On Christmas Eve

Family picture taken over Thanksgiving break!


Now to proceed to update...

So, I just spent a week driving across the United States, visiting family and old friends, meeting new friends. It has been a very exciting and tiring experience. I've celebrated Christmas over the past two months about four times and am about to celebrate it once again with my family tomorrow.

The weather is frightfully lovely here. We are getting snow! Real snow! Like a blizzard snow! But then again, I can't say if it is a blizzard or not, because I can't quite remember what a blizzard is supposed to look like. I was five the last time I saw one.

Anyway, once the snow lets up a little, I shall have to go outside and get some pictures of it! Quite glorious. I love snow, for the most part.

And now...some pictures from this Christmas! Taken by my Uncle Rick, an amazing photographer. I took some pictures of my own, but not nearly as many or so beautiful. So, here you are!

Grandma True

John.

Matthew! Love the expression on his face...

Presents!

Josh, Greg's personality twin...

Timmy!

Beautiful Hannah.

Papa, the basket case! This was quite an interesting present...

And Matthew the basket case!

David, John, and Matthew.

Hannah, Renee, and Rebekah! Aren't they lovely?

Stephen with the broken basket case. It broke rather quickly.

He is Ever Faithful

I'm torn right now. Torn between someone who I once was and don't ever want to be again and someone who I might be, someone who I'm not sure I want to be. I don't get to make all the decisions concerning my life at the moment. I'm still very dependent on my parents and I realize that they have financial concerns and have to think of an entire family. I know the world doesn't revolve around me. But I sometimes wonder at my parents' timing, or God's timing.

Just when I think I have things down, just when I've decided to stick with it, decided to enjoy life for a change rather than hate it, everything takes a turn I wasn't expecting. Sometimes I hate living in a big family, because there's so many others to think about and that only makes my selfish attempts to get more attention all the more selfish.

I'm not sure what to let go of here. My selfishness? My laziness? My bad attitude with life? It's like everything's getting attacked all at once.

Almost makes me want to laugh, because this scene in my life looks very familiar to others in the past. Only, back then I wasn't the way I am now, back then I wasn't a follower of Christ. And yet nothing seems to be any different from "back then". I react the same way to changes in life. Selfishly.

Even after all this time, after professing my faith and trust in God, I'm still struggling for some control in my life, some control over my future. I still can't accept the fact that it's God who has formed my path and God who has placed me on it. I don't need to know where "my life is going", because I know that ultimately it leads to Christ.

Why is it so hard? After all the discipline, all the struggles, all the teaching that God has put into us? Why is it so hard to trust him? It sounds so simple, but it really isn't.

A very wise person once said that we are filled with a beautiful treasure, that treasure being Christ, but we ourselves are not the treasure. We are still jars of clay, weak and breakable. I will never have everything together in this life. I will never be perfect. I will never be able to understand things perfectly.

But I do know that when I am at my weakest, God is strong. When I fail to follow Christ, he is ever faithful to hold onto me. His timing is not my timing, but his timing and his ways are perfect. And I am sure of that.

There is More

This is not the end here at this grave
This is just a hole that someone made
Every hole was made to fill
And every heart can feel it still--
Our nature hates a vacuum

This is not the hardest part of all
This is just the seed that has to fall
All our lives we till the ground
Until we lay our sorrows down
And watch the sky for rain

There is more
More than all this pain
More than all the falling down
And the getting up again
There is more More than we can see
From our tiny vantage point
In this vast eternity
There is more

-Andrew Peterson

A Blessed Day

Today was a very blessed day indeed! I love Sunday. It's always the best day of the week. Sad how often I fail to see it that way.

"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." -Romans 8:38-39

Ever had one of those Sundays where you come to church and the week has been so rough and you feel so tired? Those kind of Sundays where you can't pay attention to the sermon, because your head or your heart hurts too much? The Sundays when everything has gone wrong over the past week and you're just too overwhelmed? These kind of Sundays can be very deceiving.

Don't be deceived. Sunday is the day where we come to share God's love and to taste God's love. Yes, on Sunday we ought also share the love we have towards one another, but if we come to church looking for love in others and not in God, we will surely be disappointed.

Ever come to church and feel unloved? I have. And I've wondered why those who know God the way I know Him can be so unloving at times. But here we can easily deceive ourselves again. Just because we do not receive the love we expect from others, does not mean that God has failed in loving us in any way. Also, why are we looking for love from others on the day when God has brought us into his Holy Temple to receive His love?

Sometimes God depraves us of the love of our friends and the attention we crave from others, in order that we might focus on His love, which never fails.

And never be decieved into thinking that you're too tired to receive God's love. Nothing can separate us from His love. We usually don't think about it like this, but I know that there are days when I come to church and I'm so tired I just want to go home and curl up in my bed. Today was one of those days. I was tired. The week was long and hard. I was frustrated and confused.

And yet, I don't believe I've had a Sunday as lovely as this one. The weather was lovely. The trees were golden. The air smelled beautifully of decaying leaves (I love the smell). It was as if God was spelling his love out to me. A song by Matthew West came to mind,

I love you more
Than the sun and the stars
That I taught how to shine
You are mine
And you shine for me too

All the little children at the church gave me a warm smile. Little children always make me happy, especially babies. I love holding them.

Anyway, I almost missed out on God's love because I thought I was too tired to enjoy it. I thought there were too many problems in my life at the moment. But that is exactly what Sunday is for. To come together as the body of Christ and let go of all the problems of the week for a day and worship God. I think today, for the first time, I tasted real rest. The kind of rest that overflows with grace and love and mercy. The kind of rest that never fails and never ends.

And never come to church thinking that you're alone, thinking that you're the only one who's had a rough week. Everyone in the church has problems, whether they admit to them or not. But don't destroy the Lord's Day by talking about your problems and others' problems. God has given us one day of the week to come and let go of our troubles in order to worship Him, to experience God's love.

Let us never forget what price Jesus Christ paid so that we might taste and see that the Lord is good.

Don't You Know Who You Are?

You are more than the choices that you've made.
You are more than the sum of your past mistakes.
You are more than the problems you create.
You've been remade. -Tenth Avenue North

The song is stuck in my head, so I thought I would put it up here!

To End All Wars

So I didn't spend an entire weekend camping. I was actually kidnapped by some friends, during our stay in Arkansas. So for three out of four nights of the trip I was sleeping in a house.

If you're wondering, my family (excluding three) and I left for a camping trip this past Thursday and have just now returned. The weather was pretty chilly, but beautiful at the same time. The trees are just turning and so everything was red, gold, and orange--much prettier than the fall trees here where we live. I enjoyed the camping part of the trip, aside from the fact that the ground was terribly hard underneath the tent and I could not get hardly any sleep.

But the second night wasn't so bad, because, like I previously said, our friends dropped us a visit and we traded one of their sons for me. I think the trade was fair. My brothers definitely enjoyed having someone their own age (and likeness in personality) with them on the trip and I had tons of fun going to a crafts fair with friends who I haven't had a chance to talk to in a really long time! Yeah, I got to go to a crafts fair--a huge crafts fair! There was a really amazing variety there, not to mention really good home made kettle corn and giant smoked turkey legs. :o)

I did manage to get a little homework done over the weekend, but I still have this gigantic pile looming on my desk. Speaking of which, I need to hurry up with this post and get on with my work.

You might have seen the movie To End All Wars before. I watched it Sunday night with my family and friends. Just to warn you, if you haven't already seen it, the movie is very, very violent and there's lots of bad language. I watched it with a filter, removing all the language and the most gruesome scenes. But, the movie is also very, very amazing in that it tells an amazing and true story of forgiveness, mercy, and God's grace. The story is about these Irish soldiers during World War II who are captured and taken to a Japanese Prison Camp. The main theme of the movie is sacrifice. So many times, one soldier will sacrifice himself for the sake of the rest of the soldiers. And in one scene, a man is actually crucified when he asks the Japanese guard to take his life instead of the general who killed to guards in trying to escape and is about to face death for his actions. For me, it was like getting a glimpse of what it felt like to be the disciples of Christ and to watch him die on the cross. See, the man who was crucified, in the movie, was the man who was always quoting scriptures and keeping the army's focus on Christ. When he died "a part of all the other men died with him". But, the soldiers, throughout the rest of the movie, remember his teachings and remember to hold onto the promises of God. Throughout the movie, their acts of mercy and sacrifice begin to influence the generals around them.

"Who is my neighbor? How many times do I forgive my brother?...The answers to these questions changed my life forever." -Earnest, To End all Wars

God bless!

"With God at the center, we are most surely what we are really meant to be."

"To love God is not to love life less, but to grasp it with a surer hand, a more sensitive one. With God at the center of our life and vision, we can see more clearly what is good and beautiful in all the rest of life." -J. Ellsworth Kalas

I'm almost beginning to regret choosing "the sabbath and the fourth commandment" as my research paper topic. For the past several days I've been digging through commentaries, making notecards.

When I started to read The Ten Commandments from the BackSide by Kalas, it was sort of like a breath of fresh air! Thanks to my darling elder sister for recommending this book to me! I've only just read the first chapter, but already I love the book! And I would recommend it to everyone else.

All my followers are probably wondering what I've been up to for the past several months. I apologize for not giving updates more frequently, but life has become busier and busier each week.

I'm keeping up with all my schoolwork, thus far, which is good, because I have a lot of it. Dance is going well. The feis (for all those wondering) was very fun! And I actually came away with a few medals. Sadly, I didn't place 1st or 2nd in anything, except for the two-hand I was in. But I still had a lot of fun and I now know what I need to work on (like getting to bed earlier the night before the feis). :P