priceless.

the price you have to pay to get a clean, healthy, tender and pure heart is HIGH!

let's be honest, it isn't easy to not listen to your latest critic or be angry at the newest villain. but i think in order to keep a clean heart i have to make conscious choices to fix my eyes on Christ, tune my ears to His heartbeat and share the dreams, hurts and fears of my soul.

how priceless it is though to stand in the middle of an incredible journey where i am beginning to feel on the winning side of such a heart. a few days ago a tear filled my eye and i couldn't cry because i was shocked and so happy that something had finally touched a place i had made so guarded.

i am seeking to walk into every situation, wow i typed that and almost deleted it, and be willing to be hurt as opposed to going in guarded or gun in hand. there are still a few scabs on my heart but i haven't stopped the process. in fact, thursday i am going to begin some invasive surgery on healing wounds and cleaning out the poison of bitterness.

a clean heart before God and a tender heart towards people is priceless... and i am glad i am okay paying the price!

it can't all be bad.

my mother has me working on a project for her which involves me going through old home videos and dubbing them to DVD. thus, from that project these thoughts for sparked.

i remember growing up in quite possibly the most constricting conservative environments, both home and community (town of less that 5,000).

i was about six years old when somehow i got a hold of a M.C. Hammer cassette tape entitled "can't touch this". i would wait til my father, a minister in an ultra conservative southern church, was out of the house and i would play that tape over and over. i had no more memorized every word to that song than i began wanting my grandmother to sew me these odd shaped pants. ha ha you guessed it the famous M.C. Hammer pants. of, course i couldn't tell where i got the idea for these pants because that music was... bad, secular.

i was SIX! it wasn't that i wanted to be bad or that i was rebellious. although, some would contend that rebellion is born in the heart of a child, i know it was something much different.

even through the last few years of my adult life i have wanted to slip away and hear this band or that artist. once again, not to deceive or rebel.

but why?

i think the innocence of a child is deep in us all found great enjoyment or comfort in songs and other art. long before spiritual tour guides could come along and instruct us of all the BAD in the world, i think we saw more GOOD...

maybe it is like a child with a little cassette tape, that i am now beginning a greater re-discovery of things, possibly more significant now, that can't all be bad.

i am not saying that we should not have morals, ethics, or standards at all! i am simply saying at some point if we aren't careful we allow others to paint over the masterpiece of our creator and causing us to call "BAD" to those things which are "GOOD".

just a 23 year old... not a declaration for a movement, just part of the journey in my own heart.