For my dear sister

This blog is for my lovely sister. maybe some one will finally post something instead of her, though I love her very much. I can't believe it is almost November. I have missed my favorite season. The colors are beautiful. Christmas is right around the corner. Family is about to come to town. It's been a very hectic season to say the least. And to top it all off our house that the whole family is fixing up, needs to be done in less than two weeks! It is very stressful.

However, above all these problems and complaints, I have a request of whom ever reads this. I have a dear friend who is not very fond of blogs and wishes not to be named but I wanted to share this. He got injured and was sent to the ER on Saturday night. It's nothing extremely major but it did scare me. I am asking that you remember him in your prayers. It would be very appreciated.

And right now I have to eat my dinner and head out the door for class. I leave with this "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." - Romans 12:21

Wishful thinking....

How I wish that I could be back here enjoying the quietness of it all. So many decisions are here for me to choose my path and I keep going back and forth about it all. I wish I had the clarity of thought, mind, and soul that I had at that moment.

Lord help the decisions I make to be guided by you and not my own selfish desires.

Shooting Stars......

Well we made it back from Kentucky alright this morning at around 4am if I remember correctly. While yes, it was a short trip it was so much fun and I don't regret it a bit. I'm grateful for the time to see friends I hadn't seen in a while as well as enjoy the car ride with two friends I see pretty often. However, my favorite part of the whole trip was the moments I was on my own, one on one with God. I've spent more time talking to Him this past weekend then I probably have in the past 2 weeks all together.

On the second night of camping out Keri and I were walking back from the "facilities" when we looked up and saw the most beautiful sky full of stars that I had ever seen in person. We even saw a shooting star and when we told everyone back at the campsite what we had seen one of them they asked me what I wished for. I couldn't help but think that I am constantly wishing and hoping for things all the time and that if I were God I'd be kind of sick of all of it. Then we got into the debate about who it was that you made your wish to and if it was to something other than God than maybe you shouldn't be making wishes after all. In the end I didn't make a wish but I did say a small prayer:

Lord you know the desires of my heart.
Please help me to understand yours,
and do your will in all I do.

Last week at Bible study we were going through Romans 5. And in Romans 5 there is a verse about how "hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom He has given us." I've been learning more and more this past year about how to put my hopes more in Christ than in my own personal abilities, wants and desires. Don't get me wrong I still want things really bad some times but I know that if that is what God wants for me it will happen in His time and His way.



Here are a couple of my favorite pictures from Kentucky

Kind of a creepy horror film picture of Keri standing at the edge of a cliff.


This was our tent the first night held up by some yarn attached to the car and cooler.


An amazing picture inside Mammoth Caverns of Andrews head (taken by Dustin).

Dustin was really bored in the back seat.

Kentucky here I come!

Today I leave for the beautiful state of Kentucky with two friends of mine to meet up with two other friends that we helped move to Missouri this past summer. I'm really looking forward to the chance to see them both again as I miss their company very much. I miss having the friendship of the girl whom I helped move because good girl friends are so rare for me. I usually find myself befriended to boys instead of girls. Although I've tried to understand why this is I still haven't come to any clear conclusions but I do know and appreciate how dear it is when you can find a friend your own gender that you can talk to meaningful things about and not just small talk. I can count on my hand the number of true girl friends that I've had in my life.

So anyways that all just to say that I'm really looking forward to this weekend's trip. We're going to be camping out in Kentucky, and driving around to several waterfalls, hiking, and visiting the nation's largest caverns. I've wanted to go to Mammoth Caverns national park since I was in elementary school. My science teachers sparked a great interest in rocks and geology at an early age so my mother would take us to local caverns whenever she could. I even took a Geology course in college just for fun, and the teacher was a friend's mom and I really enjoyed her a lot. Ask me what I learned and you'd be disappointed (well I am anyways at how little I remember).

I do love the colors and lines that nature creates in rocks and have always picked up pretty stones and brought them home with me whenever I go out. I have a beautiful stack of flat river stones that I picked up while kayaking. I would take a stone home with me every time I went kayaking but after a dozen or so I began to wonder what on earth I was going to do with all of the rocks that I was accumulating. So for now they sit on my mantle in a tower of beauty.

So as to appeal to the viewers visual interest as well I leave you with this picture of my roommate flying away with her superhero cape. It's the same blanket that I had in my first post. It's such a fun picture and I hope she doesn't mind me posting it here but this is me flying away to Kentucky!

Trusting in God

So little time....

I'm a college student going to school for Art. I really want to teach. It's something that I've wanted to do since I was in kindergarten. However I'm into my fifth year of college with still another year and a half of school to go in order to get my Art Teaching Certification. There's so many things in my life that I want to be able to do but school takes a lot of time and energy. An art degree in particular takes an inordinate amount of out of class time to work on projects.

I've been considering getting just the Art degree and forgoing the Teacher Certification part simply to save time so I can be done. I can still teach at a private school with just a bachelor's degree and really that's what I want to do but would I be limiting myself too much by doing that and is another year really that much longer to have to wait (YES! and no).

Time has been something that I've always struggled with because I am something of a procrastinator (probably only the worlds biggest). It's a part of me that I've never really liked and always wanted to change but haven't yet. When I procrastinate I'm stealing time from other things that I could be doing that would be more productive and enjoyable if only I let myself do them. Instead I feel guilty because I don't have the highest priority things done yet so I put everything off until they are done and spend a lifetime trying to accomplish them.

I just feel sometimes (more like all the time) that there are so many other things that I'd rather be doing. I want to be more involved in ministry and with my church. I want to share a house with 4-5 of my friends and see what that kind of a community can be like. I also want to be working with children in some sort of school setting. Whether it be at a private school or working with homeschoolers in my own home. Whatever, I want to share my life with those kids and my love for Christ, as well as teach them about art and creative living. I want to study the Bible intensively and have God's words written on my heart. I want to travel all over the place seeing places I've never seen before and experiencing God's creation in all of them. I want to spend more time in nature and less time in front of a computer. I also want to build stronger relationships with the people that I know and love and be someone to support them in their endeavors.

I've tried to do many of these things but I'm always stealing away time from one or the other and never really fully devoting myself. Trying to find some sort of happy medium or achieve some "harmony" is just out of my reach, or so it seems.

Lord help me to do your will in everything I do.


To cheer this post up a bit I want to share this picture with you that I took on a recent bike ride to a friends house. The colors in this picture are a favorite combination of mine and I really want to work in this palette on a quilt sometime (if I ever make the time to do it). That won't probably be for a while though. I've never been one to choose a favorite color but I do have favorite color combinations and this would be one of them. My roommate probably gets sick of me telling her how giddy I get over certain color combos. I had a professor once ask everyone in the class to share one thing that makes them insanely happy and the only thing I could think of at the time was COLOR.

Well I'm going to stop procrastinating now and go finish some homework!

I don't know what I'm doing

I'm still trying to figure all of this fun stuff out. I'm not sure if the picture from my last post is visible to the reader of this blog or not whoever you are but I'll figure this out along the way.

have patience

hippie wannabe

The main reason that I am posting this picture is because I want to post it on my profile and this was the only way I could figure how to do it, so here's a picture of me kayaking and looking very much like an American Indian wannabe at the same time. Not because of the blue kayak or anything but because of the simple braid in the back.

My older sister would say that this picture represented the hippie inside of me. Although I am not a hippie I'm also not insulted but such a remark. As a lover of nature and the environment as well as all things created I don't think that being called a hippie is all that bad of a thing. After all the definition of a hippie is:

unconventional young person of the 1960s: a young person, especially in the 1960s, who rejected accepted social and political values and proclaimed a belief in universal peace and love. Hippies often dressed unconventionally, lived communally, and used psychedelic drugs. ( informal )

Granted I wasn't a young person of the 1960's nor am I into psychedelic drugs. However the ideas of rejecting "accepted social and political values and proclaiming a belief in universal peace and love." Are things that I could be categorized as. Part of being a Christian has to do with being "set apart" from the world around you and following a Christ who wants peace and love to abound in His world. Not only that but He wants His followers to share in community with each other, and those around them. Humans were not meant to be alone and to isolate ourselves from others is only going to hurt us.

Anyways I really love this picture. It was taken by a good friend with a great eye for composition in a picture, and a thoughtfulness that astounds me. He often surprises me with the way that he can see something that I didn't notice before. I'm the type of person that takes tons and tons of pictures hoping that a few will turn out to be great, where as he will take in everything in his surroundings and sort of frame the picture out in his mind before taking the picture. It's a good lesson to learn in photography and one that I am still working on but taking time in anything you do to consider the outcome can be rewarding.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood

Hello to all. This is my first attempt at a blog and I have no idea how it's going to turn out but I've been looking at blogs for so long now and wanting to do it that I figured it was time to try. Besides if my sister can do it so can I. I don't have much to say right now because what I should really be doing is homework instead of figuring out how to create my own blog, but I leave you with this picture of my cousin David frolicking with a quilt that I made for a homework assignment. He helped me out with a photoshoot I was doing along with his sister, my sister, and my roomate. You all are so amazing and great! Whether or not you'll ever see this blog is doubtful but that's okay.

You'll hear more about what this post is all about as I figure it out too and have more time to do so.

life is a gift