Worth the Wait!

So many young women it seems feel as if they need to be in a relationship. To have that man who can make you feel as if you are worth it.

However, there is no man on this Earth who can love you the way God loves you. He spent precious time planning each aspect of who you are to be. He designed every aspect of your being, from your hair, to the sound of your voice, and His creation is perfect and absolutely Worth It.

I have been reading this book called "God is Writing My Love Story" and the main point the authors are trying to get across is that why should we spend so much time looking for who we will fall in love with and marry? Why wouldn't we give that aspect of our lives over to God as well? Wouldn't it be correct to say that the One who created everything you are and has a plan for your life, also has a plan for when a man will come into your life and be the one for you to marry?

I don't know about you, but there are so many times where I have tried to take the lead and decide what is right for me, and have failed miserably. But when I trust in God and follow Him, things always seem to go so much better.

So I am now letting God write my love story. I am letting Him bring the right person into my life when the time is right.

In the end, if the love of my life is someone that is truly devoted to God the way I am, then it is WELL WORTH THE WAIT!

Difficult Conversations

Last semester I took this class with House of Hope about how to have difficult conversations and since then I have found that God continues to bring new situations into my life that calls for a difficult conversation to be had.

In my last post I talked about a professor's remarks about my faith and in this upcoming week I will be meeting with the provost of my University to talk about them. I do so not out of malicious intent or revenge, but because I feel that it is every student's right to be able to sit in a classroom without being insulted because of their religious beliefs.

I will also be talking with another member of the university community about an employer and how many who recently rent on a service trip to New Orleans (which I will write about soon) feel that she is unable to be in charge of such trips anymore. Again, no evil intentions, but rather as a way to not only protect her but to help other students who go on future service trips, to feel safe while doing so.

So as I continue to see God growing me in my ability to confront difficult situations head on, all I can say is that I praise Him for doing so. He continues to help me grow more in love with Him, more in my faith, and more confident as a child of God.

I know that through it all, He will give me the right words to say as I try to convey the things that need to be conveyed to the community around me.

Stereotypes

Today was the last day of lecture for my class. Tomorrow we just hand in our tests and people will be presenting. I however, will be handing things in and heading on my way.
I originally planned on sitting through the first half of class before leaving to get ready to go to New Orleans for a service trip but after class today I am unsure how I can sit through that professor's class.

I understand that people hear many stereotypes about Evangelical Christians. I understand that many Evangelicals fall into some of those stereotypes in one way or another. What I don't understand is how a professor can blatantly state one of those in class with no real lesson behind it.
I knew after the first couple days of class that my professor was a hard-core Catholic who is strong in his faith and can't be swayed. But to judge another's faith based off of things you've "heard" and not experienced is completely off base if you are to be a teacher in a higher institution. To say in front of an entire class that I am an Evangelical and therefore must think I'm better than everyone is completely uncalled for.
I'm used to hearing the comments and judgments. I'm used to people relying on stereotypes when they don't understand something about my faith, but a professor who prides himself in Theology should double check before he makes a blatant statement about a student without having proof to back it up.

Never once have I said I am better than anyone and I never will. Granted, this man is allowed to hold whatever beliefs he wants, but in a class where he has been teaching the use of reason when making an argument, it would be nice for him to back up his statement with proof that I have ever once said that I am better than any Catholic because of my faith!

This is one of those times where I really wish people would base their conclusions about me off of what they have seen since knowing me. Base it off of my actions and words, not simply because of my faith and title as an Evangelical.

Scarves for Hope!

I know in my last blog I posted about the scarves I was making and how I would be donating them. In the last couple weeks I have been contemplating and the one thing that keeps popping into my head is to sell them and donate the money.

Instead of pushing the idea away and being stubborn enough to want to donate them, I feel as if I am continuing to listen to God.

So here it is...the official standing on the scarves...

They will be on sale for $12 dollars. $10 of that will go towards House of Hope and the other $2 will go towards paying for more yarn! Great idea right?? Well there's more, if someone brings the yarn to me, they save $2 dollars and only have to pay $10 dollars for the scarf!

As I make the scarves I will be posting them here, as well as on FaceBook so that they will sell! I will keep you in the loop with how it's going!!!

LightBulb

For those who haven't seen the movie "Despicable Me" anytime one of the main characters (GRU) has an idea instead of saying "I have an idea" he says "lightbulb" and therefore I have to say "LIGHTBULB"!!!!

I have known how to knit and crochet for quite some time and I have always thought that I should think of a clever way to use that gift to benefit others and I have recently been praying to God to figure out what to do and the only answer I seem to be coming back to is donating the items I make.

Therefore, from this day on, the scarves, blankets, and hats I make will be donated to an organization. I haven't figured out where to donate them yet, but it's great to know that God has given me this fantastic LIGHTBULB to start with and it will only get brighter as I figure out just where this LightBulb will take me!

Plans To Prosper and Not Harm

"For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans to prosper you and not harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." ~Jeremiah 29:11

It is truly amazing what plans God can have for you in your life. First semester I had an internship at House of Hope that changed my life. I started there feeling lost and unworthy and left there feeling as if I am truly worthy and that I had a renewed relationship with my Heavenly Father!

Before taking that internship I fought against God though I could tell that is where He wanted me to be. After having such an amazing experience I decided that I would listen more intently to God in order to determine where He wants me to go in life. I have opened back up my heart and entire life to my Creator and He has continued to do great things!

Because of this determination to listen to God, I knew that the desire to interview for a spring internship at Regis Middle School was his idea to show me whether this is where my future lies. I interviewed there this morning and can honestly say that I am excited. Though it's a Catholic school, I have no doubt that God has a plan to prosper me as he writes in the Bible. Needless to say, that I will be interning there.

I look forward to whatever it is that He has in store for me! God is great and will provide if you open up your heart and pray in order to figure out what He wants you to do!

Final J-Term

Mount Mercy has one month during the year where students only take one class: J-Term (which if you can't guess, takes place during January). At this present moment I am embarking (or have embarked) on my final J-term as a student at MMU and I'm super excited about that.
It is hard to believe that I will be graduating on May 22, also known as 138 more days if you're a dork like me who likes to count down!!!
Well the class I'm taking is called Christian Action: Moral Reponse...which wasn't my first choice...I was hoping to take a fun course like Scrapbooking, but that was cancelled and my only conclusion is that this is God's sneaky way of telling me this is where I need to be.
I knew going into the class that the teachings would be based on Catholic doctrine so I wasn't quite sure what to expect other than that. My professor is energetic, outspoken, swears quite a bit (which baffles me since it's a religion class) and insists on doing little fill in the blank things in the process of teaching so he says the word "What" hundreds of times in one class and we are supposed to guess the actual word that is to replace the "what" in his statement.
The most baffling thing to me however is how often he brings up other religions and seems to bash them. He makes it a point to try and offend people with his statements. For example, he makes it a point to bring up the evangelical faith (which if you don't know, I am a part of) and talks about why he doesn't like us and how we are too conservative and only go with what's in the Bible. Basically he seems to think we don't think for ourelves, but just do what we are told by pastor's.
I don't know quite how to respond to his belief that Evangelicals are wrong when I look at the idea of Catholics praying to Mary and think that this action is wrong because it's like she is another God to them.
Yes I read the Bible and believe it. Yes, when I go to church I listen to what is said, but I do question it and think about it to see if it matches up or contradicts the Bible at all. I believe I think for myself.

I have a feeling this J-term will be quite interesting. Thank you God for putting me in a situation where I will hopefully become better equipped to defend my beliefs!

Rejoicing in Suffering

"But rejoisce that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed...So then those who suffer according to God's will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do so" ~1 Peter 4:13, 19

I have always wondered how it is that we can suffer and yet rejoice at the same time, but here it is right here. God wants us to rejoice in the fact that we suffer because as Christians we will be persecuted, looked down upon, and judged. That is only a little of the suffering He talks about though. If I look back on my life and look at my own personal story, you may be surprised to learn that I am absolutely in love with God.

I have been telling people lately that I am an open book. They can ask questions about my life and I will answer. This is partly because I feel no reason to hide the experiences that have made me who I am today. If it weren't for the hard times, I would't have grown and learned. I wouldn't be as in love with God as I am today. Therefore, in this blog I will be sharing my own personal testimony of faith and how I have grown more and more in love with God through the years.

* * * * * * * * *

I grew up in a single-father household. A rarity it seemed to me, because most of my friends assumed that a single parent household meant that I lived with my mother. When people heard I lived with my dad they assumed that my mother had died. No one could understand how a mother could abandon her children. I was only 5 when my mother left my father for another man. Many would think that I would hate her for this but I don't. They ask me if I have regrets because I didn't have my mother there. Of course, there were times when I needed a mother figure, I mean what girl doesn't need an older woman to look to when she's growing up. However, I do not regret not having her there. If she had been there, then I probably wouldn't be the person that I am today.

However, I did grow up feeling guilty. I felt as if her leaving had something to do with me. I won't go into the full reasoning here, but you can always ask if you would like. It took years before I finally figured out it wasn't my fault and is still something I have been working through recently.

So growing up, it was me, my dad, and my beautiful younger sister. I did go to church every weekend, but it was more to see my grandma and half brother (and to experience her amazing cooking). The church she attends is one for Christ Scientists, and I never truly felt comfortable at the church. I love the people, but not the teachings. To me God was just a character in a book just like in all the other books I had ever read (and I read a lot).

It wasn't until I was about 9 or 10 years old that I had learned that you could have a relationship with this "God character" that I had read about. This was when I met a girl from down the street. She became one of my closest friends and her family were the ones to buy me my first personal Bible. I had read through bits and pieces of it, talked to them about it, and they would work with me to answer questions as well as ask me questions. I didn't know what an Evangelical Christian was, but I did know that what they were telling me was interesting. I didn't go much beyond that however. They moved away before I was finished with elementary school.

When I was in 7th grade, my older sister Catherine started dating a pastor's son and attending church. She took me with her a couple times, and even started doing daily devotions with me each night. She shared the truth of God's unwavering love for me and how He wanted me to be one of His followers. I knew she was telling me the same things that family had told me years before, and I longed so deeply to have that relationship. I prayed with her one night to ask Jesus into my heart and became a Christian.

Shortly after that, a girl from my middle school, Kylee, invited me to attend youth group with her. God really was working to keep me following Him! Through the years I continued to attend youth group. But I struggled a lot with the idea that God could love me for who I was, mainly because I didn't love me for who I was.

My older sister graduated high school at the end of my 7th grade year and went off to college in California. I didn't have that role model at home anymore of what it meant to be a Christian, but I did have youth group. But it wasn't enough to make me believe that I was good enough to be loved by God. I continued to struggle with my self-image and the idea of being grateful for who I was and loving what i looked like. The summer before I started high school, my struggles came on head strong when I started skipping meals. That was the beginnings of what I consider to be an eating disorder. It wasn't full blown anorexia, but there were many episodes of not eating for days on end.

Throughout my freshman year of high school, I continued to not eat, exceptions only being when friends would want me to join them for lunch and even then, eating was minimal. I became depressed and spent a lot of time locked in a bathroom stall or sitting in an empty classroom crying to myself because I felt as if I wasn't good enough. God had left me in my mind and didn't truly love me and if the One who made me couldn't love me for me, why should I. It wasn't until March of that year that God finally cought up to me. He had been chasing me for months and just waiting for me to stop running from Him so that he could hold me in His arms and show me just how much he loved me. It was the first night in a long time that I had found myself truly still and crying out to God. I was sitting in the bathroom at home, razor in hand, and ready to kill myself, but first I was taking my anger out on God. I was cursing Him, when out of nowhere, it was like a voice stopped me and told me that I was wrong, He said "I never left you! I have always loved you and never will stop loving you. The question is, are you willing to love yourself as much as I love you?" There was no doubt in my mind that God was calling out to me to come back to Him. Follow Him. Trust Him.

It wasn't an easy journey back to being happy with who God made me to be. It wasn't until I started listening to God again, that I realized He truly had been chasing me all year. He had been speaking to me and i hadn't been listening. But how do I know this you may ask? Well, my older sister had me memorizing Psalm 139 in order to be able to visit her the summer before my 10th grade year. That entire Psalm is about how God created every aspect of who I am for a reason and loves me for who I am. I had spent the time memorizing that Psalm without actually listening to what God had wanted me to hear, until after that night.

I continued to be strong in my journey with God. I started college in 2007 knowing that God had brought me to Mount Mercy College, though I didn't know why. I started in nursing, but God soon led me to major in psychology and sociology. He knows that i am a good listener and a people person, so why not go into a field where I can listen all day! Though I continued to believe that God does love me, I didn't do much to continue to grow in my relationship with Him.

I stopped reading my Bible, other than on Sundays. It was as if I felt empty inside, and yet I continued to follow God half-heartedly. The passion I felt had dwindled, and I was blindly following without actually applying myself and applying his teachings. I was baptized my sophomore year of college. Was diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder, and continued to follow blindly.

My junior year, I knew I had to fix my relationship with God. However, God also showed me that if I were to fix my relationship with the Heavenly Father, then I would need to repair my relationship with my earthly father. Though I grew up with just my dad and younger sister, I didn't really have an open relationship with my dad. He was emotionally distant and therefore, I didn't open up to him either. In as long as I could remember, my father hadn't told me he loved me or was proud of me. In my mind, if my earthly father couldn't love me or be proud of me, then my Heavenly father may not either. I constanly compared my two fathers and knew that this was wrong. I started talking to the counselor at school and we worked out a plan. I was really good at writing out my feelings, and therefore, I worked out a letter to my dad and gave it to him to read. It outlined everything about my life that I didn't think he knew, including the eating disorder, depression, and suicidal thoughts/tendencies. Since he read that letter, our relationship has improved. We talk more, and the summer before this last year of college started, he told me he loved me and was proud of me. For the firt time, I truly believe that my Heavenly father feels the same way.

God is truly amazing. He has been working in my life constantly within the last year. He has helped me forgive my father, reconcile our relationship, and continue to grow. He has helped me forgive my mother and is working on me to try and reconcile some kind of relationship. He has led me to an internship at House of Hope, a place I never imagined myself working at, and He has shown me that I truly am strong when I listen to Him and do what he says.

I am still continuing to grow in God, and honestly that will never stop because you can never stop growing more and more in love with the one who Created you! Though I have been through suffering, I can rejoice in the fact that I have always come back to God!

"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" ~Philippians 4:13

God Truly Knows What's Best

It was only 2 months ago that I found myself wondering where I would be interning. My previous opportunity fell through and I was getting frustrated and anxious to try to find something that I wanted. Notice there, that I was looking at what I thought was best for ME not what God wanted for me.
For a couple weeks, House of Hope kept popping into my mind (as a psychology major, we would call that the unconscious) and I kept pushing it away. Yes, I knew it was faith based and that they do great works for women, but it didn't seem like something I would want.
It took me a while to realize that it wasn't my unconscious telling me to contact House of Hope, but it was God trying to get me to see that this is what HE wanted for me. He had been chasing me for some time, trying to show me that if only I trusted in Him, then I would know what to do with my life.
So I finally let Him catch me at a time where everything seemed to be going wrong. I figured if God really wanted this then I would do it. I contacted House of Hope through email about the possibility of an internship (I must admit part of me still didn't want to do it, but it's really hard to say no to God). When Lenchen emailed me back saying that we might be able to work something out, I figured, "Okay. Might as well."

After weeks of emailing, I finally met the woman behind the typing and was instantly amazed. God truly knows best. This woman made me feel right at home and comfortable not only with being there, but also with talking openly about me and my life. She had me talking about how I had repaired my relationship with my dad in the last year and how my mother had left when I was 5 and returned years later when I was 17. Things I had never talked to anyone but a counselor about, were talked about with this woman only 10 minutes after meeting her.

God truly does have a sense of humor. For such a long time, I have been believing that what I wanted to do in life is work with teens and I was going to do this my own way. Now He has me stepping back and listening to Him. Through working at House of Hope, I have become much happier than I have been in a long time, and I've only been there for 2 1/2 weeks!

During my internship, I will be helping with events, attending the annual banquet, attending a Thursday night class for women, attending a class on how to have difficult conversations and interacting with many different people.

So far, I have attended the Thursday night group: 3:12 and have had the chance to meet some women in my age group who are truly sold for God and I absolutely love it. I love the women I work with, and all the women I've met through my internship so far. I have heard stories about how women feel as if their life has been changed by House of Hope and how coming to House of Hope saved them and it's just amazing to see God working in the lives of so many women!

I've also gotten the opportunity to talk with one of the residents about her life story and how she became saved after being at House of Hope. I love it!

And to add to it, God has shown me that once I stop and let Him have the reigns that He will make Himself known in so many ways. He has led me to Lenchen, Celeste, and back to Melody, all women who are absolutely in love with God and want Him to work in their lives and in the lives of women all over! Through this He has also led me to a church just up the street from school that, for the first time since starting college, has made me feel as if I am home, as if I am in the presence of God, the wonderful Father who made me to be His lamb, His servant, and the one who can bring those around me to Him through living my life Hopelessly Devoted to Him.


"For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." ~Jeremiah 29:11-13

Classes!

I have finished my first three days as a Senior with the realization that this may not be so bad! I am taking 4 classes and doing an internship and I believe I will be able to handle it (mainly because one of those classes is meditation and who can't relax after meditating?).

The one class that I thought would be stressing me out is Senior seminar. This is the one class every senior dreads! With senior seminar comes a senior thesis! This semester I will be working on my psychology senior thesis, which will actually work out pretty great! I have decided on a topic and have only attended the class once so far. I'm thinking Pastoral Counseling or something like The Psychology of Faith and Spirituality. Obviously I haven't narrowed down a title or specifics or anything but I got a start!

Meditation will definitely keep me grounded and relaxed...unless all the reading kills me! And history will be blah but it's just a class to help me get the correct number of credits to graduate!

Developmental Psychology. What else is there to say other than as I continue through this class this semester I expect to start as a baby and slowly develop into a beautiful young woman before finding out that eventually I die.

Not the most intriguing post but life isn't always exciting or intriguing. Oh well.