Simplicity

I have been delaying writing a new post for about a week now. I have been doing a lot of reflecting this week and realized just how much I take the small things for granted. For instance, on my way home from my parent's house on Sunday, I was following a white jeep and a blue honda civic. I was just about to try to pass them when something caught my attention and I decided not to.

What did I see? From the white jeep a kid had raised his hand out of the vehicle and started to make shapes and signs at the man in the civic. It was only moments later that the person driving the civic had started making the same movements as the kid. They were doing this for a solid ten minutes. I don't know what it was, but it had really made my day to see them interacting with each other just out of pure amusement.

This week I was also thinking about why I like working with kids. Today all the kids were in amazing moods. For anybody that works with kids, they could probably all agree on that is something you take in and cherish for all that it is worth. It is very rare to have every kid in a classroom happy, and to stay happy as a whole all day. At one point, I was sitting with one of the kids, and I just smiled at them. In return, the child smiled back with the biggest smile the kid could give. My heart melted. After that we all continued to play together and had good bonding time with each of the kids.

To tie the two thoughts together, I have really been learning that sometimes the best things in life are the simplest. A smile from a child. Sweet hand gestures passed along by two people that do not know each other. The list could go on. Sometimes, actually frequently, I think how much we, or maybe it is just me, need to sit down and enjoy the little things in life. Wouldn't life be full of more love and enjoyment?

Flashback Friday: First encounters

I like to look back and think about everything that has happened in my life and how it can shape the future. I think I am going to be starting a weekly post on Friday's where I look back on something and share it with you. This one happens to be about how my husband and I got together.

We had met a couple times before we really ever started talking to each other. At one point because we saw each other, we decided to become Facebook friends. After some time, he decided to randomly start talking to me. Of course I originally thought he meant to talk to someone else and so I had asked him if he realized he was talking to me. He said that he was well aware, and we moved on in conversation. It was around Halloween when we started talking. This is important because in the Halloween spirit, he put up a picture of a creepy looking clown. It is also important to note that crazy clown pictures freak me out. Well we randomly talked for a couple days,and then he asked if we could exchange phone numbers. I had a lot of hesitation accepting the idea of doing that based on the facts that we did not know each other very well, and his picture still freaked me out. Shortly, I decided that it was worth exchanging phone numbers. 

After that we had talked the rest of the night, and kept constant communication with each other for a few months. Then we decided to meet up at a church friend's birthday party. My first thoughts when I saw him was he was a lot taller than what I thought he was, and his voice was deeper than what I expected. We did not stop talking to each other for at least a good three hours. The next day, my mom had asked if I wanted to invite him to lunch.  I originally thought that it was not a good idea to ask him after we had really just met the night before, but I invited him anyways. To my surprise, he said that he wanted to come. Months later, I found out that he had cancelled lunch plans with his mom just to come have lunch with me. I felt pretty bad about that, but I am glad that he decided to come. That December, we started to date each other.

As time went by, Michael had planned a day at the park where he would later propose to me. That day there was actually a car show that he had not anticipated to be there so he had to change his ideas slightly to make up for it. We had walked on a couple trails, and was having a great time. At one point, he randomly took me off the side of the trail and handed me a card. He went behind me to wait for me to finish reading the card. At the end of it, the card read, "Okay, I think you should turn around now." He was waiting on his knee with ring in hand and had proposed. 

We immediately went to tell our parents and they were very happy for us. I later found out that he had actually asked my dad's permission to marry me. Meeting and pursuing my life with my husband is something I will never want to change. He has positively impacted my life and has been great at encouraging me to follow my dreams and desires. I could not have asked for a guy more special than him. 

Where Are Your Priorities?

 Here is a question that has long been on my mind, how do people decide what career path they want to take? I love asking questions about how people decided to follow a certain career. It is always interesting to hear their stories. Many people say they just knew that they wanted to help people so they became a doctor, or they love children so they became a teacher. Other people are like I took the job that I was able to get at the time. It is interesting to see the vision that people set out for themselves. Of course, those thoughts always lead me to thinking about the steps that it took to get to the career that they wanted to be in.

At what point do dreams and ambitions fall onto a line of career verses staying as a hobby? What are we willing to give up to make our dreams come true? Where do our true priorities lie? What motivates you in life? All of these have to be considered in various degrees at some point in our life.

So how do you decide? What is so important to you that you just know that it has to be a daily part of your life? For me, I am still working on this and probably will for awhile. Sometimes it just seems tough to figure out where our passions in life fall that will take us into a successful career, and other times it is blatantly obvious the desires that are supposed to stay top priority in our life. So what motivates you, where is your balance in life? How did you get to be where you are at? What would you want another chance on in life? What would you never want to change? Sometimes I forget to ask these questions to myself, or if I am being honest, I do not want to face these questions, but it is never too late to figure it out.

Another Step Off of the Old Checklist

Now that the hype of not knowing how we are supposed to pay for the house that we are wanting to buy is over, we finally started the packing process today. I could not be more excited about it. Looking back, even over just the past year it is amazing to see all that has happened over the past year and a half.  First, I have been married for over a year now! Say what? Where did that time go? I moved into my first apartment, and now we are in the final steps of buying a house. I am also going to and serving at a church that I love being in community with. I have made a few good friends at the daycare I work at, and that just is the beginning of all that has happened.
It is still scary to think that there is so much ahead in life and I am beginning to scratch the surface of what this life has to hold. I also could not be more thrilled for the adventure that it will be. One of the many frequent questions I ask myself is what do I want to amount to in life? Followed by a more important question of, what does God want from my life? I tend to be very grateful that I am not going through this alone, because my mind is scattered with so many things that I want to do that I need something/someone to tell me that this is the next plan of action that you need to take.
Which of course leads me to thinking of the current place I feel I am at now. I am not in college right now, for a few different reasons and it terrifies me thinking that I have no idea what direction I am even suppose to go. I know it will all work out the way it is supposed to, and until then I will figure out more about who I am in Christ and what He wants me to be.
Throughout high school, my favorite bible verse was Philippians 4:13, "I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength." I have also come to learn that the verse is not an easy one to live out. It is easy for me to comprehend what it says, but to actually believe it as true is a whole other ball game. I like to take matters into my own hands, and when I do is when those thoughts tend to blow up in my face. Trusting that God has a bigger plan than what I can imagine and that I can trust Him through that is almost mind blowing. I am also coming to learn that my timing is not God's timing, so until the next thought comes along in what I am suppose to do with my life as a Christian, I will just check off another step on the to-do list and trust that everything is under perfect control.

Where Do I Begin?

On the way home today, I had a lot on my mind. I have recently had some very deep conversations that I was still/am trying to process. There is a letter that I have to mail that I keep forgetting to send. We are currently in progress of buying a house and we ran into issues with our loan not going through. I am also trying to figure out what I am suppose to do as far as knowing whether or not I should go back to college at some point, but not knowing what to go back for. If that is not enough to make a person's head spin, I am not sure what is. 

At the end of the car ride, I was telling myself and telling God that I am so overwhelmed in emotion right now that I might just explode. So I come home trying to relax and I start looking through the internet to unwind. Within minutes, I was reminded of one of the conversations I had today. She had mentioned something that had made me look back at our friendship and I was just able to see that she is going to be going places. I was then reminded that we are not in this life for ourselves, but for others. At that moment, I was filled with such hope for her that I immediately grabbed my husband's attention and had to share in the excitement. 

Afterwards, my husband goes on to show me some of the emails that he received. One of them was about the house that we are wanting to buy. He had informed me that our bank had found a way to make our loan go through. Right then, I about broke down.

 I guess a bit of a back story would be in order to help explain that part. Last night, my husband and I were walking through target sharing our thoughts of how the church service went, how we are to go about being a christian with daily struggles, and the hit that we took when we heard last week that our pre-approved loan was being rejected because our bank did not like his employer.

Last week, my husband went up for prayer about not worrying about what is to come next and trying to let God dictate what we do instead of the human nature trying to control every aspect of our life where we do not even give God a chance to do his work. That went well, and then immediately when we got home, he received an email that said we are no longer going to approve your loan. That had felt like such a let down, I have yet to see my husband as discouraged as what he was then. How else are you suppose to feel when the very thing that you get prayer for turns out to fall out of place. 

Well time goes on and details are skipped, my husband and I readdressed about what had happened and how we maintain trust in God when things get tough. So when my husband shows me this email that the bank had looked further into and we are approved again for the loan, I cannot help but to be in utter awe of how God works everything out perfectly. Ever since our church summer conference in June, God has shown me every week just how he provides and cares for us even in uncertainty. How can I not feel like God cares for me, cares for us? Like I said before, I am very excited to see how this year, really this life, plays out. I know there are exciting things in store and I cannot wait to find out more about God's love for us and how it can really change the core of who you are.

It Is a Work in Progress

I have been a Christian my entire life. I grew up in a Christian home and have always just "known" that  is what I would always be. I always believed it, and wanted to be a bigger, better, stronger christian than what I could ever be. I have only recently realized that Christianity at it's core is tough. Even just the transformation of knowing how to be a christian is tough. I have come to think that we will never fully understand it until we are in Heaven.
This week I was at a conference with the core of my church and to say it was amazing would be an understatement. I have always known God is love. 'Known' is the key word there. Up until this week I never truly felt like God loved me. This week has been I would say the transformation for me of really knowing what it is to be under God's love. I grew up building many walls in my life to protect myself from getting emotionally hurt and in that process I also unknowingly built up walls that would not allow me to fully understand that God made me for a reason and that I am worth being loved just for being me.
Coming out of the week, I have had time to think about what it is that I am called for, actually what we are all called for.
As Christians, we are suppose to be the light to the world. We are called to love each other, to be in community with each other, to help others out along the way, to essentially show God's love here on this earth. Isn't that a scary thought? Well it is for me. We live in a world that is broken. A world full of hurt, of pain, death, sadness. Anything really. In the blink of an eye, our lives are swayed from emotion to emotion, from one job to the next, again there is a lot of stuff that just happens in our life. What I am so glad that I have come to believe and understand is that God will never let us down. It is okay to be off of our guard to let Him come and fill us where another person or thing cannot. I have a feeling that this year for me will be a learning experience of just how to trust and to love God even more, and I am so excited for the adventure.