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"Come to Me"

"Come to Me. Come to Me. Come to Me."

On Sunday, this is how the book Jesus Calling stared. Those three short words have so much meaning to them. Just that short sentence has so much love and meaning than one would think. 

This weekend, my family and I went over to my PawPaw's house for family birthday parties (yes another family party that I am blogging about.) It's always nice to get together with family to just talk about what has been going on in our lives since the last time we saw them. Even though there are many stories that I could tell you about the party, this is a different post than the other family birthday parties posts I have written. 
After a few minutes of being at PawPaw's and saying hey to everyone, my great aunt pulled me off to the side and said she had something for me. She took me to the guest bedroom and handed me a little purple present. Before opening it she told me that she has loved reading my blog and that she got me a little "happy." When she was reading my posts she felt that God was telling her to buy me the book that she had been reading called Jesus Calling. I was so happy to get this little "happy"!! I had always wanted to buy this but never got around to it and now I know why, God wanted me to receive it from my Aunt Susie!!! 

On Sunday I started Jesus Calling. It started out by saying "Come to Me. Come to Me. Come to Me." Just sit there and think about those 3 words and picture God saying those 3 words to you. Picture a tall man wearing all white saying in a deep voice "Come to Me, *insert your name*" This really opened my eyes. I began to think about this one short saying. God, the man over millions of people, all the animals, and the moon and stars, is begging ME, a small life on this huge planet, to come to HIM, the God over this world. How crazy is that? Every day, God is trying to get my attention. All of these minuscule things are crowding my life and making my life so busy. I've been pushing God off to the side and wanting Him to wait and do things on my time. This is not how things are suppose to be done. The God of this universe is trying so hard to get my attention, through my crazy life He's been calling out to me "Stephanie, hey, Stephanie look at Me. Come to Me. I want to talk with you and spend time with you." In the book it states, "coming close to Me requires no great effort on your part." It requires not great effort on my part, but it is still so hard to stop and focus on Him in the craziness going on in life and I am personally making it hard when it takes not effort at all. Jesus suffered and died on the cross for ME so that I can live and talk to God whenever without going through anyone else or anything, and I still struggle with stopping just to talk to God when it was made that easy for me and I'm taking it for granted. 

Today, through the craziness of your day don't forget to stop and talk with God today. Thank Him for the greatness of His love and mercy. Thank Him for being patient with us.

Pray with me.

Dear Heavenly Father,

Thank you for this beautiful sunny day outside. Thank you for waking me up today and loving me unconditionally. Thank you for sending Jesus to die on the cross for me and my sins when it should of been me. Please forgive me for not spending as much time with You as I should and getting caught up in life and not turing to You when I should. Thank you for  Your greatness and mercy. Please open my eyes to see the richness and love that You have for me. Thank you for still pursuing me and chasing after me when I turn my back because I want to do things my own way at my own time. Please keep me safe and help me to be patient today. I love you.

Amen.


Revelation 22:17
John 6:37
Ephesians 3:16-19

Living a fearful life

If you read my last post, you learned about how all my anxiety started. After a few months, things started to lighten up. Doctors were helping my family and me get things back to normal. One thing that we were told was that my mom needed to stop reassuring me. Whenever I start to panic, I will run to my mom for what the doctors said was "reassurance." They told my mom that she needed to stop reassuring me, and to help me realize on my own that everything is okay and I will be okay. Also, since I was becoming best buds with the school nurse, mom called the nurse and told her to put a big note on my file that said "DO NOT LET STEPHANIE CALL ME OR HER FATHER UNLESS SHE HAS A FEVER OR IS THROWING UP!"  I was so mad. All the doctors were changing my life style around and I hated change. They were making me deal with all the anxiety by myself and it was too much for me to do alone. I felt so betrayed. My doctor gave us a few different things to do but none of them lasted very long. We tried having one hour a day to where I could talk to my mom about what I was nervous. As you can probably guess, I broke that rule many many times :) I also tried to journal my thoughts and that didn't work either. The thing that I just could never do was pray. Whenever I was anxious and having a panic attack, I never thought to just stop and pray. This is something that I still struggle with and I have to be reminded of to do. Even then it is honestly really hard to do. Handing over everything over to God especially my anxiety is difficult because I am selfish and I want to fix them and want to feel better now. Not on God's timing or anyone else's timing. One of my favorite bible verses is 1 Peter 5:7.

Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.        1 Peter 5:7

I feel like this verse was written just for me. I need to cast ALL of my anxiety on Him because He cares for me. He is the God of Comfort and the Prince of Peace. 

I still deal with lots of anxiety now. I rarely can go anywhere in public without having a panic attack but I'm learning how to deal with it all still. I have learned that it's not going to go away on its own and I shouldn't be ashamed of it and that I will be okay. I have decided that I am going to major in Psychology. I dream to be famous like Oprah or Dr. Drew ;) I want to have my own private practice and focus on anxiety and depression patients, marriage counseling, or adoption counseling. I have many dreams and ideas in mind that I want to do, so who knows where God will lead me. I would love to help others with anxiety. I think that there would be no better person to talk to than someone who has or is dealing with what you are dealing with. I hope that I can change lives and help others to feel better and to go back to living a normal life. Dealing with anxiety is never easy, it can be life altering but just know if you are dealing with anxiety, you are NEVER alone. More people deal with it than you think. 

Thank you for reading!

Fight or Flight

Ever since I can remember, I have always a scaredy cat. I have never been the type of person to do anything that could put myself in danger. I have never liked amusement parks, rope swings, water slides, four wheelers, cruises, roller coasters, airplanes, or anything you can think of that I could possibly get hurt while doing or putting my life into someone else's hands. My sister and I are polar opposites. She loves to try new things and be a dare devil type. Well to me she seems like a dare devil type but in reality she's just like everyone else. Anyways, I am always the "party pooper" that no one likes to be around. I'd rather stay safe then possibly getting hurt. I'm the 19 year old who doesn't like to go in the ocean for many reasons like not being able to see what's around me, drowning, getting eaten by a shark, and lots of others. I will not ride the Tower of Terror if someone paid me one million dollars. I don't like the feeling that roller coasters give you in your stomach and when you can't breathe. I've always had fears but when I was a Sophomore in high school the fears were turning into what seemed to be real.

Social Media has always been my worst enemy. I would read things on Twitter, Facebook, and on Google that would make me so anxious. Starting at some point my Sophomore year, I had awful anxiety. Not just occasional worries and fears, but full on panic attacks. To me, it came out of no where. My mind was constantly tricking me and had me so gullible. Whenever the sun set, my anxiety would click in like clock work. 5 years later, and I still don't know what caused this to happen. I was 15 years old and was like a baby during a thunder storm. Every Tuesday night, Dad and I would go pick up my sister from CSI where she had tumbling practice. I remember on the way home, EVERY week at the same time I would start having a panic attack. 


I was addicted to being with my mother. I never wanted to be away from her side. If anyone has the seen the episode of Full House, where they have an earthquake and Danny wasn't home with the rest of the family. Stephanie freaked out and never wanted to leave his side after that in case it happened again because she was so scared that something happened to him. Well, that was me. I couldn't stand being away from my mom. This was very difficult since I had to go to school and she had to go to work. It got to the point where I had basically kicked my dad out of his own bed, to where he was sleeping on the couch, and I was sleeping with my mom every night. My panic attacks had gotten to a nightly thing where I would be up all hours of the night and also keeping my momma up too.

Side note: Have I mentioned how awesome my parents are? I know in my last post I talked about how my dad was so patient with sharing a bathroom with 5 girls at the beach, but its so much more than that. My dad is always putting himself before others and especially for his girls. He is always going above and beyond for my sister and me. For MONTHS, he gave up his bed to me when I needed to be by my momma. (well forced out ;) ) And my mom, my mom has been SO patient with me, no matter how much I drive her insane with my anxiety, and she always has the right words to say to me. 

When I would go to school, after a few class periods I would start to feel sick and go to the nurse to call mom and I wanted to be checked out. At that point, I didn't know that this was my brain tricking me and I actually thought I was sick. After lots of conversation and brainstorming, my parents decided that I needed to go see someone for my anxiety. The doctors suggested that I start taking medicine for my anxiety. My parents were very hesitant about putting me on medicine at 15 years old. So they put it off for a few months but once it started to get worse they decided that we would try it because I was miserable and we were all exhausted. After a few months of my anxiety getting more extreme, I started to have patterns in my panic attacks. We didn't recognize these patterns at the time, but now we know about them. Whenever I would walk upstairs, something would trigger my anxiety. When I would feel out of breath from the stairs, I would start to panic because I thought I was going to pass out. (side note: one of my biggest fears is hospitals and ambulances. I had started to make the connection that usually when people pass out at school, they would call the ambulance. So in my brain, passing out = ambulance = hospital= I die.) I know that sounds crazy, but that is what I had decided happens when someone passes out, and then people die in hospitals so I figured I would die too, which is another fear I have. And somehow that all led to passing out. Then passing out led to stairs and stairs led to school. So I got to the point where I was afraid of school, because school had stairs, stairs means passing out, passing out means ambulance, ambulance means hospital, and hospital means dying. Thats basically how my mind set was and still is. 

After my mind started making all those connections, my anxiety would start kicking in, in the classes before I would have to walk up stairs. Like I said before, at that time we didn't make the connections of why this was happening but now we know. So at that time, it still was just like I was constantly having panic attacks. I wasn't sleeping and I was missing lots of time in class because I would go to the bathroom when I was having a panic attack. 

This was such a rough time in my life and I am so glad that, to an extent, it is over. I am still currently dealing with a lot of anxiety that I will write about in my next post!!

Thank you for reading!!

Paradise With My Toes In The Sand

Family Dinner at Desoto's
Left to Right: Mom, Dada, Drew, Hannah, Maggie, Bo (Kim), Anna, Dad, Me, Nana

This past week I went to Orange Beach with my family. Every year we take a family (intermediate family) trip to the beach. Usually we go with our family friends, The Burdicks, but this year we were going to take a family trip with my grandparents, aunt, and cousins. Every year that we go, we always stick to the same schedule, same places to eat, and same activities. Because they are rituals, and dad is all about rituals. ;) Every day we wake up early, or attempt to, but every day gets later and later. We head down to the beach/pool for a few hours till lunch then we go up, on our own time, and eat sandwiches on the balcony of our condo. My parents, my sister, her friend, my cousin, and I all stayed in a Condo while my grandparents, aunt, and cousin all stayed in the camper at the campground. After lunch, we would head back down to the beach/pool or a few more hours, then slowly one by one head up to shower and get ready for dinner. Getting ready this year was very interesting, we had 6 people to 1 bathroom, 5 of which were girls. Poor dad, had last shower almost

every day and still had to wait about 30 minutes for all of us girls to get ready. He was a trooper though :) Every year we head to the beach with a list of restaurants that we just HAVE to go to! Usually, I bring my friend, Taylor, to the beach with us every year but I wasn't able to this year. I felt so lost without her, I didn't know what to do with myself! I was laying in bed watching Netflix by 10 pm, when usually we would be out looking for crabs, swimming, or just hanging out with Ian and Will! It was a nice week just to lay back and relax, which I really needed since I've been working a lot more than I usually do. It'll be nice to go back to work today though, I've missed those kids! 

On our first full day, one of my best friends and her family were actually down in Gulf Shores too, but that was their last day. So I met up with Alaina and her family and got to spend the afternoon with her family! It was great just hanging out in the ocean with her and getting to catch up. Her sister, Alaina, and I found about 7 hermit crabs that afternoon! We played with them and tried feeding them some Ritz Crackers, while also feeding Sea Gulls since they caught us feeding the hermit crabs and decided to join in. One of the hermit crabs loved crawling on the cracker and holding on to it, it was so cool! 



My sister and I decided to reenact a picture that we found of ourselves when we were younger!! 

 



Even though it's not perfect, we tried!! And I still thinks its really funny! It's crazy how not so little my little sister is :'(

We had a great vacation but it's nice to be home again! I missed my friends and Charlie :)

Where I left part of my heart pt 3

A year ago today, I was in Guatemala!! 

When our teams got split up, I was apart of the team A and the team that had to move locations. We drove for awhile to our new location. We ended up in this little area that was fenced off with just land. We were going to be building two houses. One of the houses was for the grandmother of the family, and the other house would be for her daughter and granddaughter. We worked really hard for the next two days to get the houses finished and to make lifelong relationships with this family. The houses we built were very interesting. They were made with just wood and tin.We were led by, Samuel (Sam-Well), a Guatemalan who helped mission teams build these houses. He was hilarious because he was such a perfectionist and it was hard for us to understand sometimes what he wanted because of the language barrier. He would just look at things and shake his head and say "aye yi yi." When I was making post holes, he walked over and looked in my hole and said "aye yi yi, theres China!!" We finished the two houses in two days. The picture above is the kids that were on our site. I got really close with the girl on the right. When we were leaving they were screaming adios and waving. Telling them bye before that was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. While trying to keep my composure in front of them, it was time to get in the vans. Right when I looked at them from the van, I lost it. As my friends were comforting me, the girl ran up to my window and gave me her bracelet and gave me a huge hug. As you can imagine, I really lost it at that point. It meant the world to me that she wanted to share something of hers with me. 

 

Where I left part of my heart.. pt 2

Once we arrived at the mission house, things started to feel real. I had always dreamed of coming to Guatemala and I was finally there! I couldn't wait to see what the next week held for my team and me. That next day, we drove to a little village (either Parramos or Chimaltenago) to build houses. The drives to and from the work sites were probably one of my favorite parts of the whole trip. My friends Alaina, Haley, and I all sat in the back seat of out wan, I say next to the windows and had them open. To every person that we drove past I would shout "¡Hola!" Everyone was so sweet and would wave back and shout it back to me. It was so interesting to just sit back and watch how Guatemalans lived their lives. I never realized just how blessed I am. These mothers worked so hard day in and day out for their families by cooking and cleaning, and the fathers were up before sunrise to go to the land and work just to make ends meet and for their family to have food. Even if they didn't enjoy their job, they still did it without complaining. One thing that really stood out to me were the dogs. In Guatenala, dogs are not treated the same as in America. They are not considered pets. They roam around the street and just eat whatever they can find. As a dog lover it broke my heart, I wanted to love on all these puppies but I couldn't get near them because of possible rabies. 

When we arrived at our site, we unloaded all of our equipment and wanted up a huge side of a hill. The view was incredible. Actually, the picture from the top of the post is the view from our worksite those next two days of the active volcano, yes active. This first day was very eye opening, keep in mind I'm a huge germaphobe. The owners of the land that we were working on showed us through the home and lead us to where we would be working on a new room for the family. We walked through a very tiny walkway that had sheets hanging up in place of walls in between rooms. There were mattresses on the floor with no sheets and kids everywhere. They were peeping through the sheets to look at us and when we would make eye contact with them they would hide. We started to try and make conversation with them with the very little English we knew from Spanish class we took in highschool. 

Katie and I played hide and go seek with the kids and tickled them while we waited for instructions. Before we really got to get to know this little girl, Rose, she walked up and gave Katie and I flowers. It warmed my heart, I started to cry. I only knew this beautiful girl for less than an hour and I already loved her so much. She had inspired me, the joy that she had, and the smile that she always had on her face will be with me forever. Once we got our instructions, we broke up into two teams, which then ended up being guys on one team doing the building and then girls on the other team playing and loving on the kids. I was ecstatic!!! They were tons of kids to run around and play with. We played lots and lots of fútbol as you can imagine. That's all they do up there. We played duck duck goose (pato pato ganso), played with bubbles, and also pained their nails!! 

It was such a great day, I didn't get to spend as much time with them as others. Half of us got split to another site to work at. I'll write about that on the next post. Thank you so much for reading!!