Reflecting

It’s amazing how life works…some things change for the better and some for the worst. I look at my life and how unexpectedly things changed. Not all of the paradigm shifts were good, but I used each moment to help make me greater. Around this time last year I was fighting for my life. A year later I’m living for each day. Some things will never make sense to me…like why failing hurts so much more when you were optimistic of your success. But that’s life. You live. You learn. You grow. This I am learning. But most importantly, I am happy for all that is taking place.

-ZDSD

 

I remember being young and naive, thinking there was power in pursuing your dreams. One day you grow up and reality hits you. Not all dreams come true. But does that mean they aren’t worth the pursuit? That perspective is entirely up to you.

ZDSD

 

Memories

We spend so much time trying to capture memories that we forget to live in the moment.

Let the moment become a memory on its own and cherish time for what it is…

ZDSD

 

The Dream…

Sometimes I have this dream that leaves me feeling so confused and empty. While the surroundings of the dream sometimes changes, the premise of the dream is usually the same. In the dream I am pregnant, usually in the earliest stages when I discover it. Throughout the course of time I find my belly growing and the people that one would expect to be there to help me through it, are no where to be found. Not my mother or father, not my brother, not even so much as a friend. The further along and bigger I get, the fewer faces I see as I go on with my routine activities. Sometimes I see myself walking through crowds of people and them moving aside as I pass, but no one acknowledges my presence. No one is there to help me. No one to help me understand the pains of birthing. Sometimes I make it through the entire nine months of pregnancy only to find myself in a delivery room alone and afraid. Sometimes (but rarely) there’s someone there to help take me to the hospital, other times the dream just shows me mysteriously ending up in the delivery room. But no matter how I end up there, there’s never a doctor. I always find myself looking around for help, waiting for someone to give so much as morphine to ease the pain, but no one ever shows. Right before I go to give the final pushes to deliver my baby, I wake up. I never get to see the birthing of my dream baby, never get the help I seek, I am left with such a hallow and lingering feeling.

There are usually so many questions when I wake up from the dream. How and when did I get pregnant? Where was my child’s father? Why do I never get to see my baby or even know its sex? Why has everyone I know and love left me in the dream? Why do I feel so empty when I wake up? I tried to research this type of dream on the internet. The concept of dreaming of birth is said to be a sign of possibility. That if you dream of giving birth you are foreshadowing yourself birthing opportunities unknown to you yet. I am not sure if there are actual prophetic or Biblical attachments to my dreaming at this point, but one can only wonder. Why does this dream keep coming to me? Why does it feel so real? Some believe if you dream of suddenly being pregnant it means some part of yourself is trying to grow and develop, and perhaps you aren’t ready to publicly display this new found development just yet. I don’t know if any of it is true. What I do know is that if I am pregnant with some variation of possibilities, I hope life would allow me to share them with someone. I never want the delivery of any proverbial “birthing” to be as lonely, cold, and as isolated as my dreams feel.

ZDSD

 

Regrets & Mistakes

There’s a popular song by the artist Adele that has a line saying “regrets & mistakes, they are memories made”…

For some reason, that line has been resonating with me for a while. My family and a few colleagues keep reminding me how I gave up the chance to move to a new state and start my career fresh out of college. Although the job offer would have been a phenomenal opportunity, I knew in my heart that it wasn’t the plan God had for me. The area was what I wanted, the nature of the job was in my industry field, but something just didn’t feel right. It was hard for me to turn down the job, and others thought I had lost my mind in doing so. Do I regret the decision I made? Sometimes. Only because I will forever wonder what would have become of that opportunity. While there are some regrets to that situation, I know a blessing lies on the other side of my obedience. I prayed before making that decision. As hard as it was to get the answer I received from God, I am still waiting on His promises to be fulfilled. Trying to get others to understand the why’s and how’s of me turning down the “dream job” are a bit difficult. But when you know what God has in store, you need not explain what He has revealed. Eventually it’ll work out, but right now I am just happily and patiently waiting for what lies ahead. So while some people would say I made a mistake, I say all that I did is only preparing me for something greater.

Regrets and mistakes they are memories made. One day I’ll look back on what other’s thought was a bad decision and be glad that I did what God wanted me to do. It’ll be worth it.

ZDSD

 

It was meant to be…

No one wants to be reminded that their life, their existence, wasn’t meant to be. My life wasn’t planned, and in some cases it wasn’t wanted. It used to hurt me to know that there were people in this world who hated me even before my conception. But this is life. No one wants to be reminded that their life was an inconvenience but the reality is while it was an unfortunate intrusion to man, it was a planned arrival from God. I have to remind myself that on days like this. While I was an unwarranted product of teen pregnancy, I thank God for my life. I could have been aborted, but God had a plan for my life. He has a plan for my siblings’ lives and everyone else in my family for that matter. I do not know why God unfolds the hand he deals so methodically, but I trust His plan for my life. It isn’t easy knowing reality as it may be…but life isn’t easy nor is it fair. My life is for a purpose, I was birthed on purpose…even if the circumstances weren’t ideal for my mother and father. But thank God that I am here. I have lived a good life…no a great one, but this is only the beginning. There is so much more for me to do and with Him by my side it won’t matter who disapproved of my existence. One day I hope to look back with pride, pride that I made it through. Pride that I can share with others: that no matter where you come from, the circumstance or the situation that brought you here…YOU WERE MEANT TO BE. That’s all that matters.

 

The Promise

It’s hard to trust in promises these days. I often tell people: I don’t believe in lying. This is true. I was lied to so much as a child that I do not believe in lying. There were many empty promises I waited to be fulfilled…but many never came to pass. These promises were primarily from individuals I loved and trusted to be honest with me. As a result, I do not lie because I know how it feels to be hurt by false truth. Subsequently I find it hard to trust people who give out promises. Yet there is something about the promises of God. They are reassuring because I know He is not One who can lie. To this date He has never let me down, even though I let Him down innumerably. One promise keeps coming to me. When the Lord first reveled to me that He would be redirecting my career path elsewhere, I promised Him where He led I would follow. He led me into the field of mission work. I followed. As a result I have taken a hand full of missions within the United States to help improve the lives of individuals domestically. What a remarkable feeling it is to know that something as simple as cleaning and renovating a home has an impact on the world around you, and that the Lord smiles down on your benevolence. Some individuals say that mission work is stupid or not worth the efforts, but I say if I can touch just a single life and impact someone in the name of Christ my time here on Earth will be worth living. It is with the vow I gave to God that I have been moving forward in my mission efforts. He has called me to the country of Brazil to help out. I have no idea why, but I know that this is where I am called. He told me that this is where I would be going over a year ago. He promised that he would provide for me to do work there. He set me before an organization of individuals to help arrange the trip. All I had to do was fund-raise. It hasn’t been easy. For over a year I have heard people promise that they would help, promise they would support me in my endeavors, promise that they cared. Yet I have also had some of the same individuals talk behind my back about why I would spend over a year waiting on a promise that God has not yet fulfilled. It’s not easy waiting on a promise. Especially one that was given spiritually, one that no other man was told. But God has not yet failed me so I will continue to rest on His promise. He said that He would provide, so I will wait for provision. In the meantime I am doing as much as I can earthly to make the mission possible. I have set up a fundraising page on gofund me and I would love to share it with my readers here. I know there are millions of gofundme’s floating around the internet, there are millions of causes to help support, but if you feel led I ask you to consider donating to this one. It is my life’s goal to impact the world, to make a difference to someone who needs it. Will you help me do so? https://www.gofundme.com/v6qq94c

Standing on His Promise.

ZDSD

 

 

The Days…

I live in a world of “one days” and “some days”. Some nights I lay awake and think of all the things that I will one day do. One day I will be great. Some day I will change the world. One day I will make a difference. Some day I will be able to make life better for those around me. One day. Some day. But what about today? Well today I did what I do everyday. I woke up, got ready for work and class, checked my bag to make sure I had my taser, made sure my mace was still securely attached to my key chain and shoved my knife in my pocket before heading out to do my daily activities. Why must I do this every single day? Because this is what society has taught me to do, for survival. I am a young woman, although I have a muscular build, I am petite. I have some martial skills, but I am taught that sometimes that is simply not enough. I am taught to live in fear. I am told to fear being alone with any man I am not well acquainted with, any man who is larger and stronger because he could be a rapist or murderer. I am taught to fear other women, especially those who are quick to engage in verbal altercations, because she might wish to escalate a simple debate into a physical dispute, which might cost me my life. I am taught to fear anyone with brown skin who adorns a turban because this person might be a national threat, they may have a bomb underneath their garments, they may be apart of a secret organization of terrorists. I am taught to fear nightclubs and parties, because that is where date rapes occur or in recent times mass murders. I am taught to fear movie theaters because murders have also occurred there. I am taught to fear anyone in uniform because they may use their position of authority as a means to harm me, especially the police. I never knew how influential these teachings were. I typically ignore anything that bares a negative connotation, even the teachings society insists I must govern myself by. But somehow, when I am surrounded by a world of negative and miserable people, sometimes I grow weary of fighting what all I am taught to do. Today I was riding along the highway, going the appropriate rate of speed, when I saw a police car speeding up behind me with his sirens on. With all that is going on in the world, with all that society and the media has taught me my first instinct was to shrink in fear. The cop sped past me and was apparently never intending to stop me, but the innate reaction was fear. Why was that? Because this is what the world has taught me to do. I began to cry profusely. How could I, this woman who has so much strength, who is filled with all of this hope of what I will someday and one day do to make the world a better place, be filled with such terror? When did I let the world’s negatively penetrate my walls of strength? It’s hard to determine when it all happened. It could have been when I lost my friend to murder, or when another friend became a murderer. It could have been when I got to college and they attempted to reprogram and desensitize my thinking. I’m not sure when I began to be torn down, or if I have been weakened at all. Perhaps this is just a moment that will pass. All that I do know is that there is a darkness in the world and it is heavy. But I have faith that one day and some day the light of the Lord will outcast all that is wrong. One day.

ZDSD

 

One of Those Days

Have you ever had one of those days where even you have to ask yourself “what’s the matter with me?” You don’t want to be alone, you want to be held, but you don’t want to be around people or to be bothered. Such an odd internal conflict, I know. But I feel that we have all had one of those days. I started to ask myself what is the matter? Why am I so irritable? It seemed like nothing was going right, it wasn’t one of those happy “usual” days for me. I started to think about the things that were going wrong, everything that I need to do but never seem to have the time to do, all the expectations that are placed on me. I got so overwhelmed with negative thoughts that I wanted to scream. Then it hit me: I’ve been here before! This place my friends is called depression. I, for no reason to my knowledge, was beginning to slip back into that dark place I once lived. That place in my mind where I spent so many years fighting to get out. I was focusing on all the wrong that I couldn’t remember what was right. But then I remembered what God reminded me of the day of my 22nd birthday. He reminded me of all I had overcome to get to this point in my life, all of the adversity I had to face, the challenges I had to triumph over in order to be as happy as I am in life now. The adversity, the hate, the pain, the frustration….the highlight of the previous sentence: these are the things that I had already OVERCOME! Today I was in a place familiar to me, and it would have been easy to stay in this comfortable place of self-doubt and loathing, but I had already overcome this point in my life. As hard as it is to throw on a smile, go out, and socialize, I have far too much to be happy and grateful for to sit around being depressed about circumstances God has and will work out in my favor! We all have our days where life gets us to that place of frustration, we are entitled to our bad days, but the point is do not stay there. I have been able to overcome depression not by going through therapy or joining help groups, but instead by focusing on all that is good in life and remembering that God is the ultimate healer. So on these days that I just can’t seem to get out of a funk, I must remind myself of all that is good, all that God has delivered me from, and all that I have to look forward to. I hope that this message is an encouragement to someone out there. No matter how bad your day may seem, remember you have an incredible life to look forward to! You can, you will, and you must OVERCOME!

Blessings to you all on this day.

ZDSD

 

What does it take…

How much blood must we shed before America realizes we need to return our nation back to Christ? I look at the history of my country, and although it has not been spotless or without blame, the circumstances of America were in a much better place before we started removing God from all that we stood for. We have taken God out of our schools, out of our homes, our workplaces, and ironically enough some have even taken Him out of our churches. How does God feel about all of this? We give rights to any and everyone, yet we are told that we do not have the right to publicly pray….what rights to we bare? We would rather fall into the hands of an angry God and take a moment of silence after catastrophic events have occurred than to take a moment to fall on our knees and pray. What is this world we live in? I am not perfect. I am a sinner striving for the mark just like any and everyone else in this world. All I know is that God is not pleased with the way we devalue the gift of life that He has given us and He does not like that we have been ignoring Him. The Bible speaks of these things, but so many will remain ignorant to the facts of the Word because they would rather go blind to the circumstances that are happening around them. The Bible is fulfilling itself. The world is only going to get wickeder and wiser. I am not sure why God has me sharing this with you all, but I would like you to know that no matter what state you are in with God, it’s not too late to get things right with Him. In a faithless world, all God wants is for our souls to live according to His will. Please if you are not right with God, find it in your heart to seek Him now. We are approaching the end times as the Bible has foretold. There is no better time to seek salvation than right here today.

Praying for this nation.

ZDSD