I am on my own, living in an apartment with three friends and loving it.
We stayed up until 1 last night playing phase 10, and Friends episodes have been playing non-stop since we moved in. I think we are on season 2 now.  Our first trip to Wal-mart involved getting a trash can, some Ramen, trash bags, a red dish dryer, paper towels milk and cereal…basically the bare essentials. (plus guacamole, and puppy chow but those kind of qualify as essential for us)

Stephanie and Brittney live in one room and Jenna and I live in the other, with Raissa usually staying on the couch haha.  We enjoy making our traditions like always having sweet tea in the fridge.  And making trips to walmart late at night to get stuff to make queso.

I love living in the community that I have.  It is fun just walking over to my neighbors house to hang out with them, and play apples to apples.  Also we have a baby kitten he is so cute and his name is Stucco..

My days are pretty relaxed I work at an ice cream shop, but I’m still looking for a more reliable job.

I’m so blessed to have such awesome friends that I have so much fun with.  We don’t get tired of each other and have so much fun.  First thing we did when we moved in was have a big pillow fight with the cough cushions.  We got them and ran and jumped into each other…needless to say Brittney flew into the wall, we were all on the floor laughing and so began our adventure.  lol

Well i’m going to go now I am in Indiana with Jenna visiting her family having a blast.  well peace out for now, and you’re now updated on my life.

This is steph and brit!!!!  Love them!

My first year of college is almost over and I’m realizing many things.
One, I need structure.  Two, I need a challenge.  Three, I like being around people and love leading worship.
Most of all though, I have realized the joy that comes from the little things.

Coffee at a local shop made from good beans, and friendly faces.
Bike rides with friends, and stopping to look at flowers or snakes.
Mud fights with friends, and i mean absolutely getting covered in mud!

Digging holes in mexico.
Drinking Coffee to survive because of lack of sleep
Dryer sheets
Finding your favorite pen to write with.
Getting letters in the mail.
Friends coming to visit.
Getting an A on a paper you spent a lot of time on.
Wireless Internet.
The smell of Rain, but it holds off until after my classes so I don’t have to walk in it!!!!
Going to a school where personal expression is valued.
Concerts, and discovering new music every day.
Making life long friends by simply starting conversations.
Watching Disney movie marathons.
Realizing all that has been done for me.
One o’clock grill.
Finally working up the courage to play my guitar and sing so loud in my room!!
Trips to South Dakota.

Playing the Steinway at my school and rediscovering my love for piano.
Writing music.
Trying new things and discovering they are not for me.
Collegiate soccer and the excitement of improvement.

Rediscovering a lost love, and fighting to get it back.  I found Hope over Christmas break in a living room talking out my confusion with friends, and now my time is spent living within that hope.  Working to breathe in life from a perspective that hopes for the best in everything, and has hope because of sacrifice and love.
I want to love well, because it’s through love that I start to believe again.  All the faith that was eclipsed by anger starts to show on the fringes, because love is living and things can’t help but be rearranged by it.
My life will not look like anyone else ’s, but it is mine and I am responsible for living it not fearing it and what it may bring, or where it may lead.

God is the God of hope, and peace, and relevance,and true justice but most of all love.  And Although the “big questions” can cause so much doubt at the core of who I am my deep belief in these truths of God lead to deep faith in the God that created and represents all of these things.  And it blows my mind, and makes me want to live!

PEACE OUT!

There is something so beautiful about the unexpectedness of life. It’s unpredictable and mysterious. There are days when things happen you had no idea were possible of happening. And I appreciate that today, but a lot of days I don’t. Sometimes I almost convince myself that I know what is going to happen and then, I begin to think that things will happen as I have planned. Which is pretty comical when I look back on the past couple of months of my life. I wanted to do “this” but ended up doing “that” and I planned on doing things one way, and now I find myself marching forward in a direction I was headed opposite to a couple of months ago. And in the meantime before I get where I’m going there’s this transition time which is both sad and exciting because you’re saying goodbye to the way life was and welcoming in this newness that brings with it unfamiliarity. The more I think of it though it almost feels like life is one transition after another. Then you start going one direction and look back at how you were headed the completely opposite direction and the thought crosses your mind “either I was completely turned around before or I am now”. And then some wise friend comes around and tells you that its about the person you’re becoming the relationships you invest in and important things like that, that you completely relate with and bring a bit of peace to the situation.

Anyways tomorrow I embark on a new adventure, a new life marked with the residue of years past.  It’s not a fresh start, it’s just the beginning of a season.  I feel excited and nervous, but at this moment right now as I sit in my quiet house with my family all asleep, I am sad.  I know it is a good thing and people keep telling me “o you won’t be far” and “it will be great”, but the truth of the matter is that it will be very different.  I don’t want to say goodbye to the way relationships are now, but I know they will change.  I don’t want to say goodbye to being close to my family and hanging with them everyday.  I don’t want to say goodbye to home cooked meals, watching animal planet (and ungodly amount of time in a day).  But I guess it is all necessary to walk into a new season.  I guess that’s fine.  There is nothing deep about what I’m saying just the truth about what this heart feels like being torn between two seasons of life.

So I embrace all that is in my life right now, I embrace it with all of my heart and strength with tears and kisses I let go to welcome with open arms the freshness that the fall brings.  A time to love deep, run hard, live fully, worship passionately, and throw myself into it as much as i have here.

Well Oklahoma has been hit hard, and as I sit here in barnes and noble, along with many other people without electricity, i’m so thankful that my family is unharmed.  There was a major ice storm in Oklahoma, and it coated the limbs of the trees with about an inch of ice which caused them to be so heavy.  The freezing rain continued to fall, and the limbs got heavier until they began snapping causing powerlines to break and transformers to blow.  We were sitting without electricity on sunday morning at 7, we’re always the first in Tulsa to loose electricity.  Our neighborhood has many huge trees its an old neighborhood, and in our front yard is an enormous water oak.  So sunday night we had a fire going and we all went to bed.  My parents woke up atabout 340 because a limb fell and landed ontop of the house over their room.  They began to discuss what to do, when a limb about a foot in diameter snapped and fell in our front yard….at this point we decided it wasn’t safe to be at home anymore and we left.  As we were leaving we saw a loose wire sparking and lighting up my neighbors back yard.  We  drove over to my grammy’s house which had electricity and smaller trees making it safer.  you could stand out on the porch and hear branches snapping and falling all around you.  every few minutes a branch would snap and fall….it was dangerous to be outside.  i have never been so afraid to walk outside.  The branches were just too heavy.  well the worst of it is over today and the majority of the City is without power, its hard to find gas stations…and everyone seems to congregate at paneras, barnes and noble, starbucks and other places where wireless is available…well thats all just thought I’d update on the wild weather here.  Hopefully things get back to normal soon. 

Today was a great day.  I had work from 9-5 and wasn’t expecting it to be a time where I learned and had some good conversations but it was.  I came home and went on a bike ride and then just hung out with Raissa and Kjirsten. 
Everyone winded down for bed and my mind came alive, I have always been able to relate to Joe March from Little Women when she says, “at night my mind came alive, with stories and characters dear to my heart”. 
I went out on my deck to process all the thoughts my mind was being bombarded with and began to somewhat place them in order.  I always look across to my neighbor when I’m on the deck.  She is old probable in her late 70’s.  Her husband died when I was about 7 and she spends every night sitting in the same spot reading.  As I was sitting there watching her the lights from the TV in my house were reflecting off the overhang of my deck and at certain times reminded me of a strobe light.  I compared how she spent her nights to how we spend our nights.  And somehow it got me thinking about how we have a choice. 
We do not choose to live, we are born. We do not choose the family we have or the way we look or the way things happen.  We do not choose death or for our bodies to not work right, or for our cars to break down.  There are many things that we have no way of choosing how they happen.  But we do however have a choice as to the kind of life we want to live, the kinds of people we want to be. 
More and more we are given more choices, and it leads us to forget this foundational choice.  Now we can choice the way we look, by the color of our hair, or the option of plastic surgery.  Thousands of years ago peple didn’t have the kind of choices that we do now. Even when we are children we didn’t have the choices that we do as we grow older and more independent, yet don’t children seem to live life so much fuller then we do. 
Maybe with all these choices that aren’t necessarily bad, we’ve gotten distracted from the choice that is most important the choice that we’ve always had and the first choice a human was given. 
And as I sat there I decided that I want to choose the kind of person I want to be and the life I want to lead, I do not want to stumble upon it and someday find that I am this person, and have no idea why.  I’m not saying the little choices don’t matter and there are many things out of our control but what if the little choices were made not to make us look a certain way by what we can do or not do, but to furthur us in a direction we knew we wanted to go. 
What if we saw every choice as one that either furthered us along on the way we wanted or kept us from going there and in some cases derailed us. 
I sometimes wonder God’s thoughts as he was planning out creation, as he thought of us and what he wanted us to be, robotic without minds or creative like him or  whatever else he was thinking.  And at some point he decided to give us a great gift, the gift of choice.  He simbolized it with a tree, and we had no say when he breathed life into us, but when we came alive, so choice entered our minds. 
So he breathes into us, puts a piece of himself in us, and then says “now choose, choose names for the animals rule govern live, and I have placed some of myself in you to help you choose what is right, but i don’t force you too, no, for you there is a choice.” 
Many things will happen that we don’t want to happen and things that maybe we do want, but its not whats out of control that happens to us that matters as much as it is what we do with the things that happen with the cards we’re delt …So we live now with choice, little choices like whether to watch TV or read, that when summed up and simplified come down to what kind of journey you want this life to be, a journey of timid traveling one of smooth paths leading in the same general direction as others or one of excitment challenge lots of falling and uneven paths but one unlike any other… this is, the choice.

Yesterday as I sat out on my back deck, the sun was shining and I was thinking about how it had been so rainy earlier this summer. I was sitting there admiring the sun and just loving that it was there, and shining.  My mind went back to when it had been so rainy, and I realized that I loved it when it was rainy, that I in a sense forgot about the sun.  I loved the clouds and the rain, and came to not like the sun.  It is interesting to me how when I am not around the sun I forget that I love it, I forget how wonderful it is.  I settle for the rain, when really I love the sun more. 

Now I find this to be very applicable to my life.  I am like this in many aspects I don’t usually stay in touch with friends because I forget how much I actually enjoy being with them, I am like this with sports and things as simple as drinking tea.  I get busy and forget the things I love. 

This has been a cycle for my my life with Jesus….I hate to say this but I get busy and forget how much I love Jesus.  I forget how mysterious, beautiful, loving, and amazing he is.
I was reminded of the Israelites how they were quick to forget what God had done for them how he provided.  I love how they built big piles of rocks like at the Jordan river to remind them of what God had done, that he brought them safely through the water. 

The decision that I’ve made is to make reminders physical things that remind me of the things that I oftentimes forget I love.  I need to be disciplined with reading the Word(something I forget I love also)  I need to be reminded of the Love he has for me and purpose that is so much bigger then my little world. 

I don’t want to find myself in a year remembering how I forgot.

I love music, and i’ve been thinking about it a lot because my friend Bobby and I have been working on some songs for a thing we have tonight.  As I sit here now he’s playing piano in the background, I feel like I have a soundtrack.  Do you ever think about how much more exciting or moving things would be if there was a soundtrack to our lives?  In the movies like Lord of the Rings the music makes it so much more heroic, so much more inspiring.  What is it about music that is so moving.  I think that we can really feel music, we hear it, and we sense the emotion.  We are vulnerable when we play music becuase what we are feeling at that moment comes out in the form of loud and soft notes pieced together to form lines of music stacked on top of eachother forming harmonies melodies, and finally a song.  We connect with music becuase it is beautiful, when we hear a moving song like Fix You by Coldplay it is powerful, our hearts synchronize to the beat of the song, and we memorize the words because on a deep level we can relate to it.  Past the lyrics the slow rise of sound maybe we are moved by music because it shows us how when things are placed perfectly together perfectly in tune it is beautiful.  Maybe there is a part of us that desires to be perfectly in tune with something and through time we have come out of tune, we’re missing something theres something bigger going on but we’ve lost our place in it. 

Music is not just notes, it is an experience, perhaps music is something that ties us to what was originally supposed to be.  I like to think that it hasn’t changed that music is one thing that was not broken, and so we are moved when we hear it because it is still in its original form. Or maybe its just simply beautiful.