Jesus Time With Emma

                     My twentieth birthday is coming up and it hasn't hit me until recently how quick time flies the older I get. I can still remember the slumber party I had for my tenth birthday ten years ago!                   As life progresses and as I grow older, my appreciation for waking up each morning increases. In a couple of weeks I will be leaving my teens behind and entering the third decade of my life. Lately I have been reflecting on the decade I am now wrapping up and the life events I experienced from the ages of ten through twenty. These years are somewhat the same yet totally different for all adolescents. Besides navigating puberty, every youth faces their own individual battles that interfere with their journey to adulthood. They can be related to academics, relationships, or similar to what I faced, home life.           ...

                     I have had to learn to accept that there is so much about this life that I will never understand.  If I become a counselor someday I will never be able to tell my clients an accurate answer on why bad things happen to good people. I may never receive the apologies I once longed for from the people in my past who hurt me. In every new season or new relationship I enter, I am risking something. Devoting attention to something or someone may require spending money or gas milage and sacrificing a portion of my 24-hour day. In my short years of being alive I have learned that life is a complete mystery with many twists and turns. I will find myself in one place at one point and then be somewhere completely different within a year. Throughout my life people came and people went. I would think I wanted something one moment and change my mind the next. A piece of my heart would be devoted to a person or thing ...

                  "Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart." (Psalm 37:4)              What does it mean to delight in the Lord? What exactly are the desires of my heart that this verse is referring to? What is God promising readers through these words?          As a human there are specific goals that we wish to achieve while living on this earth. Many of the common desires we may have include career's that fulfill self-meaning and financial needs, as well as spouses and children to fulfill desires for emotional security and family. Other desires include traveling, starting businesses, or doing something daring and exciting. Throughout life we experience different seasons that bring us different dreams and longings. They are considered good if they are used to bring glory and honor to the Lord. In fact, the Lord created many o...

"Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever." (Psalm 136:1)          It is easy to take the blessings that we have in life for granted. With this Thanksgiving/Christmas season approaching I feel on my heart that I should write about the blessings in life that God provides us with.         How can an entire world be created by someone just saying, "let there be light."? How can a human being be formed from just a handful of dust and a rib? How can someone be rejected and betrayed century after century yet still be merciful, when they have the power to destroy everything that is against them? How can anybody be willing enough to sacrifice their own life/sacrifice their own son for the sake of their persecutors? God has done all of this. We are the people he has created and betrayed him. We are the persecutors he has sacrificed himself for. He is the reason we can live our lives in complete peace an...

         I was fifteen years old when my eyes were open to the brokenness of this world. My childhood had provided me with shelter that blinded me from the fact that life really is a hard and brutal journey. I guess that's why adults were always telling me growing up to enjoy being a kid while I was able to.                       - "Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you." (1 Peter 4:12)         I never knew what suffering was until I experienced it for myself. In my walk with the Lord, I have learned that everyone has a story. Every person carries brokenness of some sort with them as they journey throughout life. As a child I never imagined that brokenness could exist in adults, especially in my own parents. In my innocent mind, my mom and dad were perfect. I relied on ...

                 I have more recently realized just how valuable time is and how quickly it flies. It feels like it was just yesterday when I was nine years old and overjoyed to find out that I got a puppy on Christmas morning. Now that puppy is ten years older. I was once taller than my younger brothers, but now they both tower over me. A year ago, I was preparing to move into my first year of college. That first year flew by and now I am about to enter my second. It often seems like time moves faster and faster with each year that passes.            I'll sometimes look through old photographs from my childhood, and just be shocked by how much happened in my nineteen years of life. My family moved around a few times, so people and friendships were always coming and going. My parents were married for a majority of my life, and now it's been over three years since they separated. There was a time wh...

                     I felt it on my heart today to write in depth on the struggles of the dreaded season of waiting. As we journey through life, there is always that time period where we are forced to sit back and wait for that unknown next chapter of our lives. During these seasons our minds naturally fix themselves on the outcomes we are longing to see unravel. Some common examples of waiting include:  - Waiting to get that acceptance letter from your dream college - Waiting for that special someone/getting through the "talking" phase - Waiting to hear back on medical related results for yourself or for a loved one - Waiting to hear back on a desired opportunity - Waiting for a current season of your life to be over - Waiting to adjust to a new environment               There are countless seasons of waiting a person can go through. The reality is that we will ALWAYS be waiting fo...