When Riding a Bike...

Yesterday on my ride home from the bank I was flying down Beach Boulevard with the wind in my hair, not a care in the world! I was so caught up in my own free version of Thunder Mountain Railroad that I may have accidentally missed the sidewalk entirely and landed in a bush. Well, as I was enjoying my sudden jolt into Disney’s Jungle Cruise, a thought ran across my mind…if I had simply pumped the brakes a tad bit I would most likely have not landed in this ridiculous predicament. In order not to look like an entire fool, I began fussing with the gears and checking the chains pretending as though something had gone wrong…that something was my own ignorance. Regardless, I hoped on the bike and was off a grueling twenty minutes of California heat left on my ride, yet for some reason I was too busy to notice as my mind went racing.

Riding a bike is no simple task. I didn’t learn until I was around nine or ten years old. Yes, I understand that it is a little ridiculous, but some adults go their entire lives without knowing how to stray away from training wheels. I even remember a bike ride when I was younger where my sister threatened to tell on some neighborhood girls who kept pestering me about my training wheels dragging on the back. The saddest part of the whole ordeal was that I had a normal kid bike so we just attached some extra wheels but it looked ridiculously out of the norm. Not going to lie, if I saw my child self-peddling along on that thing nowadays I probably would have poked fun too!

Riding to and from school I’ve started to master the art of coasting. Once you get that bike to a certain point, you can basically coast for a good length of the road without much effort. The other day I started to realize how much I had forgotten the one rule of coasting…when going downhill you GAIN speed. Now, many of you may be rolling your eyes, but unfortunately the forgetting of this rather common sense concept was what landed me in the dumb bush in the first place. I forgot so quickly that coasting often is a way of you to check out from what you are doing. The same thing happens sometimes when I drive home from work. I always manage to get home safely, and I never fall asleep at the wheel, but sometimes I completely forgot how I got from point A to point B! Scary.

When we let ourselves go on autopilot we are at risk of missing out on what is happening in the moment. A good friend of mine told me last night the importance of experiencing what is happening now and appreciating it for what it is. It is such a simple concept, which is most likely why it is so easy to forget! The problem is that the more checked out we become, the faster life seems to flash by. Graduation is right around the corner and I don’t want to let this year become another of simply coasting through. I get too concerned with the future, and so focused on what is to come that I entirely forget about what is happening in the moment!

Not only do I forget, but sometimes I check out to protect myself. You see, I have one of the most blessed lives out there. I have an incredible family, wonderful friends, and each day I get to serve God, which is pretty legit. There are several times though in which I expect that the best moments in my life will be quickly followed by the worst. It is horrible thinking but I swear I have this idea somehow that when good things are happening something bad has to be around the corner. I have been reading James and it is all about allowing yourself to be challenged by trials. I think sometimes I assume that trials are necessary for me to grow and thus the times of good are going to be followed by something terrible so I can learn. It is awful but checking out or expecting the worst is just as bad as coasting through it!

God has been teaching me that it is in these times of blessing which thanksgiving is so much more vivid! That should never stop in the times of hardship, but it gives me time to reflect and appreciate the love that the Father pours out! Praise Him for these times for it is in them that I can truly grow in my ability to see and understand more of His love! Just a little reminder, especially on my rides that it isn’t about getting home the quickest route, but enjoying each moment along the way!

Love,

Kendra

Ms. Know It All

Dear Readers,

I apologize for the ridiculous amount of time that has passed since our last encounter. I wish I could tell you that I was off on a thrilling adventure, or too busy taking my own advice and falling in love, but to avoid blatantly lying through my teeth I might as well tell you that I just so happened to be doing a whole lot of nothing. It was sheer laziness with a hint of preservation of my own vulnerability that has kept my typing hands locked away for hours upon end. Although I don’t think much of what I would have written would have been too helpful these last few months due to some rather “confusing” and “thought-consuming” controversies I had been processing through on love. But I LOVE to keep you guessing as you already know so we will just have to watch that one unravel a bit later.

Where do I start today? Well currently, I am bloated, sweaty, and a bit on the stinky side after a wonderful but deodorant testing weekend at Dana Point with my leadership team. The humidity was rather unwelcoming and left my hair with a parting favor of frizz and grease. As much fun as I did have though, I would have to say it was rather worth it. Here I am, 21-years-old, starting what is supposed to be one of the most thrilling years of a girl’s life and I’m sitting typing away living in some fantasy land of boundaries, how-to’s, and what not to do’s.

You know, one thing I have taken away from this summer (among several of course), is that perhaps being your faithful dating advisor is that I am entirely out of the loop when it comes to really putting my stuff into practice. Next Saturday I will be standing in a wedding of two incredible individuals, pouring their hearts out for one another and glorifying the Lord in the union of their commitment to one another for life. How beautiful is that? The crazy thing is that one of the main reasons I have received such an honor of standing near the bride is due to her utilizing much of what I stand for and write in her relationship with her fiancé. She is getting married! Hello...I mean if someone else can put it to such good use than what on earth am I doing wrong?

To be honest…quite a lot. Two summers ago I was an idiot. I fell for someone entirely unrealistic and it landed me in a downward spiral of questioning and over-analyzing that no woman should, yet all women do bare. Why do we do that to ourselves? We spend so much energy telling ourselves that we should “just let it go”, “he isn’t the one”, “wait for Mr. Perfect”. We find every excuse in the world to somehow protect ourselves from physical imperfections to terrible relationships with their mothers and yet the more time we spend so enthralled by convincing ourselves out of something we wind up smack dab in the middle of falling in flove!

*Flove (Fake Love): Our idealistic, over-dramatized concept of what love should be based off of chick flicks, Nicholas Sparks, and Taylor Swift

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that love should be an experience that truly flourishes and grows daily, but for some reason I have all these silly preconceptions of how it SHOULD be. Then I end up scaring myself out of any opportunity of it as a result of not even knowing what a real, genuine love looks like. Take my parents for example, their love has lasted several years and is one of the best representations of a relationship I hope to one day model, but I never got to see how it all began. No one has ever told me how it all is supposed to begin? Perhaps because it isn’t SUPPOSED to begin any sort of way, it just does.

You know, as I write this book I feel like the biggest piece of advice I could give a girl is not to follow my example of how I lived, but how to take the wisdom I gained from my mistakes without having to experience the mistakes herself. The problem is that for each individual those mistakes will appear different. I can advise and counsel and work through situations with each person that asks me how to “solve” their relationship troubles, but that doesn’t change the fact that it will always be THEIRS.

So, what does that look like for me? I used to have this picture of a man pursuing me in a way that was so honest. I wanted someone to tell me straight up that they wanted to pursue me, I’m the kind of girl that needs that after what I’ve been through because honestly the whole actions speak louder than words thing for me is a bit tough to fathom these days. Actions can be entirely misinterpreted, but words can affirm or discourage in such a blatant way. That is why I need someone honest, because I trust words far more than what someone does. I know it is usually entirely opposite for people, but hey that is what my past situations have taught me.

A guy pursued me once though who said everything he felt, to the point of freaking me out because I was so taken back by the abruptness of it. I felt as though he was almost needy, or desperate, and ended up calling it quits after one or two dates. That is when I realized that I can have a beautiful concept of what I’m looking for in my head, but sometimes it comes in an entirely different way. I don’t let myself fall too easily these days, but at the same time once the walls are down it is pretty hard for me to build them back up. I’m starting to understand that I know less and less of what I thought I knew about how to be pursued and more and more about how to live in the mystery of it. I’ve learned that I enjoy the mysterious aspect of not fully knowing if someone is crushing on me or not, it is kind of fun! The problem is that any crush with no follow through is just that…a CRUSH.

Standing in between the tension of honesty and mystery has become one of the most challenging things for me as a woman. Mainly because I don’t believe it is my responsibility to blatantly throw out how I feel to someone, especially if their reciprocation of the feeling is in question. So then what? Wait? Be patient? All my life people have told me to wait and be patient. I can wait for hours and days and weeks and months and even years until the Lord makes it clear if or who or that there is a man for me, but what I am still asking is what am I to do while I wait? Now that is the real question.

--I’ll write soon,

Kendra