la vie est belle

Once again, it's not really about cooking today.. it's just so hard to be motivated to cook for only myself.. knowing I'll be eating the leftovers for the rest of the week. Omelettes are about as much as I've done lately.

However, yesterday I did get an amazing opportunity to go to Atlanta with a couple of my friends, Brittany and Jessica. Brittany's gotten involved with this ministry called SafeHouse Outreach in downtown Atlanta, so I went to see what it was all about. It's an outreach to homeless people, but not really a shelter. They provide counseling type sessions, and have worship services and food every night. I got the opportunity to meet a lot of the staff, and it was really cool. One of the guys that does counseling now is homeless himself (he lives in the SafeHouse). John told us his entire life story, and let me just say that nothing that's ever happened to me even comes close to his better times. His father was a coke dealer and his mother was on heroin. From there, his life just continued to spiral downward, and even when it seemed like things might get better, something horrible would happen and he would end up homeless again. I guess I've always kind of thought that if you work hard, you'll be successful, but John was living proof that this wasn't true. He has a college degree which he worked his butt off to earn, and through a long series of events, still ended up homeless, and even in jail at one point for asking for a sandwich.

But he wrapped up his story by saying that he had been through all of that to get to where he is today, and where he is today is exactly where he wants to be. He gets to help people and he gets to wake up every day excited about his job. He said, "the people who work in those skyscrapers always look so sad", and that really made me think. I've become a very materialistic person, exactly the person society wants me to be. I've wasted so much time and money in my life on things that bring me temporary happiness, if you can even call it that, when all along I don't need anything for happiness. This man has almost nothing to his name, but he loves people, and he gets to show God's love to them everyday.

I'm not saying that I'm going to stop buying things, but what I want more than anything is to experience the joy that this man had. And I know that to do that I'm going to have to completely re-evaluate my relationship with Jesus. I've really let that slide over the past few years, not just because of college (not that it helped). I've just fallen into the way of the world; not being bad by any means, but certainly not pursuing a growing relationship with Christ.

So perhaps this breakup wasn't such a bad thing. I think right now I just need to get things right with God, and then maybe in the future I can concentrate on a relationship with a guy.

After all, everything happens for a reason, right?