Not My Life, But Their's

I have always wanted to see the world. I have always wanted to travel and get out of my own space ever since I was a little girl. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be a paleontologist and travel to the deserts of the world to discover the past and the extinct creations of God. When I was a little older, I wanted to study marine archaeology and travel the depths of the oceans. In high school, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, but I took a step of faith my senior year and left my country for the first time and spent seven weeks away in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This blog was created to be a way to update everyone while I was there. Those were the best seven weeks of my life so far, and I would give anything to be able to go back. Because I was out of my home and living and working amongst strangers who became my family through faith and who I am still so deeply connected to emotionally.

I have never wanted to stay in one place. Coming back to the same home I leave would be nice, but recently, I've been having this overwhelming urge and push to leave and not come back. I love my family, I love my friends, and in some ways, I love my country. But my country, if we are completely honest, does not need me. Nor do I necessarily need it. Over the summer, I kept getting the urge to go somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere but where I am, where I was. Granted, I went back home because at the time my family and I thought I would be needed to help everyone while my mom recovered from surgery. Because of that, I do not feel too deeply a sense of regret for staying home. But next year, I don't want to go back home.

I love my family, but the biggest thing they taught me was they did not raise me to be a boomerang, they raised me to be an arrow. Psalm 127:3-5 says, "Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate." My parents firmly believed this, and they firmly believed it was their job to raise me and my siblings to be not just arrows, but flaming arrows, on fire for God and ready to spread His love and His story like wildfire. And if I do that better halfway across the world, then great! Do they like the idea of me leaving and being all alone? Of course not, what mother is going to willingly send her daughter into the world that so terribly treats women? But they trust God with me and with my life, my safety.

And still, I have been afraid of bringing up the idea of leaving the country for good to them. Because that is such a monumental life decision, and it is really quite a big deal. But it is not an urge I can shake off and leave in the back of my mind. This urge has gotten so strong and so invasive that I must act or I will never be able to focus on anything else until it is handled. And that is how I know this is not of myself or my own ambitions. This is from God.

This week is Global Focus Week at Liberty, and I love, love, love GFW. I love the booths in the library, I love the speakers the school brings into convocation, and I love the sense of willingness you get from the students. But today was So. Much. Better. David Platt (renowned for his books Radical, and Follow Me, as well as others) was our speaker today, and before I go any further, I want to say one thing: David Platt has been gifted by God with his ability to speak and with his passion for the world and his ability to clearly articulate it to the masses. So today, Dr. Platt stood up and pleaded with us to understand the depth of what an unreached people group is and the urgency with which we need to be acting. I got a lot of good notes, and I want to share them with you all so you can understand where I'm coming from in a few paragraphs.

• Unreached people groups do not have access to the Gospel. 
• They have a general knowledge of God. 
• Because of this general knowledge, they have rejected God. 
• They are trying desperately to appease different gods and sometimes even to appease their own self and sins
•  The sinful nature manifests in us in a myriad of different ways. 
• Biblically, if you are unreached, you stand condemned before God. 
• There are not any innocent people in the world, there are condemned people all over the world who need to hear the gospel. 
• Biblically, if you are unreached, you will never be told about the good news, the amazing news, the awesome truth of the saving gift of Salvation and the gospel. 
• The gospel is only good news if it gets there in time. 
• Unreached people's knowledge of God is only enough to damn them to hell forever. 
• All they have is the bad news. 

With these points, I want to say what I have been feeling for months now.

I am not meant to stay in this country. I am not meant to teach in an American school. I would love to stay and help bring about education reform, but that is not my calling. My passion is to help people, my path is to teach, my calling is to leave. There are children dying because no one is presenting the Bible as a work of literature and in doing so presenting them with the truth that it contains. There is no one translating the Bible so that students can understand it.  No one is presenting the gospel to an entire third of our world population.

And for months I have been struggling with trying to discern whether or not this desire to leave and to go international was just something from myself in an attempt to get away from a city I didn't want to live in, or if this was a true calling from God. But throughout all of convo, I was repeatedly given a sense of reassurance and relief that this is not something I want to do. This is something God wants me to do. And being able to finally know that is a God-given desire is such a relief and has removed so much internal stress from my life.

I feel I am rambling now, so maybe I should be done.
In peace,
Emily E.

A Stressed Out Life and Why There is Nothing You Can Do About It

My life is stressful.

There is no getting around that fact. It just is. Could I prevent it from being stressful? Maybe. But everything I could try would never stop things from happening outside of my control. Because I'm not God.

It is the second week of school here at good ole Liberty University, and while many people claim if they can survive the first week, they can survive the entire year, I don't know if I necessarily believe that statement to be true. Because my first week here has been incredibly stressful. And it isn't going to get any easier. I don't have any "easy" classes to fall back on this semester, I don't have time to do nothing for an entire day. I have a constant stream of work, reading, and general life to get a hold of. I have things to do, a car to pay off, poems, essays, books, and plays to read, and even more to write. This semester is not going to be unstressful. I didn't think it would be. I also didn't think that there would be as many things out of my control as there already are.

You see, my laptop - my beautiful, precious, dependent franken-computer my dad lovingly put back together for me - has broken. The screen doesn't work. It is fixable, but it will cost me some money that I don't have at the moment. I haven't gotten paid for last week's work yet. So, I can't pay to get my laptop fixed until I get money and I don't have money until (hopefully) tomorrow. Which is not good because I need my laptop in two of my classes tomorrow.

I don't have some of the books I need for two of my classes still.
"But Emily didn't you think ahead? Didn't you prepare yourself and buy your books ahead of time??"
Yes, I did. But things that I can't control happened. A girl told me she had the books I needed and then she backed out and said she didn't. Then the one book I bought used from the bookstore actually ended up not being available used and they canceled the order the day before classes start. So now that I have reordered all of these books new, I am still waiting to get the email from the bookstore telling me "WE HAVE YOUR BOOKS IN HOORAY LIFE IS BETTER AND NOT TERRIBLE."

Fun fact: I ordered these books last Wednesday. They still aren't here. Also, to the students who bought the books off the bookstore shelf because they just wanted to have them and were not actually taking my classes, I hope you step on a Lego. Why would you want to buy a random textbook, and when do you have time to read them during the semester? Please explain your life choices.

And if all of this had happened to the Emily from last year, she would have had a mental breakdown and gone home. Because this would have been too much for 2014 me to handle. But I'm not 2014 me, and I'm not going home. I'm staying here, and I'm dealing with my life like an adult. Because even if I don't seem like a "real" adult a lot of the time, there is still so much I have managed to accomplish in myself the past year. The one thing I learned since then is that sometimes, you can't control every single thing that happens to you in order to protect yourself from the real world and from keeping you from going insane. Sometimes, in order to keep yourself healthy mentally, you have to face your crap. That's just the way the world works. And the world is not mine to control. So this past week, instead of having a breakdown and flipping a table, I've been trying so (sooooooo) hard to be calm about this stuff.

Maybe what I'm trying to get at is this:

It's okay to be stressed out. It's okay to be worried, it's okay to be afraid. In fact, it's completely 100% normal to feel this way sometimes. It is normal to have uncontrollable variables in your life and be afraid of their outcomes. At the end of the semester, getting my books in a week late isn't going to destroy me. It might mean I have to work extra hard to catch up, but I won't be any worse off because of it. Going without a laptop for a week isn't awful, and it's an inconvenience, but this school has so many computers all over the darn place, the only thing that is being inconvenienced is my profound desire to stay in my room all the time instead of out in public. But even that isn't awful because guess what? No one cares about what you are doing in college. Everyone is too stressed out and focused on their work to even think about you and what you are doing. (College kids do not have any concept of sonder. Also, that is the best word and idea ever and quite honestly, should be an idea that shapes Christianity and our faith. But that is a different topic for a different time.)

So all in all, life is unpredictable and can throw you off at times. That doesn't mean it has to be stressful. It just means you're living.

Emily E.

P.S.: In regards to my last post, Nasser noticed and read it. I have talked to him. We, as well as my own personal team of girls and the actual convocation team, will be meeting after the semester settles down to discuss the matter. We have been invited to help assemble a list of women we believe will make the biggest impact in the lives of our fellow students. If anyone has a request they would like to put in, feel free to comment or contact me if you know how :)

Overall, I am incredibly humbled at this opportunity and would greatly appreciate your prayers concerning the matter. 

An Open Letter to Liberty University and David Nasser

So out of the 20+ speakers who are scheduled for the upcoming Fall 2015 Liberty University convocation this year, only 5 of these are women, and one of them has a man scheduled to speak the same day.

First of all, I would like to take a moment to write specifically to David Nasser. Pastor Nasser, I applaud you and your work here at Liberty University. I do. I am in full support of you and everything you have done for this school even in the single year you have been here. I could not be happier with a campus pastor. I know you faced a lot of opposition from a lot of different people here since you joined the LU family. And on behalf of the student body and those who agree with me, I sincerely apologize. You do not deserve, nor have you done anything to deserve, the criticism and the terrible words you received. You are a blessing to this school and I am excited and expectant to see what positivity you bring to us in the years to come.

But, to whom it may concern, and to you as well, Pastor, I want to extend a suggestion: You need to bring on more women convocation speakers. Approximately 56.5% of both the residential and online population or Liberty University is female. That is your demographic. These young women are the majority. Young women don’t need middle age, married men with 2.5 children telling them how to live out their faith. They need older women who have successfully navigated the world both as a Christian and as a woman, as well as everything else that comes along with those titles. If any of the young women (or any of the women for that matter), who sit on campus or who watch live streams of convocation come from a similar background I do, they didn’t have a lot of women leaders. They didn’t have good, godly, Christian examples to look up to. They had mothers and grandmothers, yes, but they almost certainly did not have other women they were taught about or they heard about who were successful in their fields and lives and who were also Christians. I know I did not. Now, we are in college or we are continuing our education, and in this time we have to expand our horizons and see farther beyond our homes and our childhoods, we still do not have strong, Christian women to look up to and to sit under. We are still listening to men. And yes, men are the ones who God ordained to be pastors. I understand that and agree with that. It is biblically-based and sound.

 But, Liberty University, you do not invite just pastors onto your stage. You invite all kinds of people into Vines Center. You invite politicians and journalists and authors and comedians and missionaries and performers into our Liberty Bubble. So why can’t any of these people be women? There are women politicians and journalists and authors and comedians and missionaries and performers who are all successful and who are very good examples to bring in. Women have just as much experience in their lifetimes as their male counterparts do, and sometimes, they even have more experience. Yet we do not see them, and we do not know how to find these women. Liberty, you have an incredible opportunity to pour into the lives of these women. Because women are the doer’s of the world. Women do not sit and talk as men do. Women stand up, and women wake up before dawn, and women get things done. And this generation of women are so eager to get up and to move and to get things done. But when we do not see any other generations in front of us encouraging us on, we become disheartened and discontent.

This generation of Christian women do not need an older generation of men telling them the same thing 20 different ways. We NEED to see more successful women. We NEED to see Christian women who have overcome the stigma of being a woman. We do not need men telling us how they think we should succeed. We need women showing use how they themselves succeeded.

You have one TBA spot open in the Fall semester. I ask and I pray that you all deeply consider bringing in a woman to speak.

Frustrated and discouraged, 

Emily E. 

My Brain is not a Joke

   

               

"Q: How many people with ADHD does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Wanna go ride a bike?"

Why is my disorder a joke? Why are the drugs that can genuinely help the people like me so widely abused and are also the punchlines of so many jokes?  I have felt like this for a very long time. ADHD is very hard to live with. And ADHD is not a joke. But yet, that's how the world sees it. I've talked about my struggle to cope with being neuroatypical before, and I feel like it still needs to be addressed. Because everyone sees it as a joke. And I'm emotionally tired of having to show a half-hearted smile when people try to make those jokes about it. MY BRAIN IS NOT A JOKE!

And it hurts me. It hurts my self-esteem, it hurts my countenance, it hurts my heart when people, even those close to me, joke about it. Because even after being diagnosed for over a decade, every single day is a struggle. Every single day is hard to get through. And for so many of us, ADHD is just the beginning. There are seven different kinds of ADHD, and all of them can lead to other mental disorders. I have anxiety, and from that combination comes a Body-Focused Repetitive Behavior (BFRB) called Dermatillomania, which involves a hyper-focus on picking at the skin. I am most likely going to develop depression at some point in my life. ADHD affects every part of my life, and it will until the day I die. And yet people still think jokes are appropriate. 

Would you make a joke about Autism or Asperger's? Would you make a joke about cancer or an autoimmune disease? No, you wouldn't. So why do people make jokes about ADHD? ADHD is a mental disorder. Mental disorders affect the brain. The brain is an organ. THERE IS AN ORGAN IN A PERSON'S BODY THAT IS NOT FUNCTIONING AS A TYPICAL ORGAN SHOULD. So how is that a joke? How are peoples' daily struggles a joke to the world? Is it because it is a relatively new disorder? Is it that there has been an over-diagnosis among young children? 

Every single day is a struggle for me. It takes every ounce of energy I have to get out of bed at a decent hour, and even more concentration to get myself ready. As soon as I wake up, I am aware of everything that is in my room and the bathroom next door. I can hear every person in my house, and I can feel every living thing's presence in my house. I can hear the machines and computers that are on. Every single sound that is background noise to most people bombards my thoughts. 

I have become so strict and so meticulous about how everything in my personal spaces should be organized that it is almost a nightmare and is overwhelming if something is not in place. Everything has a specific place, and if it doesn't, every single second is spent trying to figure out where it's home is. I have to set five alarms every single day or I won't get up on time in order to do all the things I need to do.

I have an incredibly creative brain, but there is so much tossing around in it that I don't know how to bring it all out. My creativity output is nowhere near the amount of creative thought that happens at every single second of every single day. There would be no way I could ever get it all out. And quite often, if I don't make a note of an idea, I won't be able to remember it later. I am also incredibly smart, but it doesn't come across sometimes because I am notoriously reckless. Actions are not always thought out all the way through and consequences are not foreseen. That makes me seem really, really stupid sometimes. And I'm not stupid. Not at all. I talk because sometimes my brain is going to fast for my tongue or my fingers so when I say something I'll stutter on a single word for a while until I catch up with the rest of the thought, or sometimes when I'm typing or texting in an informal situation, I will type too quickly to realize that I skipped entire sentences or I misspelled words.

My brain is not a joke. I don't if it's a family member or a stranger, or even someone who has ADHD as well who says it. Mental illness is not a joke. It never has been and it never will be.

Emily E.

Midnight Thinking

So, I have had a really crumby day, and I can’t sleep because my brain is a real jerk sometimes. I just haven’t been feeling very motivated to do anything lately, and even though I’ve been trying to get in shape and get healthy and feel good about myself, the past week or so has just made me feel really insecure about my body, and today it all built upon itself and I feel terrible. I don’t like my body. It’s springtime and that means that there are a lot of people who are wearing short sleeves and shorts and dresses and all that happy fun stuff, and I have (stupidly) started comparing myself to all of the skinny, petite girls I see on campus. And that’s not healthy and I know it, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t do it or that I find it easy to ignore it.

Let’s face it. I am a girl who has grown up in a western 1^st world country, in which the female ideal fed to society is that of being skinny, blonde, long-haired, and clear-skinned. I am none of those (well, at the moment. I am a natural blonde and I do not enjoy my natural color, and long hair looks weird on me.) I am chubby, I gained more weight than I care to admit in the past year I’ve been away at school, my face has been breaking out lately, and compared to every other girl I see I do not feel beautiful.

And that is the key, I do not feel beautiful. I know that I am, but lately, it’s been incredibly hard to believe. And while I am sitting here watching Daredevil and looking at workouts and feeling sorry for myself and lying in bed covered in self-hatred, I decided to write. Because writing, in all its magic and mystery and power, is the most cathartic tool in my self-care arsenal. And I don’t know what I am writing, I don’t know why I want to write, after all this time of trying to write a number of different posts and coming up blanker than a painting of a rabbit in a snowstorm. I don’t know why I want to write about my body.

Truth be told, I hate my body. I hate my hair, how straight it is. I hate my hair, how it doesn’t hold a curl or hold any sort of shape whatsoever. I hate that my hair doesn’t do what I want it to do. I hate how I hold so much of my self-worth and my self-esteem in my hair. I hate how I don’t trust anyone but my hairdresser to touch it. I hate my face, I hate the shape of it, and I hate that I have gained weight on it. I hate how I have too small features, and how my forehead always breaks out first. I hate that my eyebrows don’t arch naturally and that they look like straight lines running toward either ear. I hate my eyes and how they are so boringly brown. I hate that I can count the number of people who have ever complimented the color of my eyes on one hand. I hate my nose, how one side sticks out a bit from where I ran into a telephone pole in middle school. I hate that it is constantly covered in irremovable blackheads that will not go away for anything. I hate that I still have dark inner corners under my eyes, and how they will probably never going to go away. I hate how my cheeks get terribly red when I get nervous, when I get embarrassed, when I work out, and how they don’t go back to normal until it is two hours later and I look like a flushed, drunken girl. I hate my lips, that they are too small, and how I will never be able to project my voice loud enough to take a lead in a song because I cannot open my mouth any wider. I hate that my jawline has disappeared, and how nice and tight and clean and straight it used to be. I hate that I tilt my head down slightly and I make a double (heck, sometimes even triple) chin.

I hate my neck, how at the back of it there’s a lump above my spine that sticks out horribly. I hate that a muscle in the left side is always hurting. I hate my shoulders, how one doesn’t fit in place properly, and how one fits a little too properly. I hate that all I have to do is move it and it pops. I hate my back, for being so crooked and bent and broken that it hurts. I hate that my back causes every part of my body to be crooked, and how nothing is even anymore. I hate my collarbones, how I can’t see them anymore, and how nice they looked when I was smaller. I hate my chest, how it breaks out in acne for no reason at all. I hate my lungs because they can’t hold all the breath I need them to and how they are the first to act out when I have an anxiety attack. I hate my stomach for not being able to eat before 9 am. I hate that my stomach isn’t flat anymore, how it’s bloated and clinging to the fat and the sugar and the other foods I have tried to stop eating. I hate my uterus, for extracting revenge on me every month because surprise, surprise, no baby has been made. (Woman’s body want baby, woman doesn’t want baby, woman’s body takes revenge) I hate that it puts me in pain.

I hate my thighs, how they are so big and covered in stretch marks. How they run into things constantly. I hate my knees for bending the wrong ways, and for popping when I stand up, and for hurting for no good reason at all. I hate my calves and my muscles for tightening up when I walk and for cramping up when I’m lying in bed. I hate how I have to constantly shave to keep them looking decent. I hate my ankles for being dry and flaky and gross. I hate my feet for being too big, for being calloused and discolored. I hate my toes for bending funny and pointing in weird directions. 

 So, I have had a really crumby day, and I can’t sleep because my brain is a real jerk sometimes. I just haven’t been feeling very motivated to do anything lately, and even though I’ve been trying to get in shape and get healthy and feel good about myself, the past week or so has just made me feel really insecure about my body, and today it all built upon itself and I feel terrible. I don’t like my body. It’s springtime and that means that there are a lot of people who are wearing short sleeves and shorts and dresses and all that happy fun stuff, and I have (stupidly) started comparing myself to all of the skinny, petite girls I see on campus. And that’s not healthy and I know it, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t do it or that I find it easy to ignore it.

Let’s face it. I am a girl who has grown up in a western 1st world country, in which the female ideal fed to society is that of being skinny, blonde, long-haired, and clear-skinned. I am none of those (well, at the moment. I am a natural blonde and I do not enjoy my natural color, and long hair looks weird on me.) I am chubby, I gained more weight than I care to admit in the past year I’ve been away at school, my face has been breaking out lately, and compared to every other girl I see I do not feel beautiful.

And that is the key, I do not feel beautiful. I know that I am, but lately, it’s been incredibly hard to believe. And while I am sitting here watching Daredevil and looking at workouts and feeling sorry for myself and lying in bed covered in self-hatred, I decided to write. Because writing, in all its magic and mystery and power, is the most cathartic tool in my self-care arsenal. And I don’t know what I am writing, I don’t know why I want to write, after all this time of trying to write a number of different posts and coming up blanker than a painting of a rabbit in a snowstorm. I don’t know why I want to write about my body.

Truth be told, I love my body. I love my hair, how I can easily experiment on it. I love my hair, how I can use it to express myself and my creativity. I love that I hold my self-esteem in the state of my hair, and how a good hair day equals a good day sometimes. I love that I value and respect this part of my body so much that I only trust one person to take care of it. I love my face, how it makes a wonderfully blank canvas to apply makeup and create art on. I love the shape of it, that it is versatile and has a captivity about it.  I love my forehead, how it is neither too small or too big. I love my eyebrows, how they do not fit the status quo or the fashion of the time, but rather how they fit perfectly within the proportions of my face and sit strongly above my eyes. I love my eyes and how they are so deeply brown. I love that they are beautiful but often overlooked, only noticed by those who make an effort to see them. I love my nose, how it fits perfectly with the rest of my silhouette when I turn to look at it in profile. I love the vein you can barely see against the skin under my right eye and how it will always be there. I love that my cheeks tend to give away my feelings, and how they show me that I have worked hard to keep the color in them after a workout. I love my lips, how they are perfectly set on my face and how they are perfectly shaped, not too full and not too flat for me. I love that my jawline is still visible and that in some moments it is still strong and tight and beautiful. I love that I can entertain myself and love myself, even with two or three chins.

I love my neck, how it helps me keep my chin up and my head held high. I love my shoulders, how they are strong and broad and able to carry the weight of more than I will ever be able to imagine. I love my back, for keeping me standing tall even when I do not feel like I can stand with confidence. I love my collarbones, for sticking out ever so slightly, and for helping me look healthy. I love my chest, how it keeps my lungs and heart inside and safe. I love my lungs, how, after all this time, they still do not stop working. I love that my stomach doesn’t hurt when I eat anymore. I love my stomach because it is not flat, it is not concave, and it is healthy. I love my uterus because one day it is going help me bring a beautiful life into the world. I love that it works just like it should.

I love my thighs, for how strong and sturdy they are. I love that they keep me standing and they do not let me fall. I love my knees for helping me walk and run and jump. I love my calves and muscles because they just look so. dang.good. I love my ankles for working and bending and twisting properly. I love my feet for keeping me grounded and for helping me feel the earth beneath me. I love my toes for helping me keep balanced and to help me go on adventures.

Because at the end of the day, it’s good to write down what you don’t like, but it’s good to counteract that with what you do. Because even loving yourself is something that I figured out a while ago, it is still a constant process and something I still have to learn every single day. 

Learning to love the body God gave me, 

Emily E. 

The Desire for Community and the Joy It Brings.

It's amazing the way things you knew before are reinforced throughout your life. As a child, I was taught that community is important, first with your family, second with your church, and third with your friends. And I feel as though the past couple of weeks I have been seeing this exemplified.

Spring Break has come and gone, my online classes are over, and I got a job (YAY!) I work 8:30-4:30 the days I go in, and that leaves me with a considerable amount of time to do stuff after I get off, and I get done with classes around the same time on those days. And it gives me the opportunity not only to take care of and focus on myself when I need to, but to also engage in the lives around me. I love to encourage and uplift people. It brings me joy to see other people happy and healthy. Seeing others praise God fills me with a desire to praise God. The community you surround yourself in will definitely influence the way you see life and the way you feel from day to day. But you also have the same ability to influence those around you.

My first day of work, I decided I was going to start working out. What??? If you know me, I would rather do anything else than workout most of the time. But this idea that I have an adult job in an office now and I have more adult responsibilities have given me a push to get into better shape I guess? I think a part of it is that I turned 20 over break and that was a hard thing to handle. I'm the second person in my close group of friends back home to age out of the teen years and that's a hard thing to deal with. But I decided to step up and go ahead and take care of myself now when I am already moderately healthy then try to tackle a bigger problem later. And one of the biggest reasons I've stuck with it for almost two weeks now without quitting is that I have a giant support group encouraging me to keep going and not give up and I want to keep up the work to prove to them that I can do it. Not in a prideful way, but in a "You encouraged me and I don't want to let you down" way. Having that community of people who will hold me accountable has helped me to keep going.

Within all relationships and communities, you must first uplift and take care of others, and they in return will uplift and take care of you. And throughout all of this mutual encouragement, God is constantly being praised and uplifted. And through community we become strong enough to handle tragedy, big or small. Community is the most important aspect of life for the Christian and is something the church of Acts understood very well.  They gathered together on the day of Pentecost (2:1) and were constantly meeting every day (2:46-47).

Gather together under the banner of Christ, rejoice with praise, bow in prayer, and love one another in community. Because at the end of our lives, all we have is Jesus and the community of Heaven.

In Christ, and In Love,
Emily E. 

Breaking a Paralyzed Heart

This week has been absolutely amazing so far. For those who do not know, Christine Caine, the founder of the A21 Campaign, one of the largest anti- trafficking organizations in the world, is launching her new project, Propel Women, this week and has chosen to kick it off here at Liberty. I will be writing a post on Saturday summing up the entire week, but I want to talk to you all specifically about tonight.

Tonight Christine spoke at Campus Community (previously named Campus Church), and it was a message straight from God. I feel like there is a lot I don't know how to get out in a way that makes sense, but I'm going to at least try. First I want to share some points I got from her sermon, and then what God revealed to me tonight.

• So many Christians live far beneath the freedom Christ died for.
• God needs and is looking for a generation that not only sings songs that say "no going back" but who believe it and is willing to act upon it.
• God is looking for and going to use unlikely people in unlikely places using an unlikely plan to gain an unlikely result.
• You don't know what God is going to do with you and where He is going to do it.
• We treat God like He doesn't know what we don't have, as if God doesn't know who He called. 
• The thing that makes you feel unqualified is the same thing God is going to use to bring Him the greatest glory. 
• Do not limit God's supernatural ability in and through your life.
• I do not have it all together, but God does have it all together.
• Would you just trust God?
• Begin the walk into freedom.

Tonight was, to quote Mrs. Caine, "awesome". But there was a lot to take in and a lot of realizations to wade through.

First, my heart has become paralyzed with fear and anxiety and doubt and worry. And all of these things have caused my heart and my spirit to become hardened and overwhelmed and this has caused me to push God away to a point. I have lost sight of the God and the heart of Jesus that I saw two years ago. The one that loves me no matter what.

Secondly, I've been trying to fix myself and my problems on my own again. Again. I've been trying to solve everything on my own. Take these oils, do these exercises, eat this not that, read these books. And while none of those are inherently bad, none of them are God. But when did I stop and pray? Where in that did I sit down and open my Bible? Why did I let my independent spirit push away the biggest Helper I have available to me?

I have lost sight of my long term vision. I have become so caught up in school that I've forgotten why I came here in the first place. I have forgotten my heart's true passion to help people. That is all my heart wants to do when fueled by the Holy Spirit. I want to help people, no matter what or in what way. And I can't help people when I have forgotten who it is who fuels that passion. I have gotten caught up in the waves of busyness and learning and discovery.

And I will call upon Your name

And keep my eyes above the waves

My eyes aren't above the ways. I can't even see the sun. How blind and ignorant I have become to my own pain and confusion.

That being said, I have come to the point where I cannot handle this on my own. I am not able to manage this by myself, but I don't know where to start in being able to get back on track. I will be looking into the school's counseling services. I've heard excellent things from other students who have benefited from their services and I believe this is what I need. I do not know how to handle myself anymore. 

I have lost sight of the me that Jesus sees. I have missed the passion that I had even a few months ago. I have lost sight of my Christ identity. It is going to be a journey to find it again, and it is going to be a struggle to repair my relationship with Christ again. But for me, I know that it will be much better to ask for help from the right people now than the wrong people then. 

So. Pray for me. Pray for the rest of this week on campus, and for the beginning of the Propel Women movement. 

I do not have it all together, but God does.

I do not have it all together, but God does.

I do not have it all together, but God does.

I DO NOT HAVE IT ALL TOGETHER, BUT GOD DOES.

Emily E.