I like blogging because it's like writing in a journal with the intent of other people reading...

While being content if I'm the only one. -Kansas Heiskell, Stories are Like Time Machines

2010 was always the year that I looked forward to for graduation of high school and beginning college. Instead, 2010 has become so much more. In the last year, I have:

Packed up my life (first time).
Moved to Texas to begin YWAM.
Met people from Spain/Chile, Korea, the Netherlands, Canada, Peru, and all over the United States.
Spent 36 hours without heat or plumbing, thanks to Texas not knowing how to deal with snow.
Learned that men are like waffles, and women are like spaghetti.
Celebrated my 18th birthday.
Packed up my life (second time).
Traveled to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania.
Lived with little bugs eating me alive for 5 weeks.
Packed up my life (third time).
Moved home, to Pennsylvania.
Graduated (officially).
Finally saw Toy Story 3, after waiting for it for over half of my life.
Watched my carefully laid plans fall to crap.
Got my first (of several, hopefully) tattoo.
Packed up my life (fourth time).
Moved to "hippyville"- I.e., Cullowhee, NC.
Ate my first Bojangles meal (the second one was much better.)
Met some of the best friends I've ever had.
Watched all 6 seasons of the Office in less than two weeks.
Became hannaHRose's personal hair colorist.
Fell in love with the mountains.
Learned to cook for one on a budget.
Used about 500 index cards on the vocab words I needed to learn for my psychology class.
Learned to contra dance.
Threw balloons full of paint at my roommates.
Watched my roommates morph from strangers into friends into something that more resembles sisters.
Helped clean hannaHRose's room- 6 days, 4 bags of trash, 5 bags of yard sale/giveaway...
Found a job after two months of looking.
Took waaay too many pictures of everything that happened to or around me.
Got a car.
About tripled the number of movies I've seen.
Traveled home for the holidays (worst trip ever, but so worth it to be with my family for Christmas).

You know, when you look at that list, it seems as though I've done very little of true consequence. Yeah, I traveled overseas and prayed for people, and maybe influenced a couple of their lives. But, outwardly, it doesn't really look like I've done anything to really change the world.

This year has been more of a year in which God has rocked my world, worked with me internally. This year, I really learned to love passionately instead of passively. I learned to accept love. I learned to listen to God. I learned that sometimes, listening to God means following your heart and allowing Him to work in the situation you choose. I learned that following God means obeying him, being his hands and feet, for every minute of every day. I learned to compromise. I learned what things matter, what things don't, what things are worth stressing over, and which things to let go. I learned that just because a budget looks good on paper doesn't mean it will work out in real life (and that sometimes it will). I learned that God always comes through. I learned to take criticism in a way that helps make me better, instead of a way that ruins me. I allowed some scars to be healed that I had never allowed to be touched. I learned that you give up a few things chasing a dream. I learned that my dreams might be a little different from God's. I began to understand what it means to be in a constant, loving romance with God. I learned to not only make friends, but to be a friend.

This year will not only be remembered as the year that I found God's arms and settled back into them; this year is the year that I stopped being a person, simply one who exists, and began to function as a human, one created by God.

Bring it on, 2011... I can't wait to see what you've got :)

Me and the baby brother in Houston, TX Dec. 31, 2009

Me and the roommates, fall 2010

Combining those two things is like mixing ice cream with manure...

It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream. Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President

I wrote this back in September, but I feel like it fits the "thankfulness for everything God has been doing" deal. So, here 'tis.

So there's been a lot of questions about how I ended up here, why I'm here, and what's been going on since I got here. I'd like to clear that up for myself, and for all of you. So.

Way back in February, my roommate at YWAM, hannaHRose (who is kind of a hippie and rocked my entire world to its core), jokingly said I could come live with her after DTS. At the time I was horrified at the idea and said something along the lines of "Dear God no."
In May, when I got home, all my big plans for my life started falling apart. I couldn't go to my dream school because it cost too much money... My back up cost too much money. My back up to my back up wasn't accepting into the program anymore. I started thinking about North Carolina. Was this something that could really happen? Something that, maybe, would be good for me? I looked into the college here. They didn't have an OT program, but could I take a couple Gen Eds to get out of the way? They weren't accepting anymore freshmen. But then the counselor wanted to work with me and get me into their school. So I was going to take one course. But wait- that cost too much money (if the government wants me to go to college so bad, why does it cost so much darn money??). But I had already saved all this money to pay rent and buy groceries... So it was decided that I would move down anyway. 2 days before their registration deadline, I signed up for a class at RACC. I packed up my things, sucked up the fact that life wasn't going the way I wanted it to, and came down to NC with my tail between my legs. Thrilled to see hannaHRose and be living in the same state as her again, looking forward to the adventure and being on my own, loving the idea of being out of Lancaster again... But terrified of what was going to happen.
Yeah, I had prayed about this- a LOT. And yes, I felt like it was God. But I had talked myself into things before. What if this was one of those things? What if this was me wanting this to be where God was putting me? But on the other hand, this was the only door that had stayed open. This was the only place I had to go, other than sitting at home and being dormant for 5 months. This was, it seemed, my only choice.
I got here and, almost instantly, all the memories came rushing back. The good ones, mostly- the ones that came out in stories that hannaHRose and I managed to get out between bits of laughter. The ones that, for our first 24 hours back together, came non-stop, no matter how much we tried to stop talking about YWAM. But behind those memories were all the harder ones. The ones of what God had done through me during DTS, the ones of what God had done FOR me during DTS. The ones that I had thrown away.
You see, while I was at home this summer, I forgot. I forgot what God had spoken to me, I forgot what I had learned, I forgot what it was like to be in a personal relationship with the one true living God. I threw away all the hard work, all the time and effort, all the blood, sweat, and tears, for a summer of emptiness. A summer of "Well, maybe this is how I'm supposed to live. Maybe I'm not supposed to be relevant. Maybe, I'm supposed to be the kind of Christian who goes to church on Sunday and Wednesday and doesn't think about it for the rest of the week. The kind who gets married and has 2 children, a girl and a boy, and volunteers in the nursery and bakes cookies for youth group." But then I got here.
Here, LIFE is church. You walk in this house and the Holy Spirit is like, WHAM. You forget that you're supposed to say you're a Christian because you're too busy being a follower of Jesus. Everything that was my life for those 5 months at YWAM was preperation for my life here... For self-reflection (which I do a lot of). For ministering into other people's lives (God has me in a place where a friend comes to me at 1 AM and says, this is what I'm dealing with. And it's exactly what I'm dealing with. It's weird, but it's awesome). For having my life ministered into. For being free, released, to have friends, to be friends, to make friends. To open myself up to someone within an hour of meeting them, to hug everyone who walks through our front door, to share whatever it is we have- sweet tea, pie, a movie. To realize that this is where I'm supposed to be, right now, for this time in my life. Maybe for longer.
As I said before, I've had a lot of time for self-reflection. For going back to my hurts and why they're still hurts and not history. Which, for me, means reading. (I'm blessed to be living in a house with people who love books as much as I do and always have a reccommendation.) I read "Blue Like Jazz" by Donald Miller at hannaHRose's request... At first, it was to humor her. And then it became this obsessive thing... This guy came from where I was with God a year ago ("My life had become something to hide; there were secrets in it. My thoughts were private thoughts, my lies were barriers that protected my thoughts, my sharp tonge a weapon to protect the ugly me.") to having all of this book left, which meant God HAD to get better... And, while I'm not to this point yet, I rejoiced when Don says, "To be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously." I rejoiced in knowing that, apparently, God does get better! It's not the end of the story! God knows what He's doing! And, even more than that, I rejoiced in knowing that someone else had been through the same desert I was in! I was not alone!
Then, 3 days ago, hannaHRose handed me "Angry Conversations with God". I almost picked it up a few days ago, but I didn't want to be disappointed by her only being angry with God for the first 5 pages and then getting over it. I couldn't handle it.
I got hooked. And the more hooked I got, the more I couldn't make myself read it. This was way too much like my life. This was this woman saying to her counselor, "Either God isn't personal and I've wasted my time, or He is personal and He hates me." And her counselor telling her, just like so many people have tried to tell me, that there is another option. "God loves you, but crappy things still happen." Yeah whatever. I was halfway through the book. God doesn't get better in this one. But then I got to page 145. And on page 145, I discovered something. I discovered that God speaks into my life even when I want to shove Him off a cliff or slam the door in His face (this was one of those lessons I learned in DTS, but rejected). Susan E. Isaacs says, on her moving across the country, "Perhaps God tricked me into moving here. Maybe he lured me out here with a shiny object and then pulled a bait and switch. But maybe I needed a shiny object to get here, because the real gift might not be so shiny. And maybe I just need to be patient and discover what the real gift is. Besides, Jesus has never let me down..."

I realized... It's true. Jesus has never let me down. And if someone had told me I was coming here so God could get me to look inward and upward, I would have run as fast as I've ever run. The thing is... All the things I have seen in the last 3 weeks, all the things I wake up every morning clinging to and spend my last moments at night rehashing with God, are foundational truths that I would rather not know so that I could keep living my life (which I wasn't really living, anyway.... I was wasting it). This place- Cullowhee, NC- has become the place where I came out of the desert. The place where I found (again), and finally settled into, the arms of God.

To be continued, with where I am at now...

Sometimes, I think I would be fine if there were no cops...

But then I realize, I drive completely different when there's a cop behind me than when there isn't.- Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz

After being snowed in the house for two days and going through a gamut of emotions- thrilled to have a day off work and to see the beauty of the mountains covered in snow, to being bored out of my skull, to being downright cranky- I decided I need to have an outlet. Facebook can only do so much. I feel like all 500 of my friends are reading every word I put on there, even if it's only "up" for two seconds. I can't handle the pressure. Here, I don't really know if you're reading or not- and I'm going to go ahead and assume that no one will read the writings of a disquited young adult trying to find a way to make it on her own in this big world.

See, here's the thing- my life isn't going exactly the way I planned. Yeah, it's God, and yeah, it's amazing and I'm ecstatic to be along for the ride... But honestly, I planned on sitting in a college classroom with my parents paying for my education right now, not worrying about if I'm going to get to work tomorrow so that I can pay my bills at the end of this month.

But... Life has become something that's not about me. Somehow, I've come to realize there's something bigger, something that makes more sense and yet makes no sense at all, and I've just got to deal with it- hang on and know that it's going to come out better.

So for now, I'm going to go to bed and pray that the roads are clear so that I can work tomorrow. I'm going to pick out a White Elephant gift to take to my Christmas party tomorrow night. I might read a little Donald Miller. I'll wake up in the morning and feed the cat, empty his litter box, put clothes in the washer, and make my bed, because no one else is going to do it for me.

Oh- and, I'll relish every second.