Knowing and understanding

Recently I’ve been realising the difference between knowing something, and really understanding it for yourself. I know that love is kind, patient, doesn’t hold grudges etc, but learning that and actually applying that to myself and my relationships is different from just knowing it in my head.

This difference is key to the Christian faith; knowing Jesus died on the cross, believing he rose from the dead, even, isn’t the same as knowing that in your heart and accepting that personally for yourself. A personal relationship with God needs to be just that- personal, not academic head knowledge. Often people debate about the difference between following your head or your heart, but I believe that both are key in order for us to learn and grow in life, practically and spiritually.

I really love hearing about and learning about what others have been discovering of God and learning on their own spiritual journeys. However, if I spent all my time reading blogs about that, and talking to others without being able to actually understand those truths in my own heart and own them for myself, it’s not much use. I think that’s why my time reading the Bible in the morning is so important. I could miss church, small group, all those structured organisations, but spend time in the Bible personally learning and growing and make progress in the faith. Relying only on what others tell me God is like limits me from finding out myself. Not that reading my Bible guarantees that kind of understanding- the amount of times I can read the same passage, know what it says and is asking for me to change, without applying it in my heart or life is astounding, and quite sad once I think about it. It’s through the Holy Spirit that God can speak to me in the Bible, and so I need to pray for his help in getting to this place.

Often I feel that writing posts like this is more help to me than anyone reading them- writing clarifies my thoughts and helps to soldify those understandings I’ve been talking about. My ramblings benefit me more than anyone else. If this post is interesting, but you don’t learn from it, that’s ok. But I would say that if you’re interested in getting to know, really understand the person who made you, knows you better than anyone, good and bad yet loves you more than anyone ever could, get to grips with His word and apply it to yourself. Challenge yourself in truth. She Reads Truth has some great plans if you don’t know where to start.

The summer list

Term is officially over, and today is the first day of summer! This year I have about fourteen weeks off university, and I want to make sure we make the most of this time. Here is my list of things I hope to do this summer…

Family

• Play- lots of playing.
• Go on holiday with the caravan
• Take Phoebe to swimming lessons again
• Go on day-trips with Phoebe
• Stay outdoors when possible
• Get the photo canvas printed for the dining room
• Have friends over for dinners

Personal

• Read a book a week (a mixture of uni and non uni)
• Edit the Lisa List, my Nanowrimo draft from last November
• Make a banner for my folksy shop
• Develop my folksy shop
• Draw
• Do our travel scrapbook
• Make a birthday calendar
• Exercise regularly

Do you have a list of things you want to do in your summer holidays (if you have them?!)

A few favourite things

1. A cluster of new things, including a soft, perfect spring throw that was a steal.  2. Pretties on my craft desk  3. Sewing under the skylight, with mini bunting  4. Some long overdue wall hanging happened  5. Funny girl loves to copy and do everything the same as us!

[ Uncaptured.. the garden full of green, planting out the salad leaves, fragrance coming from unlit Yankee candles thanks to the warm weather, hugs, sunhats and the noise of pounding feet ]

16 months with Phoebe

You..

• are giving me hugs now, hanging your arms around my neck and hugging my head. You also like giving kisses occasionally which is very sweet.
• had your first ride on the back of a bicycle earlier this month, in some lovely sunshine with your grandparents near Worksop
• love bananas
• stamp your feet to request the tractor song, lie down for sleeping bunnies and clap your hands for if you’re happy and you know it
• also know actions to our God is so big, heads shoulders knees and toes and the wheels on the bus
• understand much more and respond when we talk about going to bed, going out, getting shoes, books and that kind of thing
• stamp and toddle around the house whilst chatting loudly to yourself
• love being outside and going for walks down the road
• pretend you don’t know what ‘come back’, ‘come here’, and other things mean to try and get away with avoiding doing them
• had a lovely trip ‘down South’ this month, saw great-grandparents, grandparents and second cousins, as well as playing on the slide and helping mummy revise
• have finished nursery for four months (our summer holiday) but hopefully will get to go on odd days in the summer
• went on a daytrip to Scarborough to see Amy
• love the big three wheeler pram and climbing in and out of it
• have an obsession with clips, like the ones on highchair straps and bouncy chairs. You can’t quite do them up but try really hard to
• hate having your hair washed
• still don’t eat meat or many vegetables, except peas and sweetcorn
• actually talk to people on the phone now, instead of going silent and looking confused when someone speaks
• are making more different sounding syllables and noises, ‘cat’ is almost there (‘ba’ developing to ‘ca’)
• point at the koalas on the aldi adverts before neighbours and say ‘ba’ ‘ba’ which seems to mean bear. The sound for book is slightly different !
• feed yourself Shreddies for breakfast really well, off a soup spoon normally, as it’s easier to get the shreddies onto
• have summer sandals and like to dig in the garden
• love toy cars and slides

The uncaptured

Our [Josh's] laptop with all our photos on has crashed for the second time, and for the second time we have potentially lost months of lovely photos. (Some are on dropbox, and backed up elsewhere, fear not!)

However, it’s in things like that, and it’s whilst I’m looking through recent photos that I think about how limiting it can be to rely purely upon those moments which are captured visually in photos. There are plenty of wonderful moments which will remain unimmortalised because they are ones when we didn’t have a camera, or didn’t use one. The same with the memories we remember, repeat, write down.

The uncaptured can drift away, and the feelings of contentment on a warm spring evening when baby is in bed and the exam has been done, the potential in the air of wondering what to do next; those are things which I don’t think you can do justice in a picture. Life, for me at least, has the danger of becoming a big wheel of images which scroll through my head; holiday snapshots, instagram moments, reeling through. There is a danger also of thinking that things that aren’t photographed don’t matter as much, and that the people who feature regularly matter more, or are better.

I’m trying to take some more photos of regular life, unstaged, just what our lounge looks like, or a nice shadow and less ‘cheese’ moments. Equally I want to focus on the inbetweens, the uncaptured, the actual living which can’t be encapsulated into a snapshot which shows only a millisecond of what life and existance and feelings were like then. I’m trying to take a few more snippets of video of Phoebe, just so she can see what she actually acted like and sounded like, which is harder in photos, freezing a second.

Looking back at photos from our first year of marriage – whilst it’s a shame there’s not many, and mostly just of Christmas and outings, it’s also fine, because the memories and feelings I have of that time are not diminished by not having them in visual form. The uncaptured is valuable, as is the captured (I still love photos and want to take them!). I want to remember and value both.