Five Years

Back to my big move five years ago.

It is funny the things I remember from those first few days. I remember the drive up with my parents. We had two cars so I split time driving with my mom and dad. When I was with my mom I remember I kept trying to be excited. We talked about what my life would look like over the next year in my internship and future plans of when they would come visit me. Then I got in the car with my dad and the reality of me actually being away from them set in and I spent the next few hours trying to compose myself and choke down tears. We got there and went and found the apartment I would move into the next day. I remember how surreal it all felt. Good ol’ Bella Springs. It really was an awesome place!

Then we had to go get a new phone. We had a local cell phone provider in NM so I had to get a new phone right away. I remember sitting in the hotel that night trying to figure out how to work it. I actually still have the same voice message that I recorded that day on my phone… I should probably update that! My parents stayed for a couple days and the day they left I cried in the Perkins’ backyard with the two second year girls (who were total strangers to me then) for a good half hour. I truly didn’t think I was going to make it for the first 10 days or so. I would dream about packing my car up in the middle of the night and leaving. I’m so glad I didn’t!

I can’t imagine what my life would look like without my first year of DI, or the year and a half after that with Desperation. An amazing journey began that weekend. I became an adult. I met incredible people who would forever change my life. I created my own opinions and developed godly convictions. I discovered my giftings and passions. I spent hours upon hours in tour buses and fifteen passenger vans. I became an expert packer! I went to three different countries. I lived a life that ruined me for the Kingdom. I let my past become my past and allowed God to redeem my life and mark my future. Truly it was a beautiful journey.

Five years later there are days that I wish I could go back and re-live. I know I took that time for granted. I am forever grateful for it though and know that my best days are yet to come.

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Blogging Again (Hopefully!)

So I’ve once again become absent from the blogging world. Go figure. It has become my M.O…

At any rate, I feel like it is time to start again. This time not really for the benefit of anyone but myself. I’ve found myself getting lost in my own thoughts again, something that hasn’t happened since I was in high school. Just when I start thinking I’m a mature adult, life throws me a curve ball and I feel like that awkward teenager that is just trying to figure life out. Anyone relate? My next few blogs will probably be less directed than my past ones. I’m trying to get all the randomness of my life so I can remember these awkward days and maybe help navigate the craziness of life.

Anyway, this weekend marks a big day in the history of my life. Five years of adulthood. I moved to Colorado without a friend to my name, an eagerness to start new and a dream of figuring my life out 5 years ago this weekend. I really do laugh when I think about those first few weeks. I hated it. I swore I would never like Colorado and if you were to tell me I would still be living here I probably would have had a meltdown.  Literally a meltdown. You can ask anyway who knew me then; there were many! How time (and the goodness of the Lord!) has changed me.

I truly enjoy life here. I love the cold. I love being cold. (Even after getting hypothermia… That story is for another time.) I love nearly everything about fall and winter. Scarves, boots, peacoats, soup, baking, football, pumpkin spice lattes, snow days, more snow days, holidays. The list goes on.  As you can tell I have colder weather on my mind as I sit inside my 80 degree house right now.  

Until next time my friends...

Facebook

I’ve spent the past several days off of Facebook and it has really been a mind opening experience. I hadn’t realized to the extent of how absolutely addicted I was to it. As silly as it sounds, I have felt so much pressure off of me as I’ve taken a break from it. We live in a technology driven culture and with that, there is a constant feeling I have of always know what is going on and happening. This started at first with what was going on it famous people’s lives. A few years back I became intrigued with celebrity lifestyles, not that I wanted that, I just wanted to know what was going on in them. This slowly drifted over to my Facebook friends. I’m not one of those people who are constantly on Facebook or check and update it incessantly, but I found myself having to read my entire newsfeed, figuring out what my friends had been doing since the last time I was on.  I slowly became addicted to a social media network, spending my time reading about people’s lives that I’m not even close with.  Seriously, what a waste!

Please don’t hear my say I’m deleting my Facebook page or that I think it is bad. That’s really not the case at all. (I do however want to spend my time more productively.) My problem with Facebook is this: people feel like that they need to broadcast their lives in a public display and make the small details of their lives seem like celebrity events. It’s a bit of a joke when you really stop to think about it. Last month my family found out about someone speaking poorly of us on Facebook. You should have seen us all up in shambles over something that wasn’t even spoken clearly or pointed fingers directly to us.  For a few days I was so upset by something so silly. I finally realized that it really didn’t matter. I knew in my heart that I wasn’t in the wrong and that’s what counts. There is no need for me to live my life walking on egg shells when I know that I’m living with good intentions.

So in the next few days as I transition back into social media that’s what I want to focus on. Am I spending my time wisely? Am I making my life seem more important than it actually is? Am I allowing the silly thoughts of others to affect my life? I want my life to point others to Jesus. If I can do that on Facebook, awesome. If not, what am I really doing?

A Few Thoughts on Faith

Being my OCD self I have a list of things to blog on. Obviously, that hasn’t happened and this blog isn’t even part of the list. 2011 has come and gone with such change in our lives from the beginning of the year to the end that it is almost difficult to process. I knew when I married JD that life would not be quiet, still or consistent but I was not at all prepared for the adventure that lay ahead of us. We are doing things that most young married couples wouldn’t begin to even think about, yet alone try. It makes me feel old and somewhat out of place in our generation. That has been the story of my life though. Since I gave my whole life to Jesus in June of 2006, I have lived very different than others my age. I don’t say that in a chip on my shoulder kind of way but simply to say that it is not a new thing for me to live somewhat counter-culturally.

A man I met briefly at the end of 2007 told me he saw me living my entire life against the grain. I have never forgotten his statement, yet over 4 years later it still doesn’t make it any easier to do.  People think I’m some weird, over spiritual person because I’ve devoted my life to Christ. While many my age feel the freedom to participate in the rampant sin of our generation, I hold different values. The same is true in our marriage. Very early our faith was stretched more than what I thought we could handle when we moved to back to Colorado. Yet here we still are, more devoted to our faith and thankful for the life we have here. I was hoping that the move would be the end of our faith stretching, yet here we are just a year and a half later and I feel like we are being stretched again, yet in a totally different way.

That’s the funny thing about faith. We feel like once we have gotten through something once we won’t have to go through anything again. What a misperception! It is so easy to sit in church and listen to a message about faith and say, “Amen!” and get into the hype of the emotion. But how can we consistently turn that hype into action? What makes us change from simply sitting in a church thinking we are good Christians because we showed up, to being devoted followers of Christ who live our lives with audacious faith? I don’t have the answers and it’s a hard thing to tackle, yet that is what I find myself often thinking of.

I want to live my whole life in a way that pleases the Lord. That doesn’t mean that I have to talk to every person I encounter about my beliefs.  It doesn’t mean that I have to sit all day and do nothing but read my bible. It doesn’t mean that I have to live a rigid life by some set of rules. What it does mean is that I have to be faithful to the things that I feel like God has called me to: serving, giving, loving. It means that when I feel like quitting, I have to trust that God is making a way for me.  I have to trust that God is bigger than the emotions I feel, the wrongs that I feel have been made to me, the situations that I cannot begin to wrap my head around. I have to trust and believe that I serve a God where nothing is impossible and bend my life around that fact. That for me is what living a faithful life means.  That’s how I want to please the Lord. 

Leading and Loving

     Depending on what kind of background you come from, you probably have a different view of leadership than I do. I've recently been evaluating my views on leadership and thought I'd share some of my thoughts. I grew up with an achievement mindset, meaning I had to achieve things in order to have a positive view of myself or others around me.  All growing up I was told I was a great leader, but I just thought it was because I worked hard, got good grades, was nice to other people and was good at sports. This mindset has slowly been changed and I have a different view now, which I am very thankful for. The change began while I was part of a  ministry and leadership training internship. As part of progressing through the internship, many people became leaders after one year, and got to lead a small group during their second year before completing the internship.
      I have to laugh as I look back on my first month of leading. I still very much had an achievement mentality and had a very difficult time sitting for two hours with other girls and talking about life. I just wanted to get back to work, to go sit at my desk and stare at a computer and do something that I could mark off a checklist. It was a humbling experience as I realized over the next several months that leadership was about much more than getting things done, but rather it was about people. Those were some of the most streching months I had experienced up to that point and I am thankful for the women who guided me along that process and for the precious ladies who got stuck with me as a leader. I am so thankful for my growth during that process!
    I recently had the chance to go back and talk with some young ladies who were graduating from the same internship. One of the topics we discussed was what leadership looked like stepping out of a place where you are titled with that position. I had a fairly simple statement from the observation of my own life as I have transitioned out of that same place:

Leading people means loving people.

    I have heard love described as fighting for another person's highest good. There is no other place I would rather lead from than trying to help someone get to the place of their highest good, whatever it is that means for their personal life. Leading is best achieved when it comes from a place of authentic love, not a forced situation. I find that even now when I have difficult days with the people in my sphere of influence it is because the posture of my leadership is not coming from a place of love but rather from title. This is a dangerous place to be, because my leadership then reflects what is best for me, not necessarily what is best for the people around me.
    I currently get to be a part of a few different ministries at the church I work at, working with infants through college students. It is a wide range of people, all of which I have different interactions with. I can't tell you all their names or all of their stories, but I do know that I want what is best for their lives. In order to achieve this I can only lead with a heart full of love that I hope is reflected in my leadership. So if you want to lead and lead well, love the people around you and watch your leadership transform.

Spring

I love that spring is just weeks away. I don't mind the snow or the cold, in fact, it's snowing right now and I am throughly enjoying it but there is something about spring that I love. Growing up in a family of educators summer was our safe haven, a time to breathe and be together. So naturally, when spring came every year it would make me aware of the closeness of summer and time to play and be together. This spring I am particularly excited because there are so many things coming in the next few months that make me excited. Here is a short list of things I'm thinking forward to:

1) I am half way done with my school semester and only 21 credit hours from graduation!
2) My parents are coming to see us in April. This in itself is blog worthy. I love visits from my parents!
3) Easter. Easter is one of my favorite holidays. Thinking about it even makes me teary eyed. Realizing the sacrafice Christ made for us and dwelling upon the power that conquered hell stirs something alive inside of me.
4) Going to Belize. JD and I are helping lead a missions trip to Belize City. Every one of my missions experiences have been so different from one another (the last one not being a great experience) so I am going into this trip with great excitement and anticipation.
5) Desperation conferences. This will be my 7th summer going to conference. This conference holds a special place in my heart that I look forward to every year.
6) The smell of rain and fresh cut grass. I love these smells, it triggers so many great memories.

I will probably go into detail on some of this list in later blogs, but for now, Happy Almost Spring!

For Jamie

This blog is in honor of my twin sister Jamie. Today is our first birthday not spent together....sad, sad day! As I have spent the last week or so realizing we weren't going to be together I thought of a lot of funny memories of past birthdays.

For example, Jamie, do you remember our 8th or so birthday party? Sleepover with a ton of girls and I fell asleep and no one could wake me up, even after slamming my head into the coffee table?? Funny.... Or our 13th birthday dance party in our living room because it was too cold to be outside? Then Jennifer's attic caught on fire that night! Chaos. The unforgettable moment on our 14th birthday where you choked on orange juice and tried to give yourself the Heimlich with your back brace on.  There was also our 15th birthday when Heather came to surprise us and there was a dance at school (not going to lie, was much more successful than ours!) and Dad dropped all of our friends off in the Burb! I'm not going to even mention our 16th birthday for obvious reasons that I am sure you will recall. Our 20th birthday is when you met JD and didn't like him... sorry about that! And then our 21st when you were so mad all day I wasn't going to see you and SURPRISE!

I love our memories together but would love it so much more if we could spend today with each other. We've got to figure out how to make this happen!

Spring 2007

The most common question I'm asked when people find out I'm a twin is, "So do you like being a twin?" I always smile and say yes but there's no words to really communicate the relationship Jamie and I have. Growing up, she was my protector and the one that could make everything better (unless of course she was the one that made it bad and then that was my other sisters' jobs). All the kids were scared of me, not because I ever did anything but because they didn't what to know what Jamie would actually do to them if she ever heard them being mean to me. We were chefs and ballerinas and gymnasts together when we would watch something pertaining to it on TV. She always let me get my way and be the Pink Power Ranger too! We played sports together, took every class together, and somehow grew up to be completely different people. Now we are still best friends, and I always know who to call to decide if I need sympathy or to move on. If I don't know how to make something, or just did something I'm proud of, I know I always have a supportive ear. I admire my sister's courage to not stand down to a fight, to be her brilliant self and do amazing in school, and to get ready everyday and look like a my size, fair skinned Barbie.

There are so many reasons I love being a twin, most of all because of how much I love my twin sister. So here's to you, Jamie, with as much love as you can glean from a blog! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!