a resolution for the year, you select one word and drill all the ideas behind your resolution into a single goal, a single focus. Here’s an introduction from http://www.myoneword.org:

Our resolutions seldom work because they focus on the type of person we want to become rather than who God wants us to be. Many people do not see God at work in their lives simply because they don’t know what to look for. So, what if our hopes for the year centered on who God wanted us to become instead?

It’s okay to want to be a better you—and the New Year is a natural time to start. The question is, how? My One Word replaces broken promises with a vision for real change. When you choose a single word, you have a single focus. You are moving toward the future rather than swearing off the past.

With My One Word, you’re right where God wants you: in His hands. And it’s not an extreme makeover we’re talking about. This year, the goal is to see His work in one area of your life.

Here are the steps behind the idea of choosing your word:

1. Think about what kind of person you want to become: For me, this is a bit too broad for goal setting. I normally like my goals in bite-sized chunks. But, it’s some else’s idea, so here we go.

2. Identify the characteristics of that person

3. Simply pick a word: boil down the broad concept of your ideal image of yourself into a one-word focus

So then you can go to My One Word and join and post you word, as I did. There are also links on Facebook. For me, Mrs. Kate L. Valiente, my word for 2010 is PROACTIVE. I feel like I need to write that in all caps to make it really stand out.

I’ve written many blogs and essays and journal entries about the idea of excellence in my life-a concept that’s eluded me, sadly. I’ve pursued health, expertise, and religion in various ways with the end-goal of excellence in mind. It’s a pretty high target that a person can never really hit in life but one that I’m still pursuing. One piece of the puzzle that I’m constantly lacking and bemoaning is motivation to actually get moving and reach my goals. I don’t exactly know how one manufactures motivation in his/her life but for me, I find that some days I just have to make myself get moving, whether I feel like it or not. That, in my opinion, is proactive. Proactive means heading a problem off at the pass, attacking it before it attacks you, finishing a project before the due date—in essence, it means to GET MOVING and to stay in motion. Whether I feel like it or not, whether I want a nap or a cup of coffee, even if the only think I want to do is snuggle on the couch under a blanket and read all day, PRACTIVE in my life means I just DO IT.

So that’s my one word. Published for all to see. And by “all” I mean the handful of people who read my blog J