to be still and know…

About two years ago I heard a pastor give a sermon on the verse “To be still and know that You are God,” and it was something that will stick in my head forever. I have heard a lot of messages on this verse and a lot of different ways to look at it and apply it, but this was the first time that the image of what this passage means really resonated with me.

It was the image of a child drowning in a pool. When the child panics and begins to flail his arms and fight against drowning, no one can rescue him. He is not allowing anyone to get close enough to pull him to safety. However, when the child is still someone can swim up to him and pull him out of the water.

I have a really incredible life, i have an amazing family and beautiful friends. I am extremely lucky and I wouldn’t trade the things in my life for anything in the world. However as I remain stuck in this transition period, waiting for something to change I feel like I am drowning. And as I drown, I am fighting with everything that is in me to keep from drowning. As i flail about my arms and fight hard, I am not allowing God to work and to come in and pull me out of this. I need to figure out what it means to be still and to let myself drown as I begin to understand what it means to trust that God will pull me out when I surrender trying to save myself.

my momma

i have one of those moms that would trade her happiness for the happiness of my sisters and i in a second, without ever thinking twice, and looking back on my life i can see moments where she did just that. she is the most selfless woman i know and is always making sure that the people she loves or even the people she just met are taken care of and well fed. growing up and even today every holiday is the most exciting day, every inch of our house is decorated and all through elementary school (until we unfortunately became “too cool”) she made us matching shirts with iron on holiday scenes and outlined it with puffy paint. now that we have left home she sends boxes around every holiday so that we can have a piece of her love for decorating in our own homes.

every october she makes these incredible bite size pumpkin chocolate chip muffins that cannot even be explained but must be experienced. she has been making them for as long as i can remember and the muffin season is one that has brought great memories, road trips home to lafayette and really beautiful friendships. this coming weekend was the weekend i was going to head up to the bay area to celebrate muffin season with my two incredible roommates. However, i am now heading up a few days early because my mom is going into surgery. She reassured me that it is nothing to worry about, but i decided i would rather be home with my mom during this than anywhere else. As she prepares to go into surgery she has not once expressed worry or complained but instead she spent a whole day making 200 muffins so that she could send them to past roommates in the mail and have enough for us to enjoy this weekend. Preparing myself to go home to see my mom in the hospital has put me at a place where i wish i had spent more moments in the last couple of years appreciating her and it has given me a desire to never take her for granted again. My mom has the most beautiful heart and i hope that their are moments this weekend where i can take of her in a fraction of the way that she has taken care of me when i have had surgery, or been sick or simply just been in a bad mood. my mom has taught me how to love people, how to take care of others and how to hurt for the people around you that are hurting. she has taught me that i can accomplish anything and has played a role in instilling the passion i have to seek after my dream! If i end up being half the woman she is i am going to consider myself extremely lucky..

bittersweet

For the past month I have been unemployed and desperately looking for a job. As I receive more and more rejections and more time passes, i find myself getting more discouraged. There have been moments that I have been reminded and rested confidently in the fact that God has a plan and I should enjoy the place that I am in before God moves me again, but in between those moments there has been moments of questioning the purpose behind this.

The other week I started reading a book called Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist and I just read a chapter titles 25. The author talks about how being in your early twenties is a time for you to grow and change and explore who you are and who you want to be for the rest of your life. A passage in this chapter that really resonated with me is this,

“Now is your time. Become, believe, try. Walk closely with people you love, and with other people who believe that God is very good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t spend time with people who make you feel like less than you are. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned. Give today all the love and intensity and courage you can, and keep traveling honestly along life’s path.”

So today, I am starting fresh, i am letting go of my worries about money and about finding a job that will fit and trusting that God will provide something in the exact moment I need it. I am going to take these days of being unemployed and write letters, do crafts, go to the beach, and find many other ways to enjoy the beautiful adventure that life is and hopefully in the midst of that discover something about myself that I didn’t know before.

unchangeable in the midst of nothing but change..

It has now been two weeks since I packed up my life to move to a new city to start a new chapter in my life with limited funds and no permanent job lined up. I took a huge leap out of the safe community that I had spent all summer at camp building into a world full of unknowns.

Being at Redwood camp is a beautiful way to spend the summer. I get to be surrounded by these incredible men and women of God who are there to love on kids and live in community while serving God. I was constantly witnessing examples through the campers of this beautiful childlike faith where simplicity is all they know, and when it comes to God things are black and white. I long for a faith like that, a faith where I can hold tight to the truths I know about God, and all the brokenness and sin in this world won’t cause me to lose my grip on that. This summer started off with an incredible women’s meeting where we all shared areas of brokenness that we were coming into the summer with. We admitted our weaknesses and were vulnerable with people we had met just days before, trusting that they would take care of our hearts as the summer continued. This staff was a staff that experienced a lot of transition and a lot of brokenness that came with that. There was a lot of hard things that needed to be worked through and a lot of weakness that was shown in ways I hadn’t seen in the previous two summers i have served. However, in the midst of that there was this intense beauty that radiated the way God moves. No matter what the week looked like or where the hearts of the staff were God was still changing lives. The reality of this and experiencing it first hand in the way that I did this summer showed me how unchangeable our God is. That no matter where you are at in life or what you are going through, or what you are struggling with God is always the same and is always constant in that.

As I transition out of that community and into my new life here in Los Angeles, I am holding on to this newfound deep knowledge of my unchanging God with everything in me. I got blessed with a temporary nanny job that has provided me with a lot of moments alone to think back on my summer, process and reflect on the ways that I was changed. As that comes to an end, I now have to find a job that will work with my school schedule and I need to find it within the next week! It is a weird thing to know that in a week I will not be returning to life in Azusa, and I will not be able to be constantly with my friends, or have endless amounts of free time or just sit on the cougar walk for hours as people walk by, stopping for quick moments to hear about different summer adventures. I don’t know where God is going to take my life this year, or what my life will even look like two weeks from now but I know that God is unchangeable and that truth makes me so excited to experience this new life chapter.

To all my fellow redwood summer staffers who may be reading this! Thank you for making my summer what it was, thank you for playing a role in what I learned and in that preparing me to transition out of college and into this new life as a “responsible” adult. You all are beautiful people and I am so excited to see where God takes you each next and the new adventures that you will get to experience this year!