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04/08/2013

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Your Once Upon a Time Tale

God of Wonder,
Why do I find it so easy to get caught up in the mundane busyness of life? Why do I allow the tiniest details to become the biggest issues? Why do I get so caught up in going through the motions that I forget how to fully enjoy You?

Sometimes I fear I’ve allowed the little things to swallow up the Greatest Thing of All. Sometimes I look around the clutter of my life and realize I can’t find You. And life is simply too boring when it is not lived in constant awareness of who You are and all You offer me.

And I feel that I’ve lost something I desperately want to reclaim.

I want to recapture the mystery that is You. I want to lose myself in that fairytale wonder where pumpkins turn to carriages and kisses break spells and there’s always that hope of dreams coming true. I want to drink deeply of Your Presence and lose myself in Your love. I want to dance unhindered in the courts of Your Kingdom.

But my happy thoughts have been replaced with an endless list of things I need to do and I’m learning that pixie dust wears off if you haven’t used it for awhile. That Neverland wonder feels so far away when I’m too weighed down by the trivial things in life to be able to fly.

And I know that You care about the little things. I know that You concern Yourself with the tiny details of my life. And yet… Yet I hear You calling me away from the intricacies that consume me. You beckon me out from the mundane and invite me to dance in the realm of wonder and magic.

Your hand extends the good part that Mary embraced and Martha scorned. Today I can choose to be either Mary or Martha.

So I set aside my broken priorities and allow You to sweep me off into the fantastical wonder of Your once upon a time tale.

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Rebekah Roper

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12/10/2012

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Live the Journey

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Joy in Your Presence

My life has been so busy lately. That’s been my answer for everyone who asks how I’ve been.

Busy. Busy, busy, busy.

Maybe that’s why Psalm 16:11 hit me like a slap in the face:

It’s the kind of verse that makes me realize how far off track I’ve been here of late. Caught up in the mundane. Just pushing to get through another moment. Another day.

In the hustle and bustle of everything happening in my life—the tasks I have to complete and the dreams I yearn to see fulfilled—I’ve forgotten an essential thing.

There is joy to be found in the journey. Joy to be found in the One who gives life to those as undeserving as I.

And I find that what I’ve been missing these last few weeks is joy. The joy I used to find in His presence. The joy that unveils itself with every step God leads me through.

The path of life is just that: life. It’s not meant to be routine. It’s not intended to become mundane. It is meant to be lived. Fully. With joy in His presence and eternal pleasures at His right hand.

And for too long I’ve been forgetting to live so fully.

Today I come to find joy in His presence again.

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Rebekah Roper

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12/29/2011

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#9 – Mere Existence

How’s this for a New Year’s Resolution?

There’s a big difference, you know, between living and existing. I think that if you were to ask anyone, they would tell you that they want to live. But how easily we fall into that horrible thing called “existence.” How often we simply trudge through the mundane. And how sad it is that we need a reminder to live and not merely exist.

Today I present you with the wake-up call I need on a daily basis. Here’s your reminder to step outside your mere existence and truly start living.

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Rebekah Roper

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09/02/2011

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Fairytale Fallacies, Heartfelt Prayers

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Embracing the Fairytale

I won’t be Rapunzel sitting in a tower,

staring out the window and dreaming of the hour

I’ll be free from my gilded cage.

I’ll rewrite the story. I will turn the page.

I’ll be the Little Mermaid stretching out my hand,

reaching toward the surface and dreaming of dry land.

I’ll be Cinderella going to the ball,

escaping from the everyday and standing there in awe.

Part of that world, more than a dream,

more than a life of espressos and cream.

Somewhere, somehow,

I’ll live the life I’m merely dreaming of now.

Faith, hope and trust, second star to the right,

straight on ’til morning, I’ll fly through the night.

Fairytale endings, dreams coming true,

and I’m lost in wonder – glorious wonder –

experiencing the mundane with You.

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Rebekah Roper

Posted on

10/11/2010

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Live the Journey

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Mountain-Sized Enthusiasm

Yesterday, I went on a little adventure with my friend, Shannon. It wasn’t one of those things I would normally consider to be an adventure, but with Shannon, everything is an adventure. So there we were, sitting in a bagel shop, when she finds out I had never been there before. “Girl,” she exclaimed, “I just love that I get to be part of all these firsts with you! Like the downtown mall, the Mellow Mushroom, and now this.”

I blinked. We were eating bagels and she managed to make it sound like we were climbing Mt. Everest. I quickly found her mountain-sized enthusiasm stirring my own. Believe it or not, I’m not naturally one of those excitable kind of people. I’m often hard to impress, and I don’t enjoy exploring new things. That kind of goes against everything I’ve been saying, doesn’t it? But it’s true. While my brother inherited my dad’s “happy feet,” I tend to cling to my grandma’s mentality of not wanting to leave home.

I remember how, shortly after I moved down here, my coworkers kept encouraging me to “explore the territory” and drive around town “just for fun.” I remember having two distinct thoughts about that.

I don’t think it’s wise for a young woman to wander around such a busy town all by herself.
That’s not fun; that’s torture.

That’s how little I enjoy “adventure.”

But then I go places with people like Shannon and I see the world through different eyes. As I was sitting in that bagel shop with my oh so excitable friend, I realized something… When I’m with Shannon, the mundane things become exciting and the small things appear to be colossal. I live the journey so much better when I’m living it with her. But I want to live like that all the time. I want to be the kind of person who makes an adventure out of mall trips, and pizza places, and bagel shops.

And while Shannon’s mountain-sized enthusiasm seems impossible for me to achieve, I’ll start with a hill – a little mound really. And maybe if I pray hard enough, live loud enough, and truly rejoice in the little things, my mound will become a mountain. I’ll just take it like I have to take everything else in life – one little step, one gloriously mundane moment at a time.

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Rebekah Roper

Posted on

10/02/2010

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Live the Journey

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Extraordinary Mundane Moments

Sometimes I wonder how to encourage people to embrace the ordinary moments in life. I’m pretty sure no one is simply waiting for me to tell them about the mundane moments of my day. But what I hope touches your heart as deeply as it touches mine are the moments when God shows up and makes something extraordinary out of my ordinary, mundane moments. I had one of those moments today.

I was planning to finish a significant amount of writing this afternoon, but as we all know, things rarely turn out as we expect. And since my mind was somewhere else entirely, well… I didn’t write at all today (unless you count the rewriting of the poem that has been pounding in my brain for the past 24 hours). What I did do was start feeling a little artistic, dig through all my photographs from the past four years, and meticulously edit and form them into a masterpiece. Four hours and 22 pictures later, my masterpiece was completed, but I felt as if I had wasted my entire afternoon.

But God didn’t agree. “Rebekah,” He gently reprimanded. “This is a beautiful form of worship.”

Worship? Is that really what I was doing? Was meditating on a poem about the greatness of my God and forming it into something that would serve as a continual reminder, truly a form of worship? The way God’s Presence saturated my living room in that moment left little room for argument.

What I experienced today was an extraordinary mundane moment. And I almost missed it. In fact, I think we miss them most of the time because they don’t fit into our agendas. God tends to show up in the little things that we didn’t plan on experiencing – probably because we otherwise don’t leave enough time for God in our days. But when I take a step back from my plans and agendas, the only thing I can say is this: “Giver of Abundant Life, what a glorious day to embrace the mundane with You.”