All-Nighter

This is it, folks. My first all-nighter. I have a paper due tomorrow and two tests on Tuesday. So why in the world are you blogging? Great question. And one that I don't know the answer to. But here I am. One of my roommates just informed me that on a Grey's episode a woman that didn't have a voice let her blog ruin her relationship with her husband. It might have been her way of telling me to stop blogging when I have so much to do. Point taken, Roomie. Good idea.

Now let me just drink this liquid energy and eat my ever-so-small Special K bar and I'll be ready to go.

Get excited about my post after my paper. Isaiah 54 is a phenomenal chapter (also what my paper's over.)

Idabel Weekend

Well it's definitely been awhile. This is usually the busiest time of fall semester for me because all the professors think they are helping us by having things due before Thanksgiving. They just don't realize that they ALL do it, so it does not help us.

While it's been a CRAZY few weeks, I've been really blessed by a lot of things recently. Mostly stuff with friends. Last weekend, one of my friends took our group of friends to her hometown for the weekend where her parents rented us a cabin. Oh. My. Goodness. I needed that so much! It was such a great weekend!! So I just wanted to show you a few pictures from it.

Aaron, Abigail, and Will. Just an example of one of the beds. (DON'T WORRY! Boys and girls slept in separate rooms.)

The kitchen! Kaylee's mom cooked for us all weekend and it was wonderful!!

An example of absolutely beautiful Oklahoma scenery.
And of course the Wil(l)'s had to fight in the big, manly stream.

Ok, Summer. I give you full permission to use the next two pictures for whatever blackmail you need. (Also, it's ROOT beer. Haha, still funny, though.)
Above is Ben drinking some Okie root beer. Below is Wil imitating the museum artwork.

I got to play with puppies!!!! They were absolutely precious!!
And then there was this stupid turkey that kept scaring me. Will is slightly terrifying here, too.
Some mascot or something? Oh! We went to a folk festival which is where all these pictures were taken.

Me, Laura, and Aaron listening to some classic folk music.
I'm not sure the chicken and duck liked Aaron too much.
Abigail, me, Kaylee, Lisa, Bailey, Laura, and Kayla. Wow wow wow. I really don't know what I would do without these amazing women. They are wonderful.

Me and Kaylee, our hostess for the weekend!
Beautiful Oklahoma sunset!!!
Eating dinner trying not to mess up the all-important puzzle.
Our cabin!! The Cowboy Cabin. I would go back right now if I could.
Abigail, Kayla, and Laura at lunch on Sunday.
That's Kaylee's grandpa's house. All of it was so beautiful!!

Kaylee, thank you so much for taking us!!! It could not have been a better weekend!

Pure Exhaustion

Apparently, Homecoming will do that to you. Homecoming and teaching and working and learning and everything else that I choose to clutter my life with. I'm having stress pains today in places that I didn't even know could hurt because of stress. Tell me, is it normal for your jaw to feel like it's about to go numb? Yeah, I didn't think so, either.

A couple more lyrics for you tonight (what can I say, music just speaks to me in ways other things can't):

This song entitled "For Freedom" is by Jimmy Needham. I just chose the most meaningful verses to me for tonight:

It is for freedom He set us free.

But Simon says to fill your void

With toy after toy after girl after boy

After all isn't that what we were meant for?

Please believe me when I say

It is for freedom He set us free.

I am not living a free life. Most people I know are not living free lives. We choose to enslave ourselves with things that don't really matter. I choose to fill my void with so many things that aren't the one thing I should fill it with. I found myself today filling my void with things that I know won't work because I've tried them so many times before. Yet there I went and here I go again.

And now I find myself asking the Lord as I have so many times before, "Will you please free me? Will you show me your freedom again? Will you speak your freedom and love to me in tangible ways?"

And He always answers yes. Eventually. Or immediately. You know, God's timing.

"It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." Galatians 5:1

Tonight will hopefully be a short post. (Keep your fingers crossed.)

I really just wanted to share a couple of quotes from my Bible class today. We were talking about Jeremiah's decision to remain in Jerusalem in Jeremiah 40:1-6 and the Remnant's decision to go to Egypt in Jeremiah 42:10-12. We were really just discussing decision making in general based on these two scenarios as guides to Godly decision-making. Jeremiah, for whatever reason, decided to stay in Jerusalem even though it would be harder and much more burdensome than going to Babylon. The Remnant of Israel decided to "take the easy way out" and go to Egypt rather than staying in their burnt, destroyed city.

The thing that my teacher said that left me speechless was, "Most people would rather live in Egypt than live by faith. Faith has a lot of ambiguities, but not a lot of monuments. Egypt has a lot of monuments and very few ambiguities."

It's basically just a twist on the old "Walk by faith, not by sight" phrase, but a twist that opened my eyes to how important and difficult it is to live by faith.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

Twitter and I are on a break. Facebook, too. We're all on a break. Indefinitely. I've been through a few break-ups in my life (from boys, from friends, from habits, etc.) and something I've learned about most break-ups is that it is only after you have distanced yourself from whatever it is that you realize the bad things about them. At least for me, anyway.

I'm a rationalizer. If I'm in any type of relationship, I tend to rationalize away most bad things the person or object does. "It's okay that he doesn't call, he's really busy." "It's not actually taking over my life, I just really like it." "I'm not different when I'm around them, people just change sometimes." Now, at least in my case, most of my rationalizations tend to be based in some form of truth. But they become twisted truth. And there's where the problem starts.

So as Twitter and I are on a break, I've come to realize a few things about it that I tended to rationalize away while we were in our infatuation stage.

1. I have a false sense of community when I use Twitter.

As I'm reading every hour what my closest friends and furthest acquaintances are doing, I become so "involved" in their lives that I forget to ask them about it later. I can't count how many recent conversations have started out with "Hey! Did I tell you about when ______ happened to me today?" "Oh yeah. I saw that on Twitter." I have become so involved in this 140 character obsession, that I have started to digress in my relationships with people.

2. I am more tempted to complain when I use Twitter.

As I was going throughout my day, I thought of maybe 40 different Twitter updates. I was very close to sending at least 10 of them when I would remember the break-up. But what I realized today, is that every single update I thought of was a complaint. Every. Single. One. Whether it was about my schedule or my classes or my teachers or even my friends, every one was a complaint. My word!

"Do everything without complaining or arguing so that you may become blameless and pure children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation."

Oh how quickly that is all forgotten the second I log into the world of little blue birds.

3. I take my anxiety to Twitter rather than to my Lord.

Self-explanatory. And also irrational if you think about it. Why in the world would I take my deepest worries, mask them to try and get a laugh, and broadcast them to the entire world when I could take them before my Father and have His inexplicable peace??

So, needless to say, Twitter and I have a few problems to work out before I could even think about being in a relationship again. Or maybe I should say, the Lord has many things to fix in me. Many things.

I think Twitter and I might be officially over.

This morning as I was getting ready to teach a classroom of 4th graders how to tell the difference between woodwinds and strings, I started thinking about encouraging people. And being God to people. And putting God first.

My first thought was, "How in the world am I going to do that on top of everything else?"

I could go on for days with everything I have to do this week. As I'm sure most of you know, I'm a little bit of an over-committer. Or maybe a lot of an over-committer. And of course this week is Homecoming and of course I'm in committees for both my club and the school in general. Of course, of course, of course.

But as I thought more on the subject, why would I have to "put God first" on top of everything else? That makes absolutely no sense. When God is asking me to make my life a living sacrifice, He's not asking me to do it after I've done everything else on my plate. He's asking me to do it first. To put Him first, to put His plan first, to put everything He wants for me first. Not last. Not as a last resort. And that's what I do pretty much all of the time.

This should change. It needs to change. But where do I even start?