to-do lists

I am about to write about something that I often cannot do.  And while we all know people who certainly live this out a little better than others, I think it is safe to say we all fall short most of the time.  It’s about loving people.  And not merely loving them because we feel like we have to, but really, wholeheartedly loving people. 

I call it loving well. 

And by well, I mean unconditionally, selflessly, purely, joyfully, all the time.

Being showered, covered, filled with love the past few weeks has made me think deeply about loving well.  Mostly, I am seeing the ways I don’t do it and thinking about how much I want it to be one of the things that defines my life, what I want to be known for as much as anything else I accomplish.  Nothing is more life-giving than loving someone, and it is worth doing with intention and genuineness.  As I sit here in a cozy Starbucks in Banff, Canada (because where else would I write?) I am thinking about where I am missing the mark, and I know there are a handful of things I can do to love better.  This list is certainly not all-inclusive, and those of you who know me well could probably—no, definitely— add to it.  But I am blessed with gracious friends and family who love me even though they have all the information necessary to not.  Thank you for that.  For now, here is my “Love well to-do list”:

Listen before I speak.  As much as I may think I understand a situation, I probably don’t.  Human beings are layers and layers of complexity and emotion, and often times I give myself permission to label someone and the situation they are in without their consent.  I use my education, my experience, or worse, my so-called “spiritual-ness” to justify my opinion, and I am finding that this is more damaging than it is helpful.  More often than not, people do not need a diagnosis, they need to be heard, to be reminded that God is good, to be sincerely prayed for, to be cared about.  I think that most of the time, people don’t even want my words as much as they want my ears, but my desire to sound like I have a solution usually trumps their desire to be understood.  Lord, give me a heart that listens before you give me a mouth that speaks. 

Read Galatians 6:14 every day.  As for me, may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Because of the cross, my interest in this world has been crucified, and the world’s interest in me also has died.  The problem is that I want things to boast about… I actually want you to tell me that you like how Kristin and I write and that my hair looked nice and that I am smart and pretty good at my job and will make a good mom some day.  As much as I wish I wasn’t, I am interested in those things.  But I am finding that they bring me more bondage than they do freedom, and I cannot love you well when I am depending on you to tell me good things about myself.  Don’t get me wrong, complimenting, praising and pointing out beautiful things about each other are good, necessary things, and we must keep encouraging in order to love well.  But I know that your applause won’t sustain my joy for very long, and as soon as it stops I am out of love to give you.  My source of joy has to be the cross, every day, all the time, in any circumstance, because the cross is really the only perfect example of loving well.

Celebrate everything.  Sometimes I am reluctant to join others in their joy.  Why?  The options are pride, judgment or jealousy, and all of those are very ugly qualities in someone.  When great things happen to others, I want to be the first to celebrate with them.  And not just by clicking “like” on facebook, but with a phone call that says with sincerity “I am so happy for you!”  There have been times when I was so blinded by my own myopic thoughts that I have missed a chance to love someone well.  At certain times in my life, whether is has been an outfit, a job, an engagement, a house, or a baby…  if I wanted it and someone else got it, I did not truly celebrate with them.  I may have done something on the surface, but my heart was more envious than happy.  There is no love in pity parties, but there is more love than we know what to do with in celebrations.  Whether it is a big thing or a small thing, I want to celebrate all that is good with no thought of myself.  I want to love others by adding my joy to theirs. 

Write down my prayers for others.  In my opinion, “I’m praying for you” is one of the most over-said and under-done phrases in the world.  And it’s because it is such a powerful phrase that is way too easy to say.  When I tell someone I am praying for them, there is a part of me that feels like my work is done.  “There, I did the Christ-like thing to do and threw out the prayer card, now… on to my life’s concerns.”  But then I have moments when I remember that life is much too hard for trite offerings to pray.  If I am not actually going to stop and pray, I should be ashamed of myself for even saying it.  For me, the discipline of praying for others comes in my journal, in actually putting words to paper and offering those thoughts to the One who knew them before I did.  Praying for others reminds me that at any given moment when I feel my life is tougher than anyone understands, a hundred hard things are happening to people I love, and they need me to not say I will pray, but just pray.  They will pray for me when I need it, too.  Prayer, real prayer, is loving someone well.   

Send real mail.  This one is simple, and who honestly does not like getting real mail?  There is something about hand written notes that makes us feel a little extra cared for, because whoever wrote it took more than two minutes, thought it was important enough to pay 44 cents for a stamp, and loved me enough to want me to have that moment of happiness when I grabbed her letter from the pile.  I want to do the best job I can of reminding people that I think they are pretty great, and every so often I want it to be a little more than a text.  I want to give others something to put in their drawer and pull out at the right moment, when they need a reminder that they are loved.  I have kept almost every letter ever written to me since third grade, because the words in them still make my heart happy.  Sometimes loving well is the simplest gesture with the biggest impact. 

I am an unbelievably blessed girl, well beyond what my life deserves.  I am more thankful for a God who is merciful and friends with exclusive memories than I can say.  But it is one of the most genuine desires of my heart to love others better than I do.  I have freely been given love, and I want to give it just as freely.  I’ll start with my list, but I can only hope over a lifetime it’s not a list but Christ in me doing all the loving.  

my best friend's wedding

This past weekend my best friend got married. There’s something magical, delightful and gleefully fulfilling about getting to witness a union so shaped and molded by God’s hands that it could be labeled a masterpiece before ‘I do’s’ are even spoken.  Maybe it was the sunflowers bursting out of our bouquets, the gentle breeze that danced Katie’s veil in rhythmic motion, or the giddy, school-kid love of two people desperate to share life together. Whatever ‘it’ was, it was good. It was a little slice of heaven wrapped in each embrace and every banana cupcake. It was a taste of eternal in toasted, sparkling champagne. It was a glimpse of everlasting as guests of every age danced and laughed well into the night. We celebrated love and believed deeply in its force and freedom because of the bride and groom in front of us.

Katie glowed with an effortless kind of ease. She smiled bigger than I had ever seen her smile before and cherished her day in pure beauty and grace. Although there were countless memories written in permanent marker in my mind, there were those special, extraordinary moments that, if captured on film, would launch Kodak’s marketing department into ‘kodak moment’ advertising nirvana well into the next decade.  Still, as I sorted through the snapshots of Katie walking with her dad, Alex dancing with Katie’s four-foot-nine little Nanni, Emily tearing (as in cry) up during our speech, and my sister tearing (as in bust a move) up the dance floor, there was one incredibly special moment that I will hold captive as I look back on this weekend for the rest of my life.

If you know Katie Blackburn at all, chances are you’ve gotten Starbucks with her. That’s what she does, and what other people do with Katie. So the fact that I got to go with my best friend to Starbucks the morning of her wedding may not seem like such a big deal. But, I have to thank our venti soy chai latte and our grande iced coffee with sugar-free vanilla and room for being the means to the conversation that got to take place that morning. We sat in the Pleasanton Starbucks between one young man ferociously typing on his computer (perhaps a Berkley law student) and another older gentleman enjoying his morning paper as much as his morning scone. Two girls in their twenties, giddy with anticipation of what the day would bring, sat and chatted for a bit. We talked through the day, finalized some last-minute planning, and ended each new thought with… “Wow…I can’t believe it’s here.”

 Katie would well up with a few tears and then explain herself and her tears in a way that deemed them silly or inappropriate.  For the record, the only thing silly when it comes to crying in front of Kristin Stockfisch is an explanation of tears. If one only knew the water works produced by this 6 ft blonde, no future friend (or complete stranger for that matter) would ever feel the need to explain his/her flooded emotion. So on her wedding day, I got to cry a little with my friend. Not because she was scared, anxious, or unprepared but because she was grateful. Katie sat in her pj’s with her hair up and her flip flops on and cried because in God’s rich grace and renewing mercy she sat overwhelmed by his love. She shook her head looked off in the distance and just couldn’t feel like she deserved the love she felt from her family, her friends, and ultimately her groom-to-be.

There are a lot of things I love about my friend. But on August 13^th I got to look her in the eye and tell her how much I love her humility. If only I could approach every day with the kind of undeserving reverence that Katie had that morning, I might finally understand what this grace thing is all about. It’s only in the moments when we feel significantly low in the face of a perfect God that he pours out his undying love on us in a way that takes us higher than any substitute this world might offer. Katie soaked in a heavenly dose of God’s grace that day and it humbled my heart to get to with her.

So Katie, thanks for making the real thing the real thing on a day that is supposed to be centered around ‘you.’ Thanks for crying because of how undeservedly grateful you felt, and thanks for reminding me that the shadow of the cross is the only place where we can be equally moved and rested in the presence of saving grace.

To your forever love as Mrs. Blackburn,

cheers.

a love(ly) story

A funny thing has been happening to my heart the past few weeks, and by funny I mean pretty amazing.  I still haven’t found the perfect words to describe it, but it is some combination of

 joyful, overwhelming, excited, humbled, grateful
(*if you happen to have a word for this, do share)

This season of my life has been a lot of different things.  It has been full: I finished a master’s degree and went to South America alone and said goodbye to the east coast and hello to the northwest and found a big girl job and got engaged.  It has been good: a little boy named Trey was born and is turning in to the cutest little guy on the planet and has an “I can make auntie Katie’s heart melt” smile that never fails and my blessing of niece of Bayley came into the world at the most perfectly unexpected time and I celebrated with some of my oldest friends as they married their soul mates.  It has been painful: I have let down people I love and jumped to the wrong conclusions and been ashamed of my attitude and had my heart broken.

And here I am, the week before I get to marry my best friend, and I am thinking about all the fullness, the goodness, and the painfulness, and again I feel that emotion that I can’t wrap up with my words and name with any accuracy.  And I get uncomfortable when my words aren’t sufficient, because I love words, and I feel more in control when they are enough. 

I seem to always want to write my own life stories.  I like dictating who the characters are and what the endings will be.  I like knowing what’s around the corner in suspenseful moments, and if I could place all the right people in all the right places at all the right times I absolutely would.  The setting would always be beautiful, and even though I might throw in some unpredictability here and there just to keep it interesting, I would make sure nothing pushed me too far out of my comfort zone.  But that is not how this all works.  And if I am honest, I don’t fully know how to let go of that- how to say I trust in Someone bigger and yet still feel like I want control.

Right now, I am living a love story.  It has been all those things that this season of life has been: full, good, and sometimes painful.  Saying that I am imperfect might be the understatement of the millennium.  And while at my very best I may have some redeeming qualities, at my worst I am opinionated, insecure and therefore judgmental of others, anxiety-ridden, and full of false pride.  And God very literally gave me a better half.  I promise you Alex would disagree.  As he reads this he will probably think “No way.  I got the better end of the deal here.  I did this and this and this, and I am that and that and that.  This is backwards, Katie.” But I know Alex, and I won the lottery with him.  He has been honest when it was the hardest thing in the world to be.  He was vulnerable when many other men would have run.  And he loves me so well.  It will be the greatest honor of my life to put on a white dress, come around the corner arm in arm with other man in my life- mi Padre- and walk into a lifetime covenant with God and Alex. 

I would love to know exactly what the rest of our love story will bring us.  It would be amazing to know when we will have kids and if they will be healthy and strong and grow up to love Jesus.  It would also be great if we could predict the financially harder times to come so that we can prepare better.  And if we could add some foresight into jobs, homes, moving, serving, extended family, and all of that other stuff that would be just splendid, too.  But again, that is not how this all works. 

My security in not knowing what is coming over the next horizon is this: We are all living a love story.  It’s the story of a man who lived and died on this earth about 2000 years ago, but has never not been there.  It’s the story of infidelity and betrayal from the bride, and forgiveness and grace from the one wronged.  It’s the story of persecution and mocking, then justice and redemption.  And it is the only story we already know the ending to even though we haven’t seen it yet.  This story is full and good and painful, but it’s a love(ly) story.  Putting my faith in the ending while living in the craziness that is today, well, it is the hardest thing to do.  But the only way to embrace my own little love story is in light of the big love story—the one I am not the main character in and that is not even written for my sake.

If I would have been writing my story the whole time, I probably would have left out a lot of things that happened—skipped the painful chapters completely.  But I know now I would have missed it, that thing God has been trying to teach me since the day he knit me together: that my story, even my little love story, is all for his glory.  He is the only writer who can turn ashes into beauty, pain into healing, death into life.  When I believe that, I don’t even want the pen anymore, because I know I can’t even begin to fathom what He is writing- but it definitely is a joyful, overwhelming, excited, humbled, grateful feeling knowing that He is writing me into His love(ly) story.


A wedding ring is the sign of a covenant, a never ending, continuous promise.  And it is a beautiful thing, that covenant, a forever thing.  But we have a more beautiful symbol for an even more amazing covenant, and diamonds and platinum can't compare to it.  It's dirty and blood-stained and made of wood, and it was carried for miles on the back of a beautiful man.  Jesus gave us more than a ring to promise us forever, he gave us his life.  His covenant is part of his love story with us, and it's how we live daily with all that is full, good, and painful.  If his story can overcome anything, even death, our little stories can, too.  


Alex, I love you with all the love I have today.  But my prayer is that tomorrow, in light of the cross and the beautiful covenant Jesus left us, I would learn to love you even more.  Your Bride, Katie.  

____________________

Oh what love, no greater love...

Grace, how can it be?

That in my sin,

Yes, even then

He shed his blood for me...

shadow mission

One of my favorite people in the world often talks in front of people. He has stories that are classically memorable and others that are ridiculously overused. Nevertheless, the point always comes across, the plane always lands, and often the crowd is left thinking a little bit deeper, a little more profoundly once the talk has concluded. One such story that slips into the category of classically memorable has to do with purpose. With great insight and ponder, he ventures the idea that everything in the room has a purpose. The light makes it possible for us to see, the chair is made sturdy to hold our weight so we can sit down, the door allows us to come inside the room, the door knob… well, you get it. He talks of how everything in the room knows its purpose, except us. Humans were built with such capacity, such complexity and such brilliance and yet have no answer when pressed with, ‘what’s your purpose?’

I am not the first to write of purpose. Nor the first to write of a life mission. But this is the first time that I’ve written of my own mission with a mark of unmistakable assurance. I’ve come to realize in the last few weeks with blazing clarity that the reason I feel so disconnected and terribly unused as of late is not just because I’ve moved to a new place. It’s because I’ve stepped away temporarily from my sweet spot. My purpose. My life mission. If you’re a follower of Christ and yearn to serve him wholeheartedly you should know your mission (spoiler alert- it’s at the end of Matthew.) But in the grandness of God and his incomprehensible creativity, he’s made every single human a little bit differently. So even though it’s my mission to spread the gospel, what does that look like in Kristin’s life specifically? How am I wired, molded and created to bring the most glory to the one who breathed life into me?

  I believe it is my purpose to find my own worth only in the presence of my creator, and bring others to know the value, grace, and perfect love freely available in exchange for a life carved by relentless inadequacy. 

Here’s the sticky thing about a life this side of heaven though. For every flawless purpose God has divinely woven in us, there is an equal pull from the conflicting side that I’ve heard to be called a shadow mission. Dangerously lurking in opposition, the enemy knows how we’re wired, molded and created enough to present us with a different choice on how to live. Often, he places it on a shiny platter and dresses it up to look an awful lot like our divine mission. In my own life, I’ve come to find that evil does it’s best work in me when I’m looking for my own worth in the temporary things and opinions of this world, and when I’m somehow prevented to encourage others to move towards an unshaken faith in Christ.

Needless to say, in the past couple weeks there have been several days when my shadow mission out-lived and out-worked my divine one. And candidly… those days suck. They’re lifeless, confusing, lazy and tiring. So if those words have ever been synonyms of your own life, seek the one truth, the one Father, the one savior that can transform years of insecurity, pain, and confusion into a steady, focused mission of peace and ultimate fulfillment.

Seek your mission, pray with renewed passion to do his work, and arm yourself with the light of Christ because it’s only in his marvelous light that those lurking shadows cannot exist. 

Me, My and Mine

Confession: I have a thing for C.S. Lewis.  (And I’ve already told Alex about it so it’s totally ok).  The man is brilliant, a spiritual giant in every sense of the word.  His thoughts so often are the bridge my mind takes between biblical truth and practical application.  I can’t even count how many times I have read Lewis’ words and thought, “Oh, THAT’S what God meant!  Brilliant!”  When I get to Heaven, I want to fall on my knees before Jesus, hug Elizabeth and Mary, shake hands with John the Baptist and Paul, and then have coffee with C.S. Lewis—in that order.

A few months ago I read The Screwtape Letters, and at the time I was digesting so much good stuff that not all of it sat with me.  But lately, what I have been learning is taking me back to something I remember thinking about when I read the book—my major overuse of a certain set of possessive pronouns: me, my, and mine.

And now I wonder: What would happen to my faith if I took those words out of my vocabulary? 

My time would no longer be mine but God’s time—with no detail escaping his notice and nothing happening that he cannot walk me through, my day would be spent actually doing what he asked of me.  I would be less concerned about my schedule and more concerned that how I spent the time I was given—even in the mundane—was kingdom minded.

My knee would no longer be mine but part of God’s workmanship.  Surgeries, rehab, and bad news have characterized the better part of the last nine years, and I have always viewed it is as my knee, my ability to move, and my comfort to lose.  I am wondering now that if I had seen my knee—and my whole body— as God’s gift to begin with, I might not have struggled so much to watch the athlete Katie turn into the always-limping Katie.  I might have taken comfort in the fact that God has always known what my body would be capable of, that He still knows what it will be capable of, and he has me right where he wants me.

My marriage would no longer be mine but God’s love story on display.  Pretty soon I am going to be a bride, and all of the language surrounding the preparations of the day have been about, well, mostly me: I tell people what my wedding colors are, where my wedding venue is, what my bridesmaids will wear.  But what if none of this day is mine but His?  What if I really saw this wedding as a party of gratitude that God gave me Alex so that He could teach me more about Himself?  And what if I stopped talking about marriage like Alex and I are the possessors of it but like we are the stewards of the amazing gift it is? It would probably have changed how I have prepared for it, and it will certainly change how I live it.  If I really believe it is a brief glimpse of the love He has for us, it becomes less about me right away.   And on that note…

My fiancé would no longer be mine but God’s son and the man He picked out to love me.  I would consistently treat Alex with the respect he deserves, and I would worry less that my needs are being met and more that his heart is safe and secure in Jesus.  I would pray for him in bolder, bigger, more faithful ways than I do.   

My house would no longer be mine, but the place God gave us to live where, hopefully, a family is raised with the truth of God as a foundation and friends are welcomed, cared for, and prayed for.

My money would no longer be mine but God’s blessing for me to steward and bless others with.

My opinions, my education, my friends, my goals, my possessions, my future…

What if none of this is mine?  What if I truly treated everything in my life like it belongs to the One who gave it to me in the first place?  That’s a humbling thought for me.

In the animated movie Finding Nemo, the seagull “characters” pop up a few times throughout the film and make everyone laugh as they all fly toward the treat that has been thrown at them, yelling, “Mine!” “Mine!” “Mine!” “Mine!” “Mine!”  We are certainly not seagulls, but I wonder sometimes if we are so different.  How often do we find ourselves competing for the money, the job, the reputation, the car, the clothes or the relationships just so that we can call them “mine?” 

Lewis writes it from the point of view of Screwtape this way (and remember in this phrase ‘the Enemy’ is referring to God and ‘our father’ is referring to Satan):  “we have taught men to say ‘my God’ in a sense not really very different from ‘my boots’, meaning ‘the God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I can exploit from the pulpit—the God I have done a corner in’… And all the time the joke is that the word ‘Mine’ in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything.  In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say ‘Mine’ of each thing that exists, and especially of each man.  They will find out in the end, never fear, to whom their time, their souls and their bodies really belong—certainly not to them, whatever happens."

The sin nature in each one of us has a default mode of “mine”—and never on this earth will we master the art of complete selflessness and holding our hands open to blessings.  Without exception, everything under Heaven was given to us; but daily we have to fight down the pride that says "I earned it, I deserve, and it is mine."  But maybe we could just start by thinking about all the uses of me, my and mine in our day, and do our best to remember they are most certainly not ours, but His.

*The picture above represents the "everything under Heaven" idea- and it was taken by the amazingly- and humbly- talented, Katie Trayser*

the flipped side of familiar

I’m officially a Midwest girl again. I arrived in Wheaton on Thursday evening, without eye-makeup on and dressed in a certain numbness- part hopeful, part heartbroken.  My thoughts were jumbled. Loud and clear and then painfully distant. Polished and rational, then absurd and confused. I knew how to do life in Arizona. I knew what exit to take on the 51, I knew to wear a sundress to combat the 110 degree heat but to pack a sweater for the instant chill of indoor AC, I knew exactly how to order my drink at The Coffee Bean, I knew the layout of the Desert Ridge Target, I knew how to do my job, and I truly knew the people around me in deep and meaningful ways.  Arizona, in my seven years of residence, had become completely stable. Comforting. Familiar.

Familiar, in my life, is a coin that I’m constantly flipping. On one side, (let’s call it 'heads') familiar means family. It means being relentlessly surrounded by the people, places, tastes, and smells that make me tick. It means falling gently into a routine that breathes the breath of life into others and knowing where to go to fill up my own tank. It means having a schedule, a plan, and a backup plan. Familiar is knowing the good brunch spots, and always ordering the right thing off the menu. It’s warm, it’s inviting. It’s knowing and being fully known.

On the 'tails' side of familiar is the status-quo. It’s feeling underwhelmed and under-challenged. It’s realizing nothing scares me. It’s confessing that life has been folded and neatly compiled into a corner where I can keep my eye on it. It’s clinching with white-knuckles on the steering wheel of where my future is headed. It’s lifeless and mundane. Predictable and ordinary.  It screams for a trust in something bigger than myself, but relies solely on the strength that only I am equipped with. And here’s the part that is most dreaded about this side of familiar: it’s easy.

Don’t let it be too easy. Don’t know exactly what the day holds without some wiggle room for God to truly use you. 

Maybe you’re living a life so extreme and independent that you’re longing for some familiar faces that know you and love you. Or maybe you have those faces surrounding you and you’re longing for a life that is challenging and bigger than what you can dream up yourself. I’ve been there. Both places.  And God provides fellowship and he provides purposes when we have the faith to pray and ask for them.  (Sometimes he does even without us asking.)

One thing is for certain in my own life. The perfect balance is found only in making God my most familiar. In him I am home, I am fully known and fully accepted just how I am... today. In him I am challenged. I am moved, surrendered and trudging through a life that far exceeds my own limits. He yearns to cover us in his familiar presence. It is only there that we will feel safe. Safe… but with butterflies in our stomach knowing something BIG is about to take place. Something only the living God could dream up, something that may not make sense to those who don’t know him. Something unfamiliar to us, but carefully mapped-out by the most familiar hands we will ever know. 

college

At 18 years old, I thought I knew a lot about the world. 

At 26, I don’t think I know much at all. 

But I happen to know a few, beautiful, talented, fun, energetic, off-to-college 18 year old girls— and I am writing this partly because I can’t believe you are grown-ups and I am feeling nostalgic, but mostly because I love you and wish only wonderful memories for you during the next season of your lives… so, here are the things I do know about college.

1.   It’s hard.  The first semester in particular, because you will miss home (some moments more than others) you will miss having your own room, you might learn more than you wanted to know about your roommate, you will feel nervous about finding the right classroom, you will have a teacher that you cannot understand well, and you will probably have moments of loneliness—even surrounded by thousands of other students—because in those moments you wonder who really knows who you are…

2.   It’s testing.  I know I am not the first and certainly won’t be the last person to tell you that there is no shortage of not-so-good options in college.  You can find one on a Wednesday morning as easily as you can on a Saturday night.  And these choices will always be there, and you will watch a lot of people you love make them, and you will probably make some of them yourself.  But do whatever it takes to make more good choices than bad ones.  Pick church over sleeping in, Bible study over Happy Hour, homework over beer pong, people who have always loved you over the guy who won’t be there in the morning.  And by all means, choose those Frat parties sparingly!  Go to one, see that you are not missing anything, and never go again, ok girls?!

3.   It’s mind-opening.  College makes your world bigger, in all the best ways.  Until now, you have never been in a biology lab with a single mom of three kids trying to finish her degree.  You have never sat with 700 other students in the same class and been identified as a number.  You have probably never done a group project with a recently married gay woman, an Iraq war veteran, a Theology major, a volunteer for Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, and a sorority member.  But you will do these things, and you will learn that everyone has a different lens through which they see the world.  Listen to their stories, value their experience, respect their humanity.  And all the while, dive deeper into God’s word and hold on tightly to your own story.  Confidently believe in who you are, humbly accept who everyone else is. 

4.   It’s faith-shaping.  No matter where you go to school, you will hear people in positions of authority challenge the Bible, Jesus, and even the notion of God.  I dare you to not run away from the questions but to acknowlege them.  Explore your doubts—the world is scary, and the more you realize that the more likely you are to have them at some point.  Talk with pastors, mentors, and small groups about tough topics.  Don’t be afraid to say, “Hmmm, I wonder about this…” Because I believe two things will happen for you: 1) You will eventually emerge from your questions knowing that life does not make sense without Jesus, and 2) You will confront the hard realities of this world wanting to be someone God uses to do something about them, rather than someone who blames God for them. 

5.   It’s super fun.  There is not a time of my life that I enjoyed more than college.  Lots of freedom, not a lot of bills to pay, a ton of learning, meeting so many awesome people, eating cereal for dinner, planning for your future… it’s pretty cool.  Soak it up.  Go to the free concerts, get in line for the speakers that come to campus, join clubs and play intramurals, try to get all of your classes to fit in Monday thru Thursday and have a semester of three-day weekends, be a good friend, listen well to others and don’t give your time or your heart to anyone who doesn’t listen well to you.  Take lots of pictures, call your parents often to tell them you’re fine, and just enjoy being right where you are. 

You’re off to bigger and better things now.  No one else can make decisions for you, and no one else can live with the outcome of your decisions.  You have a chance to be whoever you want to, embrace that.  And remember that you are daughters of the Creator of the Universe, and that means you have everything you need.

And please, try to remember that frat parties are stupid. 

Wishing you smiles, blessings, lessons, and love each and every day. 


*Couldn't resist adding this one, mostly because of Erin.  Love you.*