Standing in Awe

Do you ever feel like your life is work?  Well I do.  Recently I have been feeling like every part of my life is something that requires work.  Even my day off requires me to work to intentionally relax and not work.  Relationships, budgeting, processing my own emotions, traveling, planning for the summer...the list goes on and on.  I often feel like a dog chasing its tale; running so hard toward something and never actually going anywhere or getting any closer.  I have been realizing a lot about myself and digging deep into my own issues and fears that live deep down.  I feel as though I am starting to shine a bit of light in that corner where all the yucky things you are afraid of are.  However, God has been gracious. I have felt so many glimpses of joy and can feel God slowly transforming the dark corner into another area for Him to fill me up and pull me closer to Himself.  I would not even say that I am really in a healing process, bu...

I am now 23 years old.  This past weekend so many people made sure that I had such a wonderful day and I am so grateful for such great friends!  In light of my birthday I have been thinking a lot about where I was one year ago, and even took some time to look back at the past year via facebook.  I have had such a great year and probably some of the greatest changes.  Here is a list of 23 wonderful things God has blessed me with in the past year: 1.  I finished my first marathon. 2.  I visited 8 new countries. 3.  I built relationships with a new family in Spain. 4.  I got to visit my German "sister". 5.  I stood on top of the world in the Swiss Alps. 6.  I met my new niece and nephew. 7.  I swam in the Medditerranian 8.  I graduated from the University of Michigan. 9.  I got accepted to staff at New Life Church. 10.  I had the opportunity to see my sister finish her first marathon. 11.  I felt the ...

Firstly,  I wanted to make you all aware of the ability to subscribe to this blog by email.  On the right side bar you will find a box that allows you to put in your email and you will then receive an email version of blog posts as I post them.  One thing to note is that if you do choose this option and you want to leave a comment you can not just reply in your email, it will not come to me.  I hope this is helpful. In the past few weeks God has blessed me in ways I could not have imagined.  He brought a few new partners to the ministry support team and I am now nearing the 25% mark of the funds necessary for me to be released back into field ministry.  I am absolutely blown away by God's provision.  This past week felt like I was finally getting my feet under me and feeling like this job is more routine now.  I also finally took a day off.  I was caught in a cycle for a while of feeling like I was never working enough and as a result I w...

As promised, a post just for the El Salvador trip.  I was in La Libertad, El Salvador last week, and many of you helped to make that possible.  I owe you the deepest thanks, and sincerely hope that this letter encourages you.  If you have read any of my older blog posts, or even just talked to me, you may know that I absolutely love the sunrise.  I find them so renewing and love the promise of a new day.  The picture above is just that: a promise of a new day, and particularly special because it was in La Libertad, a place so near to my heart.  I woke early each morning to exercise on the beach as well as just sit and take in the first warm rays of the morning.  I meditated a lot on God's power and his ability to make everything new as I watched each wave washing up onto the shore. This past week was so good for my life and for my spirit.  I was able to reconnect with many of my friends there that I have grown close to over the past 4 years a...

I know I talked in a previous post about graduating and things changing, but I would like to explain a bit more about where I am at in life right now and what God is doing.  Praise to God, I was accepted to go on staff with Great Commission Ministries at New Life Church, and at the start of February I headed down to Orlando for new staff training.  I learned all about how to share with others about the ministry I am involved in and how they can be involved.  I have since been working full time doing Ministry Team Development (MTD) and have also done a bit of traveling. Not really work related, I had the opportunity to travel to Arizona in mid February as well to run the Ragnar relay with my sister and her family.  We ran 202 miles in 30 hours.  It was a lot of fun and great sibling bonding.  Even though running through the desert is probably not my favorite thing to do, spending time with people is.  In a way I think God used the trip to show me how...

I realize that it has been many months since I have last posted.  I think what I found is that my life back home is not anything I thought anyone would care to read.  Then I realized that God does absolutely amazing things regardless of where I am and what I am doing at the current moment in my life.  A lot of big things have happened since I last posted: I got to witness my big sister cross the finish line of her first marathon, I became an aunt to a set of beautiful twins, I graduated from college, and the whole family was in the same place for the first time in two years.  It has been a lot of accomplishments and endings, but as the title suggests, rather than feeling like the beginning of the end, it has all felt like the end of a beginning. When I returned to Ann Arbor at the beginning of the month I assumed it would feel weird to walk around campus and not be going to classes.  I was weirdly surprised that it did not feel strange or out of place at all....

So as you can probably tell from the extreme absence of my writing, it has been quite a process coming back.  After a health scare with Megan on the way home, some vomiting, and an extremely janky plane ride across the Atlantic, we made it back to Chicago.  As we made our way through the airport and through the dreaded US Customs, I appreciated how familiar and yet how foreign everything around me seemed.  People speaking English, all the signs in English, and huge toilets, all seemed familiar, but almost from a past life.  I was warmly greeted by Celeste in the airport and was so grateful to see a familiar face.  By the time we had landed Megan was feeling better and we got her on the Megabus with no problems.  Going out into the big city was very strange.  All the cars were huge, it was busy, and people seemed to be in such a rush, but to be honest I was so content just to be with family that I could not even begin to process everything, and my mind...