Friday Favorites

Kitchen Accessory - Nespresso Milk Frother from Crate and Barrel

Christmas Decoration - DIY Pinecone Owls

Cold Weather Fashion - Fur Coat and Skinny Jeans:  Bethany Joy Lenz and her daughter Maria

TV Show - One Tree Hill

Quote (From my favorite show just to go along with a theme that seems to be going on)

Friday Favorites

Favorite Coffee - Allegro Celebration Blend

Favorite Book - The Christmas Box Collection

Favorite Christmas Album - Joy Has Dawned by King's Kaleidoscope

Favorite Laugh

Favorite Fall Fashion - Jessie(seamsforadesire)

I am a bit speechless in the place God has me in right now.  The things God has asked me to partake in.  I am tempted to listen to the lies which satan tells me and believe that I won’t be able to do a good job at this.  That I am not made for this work.  I recently began a new internship at Mars Hill Church.  I church that I am absolutely blessed to call my home.  I am working in the Biblical Living department which is where we do all of our care.  This is quite a big role and I am filling big shoes as the girl that I am taking over for is absolutely beautiful.  I trust that God put me here because He has big plans of using me in His story but that can also be an overwhelming thought.  I mean, when we think about how huge God is(which really isn’t even possible for us) and then to think of surrendering our lives for Him to have His way with us.  I am not scared that the things He asks me to partake in will not be for my best interest.  I am more so fearful of how extravagant they will be(in a good way).  When I do think deeply about this fear, I realize I really don’t have anything to be fearful of.  I am under the protection of my creator, my ally, of the God who loves me and truly does want the best for me.  And the God who actually knows what the best for me is(certainly not always what I think it is).  God has been so good to me as he works on my heart.  I am so humbled at the fact that God has a hold of me at the young age of 21.  

More and more God has opened up my heart and mind to truly trust Him with my life.  My whole life.  Surrendering all of my plans to Him and allowing Him to lead me to the places He wants me to go.  When I say this, I am willing to give up any desires I may have.  This heart change is exactly that.  A heart change.  This is not something that I did my self or something that I worked hard enough to get to.  None of that!  This is directly related to God opening my eyes to the understanding that there is nothing more sweet and satisfying than freedom in Christ.  Nothing.  It is so much better to be what God asks us to be than to be what YOU always wanted to be.  God asks us to be servants for Him.  To bring glory to God’s name!  This is the reason why we can not try and manage our sin, walk the line of it and have one foot in and one foot out.  If this is what you do, then you have not surrendered to Jesus.  You have not given your life to him just as He gave his life for you.  You start with reading your bible.  Not for any checklist requirements but because we are to be filling our lives with truth.  With the word of God.  We are to be praying that God may change our hearts into the people He wants us to be.  We are to be praying the bold prayer of “may Your will be done.” We are the children of the Holy God and creator of everything, how can we not surrender our lives to Him on a daily basis?!

The Meaning of Marriage

The Meaning of Marriage by Tim Keller!  Read it, everyone.
I actually just finished this book this morning and wanted to reflect on it and think through everything I learned from it.  Now some of you might be asking me why I am reading a book on marriage if I am not married.  Marriage is actually something that God has placed a desire on my heart for.  I like to more think of it as my calling to be a wife and a mother.  I want to be a stay at home mom and raise my children so they know they are loved by their parents and are adored by Jesus.  I want to teach them, too, how to and what freedom and delight it is to adore Jesus themselves.  I want to be a wife to a man who is a follower of Jesus above everything else in life.  I want to marry a man who loves Jesus a lot more than he loves me.  I want people to be able to see my marriage and to see something different and to question it.  I want people to observe the love of Jesus through the way my husband loves me and the way I serve and love my husband.  When I think about the marriage God has for me I think of something so much BETTER than anything that can be depicted in movies.  Now with all of that said, I have been so blessed and am very content in the place God has me right now.  He has been so good to me in teaching me a ton about marriage and what He wants from it.  I am so thankful to be single as He teaches me because I can better understand it in relation to Him in my marriage rather than getting caught up in fantasizing and seeing everything in terms of me and a specific person.  Although I read this book and was unable to practically go home and make changes with a husband, it has given me a much broader picture on what to expect(good and hard) and has given me specific areas to pray regarding a marriage in the future.
This book began with sort of the history of marriage and how we ended up in the place we are at today.  No other time in history have people been entering into marriage looking to be self fulfilled by another person like they do today.  This is something that Keller refers to as the "Me-Marriage."  People are getting married because of the way that person makes them feel.  So you see the selfishness in all of that.  The thing that is so obvious is the fact that when people do this, they are putting expectations on a man/woman to fulfill them in a way that only Jesus Christ can do.  They expect their spouse to do something they simply can not do.  That is why people leave their marriages so often is because their spouse is not fulfilling them the way they expected them to do.
Marriage is a very powerful thing.  It was something that was beautifully created by God BEFORE sin entered into the world.  This means God felt it necessary and needed even when a person was in full union with God.  I love this!
Talking with a friend who has now been married for about a year and her and her husband are absolutely beautiful and honoring God has also helped me put these things I have been learning into a tangible picture.  She openly talked about how much your selfishness is shown to you in marriage.  This is actually a blessing when you think about it!  God has created marriage to sanctify you.  At the end of the day, God wants and will use your spouse to help reveal your sin so you can repent from it.  As a spouse that is what we should be helping, praying through and be open to receive from your own spouse.  There is not a closer, more connected human that you will even be with on earth.  The power of truth in marriage to talk through these sins with one another is so important!  The power of love in a marriage to lift each other up with kind, soft words that direct each other to Jesus and repentance and the power of Grace which was first displayed to us through Jesus to allow each other to forgive.  There is not another relationship on earth that can do the things marriage can do to you.  It is a blessing!  Begin looking at your spouse with eyes to see the things which God is doing in them.  See them as people who are being shaped by God into the people that will one day be complete in the sight of God!
The meaning of marriage is a selfish one but rather a selfless one.  It is to be a partner with your spouse, each having unique roles, to be an instrument in which God will use to sanctify your spouse.  What a blessing to be that person in someone's life!
I don't want this to seem as though I have rose colored glasses on and I think marriage will be a piece of cake.  I Don't!  I actually think that marriage will be the hardest relationship I have been in.  But I also know the power of God and the power of prayer and how much He will also be fighting for my marriage to be the way He wants it.  I know it will be hard but I know it will be beautiful as the Holy Spirit works on me and the spouse God blesses me with.

Let the Redeemed of the Lord Say So!

    "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so" - Psalm 107:2
I had the privilege to go to the Redemption Group celebration at my church last night which was literally a night of worship and people sharing their stories of what God has done and continues to do in their lives.  It was absolutely beautiful.
As I sit in the early morning at my local Starbucks eating breakfast and drinking a soy latte I feel led by the Lord to share my own redemption story.  Please read this story in a way which shows God's work in my life and on my heart and not anything that I have done on my own.  Praise God that I did not and could not do any of this on my own but rather ALL was done by Him.  I hope and pray that speaking truth and sharing my story will only bring you closer to Him.

I was born into a family which was pretty dysfunctional from the very beginning.  This is nothing new for me to know and if you asked anyone in my family they would say the same.  From a very early age I witnessed my dad treat my mom very poorly and as my sister and later I got older he began to treat us in the same way.  Verbal abuse was the norm and in order for our dad to like us, we had to be perfect by his standards.  We had to speak nicely to him even in the midst of his yelling at us and calling us names.  We had to let him do whatever he felt like doing and if we were hurt by anything, it was inappropriate and disrespectful to bring it to his attention.  My heavenly Father was present in my life but my earthly dad was much more important in my eyes.  He was much more important in his eyes as well. My dad never encouraged us in our relationship with Christ.  My mother took us to church but in her quiet nature did not speak biblical truth very often.  This began my quest for perfection.  From as early as I can remember I believed I was not beautiful and sadly, I equated beauty with perfection.  Because I was not perfect, I was not beautiful.  My quest for perfection came out in different ways and when I got into High School I believed that the easiest way to become beautiful was to become skinny.  I made a deliberate choice to stop eating.  I did not see it as a problem but rather something that every girl has to chose at some point in their life.  Not even understanding the sin in this my body and thoughts of food became an idol.  I became sad and angry at the people around me.  It just seemed as though they had it all together when I was putting up a daily fight to be that way.  How do people become so perfect?  Throughout high school I was continually being fed the lies of my father of who I was and who I could never be.  I came to the conclusion that I was not lovable the way I was and I had to continue to try harder.
Then God led me to a college which was a 13 hour drive away from home.  Coming out of such a difficult family environments does not go smoothly.  I came to the conclusion that not eating and being skinny was not what was going to get me love.  So I gave up and quickly realized that food was my friend.  And it became too close of a friend.  I began relying on food for my comfort, my joy, my peace, my healer, my strength and my motivation.  I found freedom in the fact that I could now eat without the burden of imperfection but I was in slavery at the other side of the pendulum.  I would eat to excess and quickly found myself in the bathroom in an attempt to throw up my shame of eating so much.  If anyone would have asked me if I had any sins in my life that were in my face everyday I would have said no and fully believed that I didn't.  A week before going back to Seattle for my second year of college I listened to a beautiful talk by one of the pastor's wives at my church on gluttony.  The Holy Spirit spoke straight to me as she read Philippians 3:19, "Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame.  Their mind is on earthly things."  I was stunned and saddened at the fact that I was blatantly choosing food over the God of the universe.  Although I was convicted of my sin and did not know what to do.  I began searching high and low for things to do in order to stop what I was doing.  I began reading books searching for exactly how to repent of something that had been a part of my daily life for the past seven years.  I had doubts that it was truly possible to repent because I didn't remember a time when I honored God with the things I ate.  To be honest I believed that was something God didn't deal with.  The basic act of eating was way too basic.  That is something we need to fix ourselves.  My binge eating and throwing up continued on for another year and when I got to winter quarter of my junior year of college I joined a Redemption Group at my church.  This was surprisingly something that I thought was a good idea to go through but not completely necessary for me.  My bingeing and purging was definitely something that I knew needed to change and I was reading books on the subject in an effort to find the best method for healing.  I sadly still had the idea in my head that it was way too below God for Him to even consider the idea of healing me from that.  Throughout Redemption Group I think I talked about this once or twice.  It was not the center of my discussions at group.  The center of the subject talked about at group was who God was.  It was revealed to me(by the Holy Spirit) that God is my loving Father who delights in me just the way that I am.  Today, tomorrow and forever will He be joyful to call me His daughter.  After Redemption Group, God absolutely transformed my heart, soul and mind and directed all of my thoughts, passions and desires on Him and bringing glory to His name!  I have never experienced the peace, joy and healing as I have in the past three months.  I no longer turn to food the way I have in the past; taking it away to make me perfect or eating in excess to make me feel loved.  Those things I find in Jesus Christ.
I have had a few people ask me what I did to come to the place that I am at.  I had tried for a couple years to try behavior modifications to escape from this slavery.  Please hear my words when I say I did not do anything but rather God pursued me.  My sin was a huge brick wall that was getting in the way of Him using me to the fullest and praise be to Him that He broke it down.
I could not be more thankful to my God for the healing He has brought to me.  I can truly say, more than I ever have been able to before, that I want and by God's grace I will live my life here on this earth bringing glory to God's name.
And I hope that is what my story does.  Brings glory to God's name and the power that He is more than capable of doing.

Redemption

What a great joy it is to no longer be defined by the world's definition of beauty but rather my righteousness through Christ's death on the cross!! 
Praise God for all of His Redemption stories :)
"I have swept away your offenses like a cloud, your sins like the morning mist. Return to me, for I have redeemed you.(Isaiah 44:22)"


I will post my beautiful redemption story very soon....

Blown Away!

I am currently taking a study break while studying for my first Neuroscience test!  I am currently in week 4 of spring quarter.  This quarter has been beautiful as God is answering my prayers to change and grow me DRAMATICALLY.  I really enjoy praying for big things because I know God is capable and faithful in that.  So at the beginning of the school year as well as every quarter, I have been asking God to grow me more than He ever has in my life.  To reveal Himself more to me and allow me to better understand myself as His daughter.  The first two quarters were the hardest!  And I sort of expected this due to the mysterious ways God does things(which are beautiful).  I felt the pains of loneliness like I have never felt them before.  I don't think I have felt lonely until then.  I didn't feel like I had a home(and in a sense I didn't).  I was paying rent and storing my things at one place and sleeping on the couch at another.  I lived out of bags.  I am so grateful for that couch as well as to my amazing friends for allowing me to stay there.  I will be forever grateful!  I also had to leave for work at 615 every morning and walk the 20 minute walk in the dark.  I am scared of the dark so it was not fun!  The only thing that kept me afloat those months was directly related to my prayers.  The interesting part as well was that I did not feel very close to God.  I just cried out to him constantly knowing he was there even if he didn't feel like it.  I feel like when this quarter started He flipped my life upside down and showed me for the thousandth time how faithful he is and how much He knows me.  I was blessed to be able to move my things into my friends house and officially move in!  This was amazing because I now get to live with my best friends.  I love them so much and they are such a support to me!  It is a joy to be able to serve these girls(my preference is when they are not looking) and just love on them.  As you saw in my last post, I was BLESSED with an amazing car!  I still can't believe that I have it and am so thankful.  I want to drive it so much :)  This car has allowed me to do more things due to not having to walk or depend on others for rides.  One of those things is to get involved in another Community Group(like a bible study through my church).  I prayed that God would put me in one that I grew from and of coarse from the first time I went to my new CG, I have been taught and grown through it.  I can not get over how thankful I am to God and to the people who are in the group!  Every single one of them has been a blessing to me and I don't think they even know it!  :)  God also gave me a new job at whole foods which is a huge gift because this just secures the fact that I  will be living in Seattle over the summer which I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT!!!
I don't want to take for granted any of the blessings in my life!  Truely, God's grace has blown my mind and I could not be more thankful to Him.  I know He is giving me what I need and even in the first two quarters I know that the loneliness was a feeling I needed to be pushed in the direction of God.  The sweetness of God's grace is unlike anything else.  I am humbled at the fact that God is even allowing me to see even a sliver of Him, to talk to him, to love hIm, and to sing to Him.  Oh, I am so undeserving!
I must get back to studying but I will continue this very soon!

Corolla

I got a new car!  It is so much fun :)

2012 Toyota Corolla

Marianne Williamson

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
- Marianne Williamson

Home

Home, Home, Home!  Going home for Spring Break.

I am sitting in the airport right now waiting for my flight :)

Currently listening to Arms by Christina Perri

It is pretty great.

I'm merely a soul within a body; humans are wired to love.  To be anything but crazy in love would just be insanity!

Always Love

I have been doing a lot of thinking over the past few weeks and this will be my attempt to put it into words.  We will see how it goes and I apologize in advance if it is all over the place and not pleasant to read.  Try and stick with me.
So I am winding down with winter quarter and about to enter into my last spring quarter of my undergrad.  This fact has been tripping me up a little.  This wouldn't normally freak me out if I was doing what I usually do and have a firm plan of what comes next.  A lot of you may be thinking that I am being a little dramatic and that I still have one whole year to figure all of this out.  My answer to this is that I am very aware that I have a year left but I also know how fast a year goes by.  I know that it goes by with a blink of an eye.
What is my fear, you ask?  Well my fear is that I will get it wrong.  The thing is that I do not know what I want to do 'when I grow up'.  When I decided to major in Psychology, my thought was that I would be a counselor.  Don't get me wrong, this still is something I want to do...along with many many other things.  The nice thing(and right now, the hard thing) about getting a BA in Psychology is that you can choose anything you want to do!  Other things which I have thought about is being a teacher(going into the school system, though, is not ideal and a big turnoff), school counseling, Child Development, Medical family therapy, Per marital counseling and many other things.  What do you pick when everything sounds like something you want to do?
A big thing is whatever I end up doing with my life, I want it to matter.  I think I have heard this statement many times and never given it more thought than, "of coarse you want your career to matter".  Well these past weeks I have really felt what people mean when they say that.  I want my life, my time, my energy, my passions to matter to someone.  I want to be able to change the lives of those I am around.  When I say this, I do not only mean those whom I am working with.  I want to truly change the people around me.  My friends, my family, if God graces me with a husband and children; I want the lives of these people be changed for the better for the sole reason that I was there and I loved them.  I feel as though I have recently forgot the idea to love people.  It seems so simple yet it is one out of the two most important commands in the bible.  We are to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves.  That is what I want to do with my life.  I want to matter to the people I come in contact with and I want to be a life changer for them.  What this looks like, I do not know yet.
I want to have a home where people are loved and this is not questioned.  I want to have friends who know that they can call me when they are lonely(oh the emptiness of loneliness is such a horrid feeling).  I want to have family who sees my appreciation for them and sees my love for them on a daily basis.  I want to have a husband who is served without having to ask and who hears the word LOVE often.  I want to have kids who knows the sweetness of a mothers love and the warmth of a hug.  I think that in my life, if I am able to love the people around me and the people who I come into contact with, I will have mattered in this life.
I am reminded of a song that I have been playing a lot lately(thanks to the newly discovered SPOTIFY).  The song is called Always Love by Nada Surf.
"Always love, hate will get you every time.  Always love, don't wait 'till the finish line."

Thank You for reading this post.  It is very important to me!

Update

So I have a little bit of time to write a post!  I just finished an essay a lot faster than I expected and so now I have tonight to relax(as much as a college student can relax).
I just wanted to point out that today was so gross outside here in Seattle.  I has been very cold.  It has been raining pretty much all day and the rain has been hard.  Like it wants to be hail but it is not quit there yet.  It has also been really windy and dark due to the clouds that have not left the sky.  Luckily, today I got out of class at 1220 and was able to walk home, take a nap and be super comfy inside my house.  We have this really big comfy couch and I have been sleeping and studying on it all day.  I currently am enjoying a cup of all natural pear white tea.  Yummy!
This quarter has been so fast that I don't really feel as though I am getting anything done.  I feel like I do not have time to get anything done.  Life as a college student is so interesting.  You always have stuff on your mind and never truly(until the breaks after your quarter is over) have time to clear your head.  Even if you do clear your head, the next time you look at your schedule, it all floods back in.  Sometimes you just want to have no worries or no to do lists.  I can say though that I am enjoying my classes.  I am learning a lot.  Last quarter(fall 2011) was a very rough quarter for me emotionally and I didn't enjoy my classes because I didn't allow myself to.  I was very stressed about so many other things that I never got to just learn.  This quarter I am taking classes for my minor.  I decided to minor in Individual and Family Development last year for my self.  I did not want to do it for my career choice(which as of now, I really don't know what that will be) but rather to help me when I have a family.  I have enjoyed all of those classes and have appreciated learning about family and certain things which will be helpful like nutrition and interior design.  It has been very fun.
So what has God been teaching me lately??  Well at the beginning of this quarter I asked God to teach me more in this quarter than He has in any other quarter.  I wanted to grow so much this quarter and I will be able to look back at this quarter and know the things which had changed in my life.  Among the many things God has taught me, He has been revealing idols to me that He is commanding me to drop, give up on them and turn to Him.  One idol that I have is my Idol of Comfort.  I can see that my desire and "need" for comfort has become a sin.  When I say comfort, I am talking about the sitting on the coach for hours at a time, eating food which tastes good and is not good for me and just the all around idea that those things is where I get my strength from.  I need to remember that I get my strength from God and God alone.  He is my refuge and my strength.  I am not saying that sitting on the coach or eating yummy food is a sin.  But I am saying that it has become a sin, a lot of the time, in my life.  I desire is so much that I think that it is a big deal if I am not able to sit on the coach for a couple hours a day.  When in reality, God is my strength.  I can go through the day without have rest because He sustains me.  He blessed me with my very first thought yesterday morning when it was so exhausting to have to get up at 6am of "God sustains me, He is my strength."  He is!  I can see that although I almost feel like I am "worse shape" in my faith this quarter because my idol is so much in my face right now I am certainly not.  Maybe I was not aware of my idol last quarter but it was still an idol in my life.  I am thankful for the Holy Spirit revealing this idol to me because now I can REPENT from it.  God is so good to me.  And I can say that and whole heartedly believe that.
I am currently going through this group at Mars Hill called Redemption Group.  It has been so great.  We are in a group of about 10 women and we just get to share and work through our junk and our past and our sins and everything and be able to see where the gospel and where God is in all of it.  We are going through Redemption, a beautiful book.  I encourage you to read it!  I am blessed to be saved by Jesus and to be instilled with this wisdom.  I certainly do not deserve any of it and yet in His grace, I am NEW!!

Busy Day

Todays Day:
6am - my morning walk to work.  I work at my school's coffee shop in the Student Union Building.
10am - got off work!  I usually have a class at 1030 but it got cancelled today!  So instead I headed to the library to read and research for a paper that is due Thursday
130pm - Walk to my Family Finance class.  It starts at 2 but I sort of like getting there a little early.
320pm - Walk to the SUB and begin writing my paper.  I met a friend in there and got to talk for a little bit.
5pm - Walk up to Subway(we have one on campus which is very convenient)  and have dinner with my friend.  I stayed there after she left and continued to write my paper
645pm - Meet a friend and we drove to our church.  I am in a group called Redemption Group at my church.  It is ALWAYS a blessing to go and dig deep with our group.
930pm - Group ends and drive home
10pm - Take a shower and just chill for a little bit

It is pouring and super windy outside right now!!  I always go to bed hoping that it will not be that way in the morning when I have to get up and walk 20 minutes to work.  I plan on writing more soon.  I am sorry I have been so MIA this quarter.