HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

to the love of my life.....


HAPPY 25th BIRTHDAY!!!! i love you so much and i can't wait to celebrate many more of your birthdays together!!!

how bored am i

at the prompting of another friend's blog, i made up a quiz for you all to take. it's about me, so we will soon see how well you all know me. have fun. maybe i'll make another one sometime. for now, i was bored and couldn't think of a ton of hard questions. we'll see what happens. happy quiz taking!!!



the quiz is here. there's no turning back now.

make me whole

i don't know who wrote this song, but it is basically the cry of my heart at this point in my life.

Lord, restore us, and revive us
take Your servant
make me whole

with lives so broken
hearts unspoken
take Your servant
make me whole

sweet surrender, take me under
Your strong tower
and make me whole

Sweet surrender, take me under
Your strong tower
and make me whole

Lord, remove us, and refine us
take Your child and
make me whole

empty-handed, all-dependant
take Your child and make me whole

sweet surrender, take me under
Your strong tower
and make me whole

Sweet surrender, take me under
Your strong tower
and make me whole

make me whole, Jesus make me whole
make me whole, Lord make me whole

decompressing

so i'm back from the women's retreat. it is so good to be back in texas, and back in the city. i love nature, don't get me wrong, but i am totally a city girl. i would much rather live in the city than in the country. i learned a lot this weekend, though, and God totatlly has something huge in store for my life. i'm going to share a bit of what he revealed to me, and ask for you all to pray for me as i go on this long, hard road ahead of me.

i've been carrying around a lot of hurt. i haven't necessarily realized i was holding it all in(i knew i was holding some in), but God made that so clear to me saturday afternoon after our third session of the day.

i have been hurting since elementary school. that's when it all started. i was never a popular kid, and, in my mind, i've never been really much to look at. kids picked on me in early elementary school, even kids i was friends with at church. kids on the street picked on me, it just felt like everybody in the world was picking on me. and it wasn't the kind of picking you do with your friends, where everyone laughs about it. no, this was malicious, out to hurt the other person, picking and making fun of.

this continued into middle school, when all the "friends" i'd made in elementary school suddenly wouldn't talk to me anymore. the way i describe it, they all became "too cool" for me. the friends i had at school, i never really felt like i connected with them. now, i know everyone goes through an awkward phase around middle school, but it seemed to hit me really hard. i was skinny, flat as a board, with braces, acne and really big glasses (some may say it was the style, but style or not, even today kids' sized sunglasses can be too big for my face. just imagine how big they were on my face back then). it was also during middle school that my mom got sick. so here i was, an awkward middle-schooler, still hurting from elementary school, who not only has to deal with being hurt by her peers, but also has to deal with a different kind of hurt that comes from having one of your parents battling a fatal illness.

throughout this time, i kept most of the pain bottled up inside. every now and then, at a youth retreat or just hanging out at the youth office(where i basically lived through out middle and high school), that bottle would spill over and out. but i would usually put a cork in that bottle relatively quickly and grab a new one to catch what other hurt was to come.

then came high school. even more awkward. sure, i'd ditched the glasses for contacts and my teeth had shifted to where they should so the metal was removed from my teeth, but kids still remembered me as the girl to pick on and make fun of. let me just say right now that words are so incredibly powerful, both in a positive way and negative. it was also during my freshman year in high school that my mother's health took a nose dive and about a month from the end of the school year she went home to be with the Lord. so here comes more pain. more hurt. a different kind than i'd ever felt before. and more and more bottles to catch and store everything.

i'm realizing now that i haven't truly dealt with my mother's death. i thought i had. but i was 15. i didn't know what i was supposed to do. i didn't know that i should get some kind of counseling. all i knew was that i didn't want to finish out high school being known as the girl whose mother died.

don't get me wrong, i have some really good, genuine friends. and i have such a wonderful and loving husband, who is just so perfect for me that it blows me away to think about it. but most of my friends don't know this about me. my husband didn't even fully know until i called him this weekend and told him about it. and all this hurt is why that even when my friends and family joke with me, where it's meant to make me laugh, it just kills me inside. it absolutely kills me.

God showed me this weekend that i have been hurting for almost my entire life, somewhere around 15 to 20 years of hurt. and it's not just been kids at school. family has hurt me, probably without even realizing it. and that's a very hard thing for me to say because i know some of them will read this, and they might be hurt by this, but that is not my intention at all. God's showing me i need to be honest with myself, and admitting who has hurt me is just one tiny step.

i'm so scared to start this long healing process. i've been living like this for so long that i have no idea what i'm supposed to do. i don't know where to start, who to talk to, what therapy i need. and i'm scared of what my life is going to feel like afterwards, the whole "not living in a state of hurt". i also know the path to healing is not a pleasant one; that healing hurts. i'm so scared right now. but i know this is what God is asking of me. and that's why i'm starting. it's not going to be easy, and it may take years. but i know that His way is the best way, and that His way is the only way.

off to OK

well, i'm off to Oklahoma(yes, where the wind, does in fact, come sweeping down the plain). why am i going there, you may ask? our church is having a women's retreat and i'm going on it. yes, this means that my beloved husband will have to brave a weekend on his own for the first time since we got hitched. i'm sure he'll do just fine.

it should be a good weekend. i'll probably have stuff to post about when i return. and if not, i'll still post something. well, i'm off to OK!!!

a mildly traumatic event

so i underwent a mildly traumatic event yesterday. i'm ok, don't worry, but i'm still trying to recover.

many of you know that i have straight, brown hair, and it's generally been very long. i had short, short hair in elementary school, and a little into middle school. but since my seventh grade year, i haven't hair "short" hair. my hair has always been classified as long. even when i cut off nearly 8 inches last summer, it was still a few inches below my shoulders.

yesterday i went to get my hair cut. i usually will wait until after summer since the past five summers or so i've been lifeguarding. the sun mixed with the chlorine or lake water can really damage my hair, especially the ends. they always turn dead by the end of summer. there's no point in cutting my hair during the summer, since the new ends would die. so i wait until i'm out of the sun and pool. well, yesterday was time.

i lost about a foot of hair. yep, that's right. i had a professional, jason, chop off at least 12 inches. that was just the preliminary cut. he tied my hair back with a rubber band, and snipped right above it. my heart was racing as i felt the scissors snipping my locks off. he handed me the mass of hair and i stared at it in shock. yes, this is what i asked for, but it was still slightly traumatic. i put my old hair into a ziplock bag and then we walked over to the sink, where the rest of my haircut experience continued.

needless to say, my hair actually looks cute. i didn't completely like the way jason styled it, but my husband loved the way it looked. the stlye didn't feel like it fit my personality. my hair hits just at my shoulders, maybe slightly below, and is layered. i now have less than half the amount of hair i had before. it's weird. by hairstyle standards, my hair is still "long", or at least medium-length to long. but to me it looks sooooooo short. what am i going to do with over a foot of hair in my possession? well, i'm going to donate it. i don't know where just yet, i'm looking up places that take hair donations. as soon as i know who i'm donating to, i'll post that information.

i'm dealing with the event well. my head feels so different. with time, i'm sure i will recover. but it was still mildly traumatic. at least for me.