Reflections

So last Saturday I was at a K-State game (I guess I do a lot of thinking there apparently). If you didn't see on the news, there were some pretty crazy clouds going on around us. It got really dark and scary, and the clouds off to my right started to rotate and get closer to the ground, which any Kansan knows means one thing - tornado. My heartbeat picked up as I looked around at the 50,000 people in the stadium around me. What would really happen if an ACTUAL tornado came through that place? I glanced back at the clouds, still eerily rotating near the stadium, and looked at my sister, whose eyes were widening. The marching band started leaving, and that's when I said, "Um, we're getting out of here."

A tornado never touched down that day, but I could see people starting to leave the stadium, some more worried than others. And I thought, "We are so incapable of saving ourselves. Without God, we are hopeless." No matter how much we like to think, we are not in charge of this planet. I thought about how anytime something terrifying or devastating happens, even the people who said they'd never turn to God end up on their knees. We are in need. It is only in times of need (for some reason) that differences are thrown out and everyone begins to bond together.

It is 1 a.m. as I sit here typing this. I was going to go to bed until I decided to go through some old pictures. My mom made me two scrapbooks when I graduated high school of pictures from my birth up until the summer before I left for college. My grandma made me one of the earlier years of my life, and then I have one that I made of my trip to Spain in 2006.

As I have been clinging to God after returning from the best, yet hardest, summer of my life, I am realizing how young I still am and how much I have ahead of me. As I look at the pictures from high school and before, I remember the times that I stressed over different things. I remember the fights I had with friends. I remember the tests I worried about, the things I wanted for myself, the tears I shed over random events. I am slowly realizing that the things that have happened in my life are so small compared to the big picture. I always say that high school was the best time of my life...and it was only four years! Four years at the time seemed like an eternity. Now I am almost done with college, and know that in a year I'm going to be facing the next big step in my life.

I am realizing that there is so much more to life than just living. Life is so much more than we make it out to be. I think about the future a lot, and I wonder when I am 70 if I will wish that I could do anything over. I hope this is not the case. I hope that when I am 70 I can say I lived my life to the fullest. Right now this is hard for me as most of the time it's all I can do to get out of bed and go to class.

But as I feel God draw closer to me, I grow more anxious for the life that awaits me. Like he's always telling me, "Just wait, there's more." No matter how much we don't want it to, time flies. Our lives are so small on this time line we call history. And afterward we have an eternity ahead of us. I want you to know my Jesus, because He's the only one that can carry you there. I want you to know that no matter how badly you've screwed up, He still wants you. And that although our lives are small, God uses them to do big things.



Oh, and I was thinking: Girls, what if we spent more time in the Bible than we did reading magazines? I have loved magazines all my life, and I think I've come to the conclusion that they're half the problem as to most of us struggle with self-esteem. I had a magazine that on one page told me this shirt would hide my stomach flaws, and the next page was about a girl who struggles with anorexia and how I should be happy with the way I am...?

Spend some time reading the words God has written to you, and they might just change how you think about yourself.