Because God is Love.

My sister can tell you. When it comes to band-aids I believe its best to just rip it off. None of that soak it in the water and pull it off slowly stuff. Just rip, bite your lip, and then breathe... its all over.

I feel like this is exactly what my spiritual life looks like lately. It seems like God is just ripping the band-aids off that are covering my pride in all of its many,many forms. Then I just sit, exposed. With ugly wounds that are evidence of the mistakes I have made. Everyone is painfully aware of my wounds, but no one can heal me. No one can help. God is the only one who can take the broken and bruised pieces and bind them back together.

It's beautiful, but very painful.

I have spent the past two weeks just biting my lip, waiting to breathe. The relief hasn't come. My wounds keep healing wrong. I keep trying to make it go faster and urge the healing on in my own power. My goodness, I wish that this is how it would work. So God has to rip the band-aid off again. He is patient with me. He is faithful to me. Despite my acting like a two year old and insisting on doing things my way. He is so good to me. He continues to rip my band-aids off. So that I will heal, like only He can heal me.

Phillipians 1:6
being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus

Posted in: on Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at at 11:04 AM 0 comments    

Right now, I am leading a small group and a covenant group in the christian sorority on campus, Sigma Phi Lambda. It is a tremendous blessing to have this opportunity to invest in my sisters in Christ and to get to see their lives and hearts on a regular basis. I love the intentionality of our time (although it is required). Anyhoo, I feel like I am a broken record because every time we meet together I insist on taking prayer requests. Now, I am definitely not the world's greatest pray-er. Probably not even in the top 5. or top 50. You get the idea. But I just love the way prayer requests 1) bond people 2) reveal what you care enough about that you want to tell others so they can join with you in lifting that thought up to our King.

Ummm... beauty-full.

In my covenant group I always ask each girl to share a praise and a prayer request, so we can have that constant reminder to rejoice in the Lord while also being faithful in prayer. I can't speak for anyone else... but I love it. It's a big hit in my life.

This is a very long drawn out way of saying that I am about to share with you the things that I am praising Jesus for and the things that He could definitely work on in me.

PRAISE
Psalms 4:6-7
Many are asking,"Who can show us any good?" Let the light of your face shine upon us, O Lord. You have filled my heart with greater joy than when their grain and new wine abound.

God has revealed sin in me.
Now, normally this totally wouldn't be a praise until there was much moaning and crying and oh me how much do I stink at life... but this instantly brought me so much joy in the Lord! Dearie me, I did not even realize how much I was trapped in this mindset of having to work for approval, work for recognition, work to serve, work to be loved, work, work, workity work. Trust me, it was exhausting. And I am very easily exhausted. Realizing that my pride was keeping me from daily accepting Christ's finish work in my life has been so so freeing. Nothing I do has any effect on what he has done. What a relief! I can't be too bad, too sad, too fat, too anything. I will never be good enough. I will never be too bad. I will never not need his saving grace. In the back of my mind Satan always whispered this "A good Christian would... X, Y, and Z." Now I can just tell Satan to talk to the hand, because that lie ain't working on me no more. (Lord willing).

PRAYER REQUEST
Psalms 5:1-3
Give ear to my words, O Lord, consider my sighing. Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God, for to you I pray. In the morning, O Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait in expectation.

My brain is about to explode, and is also falling out of my head.
If these situations weren't so debilitating/time-consuming/not fun they would be funny. I have metioned in blog-land before about both my headache disorder and my scatterbrain-ness. Well both are quickly increasing in frequency and intensity. I had a headache Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday which is just three days too many. The pain is endurable if I have enough medication in my body, but what I really hate is how debilitating these headaches are. I hate that I have to stop functioning and basically ignore everyone and everything and run to my room to lie down. I hate that I have to take a number of pills each day for life to be bearable. I now have a fear of my liver just bursting after a round of advil and tylenol and allergy medicine and motion sick medicine. My liver is just going to explode, unless my brain does first.

On a much lighter note, my scatterbrained moments are occuring pretty frequently these days. I keep forgetting when I drive to campus that I will actually have to drive home from campus as well. My body just automatically walks to the bus stop and gets on the bus without a second thought... Until I am already on the bus and moving, in which case, I run to the front of the bus and plead with the bus driver to let me off, and then my request is promptly rejected. Other funny moments include my naptimes. I frequently have vivid dreams during my naps. Last week, I dreamed that I had slept a whole 24 hours and subsequently slept through my exam the next day. To which my reaction was to jump up and run in circles around the living room screaming "OH MY GOSH, OH MY GOSH, I MISSED MY TEST" over and over and over again. Reality hit me when I looked down and realized that I had worn that outfit to school that day and so there was no way that I could have missed my test because it was still the same day. Pretty frightening.

Posted in: on Friday, October 15, 2010 at at 10:49 AM 0 comments    

Well today, I had an epiphany.

hallelujah.

I feel like this makes it a little more normal. I love black people and want to be their baby mamas because... I had a black babysitter growing up. I don't know how I never put two and two together before. From the first moment I met Cardia - I walked straight up to her and rubbed her legs and asked her if she was wearing panty hose - I have loved black people. She is the one who told me that I was ashy and needed lotion, and so I think that I have a permanent right to use the word ashy for myself. I have a very vivid memory of getting stung by a wasp and her FREAKING out. I don't even think I was crying but she was in superdrive pulling out the alcohol and calling my mom to make sure that I would live. So funny.

I am debating whether this connection to a black person gives me the right to walk up to a black person and holla at them or start getting on with my ghetto self. I probably won't because I don't want to die. Not because I think they would kill me, but because I think I would die of embarrassment.

Now that I have had this beautiful epiphany, I am determined to make some black friends and become a little more in touch with my heritage. And also I just need to know because when I have me some little chocolate children, I don't want them to be growing up like total cracker babies.

Posted in: on Monday, September 27, 2010 at at 11:22 AM 0 comments    

This is my last night to be a teenager. I will never ever be a teen again. That means I no longer have an excuse to be dramatic or rebellious. Darn. At least I got it all out then...

People in their 20s have to start moving forward with their lives... like getting married and making babies. Talk about pressure! I feel like I am just now learning how to be a college kid (minus the staying up late, drinking, promiscuous activity, wild partying, etc.)

In two hours, I will officially have lived two decades. I experienced the 90s and the millinium. Bring it on 2011!

It doesn't really matter that I am turning 20 though, because people will still ask me if I am 12. And yes I might be thankful about that one day when I am older, but I am not thankful for it right now.

Posted in: on Tuesday, September 21, 2010 at at 7:41 PM 0 comments    

It's official. I am an every morning coffee drinker.

Posted in: on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at at 9:20 AM 0 comments    

Today, while cooking, I decided that I need to use the word sassafrass more often. I have no idea what it actually means, but I am choosing to use it as a word to express my liking of something.

Posted in: on Wednesday, September 8, 2010 at at 9:29 AM 0 comments    

My life is pretty bloggy. By that I mean, I read blogs (stalk would be more accurate, seeing how its mostly people I don't know) and it has caused me to start thinking in blog format. I have mentally blogged the following a thousand and one times but could not tell everyone yet. Here goes:

My summer started off pretty uneventfully, just full of the things listed in my last post. However, it became notably more eventful when my second EEG came back abnormal and I was diagnosed with epilepsy. Just remembering that makes my heart beat faster. I started on some meds and then pretty much fell asleep for the next couple of weeks. My medicine made me so tired that I would sometimes take two or three naps a day and I was still sleeping a good eight or nine hours a night. Flashback to having mono. Still the medicine was NOT helping. My headaches were getting worse and then I saw some of the medicine's side effects when I spent a good hour and a half crying for no stinkin reason and when I suddenly forgot how to spell (I was in the spelling bee every year in elementary school - I know how to spell) and when I forgot how to talk (every thought pretty much ended with the word thing because I couldnt remember what anything was called). So all in all, NOT WORKING. My mom decided to take me to an epilepsy specialist to find out some more info and to figure out how I could better adapt before going back to school. Hedecides to put me in the hospital for a week so that I can be constantly monitored in order to determine what symptoms are indicators that I am having a seizure in my brain. It was fun let me tell you. I feel bad for every person that talked and/or looked at me during that time because I was a big whiny mess. Poor nurses. The end of the week comes and I don't have epilepsy anymore. Now I have a headache disorder exacerbated by stress. I don't know about the stress. I have argued with my mom and with my doctors until I am blue in the face because I absolutely do not believe I am stressed. But I don't have a masters or Phd, so I lose. So who knows what will happen from here... I am sure I will laugh about it one day. I will be talking to my sister and say,"Hey, remember that summer where I had epilepsy and you had to drive me around everywhere?" Her response will probably be either to laugh, glare at me balefully, or burst into tears (because she does that - love you Catherine!).

So now that mess is a little less resolved, but seemingly a little less chronic and less severe.

I just started school yesterday. I always get excited for the first day of school, I don't know why - it's a sickness. Maybe with the exception of the year before I started high school when I cried because I was so scared. This year was accompanied by none of that excitement. Now that I have two days under my belt I am really excited about my classes and schedule. Every year since I started college on the first days of class I always imagine how well I am going to do in each of my classes. Usually in my daydreams I get straight 100s on every exam and my professors praise my genius and my knack for whichever subject. So far, it hasnt happened. But my daydreams still continue and will until they are crushed by my exam grades.

I was planning on writing more, but I think its Jesus time now.

Posted in: on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at at 4:42 PM 0 comments