Erasing Life's Wrinkles

i can't tell you how many times i've read this book.
tonight's passage slapped me across the face. 
her books often do that. good pain. 

Cold Tangerines
Shauna Niequist
233.234

"For me, what God said when he made the world is a prayer: 
It is good. 

This world, it is good. 
The beauty of a perfect green apple is good. 
The first steps of a child are good. .. 
I have to remind myself that it is good. 
I have to create hope in my life, because there's something inside me that has radar for the bad parts of life. 
I walk into the kitchen and all I can see are crumbs on the counter, and I look in the mirror 
and don't even see my face, i just see all the potential wrinkles forming. 
I have a dark, worst-case scenario sensor, and it takes over. 
It's all true. 
There are crumbs on the counter. 
I am definitely getting wrinkles. 

I just don't want to live in only that reality. 
Because there is another reality. A better one. Hope and redemption and change are real, 
and they're happening all around me. 
So I choose to act out of that reality, because the other one makes life too hard, day after day. Life is painful, and we carry with us so much disappointment and heartbreak. 
But I'm fighting to save some space inside me where I can create hope. 
I can't live there in disappointment anymore. 
I've missed whole seasons of my life. I look back and all i remember is pain. ..

It's rebellious, in a way, to choose joy, to choose to dance, to choose to love your life. 
It's much easier and much more common to be miserable. But I choose to do what I can do to create hope, to celebrate life, and the act of celebrating connects me back to that life I love."