Challenge Accepted

I spent the past week in the wonderful city of New Orleans with the high school youth group I work with, and we attended a conference called Challenge.  The conference included several speakers, including Francis Chan, worship led by Kristian Stanfill, and much more.  The theme of the conference was Everything is New, and we went through the book of Colossians.  There were 5,000 plus people attending the conference, and it was such a blessing to be in one room with more than 5,000 people worshiping.  God definitely brought me to that conference for so many reasons, and he worked in my life a lot during this week.  One of the biggest takeaways for me was my prayer life, the ways in which I approach talking to my heavenly Father.  Opening God's Word or coming before God in prayer is no calm or light matter.  It is such a privilege to come before the creator of the universe, the one that gave me life and continues to give me life each day.  I have taken this privilege for granted so much as I have grown older.  Francis Chan described how when he first asked the woman that would become his wife out on a date, he spoke to her with such awe and wonder.  Now, 20 years later, with 5 kids, they answer the phone so commonly.  Familiarity has changed the way they approach each other, and the same thing can happen in our relationship with God.  It is so easy to speak the name of God without being in true awe of the great intensity that comes with talking to our God.  I have definitely been in the place for so long, but God met me right where I was at this past week, and I am in such awe now.  Another aspect of my prayer life that God confronted me on was that I don't come before God with huge matters.  I don't ask God to perform miracles or big things, and that is really because of a lack of faith in him.  God can do big things, and he wants me to ask him to do these things.

Besides the growth in my life, it was so great to be a youth leader on this trip.  It was amazing to see how the students are growing in God.  The group has such a tight community with each other on many levels, but they began to see that that community needs to include God.  Towards the end of the week they became quite a bit more vulnerable with each other, and it broke my heart to see some of their struggles.  This trip made it very clear to me that working with youth is something I don't ever want to give up.  High schoolers have such an energy that is so contagious; this was especially evident during our work projects.  We worked on a house and painted it each afternoon.  The whole group worked so hard and really came alive during this time.  Our group was very blessed by the people in the community, especially the woman that we painted the house for.  She was so thankful for us, and we had the opportunity of praying for her and the home.  The strength that God gives you when serving on trips like this is a beautiful thing.  It reminded me that God gives us the same strength each day when he gives us life.  Each day presents the opportunity to love Christ, love people, and serve in new and exciting ways.  Keeping that in mind can really improve my daily attitude.

One of the final messages talked about how faithfulness in the everyday life is the new radical life, and that is the challenge we can either choose to deny or accept.  Coming back to my job and typical life is already proving difficult, but staying rooted in my Savior is a challenge well-worth accepting.  

 

Africa on the Mind

I have so enjoyed the additional amount of reading time I have had lately.  I have been finishing books just liked I wanted to! Hopefully that will continue throughout the summer (and maybe into the school year!).  One book that I read and wanted to share about was Kisses From Katie.  The book is written by Katie Davis, who is just a few year older than me, and in it she shares her story of how God brought her to Uganda and changed her life there.  She went for what she thought was just going to be a gap year in between high school and college, but she ended up starting a non-profit organization, adopting 14 young girls, and sharing the love of Jesus in so many different ways.  Her book describes all the different ways that God provided for her and how radically he used the country of Uganda to change her.  It was such a blessing to read this and got me thinking a lot.

When I was a young kid, I fell in love with Africa.  I memorized the geography of where each country is (yes, I am a nerd...), and I researched statistic after statistic.  I did projects for school on specific countries, organizations, and problems in Africa.  I really could not wait for the day that I would get to go to Africa, but towards the end of high school I lost some faith in God's plan and stopped thinking that he might one day send me to Africa.  This book reminded me though that God's timing is perfect, and I have started praying fervently again for the people of Africa and that he might one day send me there.

The book also had me thinking about my future, specifically my career future.  Katie never attended college or got married or gave birth to a child.  But God equipped her to be a mother, a nurse, a founder of a non-profit company, and so much more to the people of Uganda.  Katie's book reminded that my job in life is to love wherever God calls me, and there are so many ways to love.  I have absolutely no idea the location or situation he is calling me to, but I do know that right now I do not feel at all called to be a music teacher in a suburban American school.  This freaks my parents (mostly my Dad...) out because they know how much I'm paying to get this college education for a career that I don't know if I want one day.  This is why, I have started praying and looking a lot into student teaching abroad.  There is a program called Educators Abroad that sends student teachers all around the world.  There are a few different African locations and many other countries too.  There are so many details to work out with my school, the program, the finances, etc, which is why I am ask God to make it clear if this is plan for me.  I cannot help but smile when I think about student teaching in Africa somewhere.  Until then, I'll keep loving right here where God has me!

Pinterest Fun!

One of my fun goals for the summer is to do crafts and things from Pinterest since I have a little more time on my hands. Well so far, two of my best friends and I have been trying lots of different things.  There has been quite a few successes and one that didn't work out so well...

One craft we found on Pinterest was bubble painting.  You simply mix paint, dish soap, and water in a cup.  Then you blow bubbles until they get to the top of the cup, and then you pop the bubbles with the paper, and they pop onto the paper.  For some reason, our blue paint would not make bubbles at all.  I tried blowing the bubbles, and I ended up with a splatter of blue on my face.  I sure was glad we decided to use washable paint!  This was a super easy craft that took very little time to do.  I thought it made cute simple cards to give to people!

I'm using a lot of the craft time I spend with my friends to make decorations for my floor next year.  My floor verse is Revelation 21:23, which says, "The city does not need the sun or the moon, for the glory of God gives it light, and the lamb is its lamp."  So the decorations will the be the progression of the sun as you walk down the hallway.  My friend and I made two poster boards for the night time part. It was fun to splatter paint with toothbrushes.    My friend Emily and I have never been artists, whereas our friend Jenny is very talented at art. So Emily and I were quite proud of ourselves for painting a moon!  

A Pinterest craft that Jenny found for us uses toilet paper tubes to make fun wall art.  You first flatten the toilet paper tubes, then cut them into smaller pieces (we did four 1-inch sections on each tube).  You then hot glue them together in the design you would like.  After that you can spray paint it any color.  The three of us had an absolute blast with this craft!

I made a sun for my floor!

I think we had more fun with adding graffiti to the cardboard!

Our biggest pinterest fail was making jello cookies  They are pretty much just sugar cookies with jello powder added in, but we made a few mistakes.  First of all, we were shocked by the large amount of butter called for (1.5 cups), so we just put in a 3/4 of a cup.  Then I dropped the vanilla extract bottle into the batter, so we had a little too much vanilla. And then, we ran out of white flour, so we decided wheat flower would work.  We then realized that we should have put more butter in because the dough was so crumbly, so we tried to add more butter, but that didn't work so well...The recipe had us making four different flavors of cookies, so we sectioned the dough off into four parts.  The recipe said to add just two teaspoons of jello powder to each section.  That didn't seem like very much to us, and in the pictures online the dough looked so colorful.  So we added quite a bit more jello powder, practically the whole packet.  So the dough was full of little jello granules, and our hands were covered in jello.  We make little dough balls and baked the cookies, but nothing changed much to them in the oven. We tried each flavor (orange, lime, raspberry, and berry blue), and they were all pretty disgusting.  They tasted like jello-flavored play-dough.  They were not pleasant to eat, but we had so many laughs while making them!

Training the Mind and the Body

For the past two weeks I have gotten into a nice routine, which has been great.  I had two weeks of training for work that flew by quickly.  Training has been a bit of a theme in the past two weeks, and I'm learning what it looks like in various forms.

Training at work included times of powerpoints, learning how to operate the computer system we use and plenty of setup in all the dorms that will be used by conferences on campus this summer.  We sorted pillows (some in the picture below!), tested key cards, hung signs, and much more.  The group I was working with was incredibly efficient and got the work done a bit too quickly, so we had many times of sitting around doing nothing.  At first I enjoyed the breaks, but then sitting around began to bother me.  I did, however, really enjoy meeting new people at work and having plenty of fun with all those pillows.  

Being on campus is definitely a different feeling when school is not in session.  There are some summer groups on campus that are here for a short time before they leave for their trips overseas, and there are a lot of science students doing research, but that is pretty much it.  It is strange to have a pick of all of the practice rooms to choose from, but I do get more practicing done now that there aren't great people in the hallways to distract me.  Oboe playing has been going well overall for the summer, and I have enjoyed playing too.

Along with training at work, I have been training in many other ways too.  Breaks from school are normally the times when I am lazy beyond belief and end up not actually getting anything done.  Last summer I didn't have to worry about that because I was working at HoneyRock Camp all summer, so I was very busy.  Being home or even at the home I'm staying at for most of the summer makes it so easy to allow a day to slip by without doing much besides watching TV and eating crappy food.  Even now that I have a job and volunteering to fill my day, it would be easiest to come home and just chill on the couch, and that is what my brain tells me to do.  But now I am having to train my brain to think differently about how I spend my time.  This is most definitely a step by step process.  I am embarrassed to admit this, but I was reminded of this while watching the Glee season finale.  That show still has me hooked, especially this last season.  At the end of the show Finn and Rachel sang the song "Roots Before Branches," and I was reminded that change does not happen right away, and I need to stay rooted in order to grow.  I'm so thankful that God gives me such a powerful root.  I had been working on the 5K running plan, and I was mildly discouraged because I couldn't feel myself progressing.  After the reminder from cheesy Glee characters of all people, I decided to spend my run thinking about this, and it was the most enjoyable run I've ever been on.  It was a joy that I was quite thankful for.

God's faithfulness is so evident in this time of training my mind and my body!     

Finishing Books...and other things

I am the queen of starting things and not finishing them, especially with books.  Ever since I can remember, I get about two-thirds of the way through a book, and then I stop reading it.  I have no idea why I do this, and it's not just with books.  I have multiple blogposts that get half-written and never posted, crafts that I start but give up on, organizing and cleaning projects that end up creating more of a mess than before, and so much more.  But I've decided that this summer will be the summer of finishing books and other things, and hopefully that habit can continue.  I started with finishing the Hunger Games trilogy.  I stopped reading the third book about halfway through. I blame this partly on the fact that the busy end of the semester prevented me from reading, partly on the fact the third book was not nearly as exciting as the first two, but mostly on the fact that I just don't finish books.  I went to my bedroom in my house that I hardly spend any time in anymore, and I looked at my bookshelf.  I grabbed seven or so books that I didn't finish back in high school, so I'm going to start with those and then move on to some others.  I'm excited for some good reading this summer!

So...one of the ways I'm going to stay accountable to finishing things this summer is by posting a list of just some of the things I want to finish.  And as I finish things, I'll post updates and pictures and my thoughts on the books I'm reading and whatever else.

1. Organize and deep clean my bedroom at home...I haven't lived in this room for more than a week in over two years, so it has become the room where I dump everything and where my family puts boxes of who knows what.  Coming home to this room is pretty stressful, so it is time to throw things away, give things to charity, and organize.  Since I'm not living at home during the week this summer, I'm going to have to be very diligent with the weekends I'm at home.  I have a history of being a pack rat for a couple years and then throwing masses away all at once.  I'm going to try to go slow and really decide what to keep and what not to.  It'll definitely annoy me that this is something that can't be done in one day.

2. Meet regularly with two of my best friends from home to do a Bible and book study...All three of us are in different worlds during the school year, one at a huge public university, one living at home, and then me living in the Christian bubble of Wheaton.  We've got different perspectives to contribute, and I truly think that God has knitted the three of together for some specific reasons.  We're planning to read Crazy Love  by Francis Chan.  I've read this before, but I know it will be so worth it to read again, especially while discussing with my friends.

3. Keep up with my 5K running plan...I don't run.  At the gym, I use the elliptical or the stepper machine or anything besides the treadmill.  I've always hated running and have so many terrible middle school gym class memories associated with running.  So this summer, I'm trying to condition my mind and body to like running.  I started a couch-to-5K running plan.  There was a handy app to buy where a voice tells me when to run and when to walk.  So far, the only thing I've enjoyed about my running time is that it is fun to see what people are doing outside.  Each time, I've seen the same man smoking marijuana...he waved at me though the last time.  At the end of the workout, I feel so accomplished, but during the running, I dread it.  Right now, my first goal is to finish the plan and be able to run a 5K.  But if along the way I could learn to enjoy running, I would not mind a bit.

4. Use Pinterest, don't just look at Pinterest...I've pinned and pinned things, but I have hardly done or used any of them.  I'd like to make some creative crafts and try out some fun new recipes this summer that I have pinned already.

5. RA Crafting and Planning...This fall I will begin the exciting journey of being an RA (resident assistant) in an underclassmen dorm on campus.  The summer is when I actually have some time to think clearly, and I know that I will regret it if I don't sit down and do some praying and planning for the year with various events and dates for things.  And of course, I have decorations to make.  I've bounced around a lot of floor theme ideas, but I finally settled on one.  To say it simply, my theme is the progression of the sun.  As you walk down the floor, the decorations will illustrate the rising to the setting of the sun.  My floor verse is Revelation 21:23, which says, "The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the lamb is its lamp."  I just love the idea of the glory of God being so bright and understanding what it means to root yourself in that glory in order to have abundant life.  I'm excited to make some really cool crafts that represent the sun's journey from the beginning to the end of the day.  If you have any crafty ideas, let me know; I'd appreciate the help!

6. Keep my plant alive...My grandma bought me this cute potted flower plant, and I've never kept a plant alive for more than a couple weeks. I'd like this one to stay alive! :)

7. Watch the Lord of the Rings movies and the Harry Potter movies...I've never seen any of these movies, and I'd just like to be able to understand the references to them that I hear all the time.  I feel very behind in the pop culture world...which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

8. Oboe Oboe Oboe...Consistently practicing over the summer is so difficult, but I've got a recital in November that I want to go well, so I'm going to need to keep my oboe skills up and growing.  It's so hard to sit in a practice room when there are more fun things to do outside, but I know the practice time will be worth it in the long run.

9. Write letters...My grandpa still lives in the non-computer using world.  He would love a letter from me.  I don't know how many times this year I wrote half a page of a letter but never finished it.  I'd love to become one of those people that sends nice little notes in the mail.  Who doesn't love getting mail?

10. Read, Take Pictures, Read More, Take More Pictures...I've already talked about my reading goals that I'd like to keep up with, but I'd also love to take advantage of my camera.  I have a DSLR that does not get used nearly as often as I'd like.  I want to learn this summer to focus more on the quality of the picture rather than the quantity of pictures.

...and finally...


Pursue God more and more and more...In each of the goals I have above, I want to get to know God more and understand a new and exciting aspect of his character.  This is his summer to do with me what he wants, and I want to bring glory to him however possible.  My problem with not finishing things often is seen in my faith too.  I start working on a discipline and don't keep up with it, or I have brief moments where I begin to grasp what it means to be rooted and God, but then I lose sight of that.  I'll never finish pursuing God, like I finish a book, but it is so exciting to know that there will always be more of God to pursue!

Better Now Than Never

Well...blogging didn't exactly go as planned.  It has been two months since I last posted, but I figured posting now would be better than never posting.

The second half of my semester was full of fun but also more stressful than I ever could have imagined.  I got less and less sleep each week, and my grades slowly went down.  It all led right up to finals week, which was just a week of no fun.  Although the second half of my semester was stressful, God was faithful all the way through, as he always is!  Here are just a few of the great ways God has blessed me this semester with some pretty great pictures to go along :)  

 
God has truly blessed me with my relationship with my roommate.  We understand each other and don't even need to use words most of the time.  We know how to comfort each other in times of hurt, and best of all we know how to encourage each other in our walk with God.  Kim knows my struggles and encourages me to seek God in those struggling times.  She is so great.

I had my first driving into downtown Chicago experience, and I survived! :D  The city has played such a big role in my semester.  I've not only enjoyed going downtown a bunch, but I've also been taking urban studies classes on campus.  I took a class called Chicago and another class called Urban Politics.   I loved both of them a lot surprisingly.  Next semester I'm taking Urban Sociology.  Last spring I realized that I am really passionate about the city, and I would like to end up teaching music in an urban school and then hopefully move towards urban music education reforms one day.  I'm so thankful that God has given me a heart for the city!

My summer at HoneyRock working as a camp counselor has really influenced my school year, and it has been so great to have a HoneyRock friends on campus.  Seeing them in the midst of Wheaton College intensity is such a delight.  You really become close with people when doing 24/7 ministry with them, so seeing them on campus brings a smile to my face and floods me with great memories from the summer.  These two ladies and I all have the least compatible schedules during the school year, but we've kept up for the most part.  I'm so happy God placed them in my life!

Conducting was something that I struggled with so much this semester, and that scared me a lot because conducting is what I am currently looking at for a career choice.  Everything in life, especially academics, as always come easily for the most part, and this year is when that all changed.  I learned what it felt like to be one of the weakest in the class, and I had to learn to be ok with this.  But through it all, I came out of the class so happy that I made it through, learned a ton, and had an absolute blast despite my lack of success.

This year I've loved living in the suite that my RA (on right) lives in.  She is such an amazing RA, and I was excited to find out at the end of this semester that I will be an RA next year.  I'm going to be living in a community of 50+ freshmen and sophomore girls.  Life is going to look a lot different next year because a lot of priorities will be shifting, and I am so pumped for this.  I cannot wait!

This is some of the oboe studio and our teacher, and I have loved having these two freshmen guys in the studio this year.  Playing the oboe has been so much more fun this year, and I'm excited to continue growing as a musician next semester.  

God was good to me this semester.  God is good to me all the time. :)   

  

Fall is a time to...

Break out the fun fall clothes!

Catch a last glimpse of the flowers.

Lay in the leaves and look at the sky.

Do fun art projects at night!

Be with friends. 

Play in the leaves.

Have fun with my roommate.  

Watch the sunset