My life in May

With just a few days left of May, I find myself wondering, " Where did the time go?" It seems when I'm going to class in Iowa City the time passes slowly and it takes effort to keep myself entertained throughout the day. 
Granted, back in Iowa City I'm not living with 7 of my siblings. It's been a fun couple of weeks (I have yet to be home for a weekend) and everyday has been full to the max. The bummer thing about that is, the days don't seem long enough and time is escaping far too quickly. 
I'm 14 days into my summer and have only managed to walk/run 85 miles, putting me more than 100 miles behind my goal. I think I've come to the conclusion that 1000 miles in 90 days isn't going to be feasible with my weekends and workdays, but I'll still shoot for 1000 by my birthday or something. :/

My college classes are...meh. Happening but not fast enough. I hate summer classes. 

My little siblings and I play a lot of cards! : ) I LOVE cards!! LOVE LOVE LOVE. One day after running I found this lovely set up waiting for me. :)

cards and supper :)

Eva made me a salad all by herself 

Kolby is cute!

Moments with God

So this is a little late but I still wanted to share it. :) 
This past semester, my roommate and I decided that since there are SO many moments in a week where God reaches down and put his fingerprints on our lives, we should write them down and treasure those moments forever. Thus! Our "God Moments" box was born and every week at Bible study we'd write down the precious things we saw God do on a note card and stored them away for the end of the semester when we would open the precious box and read over all the memories we had captured. 




The night was gloriously warm without wind and so we celebrated our God moments in the park with strawberry shortcake :) 

Just a few of the moments :)

Every single notecard represents one or more God Moment ... as you can see, God did a TON of things in our lives this past semester. 

As our Bible study will be shifting and reshaping next semester, we gave our girls a gift of our pictures from our natural  beauty night captioned with the verse that says, "The King is enthralled by your beauty" from Psalms.

The joy on their faces is so priceless!! I snapped these pictures as they looked at their picture for the first time.

It was SUCH a joyful time to read over everything God had done for us and to remember how God had carried us through the semester. Starting the God Moments box was purely experimental, but I think it's something I'll like to keep up with the next Bible study I lead. 

Especially after times when I felt like I wasn't growing or that I was actually going backwards in my walk with God after such a rough semester, I had a whole handful of reminders of the things God had done for me. There was so much to remember and it was a joyful time as we read them off to each other. I'm getting chills just thinking about it... it was so good! 

I would encourage everyone to try it sometime, whether it is keeping a journal or writing it on a notecard, we need to remembering what God has been doing for us. 

Time Flies...

Goodness gracious!! Time is just disappearing ever so quickly, especially since school is out and I have since moved back to Storm Lake for the summer. 
Moving back was certainly a crazy wonderful wirl wind of events by itself. The Friday before finals week I knocked my mouth with a metal folding chair and broke off half of one of my front teeth. This was no surprise as it had been broken 10 years prior and glued on with the assurance that it would soon fall off again. After surviving a week and a half as a hill-billy, I now have a new smile that i wonder at every day because it looks so much more real than it is. 
Since school has been out, I've managed to walk/run 66 of my 1000 miles for the summer. I'm miles and miles behind my goal, but I'm slowly but surely conquering them. 


Coming home was pretty crazy as there were quite a few siblings to greet me and welcome me home and of course they were all telling me everything I'd missed all at the same time. I LOVE my big family. I'm always just slightly overwhelmed first getting home though. :) 


I spent a weekend in Wisconsin helping a dear friend move things as she and her husband prepare to leave the Bible school from which they just graduated and come back to Iowa for a little bit while she works on acquiring a nursing degree. It was an intense weekend! :)


Now I am home again. Briefly of course. On Friday I'll head back to Iowa City to put my possessions into boxes to be stored at my new location until my lease there starts as I will not be available to move in July. 


I've also switched over to the Candida diet in an attempts to make better progress on my intestinal health issues.  It's a little more intense than what i was trying. But we'll see if it fixes me.... I really want to be better :/


So in between being gone on weekends and my 12 mile walks/runs every day, I'm working on 6 credit hours of class. I figured I'd take a writing class to boost my GPA a little... It's a little more than I expected it to be. :/ But I have thus far managed 5 papers..... just 21 to go. And Stats is.. blah. Me and math are not friends. But we'll see how much I can pack in before I start my internship with The Bridge on Just 1st. Phew!!  

Currently Crippled

It's funny how up and down the Christian walk can be. One day I'm up and on fire and totally in love with Jesus and the next day I'm wondering if my life will ever amount to anything. 
I used to think that it was a bad thing for Christians to be down and insecure, but I read the Psalms a lot and David was all over the place, too. 


So it was two weeks ago today that I was set free by the truth of going through Winter seasons of the soul. I found peace in knowing Spring time comes after a hard Winter and intense pruning. I was so overjoyed by that and I felt so loved. I felt.... loved. I like that feeling. I like smiling at that and maybe even giggling with delight knowing that I am loved. God's love is a powerful thing and is like a fountain of joy. When those moments come, I wish I could just stay in them forever. It's like a warm sunbeam when the world around is cold. 


Unfortunately, moments come and go. The clouds roll in, the rains come down, and darkness has us stumbling about blindly trying to grope out our way, all the while wondering why it's happening. 
And that's where I am now. 
It's not like my knowledge of the Truth has left me.. it hasn't. I still know that God loves me and I have a sense of peace in that. But sometimes it is something that I have heard a thousand times. Worst of all, I heard it during my darkest, most painful times. 


How is that a bad thing? You may ask. Well, when you feel abandoned and hurt and lost and alone, and someone tells you, "God loves you," it's like a taunt almost. It's an other grain of salt in the wound because we want to experience comfort and knowing that all the pain I'm experiencing is a result of God's love doesn't seem to help anything. 
I know, I know.. .I said in a previous post that I'd come to realize it's a special thing that God chooses us to go through hard times. But, at the same time, I'm almost turned off to the idea of God's love at  times because I don't like to think it was God who caused all the circumstances that left me gutted and empty in a mud pit. 
If I'm being honest, I'm almost angered by the fact. I'm still left wanting to scream 'Why!?' at the top of my lungs whilst glaring angrily up at the sky. I'm tempted to be angry and then walk away without waiting to listen to see if God has a reply. 


Sometimes, I don't want a reply. I want to hurt on the inside and be angry about it. I've been down this road enough times to know that it takes some humility on my part to ask God  to help me forgive the pain inside me and to make me whole again. It's really not that difficult to request such a thing of God, but my pride and stubbornness wants to see if I can wait Him out and see if He'll heal me with out my asking. The funny thing about that is, I think He's already done what it takes to heal me before I would even need to ask. Like He's already supplied a huge bank account in my name with all the healing and forgiveness I could ever need. 
Kind of like how the money set aside for my living expenses for this year are in a bank and it's set up in a way I can access it when ever I need. It would be silly for me to call my dad when my cupboards empty out and my fridge begins to look sparse and say, "I'm out of groceries again!! Do something!" He would reply, "Fern, you have full access to what you need. I've already provided that for you."


It's funny that I scream at God to fill me when I'm empty and beg Him to heal me again and bring restoration. 
I feel like, patiently, He looks at me and replies, "I did." And then of course I feel silly and am like, "Oh. Oh yeah..heh."


And the story repeats itself. I keep asking myself when I will learn it all til it sticks. My biology professor says to memorize something you should write it down 7 times. 
And maybe when Jesus said you need to forgive 70 times 7 times, He was secretly sharing that He would be forgiving us for all the 490 times that we forgot what we had previously learned and angrily accused God of leaving us to rot. 




Either way, it's a learning process to come to the point where we instinctively access the grace God has already measured out for us in advance. But we may claim this treasure knowing that we have full access to it whenever we work up the courage to ask.


"Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven,Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are —yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." Hebrews 4:14-16

Happy May Day Everyone!

Blogging is really one of the best ways to procrastinate things one needs to accomplish. My To-Do list keeps growing and the more it grows, the less motivation I have to tackle it. 


One thing I did manage to complete is picking a topic for my ASL presentation. The next thing on my list is to practice and perfect the presentation by 8:30am tomorrow. :/ I've been working on it for the last hour and a half and since my Tuesday has already been quite full (Class 8:30-4:30) I'm quite tired and needing a break from signing. The thing about the assignment is that I get nervous sometimes when I do presentations. When I get nervous, my hands shake. This is not usually a terrible thing for most presentations, but when you're presenting in American Sign Language... shaking hands does not work out for you so well. I imagine it's the equivalent of someone getting a terrible case of hiccups while giving a speech. :/


After that, I need to respond to some messages and emails that have been awaiting my attention for far too long... phew. 


Then, I have a final on Thursday which then leads into my needing to start studying for finals week next week/ packing up some things before I move back to Storm Lake for a little bit. 


Oh well, the life of being a student, I guess. 


I'm also getting the hang of the sleep deprivation part of being in college. I started out my college life going to bed at 10pm and waking up @ 6am. That ship has sailed away.. apparently. And while I've also been recreationally addicted to coffee, I can see now why people can come to depend on it as the crux of their being. I used to be so addicted to coffee I could drink a cup before going to bed and sleep just fine. Now since i only treat myself to it on rare occasion, I'm realizing how useful it is in helping one stay up a little later to complete assignments and study for impending exams. (LOVE coffee!)