Life here as I see it, as I leave it, is beautiful, but it has come to me broken and has often been hard to receive. It has taken a long time to experience this love and belonging. Time, mistakes, curve balls. Getting here hasn’t been quick and it hasn’t been simple. It has been rough building and steep climbing. At times it has been comprised of so many downs, I have doubted whether our general trajectory was looking up at all. Read More »
Author: Amy Rochelle
Love relentlessly, hope unceasingly, and live with abandon. I'm a lover of letterpress, holding a new book, living brave, and creating anything with paper and ink. I think life's most beautiful things include eating out of noodle boxes and reading aloud with dear friends, and I'm always looking to find just a little bit more beauty, wherever I am.
I Don’t Want To Go
I am struggling and failing to comprehend the extent of change that is about to take place in my life. 1810 days ago I moved to Redding, California as a just-turned-21-year-old. Here I built life and spent five years being shaped by it. In fourteen days, this normal will completely unravel in exchange for the new. Five years will come to completion as I get inside my little VW Beetle and drive clear across the country to new adventures awaiting in North Carolina. Read More »
When You Go and Return
The smell of wet earth is one of my favorite smells in all the world. All the landscape is green and grey, grass and clouds. Winter is never brown here. Nothing is ever brown here! It’s all the rain that makes the Tuis sing, and the ferns unfurl, and the moss cling to every surface. It holds to the air, making me want to breathe in more than I need to–like I can’t get enough of that green air inside of me! Read More »
My Individualistic Approach to Community
For the past three years, almost everybody I know has been living, breathing, building, destroying, and building again this concept of community. It has been the single messiest, loveliest journey I have ever witnessed and participated in. I am blessed to be surrounded by people willing to brave the scary parts of relationship. We’ve gone places, walked through grief, pulled apart, stitched ourselves together again, Read More »
My New Old Story
“We stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
We embrace New Years as a state of mind in which we attempt to fold up the past and define a new future. I like that idea. I like the idealistic notion of a well closed ending, a giant count-down and a ceremonious beginning after which everything is a new story. Read More »
When You’re Heading Out
Sometimes the things they say on packaging can be hilarious in way-overkill fashion. Sometimes it can be spot on. The box of the cereal I’ve been munching on states, “What matters most is what’s inside.” It’s true for cereal boxes and people and it’s been making an impression on me lately. Read More »
Recap 2012: Photography
In 2012 I undertook several new ventures. I have always threatened (myself) to quit everything else and go study art. This last semester I made true on that promise (well, except for the quitting-everything-else part). I finally decided that this impulse wasn’t going anywhere, and I needed to get behind a pencil and a camera. So I took my first art classes–one in digital photography and one in freehand drawing. I have to say, it is incredibly satisfying to get to the end of a year and know that you have actually done something you have always wanted to do. Perhaps more importantly, I reached the end of this year feeling like I had become more of somebody I want to be.
So I would like to share with you some of the progress of my daring greatly.Read More »
A Heart that Turns
It’s been one of those evenings. I have many different kinds of those evenings. This has been the kind of 3 books and a Bible and a guitar (accompanied with a giant brown blanket, some lingering Christmas lights, and a pumpkin muffin). I read a verse. “Ahh that’s so true!” I exclaimed and starting talking to Jesus about it. Then I cried. Then I told Him something I’m really needed to get off my chest. Then I opened a book. I didn’t make it far. More tears, comments, songs. Back and forth, reading, crying, praying, singing, exclaiming, asking. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not been a top-of-the-mountain, revelatory moment. It’s been a my-soul-cries-out kind of moment. I’ve been telling Him about some very particular heartbreaks. About some losses, some failures, some regrets and some disappointments. I’ve been pointing out to heaven those little corners in meRead More »
Unpredictable Beauty
What Lies Behind
“You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. Where shall I go from your spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” – Psalms 139:5-7
I have always taken comfort in times of uncertainty that He is the God who goes before me–that He prepares the way, and is in my future before I ever get there. It’s somewhat easy for me to trust Him with the things that have yet to happen, but recent history has challenged how well I trust Him with the things that lie behind. A few weeks ago as I was taking my 7 minute drive to school, I tuned into K-Love thinking, I bet there’s something playing right now I need to hear. Sometimes those 2 or 3 songs that carry me down the 44, give me just what I need to approach the day right. It’s almost my last ditch effort at perspective readjustment on days when there hasn’t been time for anything else!
Chris Tomlin was singing his new song, “I know who goes before me, I know who stands behind…” I was struck. He stands behind me! How had half the impact of this reality never made its way home? I wasn’t scared about my future, I was scared about my past. I was scared of the things I couldn’t do anything about–the things that had already passed through that small window in which I have the chance to alter them. We are powerfully present in our lives in only a sliver of time. We don’t get to go backwards and forwards and make adjustments based on lessons learned and perspectives gained. When today comes, I greet it with today’s wisdom, today’s resources, and today’s state of mind and heart. And then today leaves me, and it goes into a part of my life I can’t pick up again. Tomorrow isn’t so scary because it still has so many chances. Yes, it’s unknown and uncertainty gives fear, but it also gives hope. Where is the hope in yesterday?
He stands behind. I got excited and relieved. Although it’s hard for a time-constrained brain to comprehend, I knew with sudden sureness that the comfort of trusting a God who stands in my future could be applied to a God who simultaneously stands in my past. He’s still there. He’s still working it out. He hasn’t let yesterday go. He’s not done with it yet. Though I can’t do anything, He can, and wherever He is, there is grace, and grace makes beautiful. Trust means not only that I move forward with confidence of a good future, but that I let go with surety that He will take care of the things I no longer can. The deepest beauty and freedom of a life surrendered is that nothing is beyond redemption for a God who stands behind.
Amy Rochelle 